Episode 192: Postmodern Wet Dreams (Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote")
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2020
⏱️ 97 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David and Tamler dive into "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," a very funny Borges story that also raises deep questions about authorship, reading, and interpretation. What would it mean for the same text to be written by two different authors more than three hundred years apart? Is this story the post-modernist manifesto that literary critics like Roland Barthes believed it to be? Or is the narrator in the story just a delusional sycophant, a victim of Menard's practical joke – and the story by extension, a practical joke by Borges on the post-modernist movement to come?
Plus, My Little Pony fans finally confront their Nazi problem.
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Links:
- 'My Little Pony' Fans Confront Their Nazi Problem - The Atlantic
- Very Bad Wizards has a new shirt! [CottonBureau.com]
- Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - Wikipedia
- The Brothers Karmazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) — This is the edition we will be reading from in our upcoming miniseries.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro, |
| 0:05.9 | having an informal discussion about issues and signs and ethics. |
| 0:09.4 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of allow to say, |
| 0:13.6 | and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:17.0 | Yeah well, what are you gonna do? Life's a bitch and then you die, right? |
| 0:20.6 | Sometimes, sometimes life's a bitch and then you keep living. |
| 0:24.1 | The lady on his phone says, |
| 0:30.1 | they do attention to that man behind the curtain. |
| 0:40.1 | Who are you? |
| 0:42.1 | Who are you? |
| 0:44.1 | I'm very bad man. |
| 0:46.1 | I'm a very good man. |
| 0:48.1 | Good man. |
| 0:50.1 | Just a very bad wizard. |
| 0:52.1 | Welcome to very bad wizards, I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston, |
| 0:54.1 | Dave the long time New York Times Cup, |
| 0:58.1 | David Brooks, your boy, tweeted, if you're part of that small shrinking band who still think, |
| 1:12.1 | cancel culture is a myth, read this compassionate piece from Yasha Munk. |
| 1:16.1 | Are you finally convinced now? |
| 1:20.1 | My name is Dave Pizarro from Cornell University, |
| 1:24.1 | I'm a professor at Cornell University, |
| 1:28.1 | I'm a professor at Cornell University, |
... |
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