For our season finale, we delve into the world of dreams by looking at Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and the 1980 PBS movie based on it. What if your dreams could change the world--not in a metaphorical sense, but in a concrete way? What responsibility would you have? In this wide-ranging discussion we talk about Taoism, overpopulation discourse (again!) and the importance of public funding for the arts. Join us for our last trip into the worlds of science fiction (for now)!

Ursula K. Le Guin interview with Bill Moyers

Closing Music: "Get Along Little Doggies" by Harry McClintock

Nathanael and Erik are rejoined by guest Carl Watts in this episode covering the celebrated novel, iconic film, and its more contemporary sequel. Our conversation today touches on ideas of belief and fraudulence and, in the spirit of PKD, questions of reality and ontology. In addition, as this is our annual holiday episode, we discuss why BLADE RUNNER 2049 is, in fact, a Christmas movie.

Show notes:

"The hidden meaning of Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049"

Osmanthus

Erik and Nathanael are joined by special guest Will Murray to discuss Chester Himes' novel Cotton Comes to Harlem. Discussion includes the nature of reclamation and revolution and historical shifts in discussing racial issues.

Please note that there are substantial audio issues with this episode. We do think that the conversation is well worth listening to.

In this special holiday episode, Kline and Booth discuss James Joyce's short story "The Dead" from his 1914 collection DUBLINERS, as well as the 1987 adaptation, John Huston's last film, and starring Anjelica Huston and Donal McGann. As they parse out the complexities of Joyce's style and what makes the story so quintessentially modernist, they also examine how it fits into the holiday literary tradition in its framings of home, family, love, and human connection.

Listen to Joyce himself read from his final novel FINNEGANS WAKE here.

Booth and Kline tackle Ellery Queen's Ten Commandments themed novel Ten Days' Wonder and the 1971 adaptation of it by Claude Chabrol. What do you do with a God who makes impossible demands and enacts disproportionate judgement? How should humans press forward in a world shattered by war? And how old, after all, is Ellery Queen? These questions and more are addressed in this episode.

If you are interested in this conversation, check out Booth's book God and the Great Detective: Ellery Queen's Struggle with the Divine, 1945-1965, now out from McFarland.

Part 2 of 2. Booth and Kline discuss the movie adaptation(s) of In Cold Blood and the biopics covering its writing: Capote and Infamous. Topics covered include the ethics of adaptation, the use of source materials, and the way Capote's structure informs all subsequent adaptations.

Join us for our most controversial episode yet! Will Kline and Booth agree on the relative merits of Capote and Infamous? There is, after all, only one way to find out....

Kline and Booth revisit Truman Capote in the first of a double-episode covering In Cold Blood and the movies inspired by it and by Capote's experience writing it. Episode 1 covers the book itself and its themes of masculinity and American violence. It also asks the question--is this book a great book or merely a good one?

Kline and Booth discuss Jorge Luis Borges' "Death and the Compass" and the 1992 film adaptation. But the discussion is itself a labyrinth, covering (among other topics) metaphysical detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, Alan Moore, and Batman.

Erik and Nathanael are once again joined by Dr. Matthew Wells, who last appeared in "The Swimmer" episode of season one. This time, the three discuss Dorothy B. Hughes's 1947 thriller novel, IN A LONELY PLACE, and the 1950 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.

Booth and Kline are joined by special guest Steph Parker to discuss John Berendt's 1994 book and the 1997 Clint Eastwood movie based on it.

Note that Booth misidentifies a podcast he listened to featuring John Berendt. The podcast is Queer We Are and can be listened to here.

Nathanael and Erik dive into William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley and Guillermo del Toro's 2021 adaptation. Topics include: freakishness, tarot, whether authors get any say on what their symbolism does.

For further information see:

Abbot, Megan. "Megan Abbot on the Difference between Hardboiled and Noir."

Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A. Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination.

Pollack, Rachel. Rachel Pollack's Tarot Wisdom.

Discussion of Nightmare Alley & Use of Tarot [YouTube Video]

Erik and Nathanael are joined by Jennie Lightweis-Goff to discuss James Dickey's 1970 novel Deliverance and the film based on it. Topics include: masculinity, nature, and freakishness.

Please be aware that due to the graphic nature of the content of this episode, listener discretion is advised.

Erik and Nathanael are joined by special guest Elizabeth Allen to discuss 2001: A Space Odyssey, a somewhat unique collaboration between two giants in their respective fields. We discuss midcentury fears of overpopulation, the destiny of humanity, and the possibilities (and dangers) of transcendence.

Links:

Scout Tafoya and Tucker Johnson on Kubrick, Spielberg, and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

Farya Faraji: Desert-Level Music vs. Actual Middle-Eastern Music

Standard Ebooks

Erik and Nathanael begin a new season of PLL. This year we will be looking at books dealing with crime and criminality of all sorts. And to kick things off, we return to the Beats and discuss the collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks. This novel is a fictionalized account of a very real murder that took place in 1944--a murder that proved to be important for the developing Beat Generation. We pair this novel with the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings, which approaches the same case from a different perspective. Along the way, we talk about life on the homefront during WWII, the ways this novel anticipates the mature work of both Burroughs and Kerouac, and the ways in which some responses to the movie suggest that issues raised by the case might still be with us today. 

Join Nathanael and Erik for this special holiday season episode! They are joined by two special guests and talk about the Dickens novella as well as its many adaptations, including the Muppets classic.

Will Murray joins Erik and Nathanael to discuss John Ball's novel In the Heat of the Night and the 1967 movie based on it. Join us as we discuss the idea of the American South as branding and as scapegoat, interrogate the limits of generic forms, and answer the question of whether In the Heat of the Night is a feel-good movie.

[Production note: there are some issues with sound here and there in the episode; we don't think this detracts from the overall flow of the discussion]

It's spooky season! In their October episode, Nathanael and Erik discuss the figurative and literal body horror seen in Kafka's absurdist novella THE METAMORPHOSIS and Cronenberg's visceral cult classic THE FLY.

In this episode we take a trip to midcentury California and into the lives of the bored and desperate. It's Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion.

This movie is not easy to find, but it is on YouTube.

Youtube Videos:

The American Experience as told by Joan Didion (2003) (Source of our first intersegment bumper)

Joan Didion, 1971.

Katarzyna Nowak McNeice - "Joan Didion’s California and the Melancholic American Identity"

Further Reading

Daugherty, Tracy. The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion. St. Martin's, 2015.

Nowak-McNeice, Katarzyna. California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels. Routledge, 2019.

Vandenberg, Kathleen M. Joan Didion: Substance and Style. SUNY 2021.

A guest joins Nathanael and Erik to untangle midcentury malaise. Tune in for suburban flotation.

Caitlan Sumner joins us to discuss Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and the 1967 John Huston movie based on it.

Further Reading: 

Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. U of Georgia P, 2003.

Gleeson-White, Sarah. "Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of Carson McCullers." The Southern Literary Journal, Volume 33, Number 2, Spring 2001, pp. 108-123

Hoang Tan Nguyen. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke UP, 2014. [Booth apologizes for butchering Hoang's name multiple times during this podcast. It's a good book and worth checking out]

In this episode, Erik and Nathanael discuss Jack Kerouac's 1957 monumental Beat novel, ON THE ROAD, as well as the 2012 film adaptation.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Penguin.

—. Desolation Angels. Penguin

—. Dharma Bums. Penguin.

Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. St. Martin’s.

Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. Washington Square P.

Leland, John. Why Kerouac Matters. Viking.

Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait. Virgin.

Penner, James. Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture. Indiana UP.

Guest Carl Watts joins us to discuss Gore Vidal's troubling novel Myra Breckinridge. Check out Carl's book I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago, newly out from Gordon Hill Press 

In light of the ongoing attacks on trans communities throughout the US and the world, we would like to direct listeners to the GLAAD transgender resource page: https://www.glaad.org/transgender/resources

Further Reading:

Blanchard, Sessi Kuwabara. "In Defense of the Trans Villainess." 

Booth, Nathanael Thomas. "The Queer Utopianism of Myra Breckinridge." Utopian Studies, vol. 32 no. 2, 2021, p. 167-185.

Diffrient, David Scott. ""Hard to Handle": Camp Criticism, Trash-Film Reception, and the Transgressive Pleasures of Myra Breckinridge." Cinema Journal, vol. 52 no. 2, 2013, p. 46-70.

Hoare, Liam. "Was Gore Vidal the Real Crypto-Nazi?" 

YouTube Links:

Raquel Welch discusses Myra Breckinridge: 

Blatant: a stage production inspired by Myra Breckinridge

Christine Jorgensen at UCLA

Mae West at UCLA

In this episode we discuss Patricia Highsmith's landmark lesbian novel The Price of Salt as well as its 2015 film adaptation.

Works Cited:

Hesford, Victoria. “Patriotic Perversions: Patricia Highsmith’s Queer Vision of Cold War America in ‘The Price of Salt’, ‘The Blunderer’, and ‘Deep Water.’” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3/4, 2005, pp. 215–33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004425.

James, Jenny M. "Maternal Failures, Queer Futures: Reading The Price of Salt (1952) and Carol (2015) against Their Grain." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 24 no. 2, 2018, p. 291-314. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/696683.

Perrin, Tom. “Rebuilding ‘Bildung’: The Middlebrow Novel of Aesthetic Education in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 44, no. 3, 2011, pp. 382–401, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41289263.

White, Patricia. “Sketchy Lesbians: <em>Carol</Em> as History and Fantasy.” Film Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 2, 2015, pp. 8–18, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2015.69.2.8.

Seitz, Matt Zoller. “Directors of the Decade No. 9: The Sensualists.” Salon, 17 Dec. 2009, https://www.salon.com/2009/12/17/sensualists_seitz/.

Interview with Phyllis Nagy: https://youtu.be/xSX7hqKIw7k

Happy Halloween!

Come in out of the cold and cozy up to the blazing outpost as Erik and Nathanael discuss John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There" and the movie(s) based on it. Golden Age S.F., the limits of science and language, and very butch men battle it out in a struggle for dominance in the frozen wastes.

Join us as we discuss Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and the later film adaptation with Audrey Hepburn's iconic role as Holly Golightly

In part II of our inaugural episode, we discuss I am a Camera and Cabaret and the changes they rang on Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories

Welcome to the Projectionist's Lending Library. In this episode, we discuss The Berlin Stories, which were later adapted as I am a Camera and Cabaret. 

Welcome to the Erik Kline show! Today we look at William S. Burroughs, David Cronenberg, and Naked Lunch. We talk biography, we talk drugs, we talk obscenity. Everything is on the table and nothing is forbidden, so strap in for a bumpy journey into the Interzone.

Burroughs lecture on the paranormal.

Here's the YouTube video Booth mentions.

Booth and Kline are joined by returning guest Matthew Wells to discuss Slaughterhouse-Five, war, and time. Heavy topics, but done with a light touch since, after all, you can't spell "slaughter" without "laughter."

Music: "Cheerio," performed by the Manhattan Beach Coast Guard Band

Erik and Nathanael venture into the uncanny world of Area X, where words lose meaning and form loses consistency. Along the way they discuss Lovecraft, Nature's revenge, and the nature of grief.

Stock audio for the intro and conclusion can be found here, here, and here.

How do you celebrate the most epic s.f. franchise of all time? With the most epic podcast of all time! In this episode, Erik and Nathanael explore Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel Planet of the Apes as well as all of the movies based on it. Hear Booth's thoughts on James Franciscus! Hear Kline's digressions on James Franco! Hear both of them nearly come to blows over how close the 1968 movie is to the novel! It's all here in a blockbuster length, so grab a banana and tune in.

Kline and Booth take on Zack Snyder's Watchmen and the HBO sequel to the book. We also digress, extensively, on superhero movies in general.

Additional material:

Alan Moore talks - 02 - Watchmen by Comics Brittania

HBO's Watchmen: A Thermodynamic Disaster by Macabre Storytelling (video referenced by Booth in the episode)

Kline and Booth return for a season full of science fictional weirdness. In this, the first of two episodes on Watchmen, the two take an extended look at Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic de/reconstruction of superhero mythology.

This is the first of two episodes. Next month will feature a discussion of the Zach Snyder movie adaptation of Watchmen and the HBO miniseries sequel.

At one point in the episode, Booth refers to a certain YouTube video. This is that video. He will discuss it more in the next episode.