[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.
[00:00:16] I don't like crooks, and if I did like 'em, I wouldn't like crooks that are stool pigeons, and if I did like crooks that are stool pigeons, I still wouldn't like you!
[00:00:25] [Music]
[00:00:29] The great and us has found that!
[00:00:32] [Music]
[00:00:33] Pay no attention to that bad behind the curtain!
[00:00:36] [Music]
[00:00:42] Who are you?
[00:00:43] Who are you?
[00:00:45] A very bad man!
[00:00:47] I'm a very good man!
[00:00:48] [Music]
[00:00:49] Good man!
[00:00:50] [Music]
[00:00:53] [Music]
[00:00:57] Pay no attention to that bad!
[00:00:59] [Music]
[00:01:03] Anybody can have a brain!
[00:01:05] [Music]
[00:01:07] You're a very bad man!
[00:01:09] I'm a very good man!
[00:01:11] Just a very bad wizard.
[00:01:14] Welcome to 'Very Bad Wizards' I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.
[00:01:18] And Dave, even after 11 and a half years, we've found a way to piss off a new community after last episode.
[00:01:27] Can you guess who that is?
[00:01:31] Uh, white guy's on the spectrum.
[00:01:33] [Laughs]
[00:01:35] More specific than that though.
[00:01:37] Are they effective altruists? Did we piss them off?
[00:01:39] I don't think so.
[00:01:40] We've paid definitely some of them.
[00:01:42] Like are they really effective altruists if they were pissed off?
[00:01:45] I'm begging the questions.
[00:01:48] No, what I'm thinking of, because we've probably pissed off the effective altruists before,
[00:01:53] I don't believe that we've ever pissed off anesthesia Reddit.
[00:01:58] [Laughs]
[00:02:00] Really? We did?
[00:02:02] Let me read you. I went to the Reddit page.
[00:02:05] I haven't read all of it because there's a lot of stuff on the effective altruists aspect of it.
[00:02:10] But I did see this.
[00:02:12] The discussion of general anesthesia was hard to listen to due to the ignorance of the three interlocutors.
[00:02:19] There are great articles on this subject, hyperlinked, that are comprehensible to a non-medical audience.
[00:02:26] Even better, have on a physician and aesthesiologist who can explain what is known about this subject.
[00:02:32] It may not surprise you that a medical specialty that disconnects people from reality among other things has thought and researched this subject a great deal.
[00:02:41] So I was right, white guys on the spectrum.
[00:02:44] Exactly.
[00:02:45] No. I mean, look.
[00:02:48] I mean, I don't believe that we should have had an anesthesiologist on the last episode if we were going to bring it up in passing.
[00:02:54] That's right.
[00:02:55] That's right.
[00:02:56] Obviously.
[00:02:57] We did not stick to the usual rigorous standards of very bad wizards by not having an expert on something we mentioned off the cuff.
[00:03:08] If we were going to talk about it and even have an opinion about it, we normally have an expert.
[00:03:13] But this time.
[00:03:15] I mean, I'll read the articles, though.
[00:03:18] Obviously, I'm very curious.
[00:03:20] I have friends who are anesthesiologists that count.
[00:03:23] I haven't talked to them about this.
[00:03:25] Is this a guy?
[00:03:26] Because I just clicked on the link and it's just actually an article.
[00:03:29] Was this a way for this guy to get his article?
[00:03:32] It was his article.
[00:03:33] I don't know.
[00:03:39] Look, I should just say this looks like a real hard.
[00:03:44] I trust anesthesiologist.
[00:03:46] I'm not going to say.
[00:03:49] I don't trust big anesthesiology.
[00:03:52] Like, this guy probably, like, the little bat signal went off that we were talking, like, we exposed their secrets.
[00:03:58] I don't know why I didn't go off when Paul Blum already said this.
[00:04:01] But, you know, release the Reddit hounds.
[00:04:02] I mean, I'm not going to say it before.
[00:04:03] Like, he got, but that, like, there's a whole web.
[00:04:05] It's like a Thomas Pinchin novel.
[00:04:07] It's like a web of anesthesiologists that are, like, shutting down debate, like, honest debate and discourse.
[00:04:15] Like, Israel Gaza.
[00:04:18] They have a secret cabal of anesthesiologists.
[00:04:21] Just wipe their memory.
[00:04:22] They're like, but men in black.
[00:04:24] They make me more curious to, like, dig into your dirty secrets.
[00:04:27] Anesthesiologists are just like men in black.
[00:04:29] Like, they just do their shit and then erase your memory right afterwards.
[00:04:33] Exactly.
[00:04:34] So be that article.
[00:04:35] What does the article say?
[00:04:37] Well, you can go to the Reddit--
[00:04:38] I guess.
[00:04:39] I'm really dumb.
[00:04:40] There are great articles on this subject that are comprehensible to a non-medical audience.
[00:04:46] So, yeah.
[00:04:47] Definitely a regular listener, I guess.
[00:04:49] Yeah.
[00:04:50] All regular listeners don't call us interlocutors unless they're Jeffrey Watemull.
[00:04:55] Even he will try to come up with something a little even more pretentious.
[00:04:59] Speaking of which--
[00:05:00] Not pretentious, we love Jeffrey Watemull.
[00:05:03] But there is a great satire of literary pretension coming up, but also just a great story.
[00:05:11] The Borges, the olive, will be the subject of our main segment, but first.
[00:05:18] First, we're taking a departure from our most recent mockery opening segments.
[00:05:23] We're--
[00:05:24] Yeah.
[00:05:25] We can't take another Reddit comment like that.
[00:05:29] That's right.
[00:05:30] I'm not going to mention any areas of expertise.
[00:05:33] We're doing-- this is your idea-- top three things we've seen watched this year.
[00:05:39] So, I have my list ready to go, but I'm insecure because I'm not going to be able to match your depth here.
[00:05:48] I would just like mention a reality show and sitcom.
[00:05:53] Is Keanu Reeves going to be involved?
[00:05:56] Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:57] Keanu Reeves memes.
[00:05:59] This was just three, the best three things we saw this year.
[00:06:03] Now, I totally cheated a little bit in mind, but I got it.
[00:06:08] You're worried that yours is going to be too basic.
[00:06:10] Exactly.
[00:06:11] And I'm honestly a little worried with that mind that's a little too basic because, I don't know, it was a basic year.
[00:06:16] It was a great year.
[00:06:18] But it was a basic year.
[00:06:19] Yeah.
[00:06:20] Right.
[00:06:21] And I didn't put stuff that I happened to watch this year, but that was old or whatever, because I've watched some good old movies.
[00:06:31] But I didn't think that that was in the spirit of what we were saying.
[00:06:34] So, all right.
[00:06:36] My first is just Oppenheimer.
[00:06:39] I can't.
[00:06:40] Is that on your list, too?
[00:06:42] It is on my cheating list.
[00:06:45] Absolutely.
[00:06:46] It was my favorite experience in a movie theater this year.
[00:06:48] Yeah.
[00:06:49] And I didn't even see it in the good theater, so I didn't regularly at the good theater.
[00:06:54] Yeah.
[00:06:55] I love Nolan already, but I think that he's just at the top of his craft right now.
[00:07:01] There's a lot to say about this movie, but visually storytelling, acting, character, even just the cinematography of a bomb is amazing.
[00:07:14] He also doesn't have some of the things that he can be bad about.
[00:07:18] I feel like, you know, it doesn't have the kind of ponderous exposition, even though you would think this movie would be the perfect, like, opportunity for the ponderous exposition that he can kind of be annoying in like inception.
[00:07:36] And even like this kind of speechifying in the Batman movies, it doesn't do that at all.
[00:07:41] It trusts his audience, I guess like Dunkirk did in a way, but it's still very verbal.
[00:07:47] It just doesn't do the kind of clumsy exposition and speech stuff that he can sometimes, you know, I'm not a huge Nolan guy, but that's one of the things that keeps me away from some of his movies.
[00:07:58] And I'm like, I was amazed at how little of that was in the movie was in Oppenheimer.
[00:08:03] Like, I've never thought of him as being too exposition, like I get what you're saying.
[00:08:08] But I...
[00:08:09] An inception.
[00:08:10] Come on.
[00:08:11] Hey, I don't remember.
[00:08:12] Like, yeah, I guess.
[00:08:14] Like, what I liked about this is that he avoided what he was falling deeper and deeper into, which was like creating more and more confusing labyrinths that were just completely rendered like the movie tenant inscrutable, like probably after three viewings.
[00:08:32] You know, he can't... obviously Nolan's never going to give you a straight, like, timeline.
[00:08:38] You can't do that.
[00:08:40] He can't do that, yeah.
[00:08:41] No.
[00:08:42] That's fine.
[00:08:43] But it was fine.
[00:08:44] I thought it worked really well in this movie.
[00:08:45] And some of these performances were just so good.
[00:08:47] So good.
[00:08:48] Yeah.
[00:08:49] I think he's underrated casting, like, no one does.
[00:08:55] Yeah.
[00:08:56] Yeah.
[00:08:57] Florence Pugh.
[00:08:58] Yeah.
[00:08:59] Yeah.
[00:09:00] And he's just so good to see her.
[00:09:05] Yeah.
[00:09:06] Matt Damon is, I think, great in it.
[00:09:08] So...
[00:09:09] And the movie needs him when he comes in.
[00:09:11] It's been, like, visually amazing and really cool, but just kind of not dreary, but heading that way.
[00:09:19] And then, like, it's just kind of perfect.
[00:09:22] It's all throughout.
[00:09:23] Robert Downey Jr.
[00:09:24] Robert Downey Jr.
[00:09:25] Great.
[00:09:26] So good.
[00:09:27] Yeah.
[00:09:28] Thank you.
[00:09:30] All right.
[00:09:31] Well, it's your turn.
[00:09:32] All right.
[00:09:33] Well, I guess I'll go to that then.
[00:09:34] This was the best year for actually feeling like movies in a movie theater have a future
[00:09:42] that I can remember in a long time, you know?
[00:09:45] At the same time that the MCU people were just kind of not into it, like, not for everything.
[00:09:52] One's three or whatever did okay, or did pretty good, but, like, there was just a bunch of
[00:09:59] them that just kind of bombed.
[00:10:00] They've just been shitting the bed.
[00:10:01] Yeah.
[00:10:02] Nobody can't.
[00:10:03] Like, there's like the country, all of a sudden came to its senses.
[00:10:08] And also, I think the movies have gotten worse for sure.
[00:10:11] Yeah.
[00:10:12] But also, like, just too many.
[00:10:13] Just even if you just can't maintain that frenetic pace of movie making.
[00:10:18] Like, the audience will get weary of it.
[00:10:21] You want to also have to have watched, like, eight, nine other movies and two other TV shows
[00:10:26] to, like, appreciate what's going on.
[00:10:28] It's cute how much you undercounted how many you have to watch.
[00:10:31] Yeah.
[00:10:32] They've just kind of run out of ideas.
[00:10:34] It's like Pixar.
[00:10:35] The new people have, I think the difference is that Pixar was once really good.
[00:10:40] You know, one thing we just saw the boy in his hair in, which is.
[00:10:43] Oh, you saw it.
[00:10:44] Yeah.
[00:10:45] I was talking to some of my daughters' friends who just saw it too, and they loved it.
[00:10:50] And yeah, yeah.
[00:10:51] I mean, what did I see what was going on?
[00:10:53] Yeah.
[00:10:54] I think so.
[00:10:55] Yeah.
[00:10:56] Oh, no.
[00:10:57] Oh, no.
[00:10:58] And there's a new emotion in this one.
[00:11:01] Oh, no.
[00:11:02] What do you think it is?
[00:11:03] Oh, God.
[00:11:05] Nostalgia.
[00:11:06] No.
[00:11:07] Contempt.
[00:11:08] That would be more interesting.
[00:11:10] Also, she's getting older, so you would think maybe, like, some, like, Schme.
[00:11:16] Or shame, or...
[00:11:23] Anxiety.
[00:11:24] Oh, my God, man.
[00:11:28] Oh, my God.
[00:11:29] Yeah, it used to be beautiful.
[00:11:33] What it used to do?
[00:11:35] Anyway, yeah.
[00:11:36] I have this whole, like, cheating category of just movies I saw in the movie theater and absolutely loved this year.
[00:11:42] Like Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse, I thought it was great.
[00:11:45] Well, that's, that's on my list, too.
[00:11:47] It is.
[00:11:48] But it's okay, because I have a couple of add-ons that I'm going to talk about.
[00:11:52] I'm going to talk about that.
[00:11:53] Okay.
[00:11:54] Well, you can...
[00:11:55] I'll let you...
[00:11:56] This is kind of my cheating.
[00:11:57] This isn't actually on my top three.
[00:11:59] It's just the categories, things that I saw in the movie theater.
[00:12:03] Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse, Oppenheimer.
[00:12:06] Now, I think that Oppenheimer is...
[00:12:09] I saw it in IMAX just by myself.
[00:12:12] I saw it in 70 millimeter IMAX in fucking San Antonio, but inexplicably just has one.
[00:12:20] There's like 19 in the whole country or something.
[00:12:23] Do you know that they can only film like 15 minutes at a time on that format?
[00:12:27] Yeah.
[00:12:28] It's 70 millimeter IMAX.
[00:12:32] It's like, it's like they're shooting film on eight and a half by 11 sheets of paper.
[00:12:36] That film is huge and the machines that make it are actually so loud, the movie cameras that do it are so loud that the audio people have issues.
[00:12:45] It's very hard to get clean audio.
[00:12:46] It was actually audio-wise, like, I thought better than the regular IMAX because it didn't...
[00:12:54] It was able to modulate the audio more.
[00:12:57] It was incredible.
[00:12:58] We saw it on our way.
[00:12:59] It was me and my daughter, and we saw it on our way camping out in the area where, like, all that was happening.
[00:13:05] That's good.
[00:13:06] And it was so cool.
[00:13:07] And that was like my favorite experience just because, you know, I'm with my daughter where, like, you know, I did see Oppenheimer regular than with my wife.
[00:13:15] And I don't know if it was just the third time I'm seeing it.
[00:13:18] It's a three hour movie, but, like, it didn't seem as good.
[00:13:22] Like, I do think IMAX matters.
[00:13:24] And since it's getting a rerelease on IMAX places, I recommend listeners go see that.
[00:13:29] But honestly, maybe the coolest movie theater experience was when I went with my wife to see Stop Making Sense in the theater.
[00:13:37] They were doing a rerelease.
[00:13:39] It was like a remastered stop making sense.
[00:13:41] The Talking Heads documentary...
[00:13:43] I have no idea what it is.
[00:13:45] What is it?
[00:13:46] Stop Making Sense?
[00:13:47] The Talking Heads?
[00:13:48] You know the Talking Heads, right?
[00:13:49] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:50] Oh, it's just about the Talking Heads.
[00:13:52] It's a concert movie of...
[00:13:54] Oh, yeah, yeah, I know what it is.
[00:13:56] Jonathan Demi, you know, like one of the, if not the best, concert documentary of all time.
[00:14:02] And I'm not like, I'm a big Talking Heads fan to a degree.
[00:14:06] But this is so good.
[00:14:08] This is undeniable.
[00:14:09] Like, David Byrne, he kind of annoys me.
[00:14:12] Like, I've seen him a few times over the last, like, 10, 15 years.
[00:14:16] But, like, the talent and the music is just so freaking good.
[00:14:19] And that movie is so good.
[00:14:21] It just works so well.
[00:14:23] That was probably my favorite.
[00:14:24] I loved "Boy In His Hair" and I loved Killers of the Flower Moon.
[00:14:27] But if I'm going to pick, like, the most, like, holy shit.
[00:14:30] Like I never saw this in the theater when it came out.
[00:14:33] And I had just seen it on DVD, Blu-ray streaming.
[00:14:38] And it was very cool to see it in the theater.
[00:14:41] It was awesome.
[00:14:42] I was confused.
[00:14:43] Because when you said Talking Heads documentary, I thought you just meant like a documentary
[00:14:48] where, like, they were interviewing people as talking to us.
[00:14:54] And that's, I guess, understandable.
[00:14:57] If I hadn't said, "Stop making sense already."
[00:14:59] Yeah.
[00:15:00] In 1984 I was 9.
[00:15:03] Cool.
[00:15:04] "Boy In His Hair" and "Is Great" also saw it in an IMAX because they're releasing it.
[00:15:08] This is the thing about the fucking Marvel movies, not just taking over everything,
[00:15:13] is like, they have, like, I saw Killers of the Flower Moon.
[00:15:15] I don't think you need to see that in IMAX.
[00:15:17] That's awesome in the regular movie theater.
[00:15:19] But, like, "Boy In His Hair" was just in the local IMAX subtitle.
[00:15:23] Subtitled "Boy In His Hair" and "In Our IMAX," that's like 10 minutes from my house in,
[00:15:28] like, a strip mall, is pretty cool.
[00:15:32] Like, I just, like, thank God that, yeah, whatever the spell that was cast has been broken.
[00:15:39] Well, you haven't even done one of your real ones and I've already done one of mine.
[00:15:45] So you have to give one--
[00:15:46] Stop making sense.
[00:15:47] Oh, something he said.
[00:15:48] I chose that.
[00:15:49] Like, Oppenheimer was my favorite experience, but of the best thing that I saw it was
[00:15:53] stop making sense in the theater.
[00:15:56] Yeah, so I was gonna, like, have "Spider" versus "My Second One" and, like, just to say a few things.
[00:16:04] I already love animation, but I feel like this year I've been getting just--
[00:16:08] be nerding out a little bit more about just the art of animation and appreciating it a little more.
[00:16:15] And the two Spider-Man animated movies from Sony that they've put out are just, like, so refreshing.
[00:16:23] They're so creative and visually just stunning.
[00:16:27] And one of the things that I love that they do is they bring in elements of traditional 2D animation.
[00:16:34] They blend all these styles together into-- and then, of course, storytelling, because if you don't have storytelling,
[00:16:41] it's not gonna have a good movie, no matter how cool the animation.
[00:16:46] But I'm just of the opinion that everybody needs to stop doing comic book movies that are real life.
[00:16:54] Just stick to animation.
[00:16:57] I thought this after the first one.
[00:16:59] But I've told this story, but, like, we saw the trailer for The Flash.
[00:17:05] Oh, my God.
[00:17:07] That is one of the worst.
[00:17:08] Yeah, and I haven't watched it.
[00:17:11] But a painful-- the trailer for it.
[00:17:14] And it was right before seeing Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse where it's, like, so beautiful.
[00:17:21] All these artistic styles from all these different comic books over the last 30-40 years, it just goes into that movie.
[00:17:29] And then you see also something that's almost equally animated, but it's just a CGI fucking bullshit.
[00:17:37] And it looks horrible, and Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse looks amazing.
[00:17:42] Why don't you just do that?
[00:17:44] Just do that.
[00:17:45] It made a ton of money.
[00:17:47] I'll tell you one reason.
[00:17:49] Spider-Verse has put years into that with real animators.
[00:17:54] And my understanding of that Flash movie is that they were, like, literally paying CGI sweatshop people last minute,
[00:18:01] which, yeah, gets me to one of the things that I was going to add on to this recommendation.
[00:18:07] There's a documentary about the history of animation called Pencils vs. Pixels that came out this year.
[00:18:13] And it's just great-- like, it tells the story of essentially from the beginnings early, the Disney studio animation,
[00:18:22] all the way to the sort of Pixar in the advent of CG, and the kind of tension that grew around 2D vs. 3D computer animation,
[00:18:33] and it interviews a ton of the original artists and, like, critics.
[00:18:37] Leonard Maltin is still alive, and he's in it.
[00:18:40] And it's very scary to see him.
[00:18:43] It's just fair warning.
[00:18:44] He gave a-- he came to one of my daughter's classes at UT.
[00:18:47] Oh, really?
[00:18:48] Yeah.
[00:18:49] Did you know Leonard Maltin?
[00:18:52] That's awesome.
[00:18:54] So Pencils vs. Pixels, it's a good documentary, I recommend it.
[00:18:57] And then there's a YouTube channel that I've just, like, consumed.
[00:19:01] This year, I consumed, I think, everything they've put out.
[00:19:03] It's called the Corridor Crew.
[00:19:04] And it's a group of CG animators themselves, or artists.
[00:19:08] They're visual effects artists who work in CG, who have every week they'll just review--
[00:19:15] it's called Good and Bad CG.
[00:19:17] And they'll just point out-- so that's how I learned about the Flash.
[00:19:20] So they'll show clips of amazing stuff.
[00:19:23] And they'll give a real educated take on it.
[00:19:26] Like, I was just watching one where they were talking about the abyss.
[00:19:31] The groundbreaking work of Cameron on that to do those effects at that time.
[00:19:38] Which, by the way, just got re-released in 4K.
[00:19:41] Yeah, the transfer.
[00:19:42] Yeah.
[00:19:43] And these guys also have a series on Good and Bad animation,
[00:19:45] bringing in, like, real big names in Hollywood,
[00:19:48] like all of the people who are working on these movies behind the scenes
[00:19:51] and have them talk about the movies that they've worked on.
[00:19:54] It's just super interesting.
[00:19:56] So, yeah, those are my two add-ons, pencils versus pixels in the Corridor Crew.
[00:19:59] Corridor Crew.
[00:20:00] Yeah.
[00:20:01] Boy in his heron, or Boy in the Heron, I think it is.
[00:20:06] Although it's not the title in Japan and Japan, it's "How Do You Live?"
[00:20:11] Which is a much better title for the movie.
[00:20:14] Absolutely incredible.
[00:20:15] Absolutely incredible.
[00:20:16] The story-wise, if you're going to have an issue,
[00:20:19] and I want to see it again, but story-wise maybe there's some, you know, problems,
[00:20:25] visually at every moment, I was just in awe.
[00:20:28] Speaking of just, like, 2D painted animation.
[00:20:32] Yeah.
[00:20:33] I mean, he will go to a little CG occasionally,
[00:20:37] but this is also just all the best jibbly animators just fucking going off.
[00:20:44] From what I understand, bringing their own twist on things too.
[00:20:48] And it was amazing.
[00:20:49] I can't wait to see it, and to see the behind the scenes.
[00:20:53] See it in the theater.
[00:20:55] In the theater.
[00:20:56] If you lived in Ithaca, you wouldn't be so excited about the theater.
[00:20:59] [laughs]
[00:21:00] It might be right.
[00:21:01] It's essentially like I could get a projector in my house.
[00:21:04] You just went, we got to pick pretty much whatever, like, iMacs.
[00:21:08] You're like, "When you said your local iMacs."
[00:21:11] Yeah, it would have been shut down for a while.
[00:21:13] I thought it was going away forever, and then it just magically appeared again.
[00:21:17] I love it.
[00:21:19] I mean, people like Nolan, they actually put money into this.
[00:21:24] He's so good about the theater experience.
[00:21:26] Even when it was a bit of quicksotic, like with Hennett in the movie theaters during COVID.
[00:21:31] It was like, "Here's my least accessible movie that I'm just kidding."
[00:21:37] You can't even hear what the guy's saying.
[00:21:39] Drop the whole movie.
[00:21:41] All right, so this category is movies I saw for the first time.
[00:21:44] I'm not just going to cheat and list a bunch of them, but I will say probably the best one I saw for the first time is in the mood for love by Wong Kar Wai, which is fucking incredible.
[00:21:57] You would love it too.
[00:21:59] You love movies that are like paintings.
[00:22:02] Yeah, I don't know anything about it.
[00:22:04] It's really good.
[00:22:05] You would love it.
[00:22:06] You would even love the kind of, you know, the quasi-story that goes with it.
[00:22:10] But the one I wanted to highlight, even though it's more of a movie from last year, but I saw it at the beginning of this year, and I also kind of promised my daughters who just got a wisdom teeth out or three of them out in a miss begotten.
[00:22:26] Would you just have one?
[00:22:29] Anyway, After Sun.
[00:22:31] Did you see After Sun?
[00:22:32] No.
[00:22:33] This is a movie that came out kind of late last year.
[00:22:36] I didn't see it until January, February of this year.
[00:22:39] It's by the first movie of this director, Charlotte Wells, that has Paul Mescal, who is like the Gen Z Dream.
[00:22:47] Did you ever see the TV show Normal People?
[00:22:50] No.
[00:22:51] He was one of the stars in that.
[00:22:53] He has a very young father.
[00:22:55] You should definitely see this.
[00:22:57] And his 13-year-old daughter, he's clearly divorced from, or if they ever got married.
[00:23:04] I don't know if we ever find that out.
[00:23:06] And he's just on a vacation with his daughter.
[00:23:08] The two of them in this kind of beach resort.
[00:23:12] And it's like so beautiful.
[00:23:14] Like just this father daughter, she's about 12, 13 years old.
[00:23:19] And the girl Frankie Corrio is amazing.
[00:23:25] And you would think their interactions are...
[00:23:29] It's so naturalistic, but also really kind of surreal.
[00:23:34] And it's just also just one of the most, I don't know, you're sobbing at the end of this movie if you're human.
[00:23:42] A father is spending time with his 12 or 13-year-old daughter is exactly what we're nostalgic for.
[00:23:49] Exactly.
[00:23:50] Right.
[00:23:51] And yeah, I actually think you would love this movie.
[00:23:54] You should bump it to the top of your list.
[00:23:56] And if any listeners haven't seen it, people have asked us to do it.
[00:23:59] And I don't know about that, but it's certainly a movie to watch.
[00:24:03] Okay.
[00:24:05] So you didn't say it had to be movies.
[00:24:10] We just had watched.
[00:24:11] Yeah.
[00:24:12] So I am going to...
[00:24:15] Well, there's one I wanted to say, but I'm sure we could both talk about it.
[00:24:19] That third season of Righteous Gemstones, I think, is just such good.
[00:24:23] So fun.
[00:24:24] It's just like, I think it's so hard to do good comedy.
[00:24:29] I think we talked about it in one of our AUAs.
[00:24:31] To do that kind of comedy, where you're kind of satirizing a conservative religious institution
[00:24:40] without coming off of a total smug asshole.
[00:24:44] Exactly.
[00:24:45] It's a miracle.
[00:24:46] Yeah.
[00:24:47] Yeah.
[00:24:48] The one that I wanted to just put on people's radar, I'm trying to get you to watch it,
[00:24:52] is the docu-series Welcome to Rexum, which is about Ryan Reynolds and what's the name?
[00:25:02] Mack Lehaney?
[00:25:03] Rob Mack Lehaney?
[00:25:04] Hack Jones.
[00:25:05] Who bought this Welsh soccer team?
[00:25:09] Oh, yeah.
[00:25:10] Yeah.
[00:25:11] And it's...
[00:25:12] So there's been two seasons out now.
[00:25:14] I kind of was like, eh, I'll just watch an episode.
[00:25:18] And it's just good.
[00:25:20] It's well done and it has so much heart because it really is about this town and this little,
[00:25:27] you know, it's essentially one of these like towns that hasn't had, yeah, they used to
[00:25:32] be cold mining and shut down a long time ago.
[00:25:35] Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:36] They've had one of the worst runs of luck in soccer in the UK where they've been relegated,
[00:25:44] relegated and relegated and haven't been able to claw their way back on.
[00:25:47] What are they, how far are they from from here?
[00:25:49] They're like, as far down as you can go and still be pro.
[00:25:53] So they're like five levels down.
[00:25:55] Yeah.
[00:25:56] Well, at the start of the series.
[00:25:58] Yeah.
[00:25:59] So, and, ah, you, you think, and this is what I thought, like in a lot of the townspeople
[00:26:06] thought these two fucking like Hollywood guys who know shit about soccer are coming in.
[00:26:11] And like, what is this?
[00:26:13] Like they're going to abandon us after two years.
[00:26:15] Like they were actually sour on the whole thing.
[00:26:18] And they have to like, you totally understand it.
[00:26:20] And they understand it.
[00:26:21] And they have to like work their way into the hearts of these people.
[00:26:27] They have to earn it and they really do.
[00:26:30] And it's, it's just a very human story, but it's everything I think I was telling you.
[00:26:34] It's everything that's good about sports comes out in this.
[00:26:39] Like it's the power that it has to bring them together.
[00:26:41] They basically have like the oldest international stadium in the world, which is it looks like
[00:26:47] the oldest in the world.
[00:26:50] And so they, they put some money toward renovating it.
[00:26:53] And yeah, you learn about the players.
[00:26:56] It's, it's, it's good.
[00:26:57] It's like, you don't want to like blow your brains out.
[00:27:01] Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, yeah, with real people.
[00:27:06] Oh my God, Ted Lass.
[00:27:08] My, my penis gets soft when I ever like that word.
[00:27:11] Ted Lassa.
[00:27:12] Do you remember having to like, during sex, like think of something like Ted Lassa?
[00:27:17] Yes.
[00:27:18] Those were the days.
[00:27:21] There's a side-felt episode where George goes, he goes, what happened?
[00:27:30] I went from finishing way too fast and not being able to finish it all.
[00:27:34] Where was the sweet spot?
[00:27:36] All right, that's my list.
[00:27:43] All right, this completes it, but I want to be clear.
[00:27:45] This isn't my favorite thing that I saw, like my favorite thing that I saw is all the
[00:27:49] ones in the movie theater.
[00:27:51] And I just loved this year for movie theaters and like, I like, I'm not sure if like the
[00:27:57] movies are better than last year, but the theater going experience was way better and
[00:28:02] like, people are all going to it.
[00:28:03] Every time I saw Oppenheimer, it was fucking packed three times.
[00:28:08] Like I saw it like two months after it came out and it was still packed.
[00:28:12] Like, thank God, I just, I'm so happy.
[00:28:15] But I had to chryss in my new system, my new kind of movie palace, my movie palace that
[00:28:24] we just kind of finished and it's the kind of the soundproof room for recording this
[00:28:30] stuff and a nice big OLED TV and a good sound bar.
[00:28:36] And the movie that like, I feel like was the first movie I get, you know, why you want
[00:28:42] this kind of set up was the Lighthouse.
[00:28:44] The Robert Egger is a movie of a Lighthouse with Robert Pattinson and William Defoe.
[00:28:51] And it's just visually incredible, it's black and white, it's in this kind of aspect ratio
[00:28:56] that's really boxy like 1.19, I think to one.
[00:29:00] And, you know, the thing about these like OLED style TVs is the blacks.
[00:29:07] That's what everybody says.
[00:29:08] And this movie just brings that out.
[00:29:10] And also the sound of it is incredible.
[00:29:12] And it was, I don't know, like I watched it, I took like time from grading, just like
[00:29:18] a big contrast to just go and watch it like a, we don't even have a couch yet.
[00:29:22] So I set on the floor and just watched the Lighthouse on this Blu-ray that I have of
[00:29:29] it.
[00:29:30] And it was fucking phenomenal.
[00:29:31] Like it was amazing.
[00:29:32] And it's a great movie.
[00:29:33] We could actually do it.
[00:29:35] It's been definitely requested a few times.
[00:29:37] Have you seen it?
[00:29:38] No, it's really fricking good.
[00:29:41] And I'll always be grateful to it because I will remember that it is the first time
[00:29:48] I got like a good experience with this new system that we have, you know, like what
[00:29:53] I've been looking for do forever.
[00:29:55] That's great.
[00:29:56] It's awesome.
[00:29:57] They finally got it.
[00:29:58] I wanted to ask you, I think it texted you this bit, got lost in that.
[00:30:01] What was the very first DVD or like movie you put on?
[00:30:04] So my wife and I watched until she fell asleep, which she typically does, inherent vice,
[00:30:09] you know, the PTA movie, which I love.
[00:30:12] And what I realized only later was we put on the DVD of it.
[00:30:15] Like it's one of those Blu-rays that comes with the DVD and the Blu-ray.
[00:30:19] And I thought I was putting in like the actual thing, but I, and so, like I was like, this
[00:30:24] is great.
[00:30:25] I love it.
[00:30:26] You know, it is.
[00:30:27] It's just cool to see, you know, a big screen in a, you know, bigger screen than I'm used
[00:30:31] to in a, in a dark room, but like I was like, I don't feel blown away, you know, like, and
[00:30:37] then I realized it was a DVD.
[00:30:38] So I don't know.
[00:30:39] I, we ever watched the Blu-ray, plus you fell asleep halfway in, but then I put on the lighthouse
[00:30:43] when it was just me.
[00:30:44] Yeah.
[00:30:45] Yeah.
[00:30:46] That's an underrated PTA movie.
[00:30:47] I think it's awesome.
[00:30:48] It's sort of criminals, criminally, like panned.
[00:30:52] Even the, the, I don't think it was panned.
[00:30:54] I think, no, no, for a PTA movie.
[00:30:56] It's like at the bottom of the PTA lists that people, to be fair, I don't know what I would
[00:31:00] put it.
[00:31:01] Like, I don't know what I would put it.
[00:31:03] I mean, I would put most of it below.
[00:31:05] I love, I love it.
[00:31:06] It's like boogie nights and what's it called?
[00:31:10] There will be blood are the only ones I think are definitely better.
[00:31:12] Anything else I, I think it stands up.
[00:31:15] Liquor's pizza is alone.
[00:31:17] Liquor's pizza.
[00:31:19] But it's, it's good as licor's pizza.
[00:31:21] Yeah.
[00:31:22] All right.
[00:31:23] All right.
[00:31:25] Now, we're going to talk about one of the best things that we've read this year. I will be right back to talk about Borhas the Alice.
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[00:38:16] - Okay, now we're gonna talk about Jorge Luis Borges.
[00:38:19] - Sure story.
[00:38:20] - The aleph, which is a story that we just sort of put off
[00:38:24] doing, I think you at first weren't into it for some reason.
[00:38:27] - No clue why.
[00:38:29] Like, as soon as I reread it, 'cause you suggested it again,
[00:38:32] I was like, this story is awesome every part of it.
[00:38:34] - It's awesome, yeah.
[00:38:36] It is, I think, a quintessential,
[00:38:38] I mean, it's a classic, I think it's probably
[00:38:40] one of his most beloved stories.
[00:38:41] It was originally published in 1945
[00:38:44] in, just a journal, and then published
[00:38:50] in a collection of his stories named Aleph in 1949.
[00:38:54] And I think that we just are gonna walk through everything,
[00:38:58] 'cause everything really is connected to the plot
[00:39:00] and the details, but it hits on so many different themes,
[00:39:03] themes that we've hit on in various Borges' stories,
[00:39:06] themes about infinity and paradoxes and labyrinths,
[00:39:10] labyrinths, revenge and mysticism, which is, of course,
[00:39:14] in the inability of language to describe things
[00:39:18] that are outside of language.
[00:39:20] Also, memory and the problems with memory.
[00:39:23] - And time, the passage of time.
[00:39:24] - I also love his stories where he's a character.
[00:39:27] - I know.
[00:39:28] - And it's just a kind of, I don't know,
[00:39:32] self-saterical version of him.
[00:39:36] And then I just love his description
[00:39:38] of his interactions with Carlos Argentinos.
[00:39:41] There's so much to love in this.
[00:39:42] Like, you could not get into the thought experiment,
[00:39:45] the metaphysical philosophy of language, part of it,
[00:39:49] and still just fully enjoy this story
[00:39:52] with the philosophical questions that underlie
[00:39:55] the kind of satire of a certain kind of literary pretension,
[00:40:00] just all are part of the same issue.
[00:40:04] And like, that's what's so brilliant
[00:40:07] and why he's the best.
[00:40:09] He's the best at writing this kind of story.
[00:40:12] God, I just want to like, yeah.
[00:40:13] As you pointed out on a text to me,
[00:40:15] like, this is just one of his funniest stories.
[00:40:17] Like the satire is just, I was actually laughing
[00:40:19] as I was reading it.
[00:40:21] - The one that it reminded me of of his is the Quijote one,
[00:40:25] satirizing a certain kind of literary pretension of voice.
[00:40:30] You know, like I associate that with Nabokov,
[00:40:33] like Somerset Mom, like Tolstoy can do this.
[00:40:36] It's just so funny.
[00:40:38] Like I have a few passages there.
[00:40:39] - Yeah, for sure, for sure.
[00:40:41] And I also just love, like you were saying,
[00:40:44] when he inserts himself,
[00:40:45] like he is the, for some version of him is the narrator.
[00:40:48] And I feel like he, he's self critical,
[00:40:51] like he uses this to sort of criticize himself a little bit.
[00:40:54] - Absolutely.
[00:40:55] So this is a part, this is something that I don't know
[00:40:57] how it will come up in discussing the story.
[00:41:01] I couldn't help but think,
[00:41:02] I couldn't find anything about this,
[00:41:04] but the character that he is interacting with
[00:41:08] as you say, Carlos Argentina,
[00:41:10] I couldn't help but think that he chose
[00:41:13] the last name Argentina in this just like,
[00:41:17] on the nose way of criticizing
[00:41:19] Argentinian intellectuals for the time.
[00:41:21] - Yeah, that's, it had to be, like I know,
[00:41:24] I couldn't find anything on it, but it has to be that.
[00:41:27] - Yeah.
[00:41:27] Oh, last general thing I wanna say,
[00:41:29] it's actually kind of a beautiful poignant love,
[00:41:34] like lost love story, too.
[00:41:36] Which you don't get that often from a more Hess story.
[00:41:39] - Right.
[00:41:40] - Yeah.
[00:41:41] His stories are so lacking in sex or love,
[00:41:46] like any sort of--
[00:41:48] - Merchants with the opposite sex.
[00:41:51] - Yeah.
[00:41:52] - Not a lot of women.
[00:41:54] - No.
[00:41:55] - Doesn't pass the Bechtel test.
[00:41:56] (laughing)
[00:41:58] - No, I'm not this one either.
[00:41:59] - Not this one.
[00:42:00] So, all right, it starts off,
[00:42:04] so it's first person narration
[00:42:07] with Boer Hess telling us about the mourning
[00:42:09] that this woman, Beatrice Viterbo had died,
[00:42:14] and we come to find out that it's somebody
[00:42:17] that he clearly was in love with.
[00:42:20] - Yeah.
[00:42:21] - He was devoted to her, and he says,
[00:42:24] I knew that more than once my futile devotion
[00:42:26] had exasperated her, so it seemed like unrequited,
[00:42:29] kind of in a heartbreaking way.
[00:42:31] And we learned that since her death in,
[00:42:35] I think 1929 or something,
[00:42:37] he every year on her birthday shows up to her house.
[00:42:42] He sort of says that every year he'll stay
[00:42:44] a little longer and get there a little later.
[00:42:46] He sort of gets himself invited to dinner,
[00:42:48] and then every year he has dinner
[00:42:50] with the first cousin, Carlos Argentino,
[00:42:53] who lives in the house that Beatrice once lived in.
[00:42:57] - You get from the very beginning that he's not doing it
[00:43:00] to hang out with Carlos Argentino.
[00:43:03] In fact, that's a price for paying homage
[00:43:06] to the memory of this person who he already feels like
[00:43:11] is fading away.
[00:43:14] There's a line early on.
[00:43:15] I noticed a new advertisement for some cigarettes
[00:43:18] or other blondes, I believe there were.
[00:43:20] The fact deeply grieved me for our realize
[00:43:23] that the vast, unceasing universe
[00:43:25] was already growing away from her,
[00:43:28] and this change was but the first in an infinite series.
[00:43:32] The universe may change, but I shall not
[00:43:34] thought I with melancholy vanity.
[00:43:37] That's like already kind of stating the themes
[00:43:40] and like a central issue in the story, right there.
[00:43:43] The universe is moving away from this person
[00:43:46] that was so special to Borges' heart,
[00:43:48] and there's nothing he can do about it.
[00:43:50] It's just going to keep eroding like that.
[00:43:52] - Yeah, and I've had this thought actually
[00:43:55] about when people die that the world moves on,
[00:44:00] and it does move on so fast,
[00:44:01] and I often think about how people who I loved
[00:44:04] who were dead just didn't see this or that happen.
[00:44:08] The world is, as Jesus Christ said,
[00:44:12] the world is for the living, you just can't hold on.
[00:44:15] No matter how hard you try, the memory will fade
[00:44:20] and the universe moves on,
[00:44:21] and there's something so sad about that.
[00:44:22] Borges says later on, something that I'm gonna quote now,
[00:44:25] "After 40, every change becomes a hateful symbol
[00:44:28] of times passing."
[00:44:29] It's so good.
[00:44:30] Oh, my God, I wrote that down on an index card.
[00:44:33] (laughing)
[00:44:35] - It's so true.
[00:44:37] - So okay, he's showing up every day,
[00:44:39] I mean, every year on April 30th,
[00:44:41] and you do get the sense, you know,
[00:44:42] this was a time when pictures were rare,
[00:44:44] but obviously this was a family of means,
[00:44:46] and so he goes, and he just stares
[00:44:48] at the various portraits on the wall.
[00:44:50] And here's where we learn just some basic facts
[00:44:53] about her life that she was married and then divorced,
[00:44:56] and you get the sense that he's just been
[00:44:58] pining for her love this whole time,
[00:44:59] so it must hurt him to have seen her get married,
[00:45:01] and then he had some hope when she got divorced
[00:45:03] and then like it never panned out, and then she died.
[00:45:06] He describes Beatrice as tall, fragile,
[00:45:09] very slightly stooped.
[00:45:10] - In her walk, there was,
[00:45:11] if I may be pardoned, the oxymoron,
[00:45:15] something of a graceful clumsiness,
[00:45:17] a soussant of hesitancy or of palsy.
[00:45:21] Like, that line is like the kind of line
[00:45:24] that he's gonna go on to make fun of.
[00:45:26] Carlos Argentinos, for saying,
[00:45:31] and like this is part of the self satire, I think.
[00:45:34] - Yeah.
[00:45:35] - That even though he clearly feels this connection
[00:45:38] and like he wants to describe this kind of ineffable way
[00:45:43] that she walked, he has to do it
[00:45:45] in this kind of pretentious, labored way,
[00:45:48] that will be his exact kind of criticism
[00:45:51] of Carlos Argentino, but he's already doing it right away.
[00:45:55] - Right, right.
[00:45:56] - It's also funny that he says, yes, forgiveness
[00:45:59] for the oxymoron in her description.
[00:46:02] And then he describes Carlos
[00:46:04] as holding a position in an illegible library.
[00:46:09] - Yeah.
[00:46:10] - And then an authoritarian who's ineffectual,
[00:46:13] and then he says that nights and holidays he stayed at home.
[00:46:16] Like all sort of contradictory like that.
[00:46:20] - I like that he is authoritarian though also ineffectual.
[00:46:25] - I also like, I feel like that's kind of an oxymoron,
[00:46:30] but also not.
[00:46:31] Like I feel like I know people who are that.
[00:46:34] - It's totally true.
[00:46:35] They're authoritarian in spirit,
[00:46:37] but they just don't have it in them to actually
[00:46:40] enforce anything.
[00:46:41] - The first thing that we hear him say
[00:46:45] is when he takes him some brandy, some cognac,
[00:46:49] he takes it and he says, interesting.
[00:46:52] And then he goes on to describe,
[00:46:55] he says he launched into an apology for modern man.
[00:46:58] I picture him, he said, with an animation
[00:47:00] that was rather unaccountable.
[00:47:01] In his study as though in the watchtower
[00:47:03] of a great city surrounded by telephones,
[00:47:05] telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio telephone,
[00:47:08] and motion picture and magic lantern equipment
[00:47:10] and glossaries and calendars and timetables and boldings.
[00:47:13] He observed that for a man so equipped,
[00:47:14] the act of traveling was super derogatory.
[00:47:17] This 20th century of ours had upended the fable
[00:47:19] of Muhammad and the mountain mountains nowadays
[00:47:21] didn't, in fact, come to the modern Muhammad.
[00:47:23] - What's funny is that it's like one of the most
[00:47:27] pretentious things that you--
[00:47:28] - So inseparable.
[00:47:29] - Yeah, to possibly conceive of,
[00:47:32] but it's also kind of true for him.
[00:47:34] - I know.
[00:47:35] - Like this is a running theme with his ridiculous
[00:47:39] pomposity is that like, actually, it's like,
[00:47:42] yes, in this case, the mountain did come to Muhammad.
[00:47:46] It came to his basement.
[00:47:48] - Yeah, right.
[00:47:50] - And he's talking about modernity, which is also true.
[00:47:54] - So he tells him that he's writing this poem
[00:47:56] called "The Earth," which is a description
[00:47:59] of our own, "Tiraculous Orb" and was graced, of course,
[00:48:03] with the picturesque, digression, and elegant,
[00:48:05] apostrophe, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it.
[00:48:07] - Apostrophe?
[00:48:09] - Well, I think it's apostrophe the way he means it
[00:48:12] in poetry, but I have not drawn it, so I explain.
[00:48:15] You didn't make fun of me on Twitter or whatever.
[00:48:17] - No, I have the one who needs to be made fun of now.
[00:48:19] I just read it as apostrophe.
[00:48:22] - Well, what would it mean apostrophe
[00:48:24] like in the context of that sentence?
[00:48:26] - I have zero idea, but that's also true
[00:48:29] of a lot of the things that are said in this.
[00:48:31] - I mean, it's strange.
[00:48:32] - In Greek tragedies, this is the only reason I know it
[00:48:37] is that you'll sometimes see apostrophe or apostrophe.
[00:48:41] The first passage of the poem that he reads is,
[00:48:45] "I have seen as did the Greek man's cities
[00:48:48] and his fame, the works, the days of various light,
[00:48:51] the hunger, I predify no fact, I falsify no name,
[00:48:55] for the voyage I narrate is, o tura demashome."
[00:49:00] So you think this is the most insufferably pretentious,
[00:49:05] but as you read the rest of the story,
[00:49:10] and as you come to understand what prompted this,
[00:49:14] it's also true.
[00:49:15] And the voyage is like outside his room.
[00:49:20] Right?
[00:49:21] Like it's just, it's just true.
[00:49:22] He's just finding the language that he's using
[00:49:25] to describe it.
[00:49:27] - Absolutely.
[00:49:28] - And so it's already a signal that we're not gonna be able
[00:49:31] to describe what this is with any real accuracy.
[00:49:36] And we can do it in stylish ways or not stylish ways,
[00:49:40] but it's, we're already fucked from the get go.
[00:49:43] - Yeah, and you know, upon reflection,
[00:49:46] it is a bit of an unreliable narrator again too,
[00:49:50] because we, everything that's described about this guy
[00:49:55] sounds so pompous.
[00:49:57] So he goes on, so those four lines
[00:50:00] that he gives him from his poem,
[00:50:02] he goes on to like a long paragraph,
[00:50:05] sort of describing how awesome each line is
[00:50:08] because of what the meaning...
[00:50:09] - The stanza that I read.
[00:50:11] - The stanza that you write.
[00:50:12] - Yeah.
[00:50:13] - And he says, "A stanza interesting from every point of view."
[00:50:18] - Which, just point again, like a lot of this story,
[00:50:21] like every point of view is kind of interesting
[00:50:23] because that's what we're gonna get with the olloth.
[00:50:25] - Right.
[00:50:26] Yeah.
[00:50:27] So yeah, he gives, I won't read the whole paragraph for you.
[00:50:29] - I'll read the whole thing.
[00:50:30] Oh, it's so funny.
[00:50:31] - A stanza interesting from every point of view,
[00:50:34] he said, "The first line wins the kudos of the learned,
[00:50:36] the academician, the Hellenist,
[00:50:39] though perhaps not that of those would be scholars
[00:50:41] that make up such a substantial portion
[00:50:43] of popular opinion.
[00:50:44] The second moves from Homer to Hesiod,
[00:50:46] Siza, Hesiod.
[00:50:48] Implicit homage at the very threshold
[00:50:50] of the dazzling new edifice to the father of didactic poetry,
[00:50:53] not without revitalizing a technique
[00:50:55] whose lineage may be traced to scripture,
[00:50:57] that is, enumeration, conjuries, or conclobation.
[00:51:00] The third, Baroque, decadent
[00:51:03] at the purified and fanatical cult of form
[00:51:06] consists of twined hemostics.
[00:51:09] And the fourth unabashedly bilingual.
[00:51:11] - A boyage and no tour to my song.
[00:51:15] Unabashedly bilingual.
[00:51:17] It is so awesome.
[00:51:19] - Assures me the unconditional support
[00:51:21] of every spirit able to feel the ample attractions
[00:51:24] of playfulness.
[00:51:25] I shall say nothing of the unusual rhyme,
[00:51:27] nor of the erudition that allows me
[00:51:29] without pedantry or baldishness,
[00:51:31] and to include within the space of four lines,
[00:51:33] three erudidolutions, spanning 30 centuries
[00:51:37] of dense literature from first the Odyssey,
[00:51:39] second the works and days, and third,
[00:51:41] that immortal baguetel that regales us
[00:51:43] with the diversions of the Savoyards plume.
[00:51:45] Once again, I show my awareness
[00:51:47] that truly modern art demands the bomb of laughter,
[00:51:50] of SCARDAZO.
[00:51:51] There is no doubt about it.
[00:51:53] Goldonee was right.
[00:51:55] - That's just so gold-
[00:51:57] - And then a comic hat.
[00:51:58] There's no doubt, I love the way it ends too.
[00:52:00] There's no doubt about it.
[00:52:01] Goldonee was right, it was so perfect.
[00:52:03] I don't know who Goldonee,
[00:52:05] I don't get the right from it.
[00:52:06] - I have no idea who that is.
[00:52:07] - It is either.
[00:52:07] - The line that he says is such a great line.
[00:52:10] He says, "I realize that the poet's work
[00:52:12] "had lay not in the poetry,
[00:52:14] "but in the invention of reasons
[00:52:15] "for accounting the poetry admirable."
[00:52:18] - I think that's a key line in this.
[00:52:20] Without even fully understanding why,
[00:52:24] I feel like that the poet's work had lay not in the poetry,
[00:52:28] but in the invention of reasons
[00:52:31] for accounting the poetry admirable,
[00:52:33] that's the thing that is gonna be
[00:52:36] the problem with the allof too.
[00:52:38] You know what I mean?
[00:52:39] - You're right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:52:40] I thought about it that way.
[00:52:42] - I do think a lot of these lines
[00:52:43] that are also satirical and just really funny,
[00:52:46] like this is what I think is incredible about the story.
[00:52:49] Just connect to the philosophical themes
[00:52:52] and questions that are animating it.
[00:52:55] This is the thing, he's gonna also have,
[00:52:58] like he's gonna realize the impossibility
[00:53:00] of trying to describe what he saw
[00:53:03] and he'll do it in a different way,
[00:53:05] he will try to do it.
[00:53:06] - In a very different way, yeah,
[00:53:07] which I really wanna talk about when we get there.
[00:53:10] Just to be clear, Carlos Argentino's task
[00:53:15] that he set for himself is literally
[00:53:18] to describe the entire world in poetry.
[00:53:21] He proposed to verseify, this is Borja,
[00:53:23] says he proposed to verseify the entire planet.
[00:53:25] By 1941, he had already dispatched several hectares
[00:53:28] of the state of Queensland,
[00:53:29] more than a kilometer of the course of the ob,
[00:53:32] a gas works North of Veracruz,
[00:53:34] the leading commercial establishments
[00:53:35] in the parish of Consepcion,
[00:53:37] Mariana, Cambasérez de Arviades,
[00:53:40] Villa, Chagiones de Sperdime de N brigadeNo,
[00:53:42] and a Turkish bath not far
[00:53:44] from the famed Brighton Aquarium.
[00:53:46] And this is a theme in Borja's too,
[00:53:48] people who are trying somehow to catalog
[00:53:51] the entirety of reality,
[00:53:53] it kind of comes up in Funez,
[00:53:54] where Funez is remembering every detail,
[00:53:57] so he can't abstract things into generalities.
[00:53:59] But like he remembers, you know,
[00:54:02] the dog facing front at 315 is different
[00:54:05] than the dog facing sideways, like different things,
[00:54:07] so his task is completely a different level of infinity.
[00:54:10] But this is also a task that is a fool's task,
[00:54:14] that nobody in their right mind would think could be done,
[00:54:18] but he sets about doing it himself.
[00:54:19] Pyramid art is kind of like that too,
[00:54:21] like the attempt to recreate perfectly the entirety
[00:54:25] of the Quixote, like.
[00:54:27] - Yeah, or like library of Babel,
[00:54:29] those people who are aiming to find the true book,
[00:54:34] the book that explains the library of Babel.
[00:54:36] It's like you're trying to figure out something
[00:54:39] that in principle can't be done
[00:54:41] because of the nature of the thing
[00:54:43] that you're looking for or trying to do.
[00:54:46] - Yeah, it's such a, yeah.
[00:54:47] It's such that vibe that there are things
[00:54:50] that humans set about trying to do
[00:54:52] that are so futile that he's using these
[00:54:56] like ridiculous tasks that make like counting the,
[00:55:00] you know, the sands, the grains of sand on a beach
[00:55:02] seem like a reasonable thing to do.
[00:55:04] And it just seems like he's saying something deep
[00:55:08] about the follies of the things that we endeavor
[00:55:10] to do in our lives.
[00:55:12] - So that's his task to describe the entirety of the earth
[00:55:15] in poetic stanzas.
[00:55:17] Hear this to the right hand of the routine signpost
[00:55:21] coming, what need is there to say from Northwest?
[00:55:24] Yawn's a board skeleton, color?
[00:55:27] Sky perley outside the sheet fold
[00:55:29] that suggests an ossuary.
[00:55:32] So he's just literally describing random spots
[00:55:34] on the globe as if they had like Googles.
[00:55:36] Two audacious risks, he exclaimed in exultation,
[00:55:39] snatched from the jaws of disaster,
[00:55:41] I can hear you mutter by success.
[00:55:44] I admit it, I admit it.
[00:55:45] One, the epithet roots.
[00:55:47] - He admits that it was a success.
[00:55:49] - It admits, he's like putting the words into his mouth.
[00:55:52] - Yeah.
[00:55:53] One, the epithet routine, while making an adjective
[00:55:56] of a synonym for highway nods on Pasang
[00:55:59] to the inevitable tedium inherent
[00:56:00] to those chores of a pastoral and rustic nature
[00:56:03] that neither georgic nor our own billarled dawn segundo
[00:56:07] ever dared acknowledge in such a fourth right way
[00:56:10] with no beating about the bush.
[00:56:11] And the second, delicately referring to the first,
[00:56:14] the forcefully prosaic phrase, yawn's a board skeleton,
[00:56:18] which the finicky will want to excommunicate
[00:56:20] without benefit of clergy,
[00:56:22] but that the critic of more manly tastes will embrace
[00:56:25] as he does his very life.
[00:56:27] - The thing where he's already like shitting on his critics,
[00:56:30] like his imaginary critics,
[00:56:32] because he's not published anything is very funny.
[00:56:36] And his more manly critics,
[00:56:39] this reminds me so much of pale fire.
[00:56:42] I remember this with the Quixote story.
[00:56:44] This reminds me so much of Nabokov's pale fire.
[00:56:47] It's that same voice who...
[00:56:49] - Preempting the critic.
[00:56:50] - Preempting the critic exactly.
[00:56:53] And already kind of coming up with reasons
[00:56:56] why their dismissal of his work is...
[00:57:00] I'll say, Tamler, I know that some listeners
[00:57:02] will think our board his episodes are too rambly,
[00:57:05] but the more manly of our listeners will appreciate.
[00:57:08] (laughs)
[00:57:09] - Of more manly, the listeners of more manly tastes.
[00:57:12] - Yeah.
[00:57:13] And then he gets a phone call a couple of weeks later
[00:57:16] from Carlos Arentino inviting him to go try out a new cafe
[00:57:22] that his landlords or businessmen have opened up.
[00:57:27] And so he goes in this discussion.
[00:57:32] He realizes that what the reason for the invitation
[00:57:35] might be that he's asking board his,
[00:57:37] who is again, board his in this story?
[00:57:39] So he's a writer, he's asking board has maybe
[00:57:43] to be the one to write a prologue.
[00:57:45] - He says it was at this point that I understood
[00:57:49] the unprecedented telephone call and the invitation.
[00:57:52] The man was about to ask me to write the preface
[00:57:55] to a pedantic for all of this.
[00:57:57] But my fear turned out to be unfounded.
[00:58:01] Carlos Argentino remarked with grudging admiration
[00:58:04] that he believed he did not go too far
[00:58:07] in saying that the prestige achieved in every spear
[00:58:10] by the man of letters, Alvar Alvaro-Million-Lefenor-Lefenor
[00:58:15] was solid and that if I could be persuaded
[00:58:19] to persuade him, Alvaro might be enchanted to write.
[00:58:23] The called for a forward.
[00:58:24] So, so first he, he shits on the forward.
[00:58:28] Then Boris is thinking, oh fuck me,
[00:58:31] he's gonna ask me to write the forward or the preface.
[00:58:35] And then no, like he just wants him to be like a go-between.
[00:58:38] That's just very funny.
[00:58:40] I can relate to that.
[00:58:41] I've been that person who has thought,
[00:58:45] oh my God, they're gonna ask me to do something
[00:58:47] because they think it'll like further their career
[00:58:50] but they're not doing that at all.
[00:58:52] They're just asking me to use some connection I have.
[00:58:54] They're like, can I get Sam Harris's email?
[00:58:56] Yeah, okay.
[00:58:57] Can you tell Laurie Santos I want to invite her to Davos?
[00:59:03] No, I want to go with that.
[00:59:05] I just need 20 minutes with her at Davos.
[00:59:07] This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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[01:00:53] (upbeat music)
[01:00:54] - So then, Tim Borges does this thing
[01:00:56] that I could totally relate to
[01:00:58] where he's like, fuck, now I got to ask this guy
[01:01:01] that he asked me to get to do the forward.
[01:01:05] And he's like, I had two options.
[01:01:07] One was to find this way of telling this guy,
[01:01:11] like this guy wrote a shitty poem
[01:01:13] and he's asking me to ask you to do the forward,
[01:01:16] or I could just never bring it up to him at all.
[01:01:19] And he's like, I knew that I was gonna do that,
[01:01:21] that latter one, which is totally what I would do.
[01:01:24] I just ignore it.
[01:01:25] - Look, I have this literally written,
[01:01:27] I don't know if you can see it,
[01:01:28] but I have like Pizarro on that, like, right under that line.
[01:01:33] (laughing)
[01:01:38] - It's so true.
[01:01:41] (laughing)
[01:01:42] - I knew that you would read that and feel like,
[01:01:45] oh, that's me, I'm exposed.
[01:01:48] - I totally passive aggressively.
[01:01:51] Well, just like not just do it.
[01:01:53] - You respond.
[01:01:54] - Not do it.
[01:01:54] - It's so funny.
[01:01:57] (laughing)
[01:01:59] - Later, Borges, again, this is very funny,
[01:02:01] very self satirical.
[01:02:02] I can relate to this too.
[01:02:04] Like every time the phone rings, he thinks,
[01:02:06] oh shit, he's gonna be mad at me asking me
[01:02:08] about whether I talked to the other poet.
[01:02:12] And meanwhile, that never happens.
[01:02:15] Then he does call, though,
[01:02:17] and those same landlords who opened that good cafe,
[01:02:21] that the great cafe that he was praising,
[01:02:24] they now wanna demolish the house.
[01:02:27] And here's where that line that you quoted earlier
[01:02:29] after 40, every change becomes a hateful symbol
[01:02:33] of times passing.
[01:02:34] But yeah, like they're gonna demolish the house.
[01:02:38] He says after that, in addition,
[01:02:40] this was the house that I saw as alluding infinitely
[01:02:43] to be a trace.
[01:02:44] And obviously that's a kind of meaningful line.
[01:02:47] And here's where we first find out about the alla.
[01:02:50] He says, "The olive is in my basement and I need it to finish my poem and they can't take that away from me."
[01:03:00] The place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world seen from every angle coexist.
[01:03:08] I revealed my discovery when he was a child to no one, but I did return.
[01:03:13] The child could not understand that he was given that privilege so that the man might carve out a poem.
[01:03:19] And so now we know the origin story of this poem.
[01:03:21] He has a lawyer named Zuni, Zuni Nō and Zungri shall never take it from me, never, never.
[01:03:28] Law book in hand, Zuni will prove that my olive is inalienable.
[01:03:34] Yeah.
[01:03:35] And I feel like that's important, but I don't totally get why, but law book in hand, Zuni,
[01:03:43] Zuni will prove that my olive is inalienable.
[01:03:46] One of the things I was thinking was these landlords, Zunino and Zungri,
[01:03:51] so weird that they both have Z-names and I thought, well,
[01:03:55] this maybe on purpose, Aleph is the first letter of the alphabet.
[01:03:59] I don't know what Zuni, the lawyer.
[01:04:02] Like why there's a third Z?
[01:04:03] It's just all Z's that are involved in this poem.
[01:04:07] Yeah.
[01:04:08] I love at this point, by the way, this is the point, I remember, you know, this is the point
[01:04:13] where you're reading this and you're like, "What the fuck?"
[01:04:15] There's this guy thinks that there's a point in his basement that contains all of the world.
[01:04:22] It was a comedy of manners and a satire of the literary culture of Argentina
[01:04:29] in the late 30s or early 40s, and then all of a sudden, wait, what's going on?
[01:04:34] It's a Borg story.
[01:04:35] Yeah, it's a Borg story.
[01:04:37] And Borg has, the character has this, all of a sudden, shit falls into place for him.
[01:04:42] He's like, "Oh, fuck.
[01:04:44] This guy's actually crazy."
[01:04:45] And he's like, "It makes sense now."
[01:04:49] Which is interesting, but that seems for us thought.
[01:04:52] I mean, it makes sense, but it's kind of interesting, given what comes later.
[01:04:57] Yeah.
[01:04:58] Yeah.
[01:04:59] And then he says, maybe all of the Vite trebils, which is the family name, including Beatrice,
[01:05:04] might have been crazy.
[01:05:05] So he says, "Even though she was a woman, a girl of implacable, clear-sidedness, but
[01:05:09] there were things about her, oversights, distractions, moments of contempt, downright cruelty,
[01:05:14] that perhaps could have done with the pathological explanation."
[01:05:16] So maybe there's madness running in the family.
[01:05:19] So Carlos Articindinos madness.
[01:05:20] But I think that's also, he's saying that to explain the fact that she never loved him,
[01:05:25] like she loved her.
[01:05:26] Yeah.
[01:05:27] He is justifying.
[01:05:29] Yeah.
[01:05:30] It's given him an explanation for it.
[01:05:34] He doesn't buy it.
[01:05:35] I don't even think he buys it as he's saying it.
[01:05:38] Right before he says that, for all he thinks of him being crazy, he goes right over.
[01:05:45] I love it.
[01:05:46] He says, "I'll be there and hangs up so before the guy can stop him from going."
[01:05:50] Yeah.
[01:05:51] I'm going to go.
[01:05:52] Yeah.
[01:05:53] And he's getting some sort of pleasure in the thought that this guy's bat-shit.
[01:05:58] And that Beatrice is bat-shit, which, you know, it's a very ugly kind of thing to think
[01:06:06] at that point, I think, for this character.
[01:06:08] Carlos Articindinos madness filled me with malign happiness.
[01:06:13] Deep down, we had always detested one another.
[01:06:16] That's your Don Draper line, I think.
[01:06:18] Right.
[01:06:19] I don't think that Carlos Articindinos-- I don't think he detested Borges.
[01:06:25] Look, there's no evidence of that in the story.
[01:06:28] I feel bad for you.
[01:06:30] I don't think about you at all.
[01:06:33] Yet it's an interesting-- Borges, the character, is telling on himself as a petty person.
[01:06:42] Yeah, he seems small in this story.
[01:06:45] So he runs over to the house and, of course, he is observing all of the portraits, the
[01:06:51] pictures of her.
[01:06:52] He says, "Besides the flowerless vase atop the useless pianos smiled the great-fated
[01:06:59] photograph of Beatrice.
[01:07:01] Not so much inachronistic as outside time.
[01:07:05] No one could see us in a desperation of tenderness, I approached the portrait and then what you
[01:07:11] said."
[01:07:12] And it's like, it's a faded photograph, it's a useless piano, it's like all this stuff
[01:07:21] is just receding from him, and he's grasping at it and he can't keep it.
[01:07:29] Yeah.
[01:07:30] It's a pseudo cognac.
[01:07:32] Hey, do you have any idea?
[01:07:35] It was like, near beer, but for cognac.
[01:07:38] Is it like non-alcoholic cognac?
[01:07:40] I have no idea, yeah, but yeah, so when Carlos comes in, he says, "Let's have a glass
[01:07:47] of pseudo cognac and I'll take you down to the basement and show you the olive."
[01:07:52] You've got to lie on the floor in this particular way and you've got to stare at the 19th step
[01:07:58] of the stairway that you just went down.
[01:08:01] And I'll go back up and I'll shut the door for the darkness.
[01:08:06] And within a few minutes, you'll see the aleph, the microcosm of the alchemists and
[01:08:13] kabbalists, our proverbial friend, the multim in parbo made flesh.
[01:08:17] Much in little.
[01:08:19] Yeah.
[01:08:20] Also, just to set the scene, he's going down into a basement which has one of those staircases
[01:08:27] that just kind of pop up, you know, and he's going to pull it up.
[01:08:32] That's right.
[01:08:33] It's like a fucking horror movie, and that's his first thought that, like, "Oh, my God.
[01:08:38] He's going to kill me."
[01:08:39] Like he's putting in the basement.
[01:08:40] It becomes an Edgar Allan Poe story right there.
[01:08:43] Totally.
[01:08:44] It's like the cask of a Monteido.
[01:08:45] Yeah.
[01:08:46] Like, this guy has hated me, and like, "This is exactly how he's going to off me."
[01:08:50] But then he sees it.
[01:08:52] And he says, "I come now to the ineffable center of my tale.
[01:08:54] It is here that our writer's hopelessness begins.
[01:08:57] Every language is an alphabet of symbols, the employment of which assumes a past shared
[01:09:02] by its interlocutors.
[01:09:04] How can one transmit to the other two others the infinite aleph which my timorous memory
[01:09:09] can scarcely contain?
[01:09:11] In a similar situation, mystics have employed a wealth of emblems to signify the deity,
[01:09:15] a Persian mystics speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds.
[01:09:18] Alain de lille speaks of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, Ezekiel
[01:09:23] of an angel with four faces facing east and west, north and south at once.
[01:09:27] It is not for nothing that I call to mind these inconceivable analogies they bear a relation
[01:09:30] to the aleph.
[01:09:31] Already there is this thing that contains the infinite all at once.
[01:09:38] Yeah, simultaneous.
[01:09:40] Yeah.
[01:09:41] Simultaneous.
[01:09:42] That's obviously crucial here.
[01:09:45] And mystics have been trying to describe it with symbols, but they all are lacking in
[01:09:53] some respect because this is something that symbols can only point to.
[01:10:00] This is the fundamental problem of any kind of mystical or transcendent tradition of inquiry
[01:10:08] is, okay, you get it.
[01:10:10] What are you supposed to do?
[01:10:13] And not only in terms of describing it to other people, but in terms of even trying
[01:10:18] to understand it yourself.
[01:10:20] Besides the central problem, the enumeration, even partial enumeration of infinity is
[01:10:24] irresolvable.
[01:10:26] I saw millions in that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts.
[01:10:31] None amaze me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point without superposition
[01:10:35] and without transparency.
[01:10:38] Somehow his senses are allowing the influx of all of that to come in and he is grasping
[01:10:44] it in the moment and then he has to set himself to trying his best to describe what he saw.
[01:10:50] It says something of it I will capture.
[01:10:54] Because language is successive and what he saw was not, you're already fucked.
[01:10:59] So he's already giving all the limits with the mystical traditions and the symbols and
[01:11:05] the fact that you have language having the feature of being successive.
[01:11:10] Whereas what he saw was simultaneous.
[01:11:12] This is fool's airing.
[01:11:13] This is quixotic.
[01:11:15] I love this description that he gives.
[01:11:22] This is the juxtaposition that you have with this guy who is trying to use language, Carlos
[01:11:27] Arbandino, who's trying to use the language to systematically describe everything he
[01:11:32] sees in this poetic stanzas that are going to be thousands of stanzas to lay everything
[01:11:41] out.
[01:11:42] He is trying to just give us a flavor, like some vague sense of the phenomenology and
[01:11:49] he does it just by describing the aleph, what it looked like and then a whole bunch
[01:11:56] of random scenes that came simultaneously into his senses.
[01:12:00] He says, "Under the step I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness.
[01:12:06] At first I thought it was spinning.
[01:12:08] Then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside
[01:12:12] it."
[01:12:13] He saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty
[01:12:18] body, saw cancer in her breasts, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there
[01:12:24] had once been a tree, saw a country home and drogue, saw all the ants on the earth.
[01:12:32] What he's seeing is the earth right now.
[01:12:35] He doesn't see things from the past or the future.
[01:12:40] He just sees everything at once right now.
[01:12:44] He saw tarot card in a shop window in Mirza poor, which reminded me of Blood Meridian.
[01:12:51] He also sees detailed letters, because I guess these letters still exist, that Beatrice had
[01:12:57] sent.
[01:12:58] He said obscene, incredible detailed letters that Beatrice had sent Carlos Argentino.
[01:13:05] He said, "Hey, is that how you...?"
[01:13:08] Yes, they were first cousins, but this is - he's bearing the lead here.
[01:13:15] This is clearly one of the most important things to him.
[01:13:19] He just lists it among all of the other numerable things.
[01:13:24] But, yeah, Beatrice was having some sort of nasty affair with color.
[01:13:29] Not even step cousin, just actual cousin.
[01:13:35] It's all just one sentence, we should say too, which is another feature of what he's
[01:13:42] trying to do, how he's trying to do it, like how he's trying to capture the simultaneity
[01:13:46] of it is by making it one long sentence in the page of dense text.
[01:13:52] But peeking out of the randomness is certain things like that that kind of explain his particular
[01:14:01] focus.
[01:14:02] That's what the paradox of this olive is, is that you see everything, and nothing has
[01:14:08] more importance than anything else that you see.
[01:14:12] But when you write about it, it's hard not to import your own hairs and values and attitudes
[01:14:22] and desires on what it is that you've seen.
[01:14:26] He could have chosen anything, and he chose those letters, and her rotting remains after
[01:14:31] the letter.
[01:14:32] Yeah, he says, "Beloved monument in Cacarita," which is a cemetery in Bonasite, "saw the
[01:14:37] horrendous remains of what had once deliciously been Beatrice Vitterua."
[01:14:41] Yeah, no, totally correct.
[01:14:43] You can totally process that until now.
[01:14:45] That's why he hates Carlos Arrata and Tina.
[01:14:51] It's the view from nowhere, truly, the view from nowhere.
[01:14:54] It's standing on an external plane of existence and seeing everything that's happening on
[01:14:59] Earth simultaneously, but just like it reminds me of our discussion of The Veil of Ignorance,
[01:15:08] where you can't actually process all of that stuff without imputing something of your own
[01:15:15] mind onto it.
[01:15:16] But there's two questions.
[01:15:18] Can you process it?
[01:15:21] If you do process it, can you describe what it is that you process?
[01:15:26] I think this is definitely saying no to the second question, not sure what it says about
[01:15:32] the first question.
[01:15:33] Yeah, it does seem, you're right, and that would be the difference between perception
[01:15:39] and memory, I guess, and it may be the case that it really does seem that his description
[01:15:47] is that he processed it all.
[01:15:50] He says, "I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity."
[01:15:53] He had truly looked upon the inconceivable universe.
[01:15:56] But then, once you start the process of memory...
[01:16:00] So I think those are two separate things, but I think they're connected in the sense
[01:16:05] that once you're not experiencing it anymore, you might just be in the same kind of condition
[01:16:12] as if you tried to explain it to somebody else, trying to even remember it and make sense
[01:16:20] of it to yourself.
[01:16:22] It's like a dream that fades so quickly when you wake up and you're trying to hold on to
[01:16:27] it.
[01:16:28] You're trying to grasp it, yes.
[01:16:29] Yeah, you could just feel it leaving you as you're trying.
[01:16:33] In this case, he's ambivalent about whether he wants it to leave or not, because he says,
[01:16:38] "I feared there was nothing that had the power to surprise or astonish me anymore.
[01:16:42] I feared that I would never again be without a sense of deja vu."
[01:16:46] Fortunately, after a few unsleeping nights, forgetfulness began to work in me again.
[01:16:52] So he's got the reverse curse of Funez, but it's actually a blessing in this case.
[01:17:02] It allows him to not be in this kind of middle state of knowing that you experienced something
[01:17:10] transcendent and not being able to let that go, but then forgetfulness and it's over.
[01:17:18] And it wouldn't hurt to forget the letters that he saw either.
[01:17:24] That's right.
[01:17:26] That's exactly right, yeah.
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[01:19:42] He's clearly put Beatrice up on a pedestal that she probably didn't deserve but he wants
[01:19:51] to hold on to that.
[01:19:52] He wants to hold on to it.
[01:19:54] Yeah.
[01:19:55] Yeah.
[01:19:56] This is about grasping.
[01:19:57] This is about trying to hold on to things that can't be held on to like as much as it
[01:20:02] is about the thought experiment of what it would mean to perceive everything everywhere
[01:20:10] at once.
[01:20:11] Yes, I tried not to say it.
[01:20:16] So when he comes out of it, Carlos immediately says, ha ha see like serves you right, having
[01:20:27] your mind boggled for sticking your nose in where you weren't wanted, said a jobial
[01:20:30] board voice and you may wreck your brains, but you'll never repay me for this revelation.
[01:20:35] Not in a hundred years.
[01:20:36] But he's like a magnificent observatory, he bore his and Carlos is like, you did see it,
[01:20:40] right?
[01:20:41] You saw it clearly and color and everything.
[01:20:42] And this is the moment where he can see his revenge.
[01:20:44] He decides that he's not going to admit that he saw it.
[01:20:48] But he's going to make Carlos think that he's actually crazy.
[01:20:52] And so he just doesn't mention it at all.
[01:20:55] And he says, and maybe it would be like fine if this house gets destroyed and you move
[01:21:02] out to the country, like get some fresh country air that's good medicine for you.
[01:21:07] And that's when he walks out after that.
[01:21:09] He just walks out on the street and he sees all faces looked familiar to him.
[01:21:14] So that's the end.
[01:21:15] That's his revenge.
[01:21:16] He's going to make him, he's going to gaslight him.
[01:21:19] Gaslight him, exactly.
[01:21:20] But then we've got such a mean, petty thing to do.
[01:21:24] He really doesn't come off that well, especially when it's something that fucking mind-blowing.
[01:21:29] You've just seen the entire universe, this guy showed it to you.
[01:21:33] And your immediate thought is like, "I'm going to get him."
[01:21:38] So unreliable narrator is a good way of describing it because you're kind of on his side as
[01:21:43] this guy is the bombastic rays of his own poetry.
[01:21:51] You can't imagine how horrifying that would be to be subjected to it.
[01:21:56] And then you think the more you read the story, you realize like, it's Borghets that is the
[01:22:02] asshole here.
[01:22:03] He's the petty small person who unfortunately found out that somebody had sex with the woman
[01:22:13] that he loved and that he couldn't have, at least not fully.
[01:22:18] Right.
[01:22:19] And so we find out six months after the demolition of the building that they published his substantial
[01:22:25] poem, and he says, "It goes without saying what happened."
[01:22:29] Carlos had cantino one second place in the national prize for literature.
[01:22:33] The first prize went to Dr. Ait III, to Dr. Mario Bonfante incredibly, incredibly.
[01:22:40] My own work, "The Sharper's Cards Did Not Earn a Single Vote."
[01:22:43] Which is something that Carlos are how Argentino would have said.
[01:22:47] Would have said exactly.
[01:22:48] Yeah.
[01:22:49] Borghets then says, "There are two observations that he wants to add with the regard of
[01:22:53] the nature of the aleph."
[01:22:55] He says, "In the kabbalah, that letter aleph signifies ends off the pure and unlimited
[01:23:01] godhead.
[01:23:02] It's supposed to represent god."
[01:23:04] And the shape of that Hebrew letter is supposed to represent a man pointing to the sky and
[01:23:09] to the earth, which is like an alchemical symbol, sort of like as above, so below, macrocause
[01:23:16] and macrocause.
[01:23:17] And he asks whether or not Carlos Argentino actually chose that name or he had read it
[01:23:25] in one of the innumerable texts revealed to him by the aleph in his house.
[01:23:29] And then he goes on to say, "And this is a part that I'm just not sure about."
[01:23:34] He then goes on to argue that he thinks that this was actually a false aleph, that this
[01:23:38] was one of many.
[01:23:40] And the reasons that he gives is just like that in some Captain Burton book where he
[01:23:45] describes a bunch of these supposedly false alephs that were mirrors into the universe,
[01:23:51] but weren't actually, that there's only one true one.
[01:23:54] And that lies inside the pillars of stone in some temple in...
[01:23:59] And you can only hear it.
[01:24:00] You can't see it.
[01:24:01] And you can only hear it.
[01:24:02] You can never see it, which is hilarious in Cairo.
[01:24:06] I have some thoughts about why he does that.
[01:24:08] So do you think it's just like defensiveness?
[01:24:12] Yeah.
[01:24:13] You think he's crafted that he was looking for something to believe that that wasn't,
[01:24:20] that this guy didn't have access to the true aleph?
[01:24:23] Uh, yeah.
[01:24:24] Right.
[01:24:25] You know, I don't fully process the stuff about Beatrice and Carlos.
[01:24:31] So I was thinking of it more that he's trying to process the fact that he saw the aleph and
[01:24:38] he can't describe it properly, and so he doesn't want to think that he had this transcendent
[01:24:45] experience that he can't describe and can't even remember properly, and it's just faded
[01:24:50] into nothing like Beatrice, and so he's gonna say it's a false aleph.
[01:24:55] Like maybe he's gonna say Beatrice was a false, like, she was pathological.
[01:24:58] Like I think that's like, oh, she was just paths.
[01:25:00] That's why she didn't like me.
[01:25:01] She's pathological.
[01:25:02] Yeah.
[01:25:03] But, uh, so, sort of like that in the sense, and like, I think the story does.
[01:25:08] It does such a good job about having at the macro level this deep question of how like
[01:25:14] language, can it eat, capture the transcendent, no, can it capture the infinite and the simultaneous?
[01:25:23] No, but like, what do we do with that?
[01:25:26] What do we do the fact that we can have these experiences and then not be able to even remember
[01:25:31] it or, uh, unless we're having it, it just fades away.
[01:25:35] And like, we just plug words in, uh, in a kind of pitiful way.
[01:25:39] And Carlos, our cantino does it in his way, Borges does it in his way that's better, but
[01:25:44] it's still just not up to the task of it, you know?
[01:25:48] And I think it's like, it's not just the, the olow, the kabbalah, like this mystical
[01:25:53] object, it doesn't just apply to those things, or maybe like experiences and meditation that
[01:25:59] you might have, but then they're gone.
[01:26:02] And you don't even like, and then they fade and it's like, did it even happen?
[01:26:05] You know, like, uh, but but it's not just that.
[01:26:08] I also think it's like, he's feeling this about Beatrice and his feelings for her.
[01:26:12] And every time he tries to describe her, you know, he starts getting a little pretentious
[01:26:17] or he starts getting a little resentful.
[01:26:19] And so first he starts getting a little pretentious, the whole thing about the sousal of whatever
[01:26:24] of, uh, uh, palsy, uh, and then he, you know, then he gets very tender and he just, and
[01:26:31] and, but, and then he tries to dismiss it.
[01:26:34] That's what I think the false olive is, is like, he is also unable to not just describe
[01:26:42] what he loved about Beatrice, but also he's losing the ability to even remember it.
[01:26:49] And so he lashes out at that inability, these moments in our lives that are deeply meaningful,
[01:26:55] but every time we try to like, describe them, they get debased, but even remember them, they
[01:27:00] start getting debased.
[01:27:02] And, uh, and there's just certain things that are like that.
[01:27:05] Some things get richer when you try to describe them, but some things get debased.
[01:27:10] And memory is just like that.
[01:27:13] Yeah, I like that a lot.
[01:27:15] And, and it reminds me, I didn't read the very last paragraph, which I think is pretty
[01:27:19] crucial.
[01:27:20] It says, uh, when he describes that the real olive that might be within those stone pillars
[01:27:25] and Cairo, he says, does that all of exist within the heart of a stone?
[01:27:28] Did I see it when I saw all things and then forget it?
[01:27:32] Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness.
[01:27:34] I myself am distorting and losing through the tragic erosion of the years, the features
[01:27:39] of Beatrice.
[01:27:40] Exactly.
[01:27:41] That's the thing that kind of made me think of what I just said.
[01:27:46] And it also kind of exposes the fact that if that olive existed, he would have seen it.
[01:27:51] But maybe he could have forgotten it, but, uh, it's all, it's very hard to know, like,
[01:27:56] was he supposed to have like not only seen everything, but actually, actually seen everything.
[01:28:03] You know, like it's, like you see a crowd, you look in a crowd of people and you're in
[01:28:07] some sense seeing everybody, but you don't see everybody.
[01:28:10] But like it really does seem like this truly mystical experience was that he actually observed
[01:28:14] every single thing in that entered his mind.
[01:28:18] So he thinks he should have seen that other olive in there, you know, but I guess if it
[01:28:21] was a false olive, he might not have that's the other thing, which is like, yeah.
[01:28:25] How, why would you think that you could see it if it was a, if there was a true olive
[01:28:29] out there, this was a false olive.
[01:28:30] How could the false olive show you where the true one is?
[01:28:34] It's a little paradoxical.
[01:28:36] Exactly.
[01:28:38] There was something that was too juicy for me, like getting lost in reading about the
[01:28:42] Kabbalah.
[01:28:44] So the 19th staircase, I was like, I wonder why the 19th?
[01:28:49] Yeah.
[01:28:50] Where 19 is of significance, apparently from what I read in the Kabbalah, because you know
[01:28:58] how like every letter has a numerical value in the Hebrew alphabet, apparently the word
[01:29:04] for God Yahweh, though just the Y H W H has the numerical value of 26.
[01:29:11] But when you put in the vowels, so the unwritten things, but the sounds that you require in
[01:29:19] order to pronounce them, those vowels have the value of 19 and they say that like, in
[01:29:25] order to actually say the word God, you require those unwritten sounds and those sounds are
[01:29:32] even more valuable than the written ones, like the ones that come out of your mouth.
[01:29:37] Like, yeah.
[01:29:38] That's interesting.
[01:29:39] Pretty cool.
[01:29:40] That's really interesting.
[01:29:41] So Hebrew, when you know, like in the Torah, there's depending on the kind of Torah, but
[01:29:48] often when Hebrew is written, there's no vowels.
[01:29:51] It's just consonants and so the vowels are something that we have to import with our
[01:29:57] previous knowledge.
[01:29:59] That's fascinating.
[01:30:00] That's really interesting.
[01:30:01] And they add up to 19th.
[01:30:03] Yeah.
[01:30:04] Yeah.
[01:30:05] Yeah.
[01:30:06] So of course, the elephant is there.
[01:30:07] In the elephant, of course, the letter itself is supposed to stand for God.
[01:30:11] Yeah.
[01:30:12] Yeah.
[01:30:13] This is the whole Jewish mysticism tradition is something I don't know that much about.
[01:30:17] We probably know more than I do.
[01:30:19] So they're making me slightly so cool, though.
[01:30:21] I love that Kabbalah shit.
[01:30:23] We should do pie.
[01:30:24] You know, the Aronofsky first movie because it is about that, the kind of numerology
[01:30:32] that's a part of the Kabbalah tradition.
[01:30:35] So it's funny through discussion, like I had the sense when I read it that the tables
[01:30:43] were actually turned that the villain was actually four heads, but like I'm more, not
[01:30:47] villain, but you know, but I am more convinced that Carlos Argentina, like has got a bad
[01:30:54] rap.
[01:30:55] I think you did.
[01:30:56] I don't think Boerhas is a villain though.
[01:30:59] Like in a way, I think he is somebody who is trying to come to terms with the fact that
[01:31:05] as an artist, he can't describe the ineffable as a man.
[01:31:10] He can't hold on to the ineffable and yes, also that this idealized vision of this woman
[01:31:19] that he loved would be with this pompous and sufforable asshole.
[01:31:26] But like, you know, in the end it's Carlos Argentina who this whole time has had this
[01:31:32] olive in his basement and has tried to maybe, and competently, maybe in a way that's kind
[01:31:40] of cringey has tried to express it to the outside world.
[01:31:46] And in the end, it was just as futile a task as anything Boerhas is trying to do.
[01:31:50] He can't hold on to Beatrice.
[01:31:52] He can't hold on to the memory, can hold on to whatever he experienced with the olive.
[01:31:57] And so he's going to figure out ways of trying to deal with that, including being uncharitable
[01:32:06] in his description of Carlos Arndino.
[01:32:10] And it is, I think, worth coming back to what you were alluding to when we started this.
[01:32:17] When we read the first stanzas of Carlos's poem that sound so cringey, now that we know
[01:32:26] what the alef is and we go back to these, you're totally right.
[01:32:30] Like, yeah, of course, that's what it's insufferable.
[01:32:35] But it's also trying to accurately describe what this kid has been looking at for life
[01:32:39] his entire life.
[01:32:41] I have seen as did the Greek, the man cities and his fame, the works, the days of various
[01:32:45] light, the hunger.
[01:32:46] I prettify no fact, I falsify no name for the boyage, I narrate is Odo up to myself.
[01:32:51] All that's true.
[01:32:52] Yeah.
[01:32:53] It's 100% true.
[01:32:54] Yeah.
[01:32:55] Yeah.
[01:32:56] And you really read it differently.
[01:32:58] Yeah.
[01:32:59] This is a story you have to reread, for sure.
[01:33:01] Yeah.
[01:33:02] Yeah.
[01:33:03] So good.
[01:33:04] So good.
[01:33:05] All right.
[01:33:06] We may come back to the themes of this story.
[01:33:10] I think they are at the center of a lot of the things that we're interested in, but
[01:33:15] anything else, Dad?
[01:33:17] Oh, I love you.
[01:33:19] Hooray.
[01:33:20] [LAUGHTER]
[01:33:21] Yeah.
[01:33:22] Unlike Beatrice, I hope you love me back.
[01:33:25] He does.
[01:33:26] All right.
[01:33:28] Join us next time I'm very dadless.
[01:33:29] Backway then.
[01:33:30] Us.
[01:33:31] Have fun.
[01:33:32] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[01:33:33] Who are you?
[01:33:37] Who are you?
[01:33:42] I'm a very bad man.
[01:33:43] I'm a very good man.
[01:33:46] Good man.
[01:33:47] They think he costs.
[01:33:48] And with no more rings than you have.
[01:33:50] They do attention to that man.
[01:33:53] I'm a very bad man.
[01:33:54] I'm a very good man.
[01:33:56] Good man.
[01:33:57] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[01:33:58] I'm a very good man.
[01:33:58] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[01:34:00] I'm a very good man.
[01:34:01] Good man.
[01:34:02] [MUSIC PLAYING]
[01:34:04] Anybody can have a brain?
[01:34:08] You're a very bad man.
[01:34:10] I'm a very good man.
[01:34:12] Just a very bad wizard.