Today's episode is a response to and continuation of our recent cluster on the work of songwriter, musician, poet, and cartoonist David Berman, which you can read at post45.org/contemporaries now. Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty was joined by cluster co-editors David Hering and Sarah Osment to discuss Berman's life and artistry with his longtime friend and collaborator Bob Nastanovich. What transpired was a really special conversation, and we're very grateful to Bob for the insights he was willing to share with us. You can read David and Sarah's introduction to the cluster at https://post45.org/2023/01/introduction-6/. You can read David's essay in the cluster, "Think of Me as a Place: David Berman's Rooms in Time," at https://post45.org/2023/01/think-of-me-as-a-place-david-bermans-rooms-in-time/. You can read Bob's beautiful postscript to the cluster at https://post45.org/2023/01/postscript/.

Happy New Year from Pod45. Sincere thanks to everyone who's listened to the podcast in its first year; we really appreciate your support and hope you've enjoyed listening to the episodes as much as we enjoyed making them. We're looking forward to bringing you more impassioned and informed conversations about contemporary culture in 2023. Today's episode of Pod45 takes us to a cluster we published last month – For Speed and Creed: The Fast and Furious Franchise. For a great discussion of these much loved and wildly successful movies, Post45 co-editor Michael Docherty was joined by cluster editor Maggie Boyd, and two of the cluster’s contributors – Nichole Nomura, and Mackenzie Streissguth. You can read For Speed and Creed now at https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/for-speed-and-creed/. Sign up for the Post45 newsletter at: https://post45.org/19281-2/ This episode of Pod45 was produced by Michael Docherty and Gunner Taylor. Michael Docherty wrote the theme music.

This episode of Pod45 discusses our recent Gestures of Refusal cluster, co-edited by Sarah Bernstein and Yanbing Er.  Contemporaries co-editor Francisco Robles sat down to chat about the cluster (as well as broader questions and themes it suggests) with Sarah and Yanbing, alongside Akwugo Emejulu, who contributed the essay "Ambivalence as Misfeeling, Ambivalence as Refusal" to the cluster, and Xine Yao, whose writing doesn't feature in the cluster but whose work and thought on (dis)affect, (un)feeling, and refusal articulates closely related concerns. Pod45 host and Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty also provides some information on how you can stay informed about Contemporaries and Post45 more generally in the event that Twitter, currently our primary means of circulating our clusters, disappears in a cloud of billionaire hubris. You can read Gestures of Refusal, and sign up for our newsletter, at post45.org now. Guests Dr. Yanbing Er (@eryanbing), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore Dr. Sarah Bernstein, Lecturer in Scottish Literature and Creative Writing, University of Strathclyde Dr. Akwugo Emejulu (@akwugoemejulu), Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick Dr. Xine Yao (@xineyaophd), Lecturer in American Literature to 1900, University College London Akwugo's Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press 2022) and Xine's Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP 2021) are out now. Production This episode was produced by Michael Docherty and co-produced by Gunner Taylor, with logistical co-ordination by Francisco Robles and music by Michael Docherty.

Today our discussion takes us to a cluster we published last month, W(h)ither the Christian Right? This cluster, a wide-ranging exploration of relationships between literature, broadly conceived, and American evangelical Christianity, was edited by Christopher Douglas and Matthew Mullins. It feels like an especially urgent and timely cluster, given the religious contexts surrounding the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the January 6th insurrection and QAnon, and the evangelical movement’s embrace of Trumpism more generally, as we approach the 2022 midterms and look forward nervously to the presidential election of 2024. To discuss the role that literature plays in the evangelical world, the political moment in which the American Christian right finds itself, and how secular literary critics might engage with faith, Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty was joined by the cluster's editors Chris and Matt, alongside two of its contributors, Jenny Van Houdt and Melodie Roschman. During the episode, we mention an episode of the NYT's The Daily podcast that intersects with Jenny's essay. Listen to that here. Check out all our clusters at post45.org/contemporaries, email us at post45contemporaries@gmail.com, and follow us on Twitter at @AtPost45. Guests Jenny Van Houdt is an instructor at North Idaho College and an assessment designer for Washington State University's College of Medicine. Her work is interested in how apocalyptic thought reorients beliefs about the world. Her essay is "Red-Pilling on Patmos: A Quick and Dirty Hermeneutic for the Evangelical–QAnon Connection." Melodie Roschman (@roschmachine) is a recent English PhD graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation examines memoir, community, and resistance in the progressive Christian community surrounding the late Rachel Held Evans. Her essay is "'We Must Choose Manhood': Masculinity, Sex, and Authority in Evangelical Purity Manuals." Matthew Mullins (@MullinsMattR) is Associate Professor of English and History of Ideas at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina and the author of Postmodernism in Pieces (Oxford 2016) and Enjoying the Bible (Baker 2021). Christopher Douglas (@crddouglas) is Professor of English at the University of Victoria and the author of If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right. His recent publications include "Christian White Supremacy in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Novels" and "Silence: Kidnapping, Abuse, and Murder in Early-Twenty-First-Century White Evangelical Fiction." Chris and Matt co-edited the cluster and co-wrote its introduction.

Renowned writer and translator, Lydia Davis, is discussed in this podcast. Topics include the uniqueness of Davis's work, the lack of scholarly attention paid to her, her attention to detail and precise language, working with Davis and her abundance of materials, the elusiveness of describing her work, and the importance of grammar. The speakers also discuss the idea of formalizing Lydia Davis studies and future clusters on the Christian Right and RuPaul's Drag Race.

Today’s episode is the second of two responding to our recent cluster Bored as Hell, a series of essays all about being bored and being boring, why we get bored and how we unbore ourselves, depicting and manifesting boredom in art and literature. You can read Bored as Hell, as well as all our other clusters, at post45.org/contemporaries.  Joining Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon on Twitter) are: Busra Copuroglu (@buscopur on Twitter), a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, who edited the cluster and wrote its introduction. Charlie Tyson (@charlietyson1 on Twitter), a PhD candidate in English literature at Harvard. Charlie wrote the piece "Bored Housewives" for the cluster. Yonina Hoffman (@yonina on Twitter), Assistant Professor at the United States Merchant Marine Academy. Yonina wrote the piece "Traumatised by Capitalism? Novels of Bored Workers" for the cluster.

This episode is the first of two responding to our most recent cluster, which is titled Bored as Hell, and was edited by Busra Copuroglu.  Bored as Hell is a cluster of seven essays thinking about, thinking through, and thinking with ideas of boredom and boringness. It covers a lot of ground — boredom in academia, boredom in bureaucracy, the boredom of capitalism, the boredom of domestic labor, intersections between boredom and humor, and boredom as a gift, something that shows us the value of our time and spurs us to do something with it. The cluster has much to say about boredom as represented in and perhaps even induced by literature and film, and about boredom’s historical, social, and political dimensions.  The cluster is interested in how we define boredom and how we avoid it, and also in boredom as an affect that is always recognizable and yet strangely capacious and flexible, closely adjacent to and inflected by multiple other states of mind — desire, idleness, melancholy, anger. As the cluster shows, boredom is a phenomenon that’s been grappled with by everyone from medieval monks, to Tolstoy, Heidegger to Dennis Rodman, and its theorization is now the subject of the increasingly vibrant interdisciplinary field of boredom studies. That interdisciplinary spirit is felt throughout this cluster and is borne out in particular in today’s guests. Joining Contemporaries co-editor Michael Docherty (@maybeavalon on Twitter) to discuss the Bored As Hell cluster and boredom more broadly are: Busra Copuroglu (@buscopur on Twitter), a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, who edited the cluster and wrote its introduction. James Danckert, Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Cognitive Neuroscience Area Head at the University of Waterloo, who contributed to the cluster with the essay "Give me death or give me boredom?" James' book Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, co-written with John D. Eastwood, is out now and highly recommended. Sarah Chant, PhD candidate in Anthropology at the New School, who contributed to the cluster with the essay "So Bored I Could Laugh." Read Bored as Hell at Post45: Contemporaries now.

This episode of Pod45 is the second part of a discussion emerging from our recent cluster responding to and reflecting on the work of the Scottish novelist Ali Smith. That cluster is titled Ali Smith Now and you can find it now at post45.org/contemporaries. In our previous episode, Contemporaries editors Gloria Fisk and Francisco Robles were in conversation with cluster editors Debra Rae Cohen and Cara L. Lewis alongside two of the cluster’s contributors, Deidre Lynch and Amy Elkins.  In this discussion Gloria, Francisco, Debra Rae and Cara are joined by a different pair of scholars who contributed to the cluster – Charlotte Terrell and Walt Hunter. Their wide-ranging conversation on Smith's work and its significance takes in allegory, puns, Scottishness, the political possibilities of the novel, the semiotics of British fried chicken chains, and more.

Pod45 is the discursive cultural criticism podcast from Post45: Contemporaries. This episode is the first of two discussions responding to our recent Ali Smith Now cluster, which takes the publication of Smith's latest novel Companion Piece as an opportunity to reflect on her unique oeuvre. Contemporaries editorial team members Gloria Fisk and Francisco Robles sit down for a conversation with cluster editors Debra Rae Cohen and Cara L. Lewis, alongside Deidre Lynch and Amy Elkins, who collaborated on a piece for the cluster. The novel form, technologies of reading, connection and disconnection, collaboration and collegiality, aesthetics and politics, nature and art(ifice), irony and enchantment, joy and love and rapture: our panel bagatelle it as they see it on all these subjects and more. Part two of Ali Smith Now will follow next week. You can read the Ali Smith Now cluster at Post45: Contemporaries now: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/ali-smith-now/

Welcome to Pod45, the new discursive cultural criticism podcast from Post45: Contemporaries. In our first episode, Contemporaries Co-Editor Michael Docherty discusses our recent Dark Academia cluster with cluster editors Mitch Therieau and Olivia Stowell, alongside Gunner Taylor and Dylan Davidson who contributed essays to the cluster. This wide-ranging conversation explores Donna Tartt and her incredible speaking voice, the performativity of academic Twitter, the localities and temporalities of dark academia, resistance to and complicity with the many ills of the contemporary university, collective scholarship as a form of solidarity, and going "Goblin mode." Read the Dark Academia cluster at Post45: Contemporaries now: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/dark-academia/