Show Notes
For this week's episode of Some Marvelous Experience I am joined by Beatrice Bradley [https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/bradl629] and Brandon Truett [https://www.brandontruett.com/] for a conversation about what it means to take the Real Housewives franchise seriously as a kind of aesthetic experience. Brandon and Beatrice met in a seminar on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett the first semester of their PhD programs, but their friendship was later cemented when they began to text about their love of the Real Housewives during the pandemic. Our conversation covers the history of the franchise, a digression about Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, and a lot talk about different kinds of snobbery.
More from Some Marvelous Experience
This week's episode of Some Marvelous Experience is the first where someone suggested an artifact that I really didn't want to see. But Teagan Bradway and Jen Lightfoot overcame my resistance in order to get me to watch and discuss the 2004 horror film Saw [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387564/]. Despite the gruesome object at the center of our conversation, the discussion itself was a ton of fun. We discuss how Jen and Teagan's first sense that they might be a good match based on their shared love for terrible horror films, how genre provides a way of being with other people, David Lynch, Scream, Velocipastor, and everything in between. Teagan [https://teaganbradway.com/] is a brilliant scholar of queer and trans studies; her forthcoming book, Queer Kinship for Everybody, is going to be a very big deal. Jen [https://www.jenlightfoot.com] is an artist, musician, and podcast host: check out her own podcast Harry and Jen Do Horror with Friends [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/harry-and-jen-do-horror-with-friends/id1709222600].
Join me for a conversation with Emer Pond Feeney and Sheila Liming about Wallace Stegner [https://wallacestegner.org/bio.html]'s 1984 novel, Crossing to Safety [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/172500/crossing-to-safety-by-wallace-stegner/]. Emer and Sheila describe their experience becoming friends online during the Covid pandemic, even though they lived only a few miles from one another in Vermont, before eventually bonding in person. One early testament to their connection was their shared love for Stegner's novel, which is also a book suffused with love for the state of Vermont. Our conversation about Crossing the Safety provides an opportunity to think about friendship and reading, about living in a place that you love, about what it means to find your people at different stages in your life. Sheila, who literally wrote the book on hanging out [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717263/hanging-out-by-sheila-liming/], and Emer have both thought deeply about the life-defining pleasures of friendship; I found this conversation to be so much fun.
Andrew Epstein [https://andrewepstein.net] and Casey Epstein-Gross [https://www.caseyepsteingross.com/] join Brian for a special Dadcore [https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-her-en-1819572981/] edition of the pod. Andrew is a scholar of contemporary American poetry who literally wrote the book about poetry and friendship, Beautiful Enemies [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/beautiful-enemies-friendship-and-postwar-american-poetry-9780195388985?lang=en&cc=ad]; Casey is a music journalist for Paste Magazine [https://www.pastemagazine.com/]. They are also father and daughter. They chose to use Silver Jews's "Advice to the Graduate" as a way to talk about the history of their shared musical tastes. Both Casey and Andrew have written movingly about this particular song. You can check out Andrew's essay, "David Berman, Ambivalent Aphorist [https://post45.org/2023/01/david-berman-ambivalent-aphorist/]," at Post45 and Casey's "Time Capsule: Silver Jews, Starlite Walker [https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/silver-jews/time-capsule-silver-jews-starlite-walker]," in Paste.
Katie Kadue and Ross Lerner drop by to discuss Paradise Lost, a poem that has served as an important touchstone in their relationship. Kadue and Lerner, who have a co-written book about Spenser's Amoretti and marriage entitled Love's True Object forthcoming in the Re/Verse series from Amherst College Press, explore the difference between writing a sonnet and writing a letter, what it means to work in paradise, the affordances of e-mail courtship, and whether Milton's poem might be the first sitcom.
On today's episode of Some Marvelous Experience, Rainer Diana Hamilton [https://rainerdianahamilton.com/] and Shiv Kotecha [https://shivkotecha.com/]discuss "Duchamp Fresh Widow," Elaine Sturtevant's 1992 (and 2012) reproduction of a work original produced by Marcel Duchamp in 1920, and consider how Sturtevant's work provides an opening to think about their relationship to one another and to conceptual art and writing. Rainer and Shiv were more or less introduced to Sturtevant via two 2014/2015 museum shows: Double Trouble [https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1454](MoMA) and Drawing Double Reversal [https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/sturtevant-drawing-double-reversal/] (Hamburger Bahnhof). For examples of the writing that Shiv and Rainer produced during the period in question, see Rainer's God Was Right [https://asterismbooks.com/product/god-was-right-diana-hamilton] and Shiv's The Switch [https://asterismbooks.com/product/the-switch].