GoTTalkPod. Not your father's ASOIAF pod.

Bridge of Dream Analysis--Truth Depends on Who's Doing the Talking

The Bridge of Dream chapter (Tyrion Five from A Dance with Dragons) delves deeply into a number of the key themes in the series. These include the subjective nature of reality, the non-thought of received ideas, and the unreliability of language/communication. These issues are central to the human experience, and their treatment in this chapter makes the case for a moral reading of the text. This is a response to the Bridge of Dream episode from Boiled Leather Audio Hour. Those guys are legendary ASOIAF podders, so please do give a listen to their work. The "non-thought of received ideas" I first encountered in Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel. He was responding to Flaubert's earlier, posthumously published Dictionary of Received Ideas. Both get at the cost and consequence to the individual and society as a whole when critical engagement with ideas fails. Please do check them out. Thank you for listening!

Yes, A Feast for Crows is Great Literature

Feast reminds me of MLK Jr's revolution of values. But whereas he was concerned with race, class and militarism, Feast is concerned with gender, class and militarism. And just as MLKJ aimed to transform society by changing individual beliefs and behaviors, Feast too it is explicitly concerned with personal transformation. The book begins with the question, have you decided what you are? The next 1000 pages force us to confront that question over and over in different social contexts. Of course, no book in the series gets more hate than Feast. That's understandable--the earlier books comprise arguably the greatest epic fantasy trilogy of all time. Faced with writing a sequel to that, GRRM plotted an entirely different course--Feast sacrifices epic action for internal struggle. The original trilogy is about heroic characters remaking the world around them. In Feast, we're navigating internal landscapes. The transformation is personal. Consider these lines from the book: Have you decided what you are? The question is, who are you? Girl or boy, we fight our battles, but the gods let us choose our weapons. What is dead may never die but rises again stronger. What changed? I died in the Battle of the Trident. Who are you? No one. The earlier books contained many great ideas and insights. Feast goes a step further and shows how you can apply those ideas to enrich your own life. Another big difference is that Feast emphasizes and highlights the social context in which we operate. As a result, it offers a much more nuanced and thoughtful discussion of personal choice and responsibility than does the original trilogy. Feast also differs from the earlier books because it's the product of a different cultural moment. The earlier books were conceived and written in the 1990s, when political scientists were contemplating "the end of history." Feast is written after 9/11 and Bush/Gore, when our understanding of democracy and our place in the world has been massively shaken. The point is, Feast is not at all like the original trilogy--it's even better. Mentioned during pod: Original, correct Margaret Thatcher quote with context: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/ [https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/] Francis Fukuyama and the end of history: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184] The cost and complexity of "greed is good": https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/moral-ambivalence-gordon-gekko [https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/moral-ambivalence-gordon-gekko] GRRM against voter suppression: https://grrm.livejournal.com/287215.html Song of Myself (I contain multitudes):  ⁠https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51⁠ [https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51] The Summer Day (one precious life): ⁠https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/⁠ [https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/]

01.12 Tyrion 1/Ch.9 When Hell Really Is Other People

Welcome to the Covid edition of the pod. Apologies for the scratchy voice, but what can a guy do? In this episode, we pay our usual homage to Plato and Dante, but we also take one of our patented digressions, this time into twentieth century existentialism. You heard it right--we do an extended riff on Sartre's play "No Exit," which is the origin of the phrase "Hell is other people." It's the last line or among the very last lines of the play--the point is, it's the punchline to the whole thing. We talk about how Sartre's meaning is different than modern uses of the phrase, but above all, we look at how the concept "Hell is other people" really does capture Tyrion's experience. I strongly encourage students of Tyrion to check out the play. It's quite short--written during the occupation of Paris, it had to pass the censors, be one act and done before curfew. Other interesting tidbits--Sartre wrote the play after a conversation with Albert Camus--yeah, that Albert Camus--who also played the male lead in the original production. We close with more Socrates discussion, this time comparing Tyrion to the Socrates of Plato's Symposium. The Symposium happens to be my all-time favorite Platonic dialogue, and I highly recommend it to pod listeners, who will immediately recognize the dialogue's influence on ideas of love in Western culture. I massively cut back my Symposium rant, leaving about 15 minutes of discussion about Platonic love, Socrates, Aristophanes and Alcibiades on the cutting room floor--thank me later! Even by my standards, it was the mother of all digressions and had to go.  Still working on Lady Stoneheart episodes, so any questions or issues you want to see covered, please do leave a voice message. Thanks!

01.11 Bran 2/Ch.8 When Opposite Twins Attract: Bran, Ishmael, Perspective and Interpretation

In Brant Two, GRRM digs deep into his bag of tricks and comes up with...twincest! But this pair of identical twins couldn't be more dissimilar--they disagree on literally everything, except for maybe the need to silence Bran. Speaking of which, Jamie looks to add "kidslayer" to his list of honors/epithets.  But let's not make the mistake of having the incident at the very end of the chapter obscure everything that came before--the chapter is in fact about problems of perception and interpretation. Surprise! That also happens to be a key theme in Bran One. So it seems pretty clear based on these two chapters (and insights from the larger series) that Bran's role is similar to that of Ishmael in Moby Dick. That is, he's the (limited) lens through which we view much of the action in the story, and communicates some of the key problems and issues George wants to explore. These include the inescapably subjective experience of seeing and interpreting our reality. Of course, this problem will occur over and over throughout the series and is not exclusive to Bran. But it's clear that it is perhaps the central motif of Bran's character.  I've said over and over again that real magic is being able to see with another person's eyes, being able to feel what they feel. Early returns, however, aren't encouraging--George so far seems to be saying that it's difficult, if not impossible, to do so. Bran One and Two say that our understanding is necessarily totally context dependent and incomplete, while Arya One says we can't reliably make others aware of our feelings and experience, at least not with words. Meanwhile, here's Cat Two, earnestly encouraging us to look through different lenses and keep the parallax alive, hoping that maybe, just maybe, we can find a shared meaning. For my part, I'm on Team Cat. Whatever the resolution, I'm virtually certain that this will be an animating source for all the books to come in the series.  Note:  I'm heavily involved in a Lady Stoneheart episode. LSH as a Dante character. LSH in the context of war literature. LSH in the context of the literature of revenge--emphasis on The Iliad and The Oresteia. And finally, LSH and the contrast between restorative and retributive justice.  These are my LSH areas of exploration. If you have questions or avenues you want covered, please do leave a voice message through the Spotify pod message function. Get in!

01.10 Arya 1/Ch.7 *PART TWO* Plato's Republic and Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire

Plato's Republic is the Mother of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire. Arya One is the Midwife.  Contrary to popular belief, Arya One is not some throwaway text between two vastly more consequential chapters. In fact, it lays out the central moral and ethical questions that power the entire series. That's because Arya One is George's answer to Book V of Plato's Republic, the massively influential--and controversial--heart of Plato's great work. Plato imagines what it might take to create just individuals and a just society to promote and sustain such a citizenry. His arguments are in turns insightful, revolutionary and repugnant. George takes Plato's ideas and puts them in action--he turns Plato's thought experiment into a great fantasy epic. Arguably the action of the series--the "game" in Game of Thrones--is George underlining Plato's point about nepotism and family-based claims to power and resources. Indeed, virtually every major line of argument in Book V is echoed or addressed in some way in Arya One. Equality of opportunity and education, the role of women in society, the desirability and consequences of maintaining family names and lines of succession, bad-ass warrior women, philosopher queens, guard dogs, hunting, and yes, even incest--all of these things and more appear in both Book V and George's work. When Plato writes that a prerequisite for creating philosopher kings and queens is dividing children from their parents at birth, George takes him at his word--Dany and Jon are the literary expressions of this idea. When Plato writes that men and women should enjoy the same opportunities and education, George gives us Jamie and Cersei to show the consequences of failure to do so. He gives us Arya and Brienne to show the alternative scenario; that is, when women are educated according to their unique interest and ability, as opposed to their predetermined, gender-specific roles. In this episode, I point to the links between Plato's Republic Book V and Arya One, and try to explain how this single chapter lays the groundwork for George's entire series.  Still working on audio quality issues. I'm a literature nerd, not a sound engineer, but I am trying.  References in the text Ancient Greece Declassified: https://www.greecepodcast.com/ Angie Hobbs Plato's Republic: https://fivebooks.com/book/platos-republic-a-ladybird-expert-book/ Mary Townsend: https://www.academia.edu/34022796/The_Woman_Question_in_Platos_Republic Also, here's good, accessible discussion by Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics about the concepts of fairness and justice in modern society:  https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/justice-and-fairness/