Chronic City

Sorry for the long hiatus here at Let’s Talk Lit! I have had a Fall full of weddings, work, and I’m a soon-to-be father having to prepare for the arrival of my son early next year. All that weight of life has precluded me from being able to devote any time to this podcast.

That being said, I’ve started reading Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City on my Kindle, I invite you to join me, and I’ll try to record a new podcast this weekend. If you’ve not read Motherless Brooklyn by Lethem, I highly recommend that you read it first (just because I think it’s his best work, an excellent read, and it’s also very much about New York and it’s being made into a movie starring Edward Norton to be released in 2010).

In the Shadow of no Towers

Today’s Let’s Talk Lit! is part two of my discussion with my friend Trevor Dodge (you can find part 1 here), where we begin discussing Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of no Towers, 9/11, and a bit of Don DeLillo. It’s a long rambling discussion that stretches over forty minutes long, but we touch on some interesting bits, I think. The discussion will continue in another podcast episode to be released later this week where we’ll continue our 9/11 discussion and talk some about David Foster Wallace. Please let us know what you think in the comments below.

Dante’s Inferno, the video game

Today’s Let’s Talk Lit! is the first part of what is going to be a multipart conversation with my friend, Trevor Dodge. In this segment, Trevor introduces himself and then we discuss Dante’s Inferno, the video game, as a cultural artifact and its connection with The Divine Comedy. I decided to bring it up, as Trevor wrote an interesting essay about the video game over at First Wall Rebate: Dante’s Inferno: The Age Of Anti-Intellectual Property.

This leads into a discussion of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, which we will begin discussing in the next installment of this multi-part episode. The music I use in the intro to this episode is an excellent mashup of Jay-Z and The Cure.