Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

In “Holy Sonnet 14,” John Donne would like his “three person’d God” to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that neither reason nor the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine—what’s needed is God’s violent intervention. Wes & Erin discuss Donne’s surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for salvation. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet— John Donne’s biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps its no wonder that his great subjects were mortality and death. His Holy Sonnets, likely composed between 1609 and 1610, and published posthumously in 1633, are a collection of 19 poems written after the sea change in Donne’s subject matter from the secular to the sacred. They reflect his anxiety over his conversion to Anglicanism and his eventual decision to enter the priesthood, and meditate on salvation, death, and the wages of sin. Erin & Wes discuss Sonnet 10 in this series, “Death Be Not Proud,” an address of Death personified, whose power gradually diminishes beneath the force of Donne’s dazzling poetic rhetoric. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Delve into the dark layers of Roman Polanski's 'Chinatown,' where trauma and secrecy intertwine. The setting reveals more than meets the eye, encapsulating themes of corruption, police ethics, and personal struggles. Explore the moral ambiguity of Jake Gittes and his flawed journey through a treacherous landscape. The discussion navigates the intersections of ambition, familial ties, and societal decay, showcasing how the past haunts the present. Water becomes a powerful symbol, emphasizing the cyclical nature of truth and deception. Expect thought-provoking insights!

It’s a play full of contradictions, secrets, lies, and unspoken rules. It’s a play decidedly for adults, but about a child—an imaginary one, no less. It takes place on a college campus, but it is absent of students. And it’s about “fun and games” and “playing pretend,” but its games are harsh and shocking, and playing pretend involves vengeance and even murder. Wes & Erin discuss Mike Nichols’s 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, adapted from Edward Albee’s 1962 play, and ask what it has to say about the nature of game and play itself, as well as what might be generative on the one hand or contraceptive and inhibiting on the other about our relationships with our spouses, our parents, our children, and our work. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem “Sunday Morning” seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world—if we give it enough rapt attention—is as good as any chant or prayer. But can a return to nature worship solve the problem of nihilism, once monotheism has been eclipsed by modernity? Are memory and desire as permanent heaven, and can the poet become their high priest? “Sunday Morning” is a poetic dialogue about these questions. And whether or not we’re satisfied with its conclusion that the world is nothing more than an “old chaos of the sun,” the poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, MasterClass, where you can learn from the world’s best minds–anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. This holiday, give one annual membership and get one free by going to masterclass.com/subtext. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Before she settles down to life of homemaking, security, and insurance policies with Bruce Baldwin in Albany, star reporter Hildy Johnson has one more story to write for her ex-husband and ex-boss Walter Burns, editor of the Morning Post. Hildy must write up an interview with convicted killer Earl Williams that will grant him a last-minute reprieve on the basis of insanity. The ingenious angle she finds to prove he’s insane: Earl listened to so many soapbox speeches in the park about the socialist concept of “production for use” that when a gun was placed into his hands, he had to shoot it. Howard Hawks’s 1940 film “His Girl Friday” knits together two plots from two very different genres. One is a romantic comedy that intends to reunite its main couple in something like wedded bliss. The other is a dark drama of murder and corruption, complete with a gallows lurking just outside the window and a suicide attempt that takes place on screen. Yet Earl Williams and Hildy Johnson’s fates in their respective plots are twinned. Both are, in a sense, looking for their own reprieves. And Hildy has her own production-for-use dilemma. What was she made for—the life of a newspaperman, or the life of a housewife? To what kinds of production should we devote our own lives? What are we made for—risk and adventure or security and insurance? Wes & Erin discuss. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, MasterClass, where you can learn from the world’s best minds–anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. This holiday, give one annual membership and get one free by going to masterclass.com/subtext. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Dr. Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options—philosophy, medicine, law, and theology—all seem disappointingly ordinary. He is of course not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of knowledge is power, especially once it has become technology. At an individual level, what education seems to make us is an insignificant part of a formidable machine. For Faustus, the only way to make book learning great again is to extend it to the domain of black magic. And yet all this seems to earn him is an all-expenses-paid European vacation—notwithstanding the perk of having Mephistopheles as tour guide—to be followed by eternal damnation. What’s the point of selling your soul to the devil? How do we avoid subordinating our own search for meaning to the desire for power? Wes & Erin discuss Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.” For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of the brother that Edmund was born to replace? Is it the doctor who prescribed morphine too readily? Or is it James, Mary’s husband, who hired a third-rate doctor because he was too cheap to pay for his wife’s proper care? James, in turn, will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse. To ask who is to blame for Mary’s addiction, or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering. Are our woes self-created—or at least self-perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by caregivers, the legacies of nature or nurture that we are powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Wes & Erin discuss. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

In the beginning, Colonel Nicholson seems to be a stickler for principle, willing to die rather than have his officers do menial labor in a Japanese prison camp. In the end, his principles seem to be a cover for personal vanity. He is willing to put his officers to work building a bridge for his enemies, as long as it leaves him with a legacy. “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is a reflection on the meaning of work, and whether the ravages of time, if not war, imply that being happy in one’s work—to use a phrase repeated several times in the film—is nothing more than futility and madness. Is work the key to freedom, or is it inevitably a form of bondage? How do we distinguish the desire to be creative from the desire for prestige? When is destroying something more creative than building it? Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Buck Mason and Athletic Greens AG1. To get a free t-shirt with your first Buck Mason order, head over to buckmason.com/subtext. To get a free one-year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 and free travel packs with your first purchase of AG1, visit athleticgreens.com/subtext. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website

In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that, though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland’s capital city, he had not managed to render its famous, unrivaled hospitality. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in “The Dead,” the book’s final story. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan Sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany, and fittingly its central character, the Morkans’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story’s end. Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after-dinner speech but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. How might the virtue of hospitality include the need to incorporate difficult feelings about our families, our homelands, and ourselves? And is the story’s ending, with its incorporative vision of snow falling on both the living and the dead, hopeful or hopeless? Wes & Erin discuss. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Buck Mason. To get a free t-shirt with your first order, head over to buckmason.com/subtext. For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website