Episode 280: Mad Masque (with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel)

[00:00:00] Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, Dave Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion

[00:00:10] contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:30] The fading on has spoken, a new attention to that man behind the curtain.

[00:00:40] Who are you? Who are you? I'm very bad men.

[00:00:51] I'm a very good man. Good man. They think he's lost and with no more brains than you have.

[00:01:01] They do our attention. Come on man. Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man.

[00:01:13] Very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:23] Dave, today we have the weird studies guys on to talk about the mask of the red death by Edgrell and Poe in the main segment.

[00:01:33] This got me thinking, is this podcast ultimately some kind of death cult?

[00:01:43] Wait a while. Do we tend to focus on morbid content nowadays?

[00:01:51] Well, I had a rationale for this. For one thing, most people start a podcast. They don't think they're starting a death cult.

[00:02:05] Most people who start death cults probably don't think they're starting. It just goes.

[00:02:13] It's slippery slope and before you know, you're buying Nike's and cutting your balls off.

[00:02:17] I guess. In the poor history I read, it was describing another multi-volume text where the only word that wasn't mentioned was time.

[00:02:29] That's how you knew that it was about time. What's the one book that we keep saying we're going to do but we never do?

[00:02:39] Yeah, but we're denying the denial of death. So we're embracing.

[00:02:43] Okay. Good. Yeah. Okay. We're a lifeline.

[00:02:47] Yeah. I do agree that eventually we will die and we probably will still be doing this fucking podcast.

[00:02:53] We think death is the escape, but it just won't be. It'll just be really awkward if we die on the like while we're recording.

[00:03:03] Yeah. We should probably decide would we post that one?

[00:03:07] I mean, so are you thinking both of us die or just one?

[00:03:11] No, I'm thinking one of us dies and the other ones like, oh fuck man now I have this like the raw audio, you know, like should I let everybody know?

[00:03:19] It's like one more ad, you know, maybe better help is giving us some money.

[00:03:23] Right. We can just get one last little Patreon. Yeah.

[00:03:27] I think I would do it, you know, don or you in your memory.

[00:03:31] Thank you. Maybe.

[00:03:33] What if my last words are like it's not that bad guys?

[00:03:39] Again, we're a death cult.

[00:03:43] Okay. Let's move on to Lippetimo.

[00:03:47] Yes they say.

[00:03:49] Yes. The muse-bush and more ways than one.

[00:03:55] So that's the second segment and the first segment maybe we're going back to our roots or I don't even know if this is our roots.

[00:04:01] I don't know what this is.

[00:04:03] We've never been presented with this such clear, I think it's definitely though the spirit of our roots.

[00:04:11] So this is Ayela.

[00:04:15] Ayela.

[00:04:16] Okay.

[00:04:17] Yeah.

[00:04:18] Ayela who is what is she exactly?

[00:04:23] Ayela is a very intelligent woman who has developed a strong internet following because she I think posts very interesting and provocative content, but she is a sex worker.

[00:04:33] She's on only fans. I think she used to do camming and very open about her sexuality.

[00:04:39] She actually was raised a super, super strict Christian and left them.

[00:04:45] She's also like I guess what you would call, we would call him out rationalist.

[00:04:51] She's like the Slate Star Codex of sex workers.

[00:04:55] Exactly. Yeah.

[00:04:57] She is the beacon for thirsty rationalists everywhere.

[00:05:03] I know that she's out there but I've never dived in before you suggested this.

[00:05:11] But she seems like the sex symbol for our times, data driven rationalist kind of process oriented on this spectrum.

[00:05:21] Like she's not by her own admission by her own admission.

[00:05:25] She's not self obsessed but she is engaged in a kind of constant self examination from what I can tell in a way that reminds me of our age and especially millennials.

[00:05:37] Yeah. Right.

[00:05:39] And she does, you know, it's not like she's not just posting sex stuff.

[00:05:43] Like she posts very interesting polls.

[00:05:45] She has like very, you know, like very provocative takes on all sorts of things but she's definitely very open about talking about her own experiences.

[00:05:57] The thing that I think is so perfect for our times at least according to my obsessions is how quantified and graph driven everything is.

[00:06:07] There's a lot of charts and graphs and data like that in that accompany her openness and transparency about who she is and what she does.

[00:06:21] Right. She it's like she thinks and like spreadsheet.

[00:06:25] So what we're going to talk about which I'm so glad you suggested is I guess she had a birthday orgy but it was more like a birthday gang bang.

[00:06:37] I guess we could talk about whether to, you know, how to classify it.

[00:06:43] Well, she titled it my birthday gang bang. So I'm going to leave her to the categorization.

[00:06:47] Yeah. I'll trust her.

[00:06:49] I love to experience.

[00:06:51] It's this is a very funny account like we're only I don't think either of us subscribe to her substacks so no but by the end of this post like didn't you want to absolutely.

[00:07:04] So like if it hadn't been like I was too close to recording. I think I might have and also I just to get the because it ends on like she picked a good place to end it for the free.

[00:07:16] But there's a lot here in just the free preview and we'd probably have to make it a main segment so it's probably for the best.

[00:07:24] It's okay. So she had a birthday gang bang that she organized as like a full on event and this is this blog post is the story of how that went like from beginning to to end basically her her boyfriend and some friends put together this event and it turns out to be like quite complicated logistically to do this so.

[00:07:45] Already like I'm out.

[00:07:51] This is not the kind of impulsive irresponsible sex that I like.

[00:07:57] Okay, so she I'll just briefly do like the flow charty account so she put out a call for applications to be part of this bang gang bang.

[00:08:10] She had like some sort of automated filter and she reported that 1600 people responded to the survey 776 of those passed the automatic filter then she had a manual filter where people read it 448 of those passed that they of those they contacted 251 they interviewed 83

[00:08:33] 3 strangers and had 25 friends they invited 87 people they asked them to get tickets which were free but they could donate of those 87 people 56 got a ticket 13 canceled 43 now we're at the point where like you're really if you're really going to do is you got to commit you they had to go get an STI panel of like one thing I learned from this is their ST eyes that I had no idea.

[00:08:57] I'm glad that I'm not in that world but at the end there's 42 guys in this house or whatever wherever they were all in bath robes all like nothing like custom bathrobes.

[00:09:14] I went to the a la B day gang bang and all I got was this bathrobe and also to fuck a point star now here's where I have a little bit of qualms she does have an only fans.

[00:09:27] The point is really a porn star and I'm really a really.

[00:09:30] I know only fans star I'm willing to say anyway yeah so it's quite a like an interesting situation so one thing I found really interesting about this post is that at least in the free version she doesn't say anything about the attractiveness of the men right like they had.

[00:09:48] Like they had to get into their penises once that's the quick thing wait before we get to that can we just note that she leads this post it's her sub stack with a quote from Nelson Mandela.

[00:10:05] It's I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it the brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers that fear Nelson Mandela.

[00:10:18] And I just like the opening so that leads perfectly into from the outside it might seem like I am fearless in my sexual adventures like I'm a confidence slut running wildly from penis to penis this isn't true at all all the best risks I've taken in my life all the sexual choices.

[00:10:37] I've made that have revoked societies blessing on me I've done despite experiencing sheer terror and I don't even know if this fits like this doesn't fit with the other preconceptions like to just lead off with the Nelson Mandela quote about this.

[00:10:54] You know very kind of bureaucratically complicated orgy is funny yeah it is quite hilarious and.

[00:11:04] Some people might get in trouble for that something she will you know maybe if she had started with like the arc of your dick bends toward my pussy.

[00:11:15] Is there like a break down of the demographics of no there's of the men yeah no there's not like you know again unless it's big content we really should have written this off on our taxes and just bit the bullet like we might have to follow up.

[00:11:31] Yeah but unless it's in the page content there's no yeah there's no we should do that we said perfect for like a quick up yeah you can you can't you got it like this is well written and interesting and she is like very open in a way that like you're right there is this line of like is she self obsessed like I'm not I don't get the annoying vibes now objectively this is all about her.

[00:11:54] But she's she doesn't exude that that energy of like me just being annoying no it's not like the kind of narcissism it is that kind of like again associated with millennials that I'm just constantly thinking about like what it is I'm doing and does it make sense and it is irrational and I need to like figure it out and I need to get it you know in numbers so that I have some metric that I can judge like well I don't know that I you know I don't know the millennials are into metric.

[00:12:23] Generally but they're definitely into let me share what I'm thinking with the world and get some feedback on this like for sure like in a way that I am not personally but I also think that like we are not.

[00:12:36] No we're just not like even for our generation all right so now there is a real logistical problem here where you have 42 guys that you buy to a gang bang and they have to be hard right like and you have to come up with some rules.

[00:12:53] About how this is going to go so they have fluffers should we explain what a fluffer is.

[00:13:00] Yes, the fluffer is somebody that like their job is to keep the men hard right for like in the poor industry yeah in between there's a lot of work or whatever yeah so that when it's time to shoot they'll be ready.

[00:13:17] And they're usually really attractive women she said she had like two women that just were there to look hot and then like eight women I think who are actual fluffers and who would do like blow jobs or hand jobs or whatever they need to do to keep the guy.

[00:13:33] Alright so what I love is they held an opening circle to kind of initiate the event and the opening circles she says where we went over the rules behavioral norms and expectations one of the organizer is made everyone solemnly swear to do their best to come only in the birthday girl as opposed to in any of the fluffers so you're not allowed.

[00:13:59] You're not allowed to or at least you're not supposed to it's a norm right coming the fluffer you have to come in she said it's not their birthday you know it's not there birthday right she said that we had way more fluffer interest than anticipated by the favorite sentence.

[00:14:18] Yes, yes, we had more fluffer interest.

[00:14:21] It's true that's a great.

[00:14:24] That could be like the line that opens a short story you know yeah by the end we were turning away women trying to get in which was an absurd position to be in I think more women than you might think actually do want to participate in gangbang sludgery they might just not admit it publicly or feel safe enough at most events to inhabit their full sexual expression which is I find intriguing actually I kind of want to know.

[00:14:48] Yeah, how common do you do our listeners to whatever percentage of female listeners are you secretly harboring a desire to be a fluffer yeah and I guess you know guys maybe two but it's sort of different.

[00:15:04] Are there fluffers are there male fluffers for women no right no so but there are I've heard that there are plenty of male porn stars who prefer male fluffers yeah that means sense so you know.

[00:15:18] It's big tent.

[00:15:21] So she writes right after this flow chart that outlines everything she says of the 42 who attended 37 actually penetrated me thus tanking the average a little number of the planet some of the guys were experienced or do you think stars where they made comments comparing this gangbang to others they attended others were totally new to any kind of sex party some hadn't had sex and years and one was a virgin.

[00:15:45] This event was not kind towards men's penis is lots of men had trouble getting hard which is deeply understandable because practically for them the experience was a bit like being a breeder in a cow pin.

[00:15:55] And then says okay so the way that it would go was.

[00:15:59] I'll there would be just a line of guys trying to get hard and once a guy was sufficiently hard he'd come bang me summoned by organizers yelling anybody got a hard cock line your cells up by hardness they had to jack themselves off furiously

[00:16:13] and then they got three minutes to attempt to come while banging.

[00:16:18] That would be like a that's a lot of pressure that's a lot of it in front of a bunch of guys who are like jacking themselves off or like not to use the euphemism.

[00:16:29] I'm.

[00:16:34] That's like there's no fucking way like I really think if they had odds for me in this position like three minutes here I would have failed at any like I probably at every level but like like here the odds of me doing it are like you know plus

[00:16:55] twenty five hundred you know I yeah I don't see it right she's also surrounded by other men who were holding her down oh yeah right no it's over forget it so like yeah

[00:17:08] it's just a line of guys and they just had to get a hard enough cock and they had to like go go go go

[00:17:16] It's like guys in army movies parachute eat right from the plate in toy story like that.

[00:17:23] But then also line yourself up by hardness like I'd love to know I wish they had a like a graph for like to what extent was that objectively like the lineup of right actual

[00:17:37] Yes I remember seeing like in some sort of medical discussion of erection strength over the life of a man show it like an illustration of the angles of erection as you age and how like when

[00:17:52] you're young it's like pointing up by the time by the time you're like old it's like a thousand rod like it's just like water in the ground.

[00:18:01] That's so sad fuck getting old it's such a perfect metaphor for getting.

[00:18:13] Just pointing out it's like it's like downtrodden you know it's like sad.

[00:18:19] You're dick is saying can you tell can you tell them I was sad.

[00:18:22] Yeah.

[00:18:29] This is why the mid-Samar like ritual of just you're 72 and you jump off a cliff and hopefully you die in the fall but if not somebody's just going to bash your head

[00:18:41] and like that's actually for a brief moment there you're tick will be pointing out yeah.

[00:18:46] It's a way to go out.

[00:18:52] Okay so okay talk about your data collection.

[00:18:55] Yes so she's collecting data on every aspect that she can I think so she had like you said eight fluffers and now the guys could be because

[00:19:04] they're only getting three minutes with with a la like they get three minutes presumably inside her yeah and they can spend as much time with the fluffers as they want before or after.

[00:19:17] And so she asked all of the men which fluffers they engaged with and which and what activities they engaged in so she has a little chart that is has four categories of sexual play hand job blow job that

[00:19:34] was original and I came with her which I guess is like mutual masturbation or something.

[00:19:40] And not a or maybe or maybe it's just according to a whole in terms of the rules of the right unless it was after yeah or it might just be yeah separate thing did you

[00:19:50] or did you not like yeah.

[00:19:52] Oh I just mean that you're not supposed to come in the fluffer you're not these were people who broke the norm yeah.

[00:20:00] And so you just see looking at this she also didn't you know she I think she says that the fluffers were attractive women but and from this chart you can see that like there's one fluffer who got the most action.

[00:20:11] I don't know if she was like just the busiest or the most attractive or what but she was as as a la says fluffer be fluffed hard yeah fluffer be and like in every category.

[00:20:24] Did every category yeah she definitely got the most people to break the no coming in fluffer rules to I feel like she was using a lot of her resources at once probably fluffer F2 had like it was a respectable showing yeah right and what they just blew everybody.

[00:20:47] She's like the girlfriend and clerks.

[00:20:49] Yeah.

[00:20:55] How many days did you suck on the way.

[00:21:00] So what are the things that I find very funny is is that when you look at fluffer bees numbers and then you look at fluffer see there's like a huge difference there's like yeah four or five guys who engaged with

[00:21:15] fluffer see whereas there's like 30 plus guys engaging with fluffer bee and so they must have seen the results these are the men reporting and so fluff there's a parenthetical here.

[00:21:25] Fluffer see reports she definitely gave more blow jobs than for instance fluffer D and thinks people didn't remember them as much because fluffer D was having vaginal sex but fluffer see was.

[00:21:35] Well that girl was fucking everybody I just got dinged for like for just sucking.

[00:21:43] Oh god fluffer see is going to get radicalized you know like it's also important to say she reiterates this a few times that like everybody was fully consensual and seem to be having a good time and nobody felt weird about it at least not the time with this yeah this is something that's kind of interesting to like I'm a let a thousand flowers.

[00:22:04] Flowers bloom kind of guy but this is just not my flower at all alright but like it does seem like maybe this could be a good supportive community in some ways like yeah yeah then even just having a fluffer see who feels a little bit insulted or disrespected by the numbers it's like well in any kind of community you're going to have somebody like that yeah absolutely so.

[00:22:33] Yeah yeah so the only person who might have permanent damage is the guy who lost his virginity in a gang thing but maybe he's proud of I don't know like it's better than being a virgin probably however much longer probably a good good time long.

[00:22:49] Yeah this is where you're really interested and I'm really interested in knowing how old these people so yeah speaking of the Virgin she says one of them was a Virgin we asked if we could celebrate his first time

[00:23:01] and he said yes the wackier the better I believe so we had him go first he literally said Leroy Jenkins as he entered and popped confetti over him when he finished and I signed a personalized gift for him it's a world of warcraft character who yells out Leroy.

[00:23:19] Virgin. It's the most virgin of virgin things you could do I think yeah and it really again like if you had to describe like a sex scene for our age like that that's it you know this is like the equivalent this is what it's

[00:23:37] instead of like 16 canals we get like Leroy Jenkins like you come in a la yeah he was also wearing a heart rate monitor and shared the data with me so we have now a chart of the Virgin's heart rate.

[00:23:51] Unbelievable amazing amazing I also like once a man had sex with me he drew a tally mark on my leg with a sharpie and then signed the guest book which was a pretty white wedding guest book I got because it was hilarious.

[00:24:06] It turns out it turns out there we got a nice picture of it it turns out Lou ruins Sharpies good to know good to know yeah so despite us starting out with the surplus of sharpies by the end of the night we were scrounging I like the image of all these dudes like scrounging around for Sharpie yeah.

[00:24:30] So upon banging the birthday girl men got a sticker blue for banging gold if they came it's like you know when like the kid we're preschooler would come home and they'd have like a smiley face or like a normal face or a sex.

[00:24:46] God I'm going to wonder if my daughter banged a lot so here's the thing they could continue banging and coming in fluffers if they wanted after that.

[00:24:54] And if the flowers are down yeah which I feel like is unfairly treating the guys who failed to get it up and penetrate a less successfully but maybe like now they go to a fluffer in the pressures off and there's not like this.

[00:25:07] Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun well you're doing it like maybe that would have been great like you know yeah that's true I just do feel bad for the guys who just never got a chance you know they don't even get the consolation price.

[00:25:19] They got no sticker yeah they made each other a lot like hey what sticker did you want so okay I have to ask you a question.

[00:25:30] One one of the charts is how many orgasms did you have at this fuck right and so like as far as I can tell this is self reported data so 12 people just reported zero orgasms no fluffer no I

[00:25:48] a la 14 say one seven say to one says three two says four one says five two says six orgasms I think there are unicorns like that I think they're there I

[00:26:07] think that such people exist I am not such people the whole vibe of this doesn't strike me as encouraging anybody to lie about anything like if you follow her it you know you're probably

[00:26:20] think that it's sacred to like accurately report data so like I kind of believe it like I think that there are you know I don't know how long does she say how long the whole event lasted.

[00:26:33] I don't know like yeah so I don't know but there are a lot of cons but are there two unicorns.

[00:26:43] There are two.

[00:26:47] But I mean like that's like impressive recovery like it's very impressive like that so interestingly like the way

[00:26:57] that this post concludes right before you have to get to the pay is she's just assessing like how her experience was and she says like you know like as she's happy that

[00:27:07] she did it but it wasn't like the most pleasurable of sexual experiences because she was just so focused on managing everybody's expectations about the

[00:27:17] experience which I get like that seems like a lot of pressure on her being the host is not a relaxing thing that seems like she had to be the host for all of

[00:27:27] them and like apparently she has some kinks about like you know fighting and stuff that she was yet to sell herself from biting so I'm going to sell

[00:27:35] herself from bite that sounds who among us like that's why the guys are holding her.

[00:27:41] Yeah yeah yeah yeah and she's like she has a striking amount of empathy for these guys you know she's already talked about like how she

[00:27:51] doesn't blame them for like not getting hard and she says I ended up subtly attempting to manage people's experiences I really felt for the men

[00:27:57] putting themselves in such a vulnerable position if I wanted to freak out or do something weird I suppressed it because I knew they didn't know me

[00:28:02] or how to interpret my actions they hadn't been fully briefed really and I didn't want to worry them.

[00:28:06] Yeah I got like this part where she says that you know it's just like I'm glad I did it but I do these things to like relax and have

[00:28:16] feel relief and so she's going to have a more normal orgy next year.

[00:28:20] Yeah again as we all do.

[00:28:23] I think we all have to try one of these you know and I admire like honestly I admire the people like I can see

[00:28:35] the appeal it's funny because I did have like when I first heard about this I did have like this gut reaction that's sort of like maybe just a

[00:28:41] result of like a hard Christian upbringing that like this is somehow bad.

[00:28:45] And maybe it is like maybe I just don't know why it is but but the way that she wrote about it and described it like

[00:28:52] I buy that people are like hey you only live once like if this is something that I'm kind of curious about and I get the chance to do it like I'm going to do it

[00:28:59] like as she says at some point she's like there's nothing inherently bad about having a penis in my vagina.

[00:29:04] And there's nothing inherently bad about lining them up I'm convinced rationally that good for them.

[00:29:11] Yeah I mean my issues with it aren't that it's more like the parts of that sound like you're going through like passport control

[00:29:20] like when you get back like just the like the bureaucracy the signing the being in meetings the lining up.

[00:29:27] You're like that for gang bangs but not the red tape.

[00:29:31] Okay we should read the end and then wrap up and get to the weird studies guys but and it's not the end of the post is just the end for us.

[00:29:41] Yeah first she says that she thinks it's likely that some of the fluffers will get their own birthday gang bangs in the future like maybe

[00:29:50] at least flutter be flutter be reviewer like to one of them.

[00:29:57] But then she says on a personal level I had two primary things of note penises.

[00:30:04] I've never had such a controlled experiment of penis experiences usually I'm experiencing penises in different positions while in different moods

[00:30:13] but this was just one penis after the other and the differences were really apparent.

[00:30:18] I found I completely changed my mind about a specific penis trait and this will update the way I talk about penises moving forward.

[00:30:29] I move through three distinct stages while lying on the bed for hours nervousness a god complex and then cope but first penises.

[00:30:42] This is like the season two finale of twin peaks were like to be looking himself in the mirror and just like saying how's Annie and it ends and you don't get another one for 20 like 25 years.

[00:30:56] She's the ultimate cliffhanger like what like do I have the penis straight that was.

[00:31:03] I like that it will update just going to update her prior.

[00:31:07] Exactly that's what this is she's appealing to the right rationalist reading this are have like a serious job at the end not a full on pointing pointing north pointing up.

[00:31:19] They go to the front of the line.

[00:31:25] But what a brilliant yeah it's like who shot J.R.

[00:31:31] To print even older reference given that it's probably mostly guys that are reading this.

[00:31:37] Or maybe I was good and she says maybe like there are a lot of women who are just like reading this and being like wow fuck yeah.

[00:31:46] But yeah it ends this post is for paid subscribers so what what a just brilliant way to end her post what guy reading this isn't going to seriously consider knowing whether they're dick.

[00:32:01] You know like I bet you she got like 3000 new subscribers at least yeah including one of us for patreon.

[00:32:11] Discussion that quite let's use the very bad email.

[00:32:18] We're cowards.

[00:32:22] I will say that you know I have to say this just my pet projects but I don't know if this is such a well controlled experiment of these experiences because you got to take into account order effects.

[00:32:35] You know sample.

[00:32:37] You're already coping from what per like what you're preparing and 42 you know or whatever like.

[00:32:45] What in French statistics that she is.

[00:32:50] All right we'll be back. We're actually going to have a very respectable conversation such a tone shift in the seconds segment.

[00:33:00] We'll be right back to talk with JF my tell and Phil Ford from the great weird studies podcast about Edgar Allen pose the mask of the red death.

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[00:37:41] All right, we're so happy to welcome J.F. Martel and Phil Ford from the Weird Studies podcast and we are going to talk about Edgar Allen.

[00:37:52] Edgar Allen posed the mask of the red death, the red death. Right?

[00:37:57] Not just any red death, the red death.

[00:38:01] Yeah, this has really been wanting to have you on for a while. I listened to your podcast Weird Studies and I even am honored to have been on it for an episode on what was it? Firewall with me right?

[00:38:16] Yeah, I thought maybe we could get started by maybe you guys telling our audience some of whom may not be familiar with your podcast or even the genre that you deal with weird fiction, weird things in general, the weird.

[00:38:31] So what exactly is that? How could you define that for people who might not be even aware that this genre exists?

[00:38:39] I believe Tamler's asking, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions?

[00:38:43] Exactly. It's very burden and desire to know.

[00:38:47] And then I have three counter examples.

[00:38:50] Yeah, there'll be no such thing as weird by the end.

[00:38:55] So I guess is it easier to start with weird fiction or with the weird in general, Phil, what do you think?

[00:39:00] Well, I'll say about the weird is just how I defined it for the purposes of some content for the website.

[00:39:07] I wrote that the weird is whatever lies in the far side of the line between what we can easily accept from our world and what we cannot.

[00:39:16] And some things are just kind of radically ill situated within whatever cognitive or emotional frameworks we use to make sense of the world.

[00:39:29] The contents of that collection of items is obviously going to change as overtime, but there does seem always to be in existence some kind of remainder some folder in the great universal filing cabinet marked missing.

[00:39:45] And some things in this world seem to belong to that category on point of principle.

[00:39:56] It seems almost to transcend the vagaries of what people find weird and what they don't at any given time.

[00:40:04] I suppose I feel like a weird fiction is always kind of trying to grow towards that feeling of the generally and genuinely in commensurable, you know, it's it to me is fiction that gives you a little shock.

[00:40:21] And it can be a very little shock. It can be very subtle, but it gives you that little shock of all charity of something just radically other from your own not only your experience, but categories of thought.

[00:40:33] The complexion of your emotional life, just something that stands outside and wants to come in.

[00:40:40] Yeah, I think a big part of what we're doing on our show is geared towards challenging questioning or finding the kind of edges of the modern epistemic the modern paradigm we operate in.

[00:40:52] And that's not an anti modern position. In fact, I think it's the eminently modern position. The modern position should be that we don't just know how things go.

[00:41:03] And so if you take that idea to its full kind of consequence, you face a world that you can never fully understand.

[00:41:11] And so it encourages you to keep looking for the edge, looking for the weird angle on things. So for example, we might discuss like a fairly innocuous movie on our show, but we always try to find that point in the narrative if it's a movie or in a story piece of music or whatever where things get a little weird where suddenly something that seemed fairly familiar and domesticated so to speak suddenly reveals a kind of like soup song of weirdness, you know,

[00:41:39] and weird fiction is just fiction that sets out to do that. So we tend to gravitate towards that type of fiction, but also towards other topics such as the occult, the paranormal, I mean, everything's fair game in our show like we can explore all these different avenues, but we tried to avoid doing it as kind of like partisans or believers of one or another take on any of these topics, right?

[00:42:03] So we tried to maintain a kind of Jamesian, pragmatic approach.

[00:42:07] Yeah, late William James is I think in the same spirit as your show.

[00:42:13] Oh, we're wearing his spirit.

[00:42:15] Yeah, well, you know backward causation, retro causation, weird idea.

[00:42:21] Exactly.

[00:42:22] What are the quintessential sort of authors for you of weird fiction?

[00:42:27] Well, it's a big list for me, but we're like let's just limit ourselves to pros fiction.

[00:42:31] Who would you say are the key ones fill?

[00:42:33] Well, there's the canonical I mean, like the first name ever anybody is going to mention probably is HP Lovecraft, but I suppose my own attitude is a little bit more personal or perhaps self indulgent.

[00:42:45] Just what are the writers who induce a certain feeling in me for me, the feeling is always that there's something going on in the book that is straining against the limits of the world.

[00:42:56] And I'm not saying against the limits of the page and wants to somehow in fact reality, the kind of book that I shouldn't be reading when I can't sleep at three in the morning.

[00:43:07] And I've often felt like some of Philip K Dex novels like Uwek and the three stigmata or valus.

[00:43:14] You know, I don't think people just say, oh, Philip K Dex he's a science fiction writer, but to me he's a weird fiction writer.

[00:43:20] He fulfills at least my own personal criterion for being a weird fiction writer.

[00:43:25] For me, I think that the key ones again, it's really personal. But if we were to like draw at a cannon, right? We could talk about HP Lovecraft, Arthur MacKin, Aldrinon Blackwood.

[00:43:38] Lord D'Ensanie.

[00:43:39] Lord D'Ensanie there's a sore that sometimes it's referred to as pre-token fantasy.

[00:43:45] A lot of that stuff was weird. A lot of the pulp fiction of the 30s and 40s now is just kind of grouped under this rubric of weird fiction.

[00:43:53] There's a mixture of genre and that type of fiction, you might have science fiction elements with fantasy elements and that sort of thing.

[00:43:59] It's a big tent. The ones that I keep going back to, well, I'm just reread Robert Chambers book, The King and Yellow, which is one of my favorite pieces of weird fiction.

[00:44:10] Arthur MacKin, I just mentioned Lovecraft, I'm a huge fan.

[00:44:14] You gave us a color out of space as an idea because I consulted you.

[00:44:18] Yeah, that's right. That's some late Lovecraft. The late Lovecraft is really, really good stuff, I find.

[00:44:24] And then finally, a contemporary writer that I really, really appreciate is Thomas Legotti.

[00:44:29] I also want to give honorable mention to Flannery O'Connor, who's not usually included but I think is an excellent writer of weird fiction.

[00:44:39] I think he's probably doing an episode on her soon. We do listen or select an episode and that was a finalist of the topics.

[00:44:46] I recommend it. Yeah, she's been trying to get us to do one of her stories for a long time.

[00:44:51] Or her essays. Her essays are really good too.

[00:44:54] So I just listened to, I'm doing this course on Borges and philosophy.

[00:45:00] And I'm doing Talon, Uqubarr, or Bisturcius in Thursday's class.

[00:45:06] And so I listened both to our episode on it and then to your episode on it.

[00:45:10] And I think that's an interesting example. Like, I wouldn't think that you would put Borges and the canon of weird fiction even though I would.

[00:45:20] I would. Absolutely would. Yeah. Okay. No, and I think deservedly so. And especially that story because that's a story that's straining against the page like more than any story I can really think of.

[00:45:32] Yeah. And I remember that episode that we did as being one of the most sidebar intensive of all of our episodes.

[00:45:40] I think our time staying on topic. Yeah, yeah. We were like, okay, anyway, back to Talon.

[00:45:46] Yeah, speaking of that, I guess we should get into this story by Edgar Allen Poe which is quite a story.

[00:45:54] Should we just go around and give or just our opening impressions about the central themes or something about it?

[00:46:02] Was it you, J.F., that suggested this for a topic?

[00:46:06] I included it in a short list of possible post stories. It's one of my favorite post stories, not for the message but for the the decadence of it, the color and the aesthetics of it.

[00:46:17] I find it really haunting. So that's why I suggested it. Yeah, it drips for sure.

[00:46:22] Oh yeah. So what are the, I don't know why I'm being like, what's that show?

[00:46:28] The something group. Oh, the McLaughlin group.

[00:46:33] Like, wow. Oh my god. There you go. That show from 1993.

[00:46:39] What did you think of the? Disagree. Yeah, opening salvas.

[00:46:46] The mask of the red death. Right. Well, I mean, apropos what J.F. just said something that I love in stories.

[00:47:00] I like things that are both a little motionless and a little area or a little weird.

[00:47:07] I get impatient with just plot the mechanics, the hydraulics of plot of feeling that I'm being frog marched through more or less obligatory series of plot points towards some conclusion.

[00:47:22] And we talked about this a bunch. We talked about this actually talking about Mizaki's film, Spirited Away.

[00:47:28] And what I love is mood. I like the, as it were, the musical aspects of fiction or perhaps to sometimes think of it as almost spatial.

[00:47:40] Like some stories feel like they unfold a space for you to inhabit.

[00:47:45] Not not not not a very directional space, not a corridor, not a place marked with arrows where you have to go down certain hallways, but just a place where you can hang out a place that is full of mood.

[00:47:57] Before when I was preparing for this, I was like, you know, maybe I'll watch that Roger Korman film 1964 film, Mask of the Red Death.

[00:48:05] And I started watching it and just turned it off immediately because I'm like well, to take this story and turn it into a movie they had to make a villain.

[00:48:12] So Vincent Price who's awesome but like you know we had to turn Prince Prosperon to a cruel tyrant.

[00:48:17] And we had to turn the story of Mask of the Red Death into a kind of you know story of retribution of divine justice.

[00:48:27] And all of that stuff is what I don't want. What I want is what the story, the short story gives us which is this incredible creepy mood like a dream.

[00:48:38] Like when you wake up from a dream and you try to tell somebody what it was but it's like it's almost like it falls apart in your hands.

[00:48:45] You can't say what it was because what happened wasn't what was important.

[00:48:49] It was like the quality of light or the way that the way that set of bagpipes looked on that table or whatever it was we're dreaming about.

[00:48:57] And it's just so this story is so full of that. That's what I love about it.

[00:49:02] It doesn't have much of a plot. It's just a dream. Yeah, totally.

[00:49:06] Yeah, I love that too. That space, the similarity between Miyazaki and the other works of fiction that you're talking about that is patient and you're right.

[00:49:17] You need that to create a mood. You need a bit of stillness to impart an emotion like eariness that doesn't come from a direct description.

[00:49:27] It's like the offbeat in music. That space in between the notes to let us feel and it's something that's sort of alluded to in the text itself which is when the clock strike and everybody has the stillness, then they can actually, you know, and when it's striking 12 that gives them an extra long time to notice things.

[00:49:47] And that's when they notice the red death. Yeah, I love that.

[00:49:51] This is one of the reasons I think why if you look at the history of weird fiction, it tends to favor the short story over the novel.

[00:50:00] You know, the top writers in the field tend to write shorter fiction, novellas or short stories.

[00:50:08] And then, you know, the story of the god, Thomas Ligadi has spoken about this and just said that you just can't sustain mood for the entirety of a novel.

[00:50:15] Some can, but of course you'll have to start having color shifts and mood shifts along the way it may be play with a series of moves, but to really capture, you know, speaking of poems specifically, I mean, he wrote essays about what a short story should do.

[00:50:28] And so it's about capturing one specific emotion, right?

[00:50:31] But his understanding of the word emotion or this maybe affect would be a better term that we could use for it or mood and ambiance, a kind of like a whole situation in which some change is happening.

[00:50:42] Some moment is change but it's not about following tracking the consequences of a change but trying to get to that moment where things turn or things something is happening something beyond any particular event, something that's kind of just like implicit in the whole situation.

[00:50:57] And I find that this, this story does it like masterfully and what I love about this story specifically a mask of the red death.

[00:51:04] So it's basically the plot couldn't be simpler there's a fictional, but we don't know where we are.

[00:51:09] I've always imagined that this is a sequel to the tempest because we have a Duke called Prospero who is I always say this is Prospero's like this is the final part of his vengeance.

[00:51:21] But then he dies so it doesn't really work as a theory.

[00:51:24] But you have this Duke who is his land is basically overcome by this horrible plague like a horrible illness that kills you in a half hour, a half hour of profused bleeding through every pore of your body.

[00:51:41] And so what he does is he castulates himself in like a thousand of his courteers into this in this Abby and this palace that of his own design, this kind of crazy mad place.

[00:51:52] And then throws this masquerade ball in there and the story is all about how the red death of plague infiltrates the palace and then the red death ends up coming in.

[00:52:03] And what I wanted to mention is that one of the center pieces of the story is this clock on the wall, this the last of the seven rooms in which the ball is taking place.

[00:52:12] And the clock is constantly referred to and it's punctuating the whole story in the clock, of course, is counting down until the red death comes in.

[00:52:19] But the whole story is built like a clock.

[00:52:21] You know, he spends I think 80% of the story is just him putting the pieces in place, you know, this room's there and then that room has this color and then the lights are here and it's just setting up this one moment where this one masquerade participant comes in no one who knows who he is and he ends up being, of course, the red death.

[00:52:41] And the whole thing is built like clockwork, the plays I mean the story is kind of like almost like a diorama, you know, and I love that about it.

[00:52:49] So I like to when you emphasize stillness Phil and also David, this is a very still story, nothing moves things are turning because it's a ball people are waltzing but nothing's moving until the very very end like a clock actually exactly right.

[00:53:03] Yeah, I was with Phil also in the dream like I got a very dream feel from this story not that it's literally a dream but it's a dream narrative.

[00:53:12] And it reminded me as things typically do of like a kind of linchian dream, like lost highway or mollhorn drive where there can be some kind of bright fantasy elements of it, but the cracks are already appearing and they're getting worse, you know.

[00:53:30] And it's like the dream can't fully sustain itself and the reality, the things on the outside, you know, literally in this case that you're trying to keep out they can't be contained and then like the cracks are showing.

[00:53:43] This story is all it's like if the whole mollhorn drive was in club silencio, you know where it's camera shaking and like it's just about to cave in like the dream is about to cave in and reality is just beating down the hatchets.

[00:53:59] And then yeah, at the end you die.

[00:54:03] Yeah, it's like it's already inside.

[00:54:05] It's like you can imagine that you know because they go into this castle and they actually like weld the port colors shut so nobody can leave.

[00:54:13] Right.

[00:54:14] But you know the sense you get is that the thing the plague is already in there.

[00:54:18] You know, it's already in with them.

[00:54:20] Yeah, I can't like you can put the stained glass windows and the curtains and all that but it's not.

[00:54:27] Yeah, it's going to find its way inside.

[00:54:30] Right. I mean from that point of view, you could easily read this as an allegory for you know the consciousness of an individual person because it works very much the way repression works.

[00:54:42] You see the the battlements of raised against the thing to be kept out.

[00:54:47] You see these extraordinary preparations preparations on a vast scale, a thousand courtiers and they set up a foundry specifically defuses all the metal gates shut and inhabit this

[00:55:01] Abby for a year or something for a long time and create an entirely artificial world like there's no at least the way it's described.

[00:55:11] There's no natural light in this suite of seven apartments.

[00:55:15] There's and this is almost fantastically weird touch.

[00:55:19] The windows are all windows that give on to a closed corridor.

[00:55:24] Right.

[00:55:25] There's like nothing from the outside.

[00:55:27] Everything is entirely self enclosed, a self enclosed little made world where the lights are coming through these colored stained glass windows from these brazier is but there's no natural light.

[00:55:39] And you know, you could sort of think of this as like an allegory for psychosis.

[00:55:44] I'm just trying to keep the awareness of something and of course it's futile.

[00:55:48] Although I'm not going to say that that's like primarily the way I would think of it.

[00:55:52] I suppose I'm slightly resistant to thinking in two allegorical away what I was thinking actually partly because I'm teaching the history of Western music at Indiana University Jacob School of Music this semester, the 1800 to the present and one of the pieces we did recently was

[00:56:08] records Strauss's opera Salome which is based on Oscar Wilde's Salome and that's a decadent, decadent opera.

[00:56:18] That was a decadent fiction and I was thinking particularly about the ending and there's this kind of

[00:56:23] thelma and Louise vibe you sometimes get in decadent fictions the glorious moment where you drive that car right off the cliff.

[00:56:32] It's almost sort of like these fictions exist as demolition derbies where the point is to have the smash up at the end the point of creating this hermetically sealed environment that keeps the world the natural world out

[00:56:46] and permits the elaboration of this fibrile over cooked mannered decadent world that exists solely to the reason you create that bubble is to prick it at the end there's this gesture in the narrative of the unrealizable unsustainable beauty of the purely artificial

[00:57:09] it must crumble before the daylight in in salamay it's the nocturnal world that ultimately has to yield to the solar world.

[00:57:17] Salamie has to die beneath the soldier shields at the end and it's not a tragedy that's like the glorious consummation of the decadence of the story.

[00:57:28] Yeah, although there's something about him going after the red death with a dagger kind of going through all the rooms.

[00:57:37] Okay, I'm gonna get this guy like it says he was kind of ashamed of his cowardice like there's something it doesn't seem like a triumph intending for Prospero.

[00:57:46] No, not for him.

[00:57:47] Yeah, but I guess we're talking about it in totality and Prospero is just a small part of the ultimate triumph of the decadence.

[00:57:56] Yeah, yeah, but the thing that triumphs is not any figure in the story it's the triumph of the destruction.

[00:58:03] It's the triumph of dissolution and death and decay.

[00:58:06] Yeah, this is written to me like such a reverse fairy tale.

[00:58:11] You know there's a prince and a castle and his name is Prospero and he has this act of bravery at the end.

[00:58:17] He's gonna save all of all of the people on his friends, but it's just all like twisted and death and decay takes over everything.

[00:58:25] Yeah, and it's so ironic from the start.

[00:58:27] You know when what the prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and segacious those are the three things he precisely isn't.

[00:58:34] He's not happy.

[00:58:36] Well, I mean he's not dauntless because he's scared shitless of the plague and he's not segacious because he's screwing over his entire kingdom to save a thousand select.

[00:58:47] Yeah, and you deliberately ignore what's happening outside.

[00:58:53] Actually, I was one of the questions I wanted to ask you both about because you know this fiction more than I do but I'm interested in the narrator.

[00:59:01] He's quasi-amnitient but also quasi-journalistic like he's there first person like I told you about this now I'm gonna tell you about this.

[00:59:10] He's also like you said ironic he's kind of sarcastic in how he describes certain things.

[00:59:16] If we're meant to think that he was there, that doesn't work because everybody died and so it's this narrator that's a little hard to place.

[00:59:25] What is connection to the story is and it reminded me of a short story that I now teach every year the ones who walk away from homaloss has a similar kind of narrator that is talking to you very conversationally

[00:59:38] talking to you like they're there like they're witnessing we're just getting their report of what's happening sometimes the tenses can switch but it's never exactly clear what this narrator is.

[00:59:49] That's classic poll that's just classic poll yeah, but yeah I think so I mean it's the ones I know are more first person narrative like that's true general first person narrative.

[00:59:59] He's got a few yeah he's got a lot of first person in this case there is a first person voice there like you said he does speak in his own voice but he never inserts himself into the plot at all.

[01:00:11] There's one conspicuous moment of dissonance for me I particularly noticed it was the mention of her nondi her nondi which is on the second page there were much glare and glitter and pick on C and fenthasm much of what has been since seen in her nondi that's not the same thing.

[01:00:28] Her nondi that's a play I think by Victor Hugo which I only know because just happy very determined to an opera and that's a real world fiction a real world cultural reference that positions the narrator in you know our world the world that can

[01:00:45] Victor Hugo and yet none of this has happened so that's is what I was trying to get at is that I think that this is a deeply unreliable narrator and possibly a psychotic narrator or at least seriously deluded.

[01:01:00] No interesting like the madness has infected the narrator too as he's describing it or what we're doing what we're given is just this is just the monologue of an insane I shouldn't use that word but you know of a psychotic person.

[01:01:12] Fill and I just did a show on expressionism sounds very abstract but ended up really great I think it's really great show and we talked about the cabinet of doctor Caligari famous 1920 German expressionist film.

[01:01:25] It's bookended it's got a framing story and it's essentially at the beginning you see this is guys starts telling the story then we get the story and then we come back to his world at the end and be realize only at the end we learn that he's an inmate in an asylum and so everything we've been told might have been just inner experience but they're not.

[01:01:42] And again there's so many ambiguities at that point that maybe what we're seeing is just that he ended up in this place because of what happened and it was all real you just don't know so there's a kind of like built in insoluble ambiguity that I think I sense in the narrative as well yeah when do you place the story I get the sense this is like the tempest 16th century something I would say 15th or 16th century yeah yeah so then him referring to 19th century work.

[01:02:11] In it is definitely placing us more in the kind of omniscient narrator or it's a historian right this is a piece of historical text this is you know that's right.

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[01:04:54] what added a little bit to sort of consistent with what you're saying about the narrator perhaps experiencing madness or just being a story about madness for some reason it was jarring to me when he all of a sudden switches to the present tense which may be

[01:05:10] which may be like okay he's in there you know like he's in there describing and then he goes right back to the past tense.

[01:05:16] yeah suddenly he's he's taking us and some were in the present tense and he's just describing what's happening in the clock and it's interesting because it's when he's talking about time in the clock.

[01:05:27] sounding go into the present and almost like he's taking us out of time into this eternal present where we're always in the presence of the red death or something that convention if indeed it is a convention is is in service of something that I think is like absolutely.

[01:05:40] a hallmark of weird fiction at least to me which is raising doubts usually fairly subtly about the reality claims of the world that's being narrated what are the reality claims of the world within which this takes place and because there are these fantastical elements to this story it feels like oh it's fantasy you know I don't have to ask questions about like well how exactly do you bleed through your pores any.

[01:06:10] way is that even physically possible I feel like I'm off the hook and I don't have to ask that question any more than I have to ask where middle earth is exactly.

[01:06:19] but then that's just a subtle imposition of something from a realistic world a piece of real 19th century literature or a switch of temporal frame it can be subtle enough that I mean it's not going to draw attention to itself but it will undermine the sense that

[01:06:39] even as a fantasy world this is a bounded and stable.

[01:06:43] and it like we understand what reality claims it raises these little details are things that subvert the pot any possibility of there being at like a unitary kind of like reality frame around this yeah you know one other example of how weird fiction can play with time and interesting ways what's my one of my favorite examples and it's one of the most glaring examples of this is in the book called.

[01:07:06] the king of elflands daughter by lord done sanny it's basically just a high fantasy fairy tale about a guy who goes into elf land to steal the king of elf lands daughter brings her back and marries her and it's just that and at one point in like chapter seven is like now some readers are going to be wondering when did all this happen and he gives you a years like this happened in 1536 or something like that it's like super specific.

[01:07:29] but you're obviously not in a in a there in a lot of yeah and it actually increases the weirdness it's kind of like the weird is not in the fact that we're in a totally fantastical place.

[01:07:40] or the fact that's weird stuff is happening in like main like Stephen King novel you know but the weird is like things are happy you're always in the in between you're always between the imagination and reality and that's kind of twilight zone.

[01:07:53] you can never settle into some metaphysical frame that's comfortable either imaginary or real you know that's a boy has special deals exactly that is like this tons of real references tons of outlandish thing and you get dizzy from it precisely because of.

[01:08:09] you know this just mix of real elements with things that well we think can't be real but yeah you know all of that just starts to get thrown up into question yeah that's exactly what I meant when I was talking about.

[01:08:23] but like for me weird fiction is stuff I shouldn't be reading at three in the morning when I can't sleep yeah right you know because because of exactly that vertigo that feeling of like just where are the limits if the book is so insistently raising doubts about its status as a book it's status as a story.

[01:08:44] if it is so loosely contained within its own fictional frame you have this sort of feeling of like oh this is kind of bleeding into like my world.

[01:08:55] make you feel a little paranoid when you can't sleep at three in the morning I guess more specifically it's hard to ignore some of the themes I agree that I don't like it as a kind of obvious political allegory but it's undeniable that having a wealthy.

[01:09:14] I think that's the only way to ignore this is to ignore all this death it's too disgusting it's too disturbing I can't deal with that I'm just going to get all my rich friends together for the most decadent kind of ball you could possibly imagine.

[01:09:30] I don't know how does that element of the story interact the kind of the political not message but the political insights I just want to say that I'm so thankful that we have all transcended.

[01:09:42] I think it's important to discuss that part obviously I mean especially having lived through you know.

[01:10:07] How it interacts with the other weird elements that we've been talking about so far, because

[01:10:12] it's just undeniable that it's got to be part of what's going on here.

[01:10:16] This idea of the privileged wealthy people ignoring the disease, misery and suffering

[01:10:21] of that's outside trying to not let it affect them or even just be in their presence.

[01:10:27] You know what I mean?

[01:10:28] I'm struck by how little comment the narrative includes about that.

[01:10:32] I mean, there's an implicit like, you know, the red death raged outside.

[01:10:36] But there's no judgment on the courtiers for doing this.

[01:10:39] The sarcasm maybe, yeah, might be.

[01:10:41] But that's absolutely.

[01:10:42] No, I think you're right about that.

[01:10:43] But I think it's just interesting that it's not put forward as kind of how we're supposed

[01:10:47] to think of this.

[01:10:48] It scales up from the individual to the social level of absolutely effortlessly, it being

[01:10:54] the story and the interpretation of it.

[01:10:57] Once you permit some degree of allegory in the way you're thinking about the story, which

[01:11:02] is almost inevitable because, I mean, that's the story that it's...

[01:11:05] So clearly about a return of the repressed and, you know, as like Tadeau or Dorno and

[01:11:12] Moxhorkheimer liked to point out there's an intimate relationship between repression on

[01:11:19] the individual human psychological level and on the social level.

[01:11:24] And yeah, what sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander if you're thinking about this.

[01:11:28] There's an expression of the futility and madness of a certain kind of repression that

[01:11:34] also is touching on a kind of social madness that is obviously very visible, very tangible,

[01:11:42] palpable in the world that we're actually in.

[01:11:45] I was reading this and I was thinking about something I've read.

[01:11:49] I've read actually a number of places, the Uber Rich, you know, mega billionaires who

[01:11:55] are trying to figure out how to basically do exactly what Prospero does in this story.

[01:12:01] In the event of civilizational, ecological, etc., collapse to have like a private army

[01:12:07] of people protecting you from all the people at the gates trying to get in and take your

[01:12:12] stuff.

[01:12:13] One of the Douglas Rushkopf was...

[01:12:15] Yeah, Rushkopf was...

[01:12:16] He wrote an article.

[01:12:17] He was invited to speak to a bunch of Silicon Valley dudes like powerful people and he thought

[01:12:23] he was going to be talking about giving his usual thing on critiquing the media and

[01:12:26] media literacy at the time and that sort of thing.

[01:12:29] But they ended up just...

[01:12:30] They're like, okay, so what do we do when the event happens?

[01:12:32] How do we survive?

[01:12:33] And Douglas Rushkopf was like, what?

[01:12:36] Why me?

[01:12:37] Yeah, that's a real thing.

[01:12:40] It's so funny how you could unironically adopt that attitude.

[01:12:43] You know?

[01:12:44] Yeah, it's just...

[01:12:45] One of the things about this story that strikes me as extra horrific is how little I

[01:12:52] thought about what's going on outside.

[01:12:55] You know, the gates are welded shut and there is absolutely zero discussion of what's

[01:13:01] happening outside the gates other than that we know the red death is taking over.

[01:13:04] I also thought that it was great to use the decadence of the rich as somehow symbolizing

[01:13:11] just the comfort that we all have in repressing thoughts of whatever we're trying to repress

[01:13:15] but it's specifically death.

[01:13:16] I mean, the rich are the most comfortable in this story because they can but we all

[01:13:20] are in a position where we can ignore large portions of the world that we don't want

[01:13:25] to think about.

[01:13:27] Yeah, that's true.

[01:13:28] And we are like princes shutting ourselves up in a castle and having revelry.

[01:13:32] Yeah, and like you said, like we're also good at distracting ourselves from the parts

[01:13:37] of ourselves that we don't want to face.

[01:13:39] Yeah.

[01:13:40] Well, that's another light motif in this story is generally that which is unassumable

[01:13:46] to near culture, to whatever your ideas, your notions, your education, your class determined

[01:13:55] takes on things.

[01:13:57] All of the various civilizational structures of the veils we have that we cast between ourselves

[01:14:04] in that kind of ultimate outside, that kind of hard, cold, unyielding outside, the non-negotiable.

[01:14:13] The sense of that as something that bleeds through that as an outside that wants to come

[01:14:17] inside, I think that's a fairly widespread trope and weird fiction.

[01:14:22] This is a passage on the second last page, Ish, depends on what edition you have, I suppose.

[01:14:29] This is a description of the figure of the red death, the figure of death when it first

[01:14:35] appears and describes the figure in question as having outherred at hered and gone beyond

[01:14:42] the bounds of even the princes indefinite decorum.

[01:14:45] There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion,

[01:14:51] even with the utterly lost to whom life and death are equally just there are matters of

[01:14:55] which no just can be made.

[01:14:58] The whole company indeed seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of

[01:15:02] the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed.

[01:15:06] And it's like the ideas like even if you're making life and death itself a joke.

[01:15:11] There are some graveyards that you cannot whistle past.

[01:15:15] And the figure of the red death is the figure not only of death and not only a figure of

[01:15:20] plague and pestilence but a figure of that, some kind of ultimate contingency, some absolute

[01:15:26] contingency that nobody can laugh at.

[01:15:30] If we take the chambers as some sort of allegory further and further repression, what's horrifying

[01:15:36] to me.

[01:15:37] The last chamber, the deepest one, the one where you should be the most protected is the

[01:15:42] one where death lies.

[01:15:43] Exactly.

[01:15:44] That's where I wanted to say.

[01:15:45] Yeah.

[01:15:46] The fucking irony of you building this thing.

[01:15:49] Yeah, that's the thing.

[01:15:50] What did you expect would happen?

[01:15:52] I mean in a sense.

[01:15:53] The worm is at the core.

[01:15:54] The worm is at the core.

[01:15:55] Yes.

[01:15:56] I think the reader is expected to see the end coming from the start.

[01:15:59] I don't think we're supposed to be a surprise.

[01:16:02] The whole thing is kind of this labyrinth, this kind of suite of rooms with different colors.

[01:16:06] I think it's like blue, green, blue, purple, green, orange, white, vents to the violet and

[01:16:13] then finally black shot with red.

[01:16:15] Yeah.

[01:16:16] That's the only one where the curtain doesn't match the room.

[01:16:20] Yeah.

[01:16:21] Okay.

[01:16:22] So just so the listener understands, you've got seven rooms each with a different color and

[01:16:26] the stained glass windows which are the only source of light because they have these

[01:16:29] brazers outside the windows shining the light in into each room.

[01:16:33] Each room is monochrome.

[01:16:35] It's one color.

[01:16:36] So you're in a blue room and then you're in a green room, etc.

[01:16:38] Orange room which I find particularly, that must be horrific in itself.

[01:16:41] But then at the end of this you have a black room and that one for reasons we, not privy

[01:16:47] to, doesn't have black windows.

[01:16:49] It has red windows and the light coming in is red.

[01:16:52] So it's a totally black room red, black carpet, black walls with this red light coming

[01:16:57] in.

[01:16:58] And that's where they put the clock, which like sounds the hour loudly every, you know,

[01:17:03] and it seems like the whole thing was set up, which is why when prosperous, like who

[01:17:06] is this intruder?

[01:17:07] Like, oh, I thought you built this thing for him.

[01:17:10] I don't know what else could happen in this place.

[01:17:12] Like you just basically, it's like you set the stage, which I guess that's why the

[01:17:16] story is called the mask of the red death, like mask, M-A-S-Q-U-E is a theatrical form

[01:17:22] that was really popular at the time that this story seems to be set, you know, early

[01:17:27] modernity late 16th, early 17th centuries.

[01:17:31] And a mask was basically, first of all, it was a play but performed by nobles.

[01:17:35] Right?

[01:17:36] That was the big difference in a mask and a regular play, regular play where commoners

[01:17:39] acting, a mask was, oh, the nobles, the queen herself gets to be in the play.

[01:17:44] And it's always a morality tale.

[01:17:46] And the masks were always designed to prop up a power structure, the ringing monarch

[01:17:50] or whatever.

[01:17:51] So here we have the most ironic touch is that the mask doesn't start until the red death

[01:17:55] enters.

[01:17:56] That's where the play begins before that it's a mask array that people are dancing.

[01:17:59] The show begins when the play comes in.

[01:18:02] That's the mask and also the story itself is the mask, but it's like an anti-masks because

[01:18:06] it's a mask that doesn't prop up the existing power structure but literally destroys it.

[01:18:13] If you can only imagine the scene following the very last line of the play when all these

[01:18:17] aristocrats start to bleed out through their pores and die within half an hour, like

[01:18:21] it'd be like a clive barker level, kind of, gore scene that he doesn't bother telling

[01:18:26] us about.

[01:18:27] I love the image at first when he appears and then Prospero decides, okay, I'm going

[01:18:32] to confront this.

[01:18:33] And we're going to get him and we'll hang him it on.

[01:18:37] And then everyone takes a step towards the red death and then just immediately, oh,

[01:18:42] I know if we can't make it.

[01:18:44] Sorry, yeah.

[01:18:45] We can't fuck with this.

[01:18:46] And then as he starts walking through all the rooms, the way he describes all the people

[01:18:51] just clearing a path for him and trying to hug the walls, but there's no escape from

[01:18:56] this.

[01:18:57] They're just trying to get as far away as they can, but it's at this point everybody knows

[01:19:02] they're prolonging the inevitable.

[01:19:04] They can't repress this anymore and they can't confront it.

[01:19:08] It's too late for that.

[01:19:09] So I love that image.

[01:19:11] It's great.

[01:19:12] I imagine something like a nautilus shell.

[01:19:14] One detail of the suite of rooms is, he says, well, you know, what you find in a lot

[01:19:19] of grand palaces is a room, one room after another, like box cars, so that you can throw

[01:19:25] open the big doors between rooms and see this uninterrupted kind of promenade.

[01:19:30] And this building isn't like that.

[01:19:32] This is built very much according to Prosperos peculiar notions.

[01:19:35] His love of the bizarre, right?

[01:19:38] Yes, that's right.

[01:19:39] And you get the, at least the way I imagine it is that the room's curve or that, like

[01:19:43] you can't see down the hallways because at each point, each room is at an angle to

[01:19:49] the other.

[01:19:50] And I like to imagine, although there's nowhere said that this is the case, that the overall

[01:19:54] plan of the suite of rooms is like a nautilus shell, like an occure with the black room

[01:19:59] as the core, the center.

[01:20:01] That's cool.

[01:20:02] Yeah.

[01:20:03] What do you got?

[01:20:04] Obviously there's lots of imagery and symbolism in who knows if Poe wanted us to interpret

[01:20:07] but I'm going to ask you guys nonetheless.

[01:20:09] These big tripods, he says there's no lamps or candles or these big tripods of fire

[01:20:15] outside each room shining in.

[01:20:17] Somehow this was a powerful image to me of the tripods of just torches burning outside

[01:20:22] and shining in.

[01:20:23] Yeah.

[01:20:24] Didn't want the light to be direct in the room.

[01:20:26] No, the light has to be, it's almost like this artificial sunlight or something.

[01:20:30] They're creating not just their own kind of safe architectural space on Earth but they

[01:20:35] want to create their own reality where none of the windows as Phil was saying open onto

[01:20:40] the outside world, they all open onto this external corridor that winds us way through

[01:20:45] around the rooms and instead of chandeliers or candelabra which would also be fire, the

[01:20:52] light sources are these big tripods outside of each stained glass window shining the

[01:20:56] light through and I think the idea is that he wanted each room to be completely prospero

[01:21:01] did, wanted each room to be so suffused with its color for reasons we're never told.

[01:21:06] It's total monochrome.

[01:21:07] It's total monochrome in the light source.

[01:21:09] Even the light is of that color.

[01:21:10] Yeah, it's got to be filtered through.

[01:21:12] Right.

[01:21:13] Yeah, before they can see it.

[01:21:15] You know, Tamler you were talking earlier about the dream like nature of the story and

[01:21:19] it reminded you of Lynch and I agree but another film that I think has weird kind of affinity

[01:21:24] with this is Eyes Wide Shut which has a similar kind of weird color scheme.

[01:21:29] And I don't know the whole film seems designed like it feels indoors even when you're in the

[01:21:32] streets of New York, it feels like a kind of New York kind of set.

[01:21:35] The whole thing feels closed in and has to do with elites.

[01:21:39] I don't know.

[01:21:40] I just, they're right to me but the gathering for a decadent ball with masks with no windows.

[01:21:46] We look at the ball at the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut there are no windows and this

[01:21:49] is it a Plato's cave kind of?

[01:21:51] Yeah, I was worried about that because you have the fire and then the artifacts in front

[01:21:57] of the fire that is casting the shadow onto the wall which is all the cave people see

[01:22:02] and all they think then is this is reality.

[01:22:06] So these people are having with the artifacts being like the windows and the fire being outside

[01:22:12] and they're in this land of illusion or maybe like in this case delusion, you know we're

[01:22:19] having we are in this multicolored, waltzing wonder world and that the things outside can't

[01:22:26] get in.

[01:22:27] There's too many things in the way of our I don't know of our dream of our celebration.

[01:22:32] Yeah, that sounds there's a guy William Irwin Thompson wrote a bunch of great books

[01:22:37] past a way a few years ago.

[01:22:39] Really interesting his cultural historian really far out.

[01:22:43] I remember him talking about you know modern Hollywood and contemporary like pop artists

[01:22:49] as the interior decorators of Plato's cave which evokes this story, you know it's like

[01:22:54] this is Plato's cave like pimped out.

[01:22:57] You know like it's but ultimately it's the same thing.

[01:22:59] The lights coming in with a particular color that's control the chosen by Prosperos

[01:23:04] a human being and then there's still have a bunch of artifacts.

[01:23:07] I mean, they're not you know people aren't encountering the shadows of the artifacts

[01:23:10] but they're encountering selected, you know chosen designed artifacts that are there in

[01:23:15] order to generate a specific experience.

[01:23:17] So I think the idea of Plato's cave is we perceive one small fragment of reality but

[01:23:22] take it to be the whole right and filtered reality a reality that isn't actually reality

[01:23:28] but right yeah.

[01:23:29] Now I would say more that it's we see a part that we've mistaken for the whole as opposed

[01:23:33] to we see an illusion and there's like this you know but that's a metaphysical.

[01:23:38] Interesting.

[01:23:39] B if I have yet.

[01:23:40] I mean it's interesting if you understand I'm sure I don't think Poe was thinking about

[01:23:44] this but if you understand pure light is a combination of all the colors of the spectrum

[01:23:49] on this is he has artificially divided the spectrum.

[01:23:52] Going back to something Phil said earlier like it does seem like a done deal from the start

[01:23:56] and he even feels like there's a level of delusion among the people who are attending

[01:24:02] this ball but there's also a level of we know we're close to the end.

[01:24:07] This is what you do when the end is near.

[01:24:11] Eat drink and be married.

[01:24:12] Yeah.

[01:24:13] Well it's JF was saying a moment ago it's like what did they think was going to happen?

[01:24:16] Yeah.

[01:24:17] I mean after Poe that I'm thinking about the setup, the whole the extraordinary stage that's

[01:24:24] been set for this to happen and it seems like this is the only thing that could have

[01:24:27] happened given the way the stage was set.

[01:24:30] And I was like this is the way ceremonial magicians work.

[01:24:33] Basically it's like watching a bunch of people unwittingly doing a vast collective magical

[01:24:39] working for the materialization of an entity that's going to make them bleed out their

[01:24:44] face.

[01:24:45] Yeah.

[01:24:46] And that's interesting from a psychological viewpoint because that is something that

[01:24:49] if you read like psychoanalysis, you'll find all kinds of stories about people setting

[01:24:53] up their own demise meticulously over months and like putting everything in place with

[01:24:57] that their life can come and fall apart.

[01:24:59] I mean, I've seen it personally.

[01:25:02] People do that and you're like well, you know, it's so weird when prosperous reacts

[01:25:06] with shock at this intruder when it's like dude, this is your show.

[01:25:09] You've set this up.

[01:25:10] He has arrived.

[01:25:11] Like what else could have happened?

[01:25:12] That's the beauty of repression.

[01:25:14] Yeah.

[01:25:15] You can surprise yourself.

[01:25:16] That's really true.

[01:25:21] I love the, Phil, you read the parrots as he outhered and heard.

[01:25:26] And I love the imagery there.

[01:25:27] But her it does leave Jesus untouched.

[01:25:30] So I don't know whether or not we're supposed to believe that somebody survived.

[01:25:33] Ah, good point.

[01:25:34] An airy mess maybe.

[01:25:35] Well, there's only a reader survived.

[01:25:37] He's like the animal.

[01:25:38] He's the only one who lived to go tell the tale.

[01:25:42] Or isch male and Moby Dick.

[01:25:44] It's like, and I found a board to cling onto.

[01:25:47] And so.

[01:25:48] Oh, yeah.

[01:25:49] Yeah.

[01:25:50] I think after what Phil read that he just walks unimpeded past within a yard of the

[01:25:56] Princess Person.

[01:25:57] And while the vast assembly as if with one impulse, again, making it seem like this is

[01:26:02] inside of one person shrink from the centers of the room to the walls.

[01:26:07] He made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished

[01:26:13] him from the first through the blue chamber to the purple, et cetera.

[01:26:17] So like that solemn and measured step also gives that kind of clockwork.

[01:26:21] Like this is what happens just as the clock is going to strike 12.

[01:26:25] This is what's going to happen.

[01:26:27] And I was just going to talk about that actually.

[01:26:29] I focus on sounds like where sound becomes an important part of a story.

[01:26:34] I always notice that.

[01:26:35] And the description of sound, the description of the bell of the clock.

[01:26:40] Like it's easy to look at the clock and think like, oh, machine for telling time.

[01:26:43] So it the presence of this Abinny clock in the final black chamber is a figure of time.

[01:26:50] But to me, it's also a figure of a certain kind of sound that completely differs from

[01:26:54] the other sounds that not this not exactly described, but sort of jestered at a sense

[01:27:00] of like waltzing, a vertignous sound of things turning and churning.

[01:27:05] You know, the way waltzes do the triple rhythm always sort of propels you forward.

[01:27:10] Another eyes wide shut parallel.

[01:27:12] Yeah.

[01:27:13] Yeah, yeah.

[01:27:14] Depreved sounding waltzes like this is an old trope in classical music, the idea that

[01:27:18] of waltzes that get out of control of sound that becomes too vertignous.

[01:27:23] The horses fly off the carousel.

[01:27:25] Yeah, exactly.

[01:27:27] And against that sense of like a whirling sound is the solemn voice of the clock that cuts

[01:27:36] a swath through the sound.

[01:27:38] Yeah.

[01:27:39] And then the straight line of time, irreversible time cutting through the circular waltz,

[01:27:43] right?

[01:27:44] It's kind of like inevitable.

[01:27:45] Yeah.

[01:27:46] And also it could raise and lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep

[01:27:51] and exceedingly musical but of so peculiar note and emphasis that each lapse of the hour

[01:27:55] of the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause momentarily to harken the sound.

[01:27:59] Yeah.

[01:28:00] Lovely.

[01:28:01] Yeah.

[01:28:02] Yeah.

[01:28:03] Yeah.

[01:28:04] And then the nervously laugh a bit once the clock stops.

[01:28:05] And they're like, anyways.

[01:28:06] And they just like, right.

[01:28:07] That's again.

[01:28:08] You know it.

[01:28:09] It's like every time that clock goes off, it's like, oh yeah, we're horrible people and

[01:28:13] we're going to die.

[01:28:16] And they go back to the circles.

[01:28:18] You remember the feeling when you're like, I don't party anymore.

[01:28:22] When I used to like go out with friends and have a good time for a weekend at a cottage

[01:28:27] or something.

[01:28:29] And just the occasional kind of reminder that this is like it's a platitude.

[01:28:33] But the constant kind of like, oh yeah, and then on Monday, I have to go back to work.

[01:28:37] Or this will end, this too shall pass.

[01:28:39] And this kind of feeling of like the spinning feeling of feeling like things are eternal,

[01:28:45] feeling angry in this moment touching on eternity combined with a straight line of time just

[01:28:49] cutting right through it and just reminding you that things are just going to irreversibly

[01:28:53] move on.

[01:28:54] This story kind of encapsulates that sensation.

[01:28:57] Absolutely.

[01:28:58] Yeah.

[01:28:59] Vacations are good for that.

[01:29:01] You're on this vacation with your family.

[01:29:02] It's the best.

[01:29:04] You're having so much fun.

[01:29:05] And then as the day that you're going to leave starts to draw nearer, you start more

[01:29:10] to have those moments of God.

[01:29:13] It's really like I'm going to get back.

[01:29:15] I'm going to have life coming back to actually behind you.

[01:29:18] 8 a.m.

[01:29:19] Committee meeting.

[01:29:20] Yeah.

[01:29:21] Oh yeah.

[01:29:22] All the little deaths of life at which point you will start leading out your face.

[01:29:25] I feel that way in committee meetings.

[01:29:28] It's a great description of how I feel.

[01:29:30] It's like my body is rejecting it.

[01:29:36] The bleeding through the pores is Christ in the Garden of Gisemite.

[01:29:39] Yeah.

[01:29:40] Sweat sweating blood.

[01:29:42] Yeah.

[01:29:43] I love that that Oh, gives us like a it's almost like he's tossing in a little numerology

[01:29:47] here when he feels the need to tell us the 3,600 seconds of the time, time capital T

[01:29:52] that flies.

[01:29:53] Yeah.

[01:29:54] And there's a the idea of the circle circle there to 360.

[01:29:58] Exactly.

[01:29:59] Yeah.

[01:30:00] I'm going to ask you guys at least one more thing.

[01:30:03] What do you make of when it when he says that you would have supposed this guy to be mad

[01:30:09] until you got to touch and see him?

[01:30:11] And then you would realize that he's not like what was that line about?

[01:30:14] I was wondering if someone would bring that up.

[01:30:16] I don't know what to make of that line.

[01:30:17] It's so interesting.

[01:30:19] Is it just yeah, that he would bring you under his illusion that he's not there are some

[01:30:24] crazy.

[01:30:25] There are some who would have thought him mad.

[01:30:27] His followers felt that he was not.

[01:30:28] It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not, which is another

[01:30:33] weird reference to Christ in a way.

[01:30:35] Right?

[01:30:36] Yeah.

[01:30:37] That's right.

[01:30:38] That's what I'm talking about.

[01:30:39] Yeah.

[01:30:40] The bad and Thomas.

[01:30:41] Yeah.

[01:30:42] But it's just hard to commensurate like this guy.

[01:30:43] Oh, the blasphemous parody.

[01:30:44] Yeah.

[01:30:45] Kind of like anti-right.

[01:30:46] Yeah.

[01:30:47] Yeah.

[01:30:48] Yeah.

[01:30:49] Exactly.

[01:30:50] It's like the the bizarre.

[01:30:51] What's how does seeing touching?

[01:30:52] It's bizarre.

[01:30:53] How does hearing seeing and touching someone convince you that someone's not mad.

[01:30:56] I guess it makes no sense.

[01:30:59] Also, what does it mean that he had followers?

[01:31:02] I mean, he's the prince, right?

[01:31:04] Yeah.

[01:31:05] He's a duke, but like the followers being like he's kind of also a kind of cult leader.

[01:31:10] Yeah.

[01:31:11] Maybe he is the magician preparing the chamber for it.

[01:31:14] Yeah.

[01:31:15] It makes so much more sense if it is interest psychic for some reason.

[01:31:18] I don't know exactly why, but I get that that I don't know.

[01:31:22] There's something little pieces of us that are all insane over somehow grounded as a whole.

[01:31:28] Yeah.

[01:31:29] I think that is kind of one of the classic readings of the text and a lot of post stories.

[01:31:33] Like, oh, this is a dissociated or kind of like fragment in mind here, which I totally

[01:31:38] can get behind.

[01:31:39] But just to hang out with the naive realist reading for a second, I was going to say

[01:31:44] that if there is a mask in this, right?

[01:31:46] If there is an actual play that's not just the story itself, but there is a mask in them,

[01:31:51] you agree that the mask begins when the the mummer of the red death comes in at the end.

[01:31:55] And what if Prospero is, what if this whole thing was set up by him?

[01:31:58] What if this is his, he's playing his part in the play?

[01:32:01] He's going to run at it with a dagger than collapse down and then like, so maybe this

[01:32:05] is a sequel to the tempest.

[01:32:07] Maybe this is Prospero finally wreaking vengeance on the entirety of like Italian peninsula.

[01:32:13] Um, I don't know.

[01:32:14] But is he what I don't get about it as a revenge tale is?

[01:32:20] Well, he would have, he would have summoned the red death to begin with just as he does

[01:32:24] by setting up the space and like creating a clock like the black chamber for it.

[01:32:29] Like he's behind it for the whole village.

[01:32:32] I mean, yeah.

[01:32:33] Okay.

[01:32:34] That's my that's my comic book reading and then also kind of gave people a temporary

[01:32:39] feeling of safety in his palace.

[01:32:43] What I like about that is that part of his own play is him getting really indignant

[01:32:48] and and kind of rushing him and charging him and then just immediately die.

[01:32:53] And like he was a very self deprecating way to go out.

[01:32:57] Oh, yeah.

[01:32:57] You know, I do, I do love this.

[01:32:58] Like if we're doing the night realism thing, you know, like there's no way that red

[01:33:03] death could have made it in unless the guy who planned it all led him in.

[01:33:08] This was all and we don't know how much time is supposed to have gone by.

[01:33:11] But I love that at the stroke of midnight when they all have enough time to pay attention

[01:33:16] is when he constructs the climax of his his play.

[01:33:19] Yeah.

[01:33:20] Can I?

[01:33:21] I'm wondering if you would mind if I just read the last paragraph because it's so badass,

[01:33:26] it's so good.

[01:33:26] Yeah.

[01:33:27] Yeah.

[01:33:28] And now was acknowledged the presence of the red death.

[01:33:30] He had come like a thief in the night and one by one dropped the revelers in the blood

[01:33:36] bedoos halls of their revel and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.

[01:33:42] And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay and the flames

[01:33:48] of the tripods expired and darkness and decay and the red death held

[01:33:52] illimitable dominion overall.

[01:33:55] Yeah.

[01:33:56] Your cold voice makes it even sex.

[01:33:59] We can't wait to see you guys hire Adorsten Wells here.

[01:34:05] It is like I feel like we should have you like, I don't know, we have to pay,

[01:34:09] I guess, to just do all the readings whenever we're

[01:34:13] suck at readings.

[01:34:14] I think we both noticed you had the other Jesus reference.

[01:34:17] Yeah.

[01:34:17] The thief in the night.

[01:34:18] The thief in the night.

[01:34:19] I didn't realize until this discussion how much Jesus, the son of man will come like a

[01:34:22] thief in the night.

[01:34:23] I mean, there's all this Christ.

[01:34:25] It really is a magical sort of reverse, you know, like upside down cross.

[01:34:30] Right.

[01:34:31] That's a damn story.

[01:34:32] I do like that.

[01:34:33] I kind of wonder if we're going to go with the idea that

[01:34:38] Prospero intentionally let in the red death.

[01:34:42] What does that mean about whatever the political message is?

[01:34:48] Because it's someone who has decided we all deserve to die.

[01:34:53] And this is an expression of a kind of anguished or crazed remorse.

[01:34:59] Or is it just, we're going to go out.

[01:35:03] I want to go out on my own terms and my own insanely theatrical manner.

[01:35:08] I would read it in the sense that Prospero isn't even human at all.

[01:35:12] But rather, you know, in the stories of H.B. Lovecraft, there's a figure,

[01:35:16] a god or a great old one named Naira Lothatep.

[01:35:19] That's how I pronounce it.

[01:35:20] I've heard different pronunciations.

[01:35:21] Naira Lothatep is this strange wise man, scientist, Tesla slash like

[01:35:28] Akinaten type of figure that comes out of Egypt.

[01:35:31] And he wanders around the world showing his technological marvels and people kind of lose it.

[01:35:36] And then he just basically brings chaos and destruction.

[01:35:38] But he does it under the guise of this inventor and this magician, this wizard.

[01:35:42] So Stephen King, his character Randall Flagg who recurs in several of his novels is by his own

[01:35:49] emission, Naira Lothatep.

[01:35:51] So there's a sense in which Prospero could just be the come-upence of this aristocratic society.

[01:35:56] And suddenly, he's just basically the kind of Egrigor or collectively created super ego

[01:36:03] of this ruling class.

[01:36:05] In which case, the story becomes extremely timely because we can't just blame monarchy now,

[01:36:10] you know, for this type of elitism.

[01:36:12] It could happen here.

[01:36:13] You know, you could have a fully, quote unquote democratic society with a very rich oligarchy,

[01:36:18] which elects the spiritual Naira Lothatep figure that leads them over the edge and into the void.

[01:36:24] I don't know.

[01:36:24] I just find that I don't think you lose any of the social critique if you take that reading,

[01:36:29] which I mean, once again, we should just stress that this reading is just for shits and giggles, right?

[01:36:33] Yeah, that's one reason.

[01:36:34] Yeah, strictly for reasons.

[01:36:35] Yeah, like that is the right.

[01:36:37] But as the sort of natural outcome of the structures that have been set up,

[01:36:43] yeah, exactly.

[01:36:43] Because self-destruction was built in from the beginning.

[01:36:46] It's like those billionaires, you know, like all these insecurity were within without

[01:36:51] was the red death.

[01:36:52] I like the idea of one of them just kind of breaking and the without into their bunkers or whatever

[01:37:00] they have planned, their little armies.

[01:37:03] It's going to have those going to release the gas in the underground bunker.

[01:37:08] Yeah, or are you?

[01:37:09] And if he's reverse Jesus, he didn't come to save them.

[01:37:12] He came to destroy them all.

[01:37:13] Yeah, you know, he would be the opposite of the savior.

[01:37:15] Anti-Christ.

[01:37:16] I mean, that's one of the basic gestures of decadence, which Poe, of course, is one of the great

[01:37:21] founders of that whole kind of aesthetic movement is to reverse and invert.

[01:37:26] Not in the name of like, you know, I think that ultimately, decadence is kind of a moral,

[01:37:31] like it has a moral dimension, that aesthetic movement.

[01:37:34] I don't see it as a kind of nihilistic movement.

[01:37:36] A lot of those decadent writers ended up becoming very religious eventually.

[01:37:42] But rather, it's a way of affirming the moral access by going to the cesspool at the bottom of it.

[01:37:48] You know, but you're still affirming some kind of moral horizon or some kind of moral access

[01:37:52] by going there.

[01:37:53] So it's an inversion without being necessarily a kind of rejection of the kind of religious dimension

[01:37:59] writ large, right?

[01:38:00] It's the left-hand path.

[01:38:02] Right, left-hand path.

[01:38:03] Right, there's a great essay by David Bentley Hart on Leon Bluat who is one of the great decadent,

[01:38:08] the French decadent writers and he develops this idea that French decadence was a kind of left-hand

[01:38:13] path within Catholicism.

[01:38:14] It's a very interesting essay.

[01:38:16] Cool.

[01:38:17] Well, this was a lot of fun.

[01:38:19] We should wrap up.

[01:38:20] I see Phil let you get some tea.

[01:38:25] Yeah, but this was so much fun.

[01:38:27] I really appreciate you guys coming on.

[01:38:30] Super fun.

[01:38:31] I can't believe this much time.

[01:38:32] I just looked at the time as...

[01:38:35] I know.

[01:38:35] See, the Ebony clock has...

[01:38:37] The Ebony clock has been...

[01:38:38] Yeah, exactly.

[01:38:39] So thanks so much you guys for coming on and...

[01:38:42] Thank you guys.

[01:38:43] Yeah, thank you so much.

[01:38:44] Hope we can do it again sometime.

[01:38:46] Absolutely.

[01:38:47] Yeah, and we'll talk soon, truly.

[01:38:49] Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:38:51] The leading on Has Fallen!

[01:38:55] We know our tension to that day might hurt.

[01:39:04] Who are you?

[01:39:05] Who are you?

[01:39:07] I'm Very Bad Man.

[01:39:09] I'm A Very Good Man.

[01:39:10] Good Man.

[01:39:15] They think we lost and with no more brains than you have.

[01:39:19] We know our tension to that man.

[01:39:25] Anybody can have a brain.

[01:39:29] You're A Very Bad Man.

[01:39:31] And Very Good Man.

[01:39:33] Just a very bad wizard.