Episode 110: Questions

Questions: A Special Interview Show

Scholarly Questions about the Making of the Show
Questions about Doug’s Production Schedule
Questions about L&H Events, Travel, and Meeting Listeners
Questions about the Scope and Eventual End of the Show
Some Miscellaneous Questions
Questions about the Music in Literature and History
Some More Miscellaneous Questions
Questions About Doug’s Favorite Books and Theorists

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 110: Questions. This is a special program in our long series, in which you, the listeners, have sent me, your host, interview questions. Over the next two hours or so, I will answer the questions that you’ve sent, which range from academic questions about how the show is made, to personal questions about me as a human. Let me say ahead of time that if you are just here for the usual literature, philosophy, theology and so on, I will ask you to skip this one, as I don’t intend to offer any content on cultural history today – not much, anyway. If you listen to Literature and History, you know that I prefer a professional, scholarly approach to the material with no fluff about what I had for breakfast, and with today’s episode, I’m making a special installment before returning to the usual long form, content-only, ad-free episodes we usually do, next month. So again, if you’re just here for the educational content, and don’t want to see behind the proverbial curtain, please don’t grouse at me for releasing this free, extra program in the feed – skip over this one and jump back in at Episode 111: Pre-Islamic Arabia. Otherwise, let’s get started.

I’m making this special program for a couple of reasons. First, a bunch of listeners requested it. Second, over the years I have had a lot of the same questions asked again and again, and I thought that others who had listened to my voice for hundreds of hours might be curious about the same sorts of things. Third, I am trying, this year, to spread the word about Literature and History more than I have thus far, so I figured I’d start by just talking about the podcast a bit with you guys. Finally, I am a human, and not a wraith who eats dictionaries and burps footnotes, so I’m happy to get a little more personal for one show.

Scholarly Questions about the Making of the Show

To begin, I got far more questions than I had time to answer, and some people sent six or a dozen questions, and I didn’t want this thing to be too long, so I didn’t try to answer everything. There were many repeated questions, though, and those are the ones I’ll try my best to answer. Let’s start with the number one question. The question that I maybe got the most was various versions of, “What have you learned while producing Literature and History that was most surprising to you,” so let’s start there.

Tami from Alabama, on Facebook, asked “What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned while researching for this podcast? Something that knocked your socks off! (If you have something).”

Tami, I think I have a pretty good answer for you, but I have to go back to the beginning. A lot of you know, because I’ve mentioned it in the show, that my degrees are from English departments. In English departments, we don’t always do a very good job with comparative literature. As the departmental name indicates, we predominantly study English language literature, although somehow a few dozen other books and authors always sneak under the limbo stick. Mainly, anyway, it’s English. As the product of American English departments, about halfway through grad school, I hardly knew anything about the literature of antiquity. I’d read Homer and some classical Greek and Latin drama, but everything before that was a fogbank. When I started getting into Bronze Age literature – I should say, when I became aware of Bronze Age literature – my jaw dropped. That changed everything for me. I had been vaguely aware that the Old Testament had been written around 500 BCE, give or take a century or two. I had not known that that the ancient literature rabbit hole went all the way back to the 2000s BCE.

In college, I’d bought a book at Moe’s in Berkeley called Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, published in 1983 and done by the great Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer and the folklorist Diane Wolkstein. This book included the text I’ve often called the Epic of Inanna and Dumuzi, or the Epic of Ishtar and Tammuz, the most important epic that inexplicably, no one has ever heard of. I read that Mesopotamian epic my senior year of college and I just felt like there was something wrong – that’s the only way I know how to say it – that scholarship on literary history was not yet very mature – you know that there was no conspiracy or anything, it was nobody’s fault, but that we could do a better job, as a species, understanding what our earliest surviving texts were. That laid the seeds for Literature and History – this notion that until someone better came along, I would take a stab at offering an aggregated literary history that began with the actual first surviving literature and then push forward from there. It was funny, because at the other end of my twenties, the University of Texas Press published translations of the Temple Hymns of Enheduanna of Ur, who lived and worked in the 2200s BCE, that publication was in 2009 or 2010 – I can’t remember – but that lit the fire a bit more to write the aforementioned literary history, because I got a sense that during the aughts, more translations of ancient Sumerian and Akkadian poetry were becoming available. Here she was, Enheduanna of Ur, the first named author in literary history, and I never heard of her until I was 29, even though I’d been neck deep in books for a decade!

So that was the most surprising thing I learned while researching the podcast, though it happened a while before I ever started L&H. While actually writing Literature and History, there have been a number of “why in the – you know what – hasn’t everyone heard of this” moments. One of those was reading the Baal cycle and other Ugaritic literature and seeing all of its ties to the Old Testament. Another was Menander’s Old Cantankerous – a play from 316 BCE that all of a sudden basically sounds like a Shakespearean comedy, one century after Classical Athens – wow – that’s a whopper of a text. Another was reading the full Nag Hammadi library and thinking, that it really should be more well known by the two or so billion Christians out there that a bunch of interesting early texts from the religion have survived in their more or less complete form. All of these moments made me think, “Geez, why are these things still so obscure?” But, you know, that’s one of the main reasons why I produce the podcast – I’m trying to draw attention to some of these materials by showing how they’re part of the same long story, even if our various educations didn’t quite have time to include them.

Next question: Daniel Solano, from Zurich, on Facebook, asked, “Have you ever discovered a historical event or figure through literature that changed completely how you viewed that period of history?”

Daniel, that’s a good question, and although it’s sort of close to the one I just answered, let me give a slightly different response. Sometimes, literature teaches us a different history than history does. Take the 30s BCE, for example. This is, in Roman history, the end of the demolition derby that killed the republic and birthed the empire. This is the decade in which the Second Triumvirate turns on itself and the Roman Mediterranean turns red with the blood of civil war, until only Augustus is standing. But the Roman poetry that survives from the 30s BCE paints a very different picture. Here’s Virgil’s Eclogues, an incredibly beautiful collection about herdsmen playing pipes in leafy landscapes. And there’s Horace, writing about how he’ll always be proud of his father, even though his father was a freedman, and admitting that he – Horace, I mean – ran from the battlefield of Philippi to save his own skin. The Roman poets of the 30s and 20s humanize the fall of the Roman republic. They give faces and feelings to the tribulations of a beleaguered generation. Literature often does that. We come across poets like Ausonius and Venantius Fortunatus, and they remind us that beneath the maelstroms of wars and dictators there were people with close networks of friends who appreciated one another. We come across something like Ecclesiastes and we think that although people from Persian or Hellenistic period Judea lived long ago and in a galaxy far away, they were asking the same philosophical questions that we still are today. Reading history is like watching a silent movie, but literature turns the sound on and you get to hear what people were actually saying.

It’s often surprising, then, to hear something like tender pastoral poetry come out of a decade of Roman civil war, or loving letters and panegyrics to friends being produced during seemingly callus epochs of regional instability. It’ll be surprising in a couple of episodes from now when we read some very early Arabic qasidas, or odes, and we see that although sixth-century Arabic poetry was produced in a predominantly rural peninsula anchored in animal husbandry and trade, sixth-century Arabic poetry was also as figuratively advanced and impressive as any other archive of literature Earth ever produced.

Literature is just full of historical surprises like that! Here’s Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, teaching us that an ideology existed throughout the Hellenistic period not somehow invested in the exaltation of the individual and the afterlife. Why, that’s worth remembering. Here’s Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, proving that while we think of Stoicism as a self-help philosophy focused on coping with adversity, in antiquity Stoicism was also much more a broadly religious system with something like a watchmaker God at its core. So, it’s a great question, Daniel, and I think all of us get surprised by literature, and that it cracks open history and changes our perceptions of things. I’m like anyone – I sometimes just arrive in an unfamiliar historical period and feel like it was a long ass time ago, and people were probably eating mud and drinking ditchwater, and then I start reading the textual remnants of the period and I’m pretty quickly disabused of such assumptions – all of us have suppositions about how the past worked, and we read in order to have those suppositions corrected or even destroyed, and that process is actually a really happy one.

Next question: Ruxi, from Romania, on Facebook, asked, “How has researching the podcast challenged, changed or confirmed any previously held biases or assumptions? (About authors, historical periods or even the process of doing a podcast itself.)” And Joseph Maltby, via email, asked a very similar question.

So, that’s a great question, and as it’s following on the heels of Tami’s and Daniel’s similar ones, let me just say I’m flattered that you guys are curious about my own learning process. I already said that before beginning this podcast, and certainly while working on it, I’ve read plenty of books that are inexplicably obscure, and have been glad to produce episodes of them. I’ve described having my own suppositions or expectations contradicted and corrected by primary sources. That’s kind of the whole point – what physicist Richard Feynman called “The pleasure of finding things out,” in my case having my parochial worldview as a nobody from Northern California corrected and made a little bit more accurate. So, let me talk about the opposite – things that have driven home my own biases.

I am not a misanthropic person. I like people. I believe in us. Maybe that’s because I study literature, and literature is beautiful, and it was written by all of us, and it belongs to all of us. In L&H, we have been through some pretty awful junctures of ancient history – massacres by ancient Egyptian kings, Assyrian siege warfare, Alexander’s conquests, any given century of ancient Roman history, and on and on and on. Some junctures have challenged my optimism. More often, though, thus far, ancient and early medieval history have supported what studying more modern history in school already taught me – that the generic human unit is a blank slate, capable of cruelty and kindness, that the default human being is both glorious and shitty, but that participation in organized societies with a free circulation of information tends to instill compassion more than callousness. The show has reinforced my optimism, more often than not, then, and showed me that when we are sequestered apart from one another in tribes, sopping up misinformation about each other from those who gather power from spreading that misinformation, we are at our worst; but that on the contrary, when we are in front of each other, or even just reading about each other in detail, and we allow our presuppositions to be disintegrated, we’re at our best.

Next question: Malte from Berlin, via email, asked, “What is your favourite ‘misconception’ you frequently encounter on the topics you researched so far?” And several other people asked that.

Malte, I don’t know if this is a “favorite” misconception, but there are two related misconceptions about antiquity that I will now take the opportunity to debunk. First, I don’t like it when people tell me that the origin of this or that thing was this or that moment in ancient history. If someone tells you that Socrates was the father of philosophy, or that the Sumerians invented irrigation, or that ancient Egyptians invented the bipartite afterlife, then they break what I consider to be the cardinal rules of ancient history – (1) everything, always, is much older than we think, and (2) everything was always already much more interconnected than we think. Thus, when people say that ancient Greece was the fountainhead of western civilization, or that ancient Israel was the fountainhead of western religion, that is asinine. Before them were Babylonian intellectual history, and Assyrian, and Sumerian, and before the Neolithic I bet people had pretty sophisticated culture and folkways and that if I lumbered up to a Paleolithic campfire I would be the most boorish and inept person there, because people are always clever, and human culture is always complex.

And that takes me to the second misconception. When people tell you that the Greeks invented X, or the Judahites invented Y, they might indeed have been the first to generate a surviving example of something, but that doesn’t mean that the surviving example is actually the first of anything. I’ve just finished a bonus series called the Actual First Novels, and one of the main things that series will teach you is that at no point did some lady grind her teeth and mutter and suddenly blast out the first novel, but that instead, novel-like things existed for hundreds of years at separate places and times, and for all we know, pre-literate people were exchanging auditory prose novels all over the world for tens of thousands of years, because again, people are always clever and we like creating art and making stories. So yeah, the ancients loved etiology, or the study of the origins of things, and accordingly so do we, because we’re all the same generic human unit, but the search for the origins of things often errs on the side of overzealousness.

Next question. Joseph Maltby, via email. Joseph, you asked five questions, and they’re all good, but time is of the essence, so I may not get to all of them, so here’s one of them: “Is there anything you left out or would add to your early episodes based on having practiced making the kinds of connections and doing the kind of analysis you have over so many episodes?”

Yeah, there are a few things that I wish I would have done more content on. I wish we could have done a bit more ancient Mesopotamian literature. People were more interested in it than I anticipated when I started the show a long time ago. Also I should have done Theocritus’ Idylls. And the Old Testament or Tanakh – that is just a complicated text to teach. On the one hand, honestly speaking, hardly anyone has actually read it, though everyone says they have. I ended up teaching it basically the way that it’s laid out in a Protestant Bible, and then folding the Deuterocanonical material into bonus episodes. It was fine. It worked. I did re-record all of those a couple of years ago, and I’m satisfied with the result. However, I did always wonder what it would be like to teach the Old Testament in the rough chronological order in which scholars now estimate the books were actually written, subdividing the books into pre-exilic, exilic, Persian, and then Hellenistic period books – again granted that scholarly dating is provisional. That approach would have big advantages. Ruth, Tobit, and Jonas are later, and they’re very different books than Numbers and Deuteronomy, which are earlier, because of course Judaism changed between the late 600s and the mid 100s BCE. Anyway, that’s the only thing that really comes to mind, and it’s been a pedagogical puzzle for me for years, but I’ve concluded that it’s also sensible to just teach the Bible the way it’s printed today.

Next question: Geoff from the UK, on Facebook asked “are you planning to do an episode on The Rule of Saint Benedict at all?”

Geoff, the short answer is that I don’t think so. It is quite an important text in the history of Christian monasticism, and it’s an appealing one, too, I think, in that it – ah – began the Benedictine Order’s moderatist path between asceticism and community life and work. It’s probably something that Literature and History could have covered and a sensible part of sixth century history to discuss. For the record, everybody, the Rule of Saint Benedict was done around 530, so just after Boethius, by Saint Benedict of Nursia, and the Benedictines are now the oldest order of the Latin church within Catholicism. The Rule of Saint Benedict was, I believe, generally done to outline the overall organization and rules of a monastery and the conduct of monks there, and it was so farsighted that it’s still a baseline text for the order today. I always did like monks, and a lot of what we’ve read in this podcast is due to their hard work, so for all the monks listening, thanks, fellas. And yeah, Geoff, thanks for asking about the Rule of Saint Benedict, too – I’m sorry to have skipped it, but we’ve got to keep the train rolling, too.

And the next question is a call-in: “Hi Doug, this is Mark, from Cleveland in Ohio, and I’d like to know what your search algorithm is – how do you start looking for information, what are your favorite databases, and are they proprietary, or publicly available?”

Thanks for that question, Mark! Lots of scholarly questions from you guys, wow! My journey with each episode generally begins and ends with the main text. As an example, I might grab the Oxford edition of Catullus’ collected poems to start. First step is, read, or reread the text. Next step, read the scholarly introduction. Next step, look at the bibliography in the scholarly introduction. These Penguin, Oxford, Norton, Bedford, Blackwell, Routledge, Harvard University Press, and other editions that I commonly use in Literature and History generally have strong bibliographies. Then it’s legwork time. I use a free app called Libby to check out E-books from my regional library system so that I don’t have to buy everything, although I usually end up buying a couple, as well. I’ll spend a first week with a main round of secondary sources, and then go onto a second round, once I start to understand the general state of the field of research on a topic.

During this process I often use what are commonly called Companion books – for instance, the Cambridge Companion series, or the Routledge Companion series – these are books intended to be read alongside primary texts, as when, just as an example, I used the Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s City of God in order to get a bunch of essays about the book I was researching all in the same place. Also during a second round of research I make use of a database called jstor – that’s jstor.org. This is an online library of academic journals, and at some point, they made free accounts available to individuals who, like me, do not have academic affiliations. As a mere peasant, like myself, you can sign up and have free access to 100 articles per month, which is enough for my purposes.

Anyway, once a great big bundle of notes is compiled into a single document, then I’m ready to write the episode. That’s, basically, the process. It is overall the same unglamorous analog strategy that I learned back in graduate school – start with a professional bibliography, get a hold of half a dozen sources in it, pay attention to the sources of the sources, and go from there as far as is feasible with my breakneck schedule. Unfortunately, I can’t use WorldCat and interlibrary loan the way that I did to power through graduate school, but jstor helps a lot – if anyone is listening from jstor, thank you for letting the peasantry have access to your catalog – we use it!

Questions about Doug’s Production Schedule

Next question: Perla, from Mexico, on Facebook, asked: “How do you manage your time to be able to do these fully researched, well written episodes?”

Perla thanks for the question, and the answer is methamphetamines and cocaine. Just kidding, I’ve never tried meth or cocaine. How do I manage my time to do the show. Hmm. I guess there are a couple of answers I can give that will explain it fairly quickly. The first is that I’m a pretty fast reader and writer, which has always been the case. It’s good to read and write slowly, too, by the way, and more deliberately, but you know, I have to go at a good clip. The second thing is that in grad school I learned some basic research tricks that I think many people know, both inside and outside of academia – I talked about that in the previous question a bit – but one thing a researcher needs to know is what not to read, as well as what to read; when to allow yourself to slow down and get distracted, and when to just push forward and get stuff done. So yeah, reading and writing quickly, and then the research – for three, I try to manage my day job – I’m a technical writer – pretty well, and get things done there proactively, generally work is its own contained thing that doesn’t leak over.

I guess I should say, Perla, to you and everyone, too, that this podcast isn’t, like, something that I have to force myself to do by strength of will. This is almost always what I want to do. It’s fun. So staying up late after work fooling around with an episode is often exactly what I want to be doing. Sometimes, because I sit at a desk during the workday in front of a computer, I’ll actually write and take notes longhand, just to have a change of pace, or at the least sit on the couch with a laptop.

But you know how else I manage my time? I have listeners who make me feel appreciated, that’s how. Whether I do need to take a break, or whether I just need a little pick-me-up, the feedback that I’ve had from you guys over the years, even if – and I’m sorry – I haven’t had time to reply directly to all of it – the feedback has been absolutely inspiring, and it’s nice to be neck deep in some text, yawning over some tea at eleven at night, and considering whether or not to read just a bit more and think, [yawn] I should do a little bit more tonight, man, they’ll appreciate it, they’re in this with me.

So I hope that answers your question, Perla, though it’s kind of a boring answer – just speedy reading and writing, some ordinary research knowhow, a manageable day job, and everybody listening right now.

Next question: Barbara in Amsterdam, over email, asked: “The research and work that goes into this podcast must be so time consuming. I get the impression you do it all on your own and that you also have a day job. Can you tell us what it is and how you manage to do it all? How much time does each episode require to research and produce?”

Barbara, great question, I’m happy to answer it. I’m a technical writer at a small software company. Here’s how that got started. When I was 22, between undergraduate and graduate school, I moved from California to Washington D.C. for about six months and started working in telecommunications, in Engineering and Operations, basically as a technical writer. After that, throughout graduate school, for several subsequent summers and then throughout many academic quarters, I was doing consulting work on the side for a couple of different companies, all in telecom, all basically related to technical writing. I think a part of me kind of knew that an academic job in an English department was going to be hard to come by, so I was hedging my bets. The first thing I did when I finished my PhD, after a postdoc, was to work on consulting contract centered in Brazil, because when someone says “Brazil,” the answer is yes. After that, my career zigzagged twice more and I ended up at the aforementioned software company. My career hasn’t been what I anticipated, but it’s been fine.

Technical writing is generally just a day job for me, but in some strange ways it’s informed my work as a teacher. In tech writing, we often strip sentences down to their most basic elements. We have to take things that are quite complicated and multipart, and distil them into just a couple of images and captions. When I come to a whole new ideological system, like Zoroastrianism, or Manichaeism, with a new cosmogony, and eschatology, and deities, I’ll often think, for a moment, like a technical writer, and begin by just drawing diagrams with captions and testing those against primary readings to see if they hold up. Equally, as a someone who’s done English degrees, it’s nice to have a career that encourages being really concise and clear, rather than verbose. And I like working with engineers and software developers, too.

To answer the rest of your question, Barbara, episode production takes a while. I’d say it’s anywhere from 80 to 200 hours per episode, depending on the show. It’s pretty easy for me to write shows on narrative literature – for instance, epics, plays, and novels that have plots I can retell and dress up with a bit of music. Writing shows on poetic corpuses, or philosophical oeuvres, or sacred scriptures – shows that require a lot of pedagogical organization on my part – that takes a lot longer. And I say “writing,” because writing is the vast majority of what I do for Literature and History – this is above all else a writing project, though at the end of a writing period I go through a production process that takes several days to get a show recorded and mixed and then put on the website. An Aeschylus play might just take a couple of weeks, but something like the Talmud, or the upcoming biography of Muhammad and synopsis of the Qur’an – these are shows that take a lot of very extensive reading and careful work.

I have podcaster friends who are going to AI for audio editing, and I do understand the need for efficiency. But I love the iterative process of producing an episode, because I revisit the material so many times. I will have finished writing an episode six months ago, for instance. Then I’ll go back, and edit it for a day or two. Then I’ll record it. Then I’ll put music behind the voiceover. Then I’ll listen to the episode while reading the transcription, and check mix volume levels and make sure there are no mistakes. Then I’ll get the transcription on the web, converting footnotes to HTML and lots of other nitty gritty stuff. A lot of the time I’ll listen to the show again before release. By the time all of that’s done and I publish a show, I’ve been through my own episode many times, researching it, writing it, editing it, reading it into a mike, listening to it, formatting it for the web, and listening to it again – it is a fabulous way for me to learn. The workload is just bruising, sometimes, but I end up having pretty good retention of everything covered in the show.

Next question: Nick from Virginia, over email, asked: “In the episode on Boethius you mentioned that you reviewed old reading notes while preparing. What is your system for taking reading notes? How did you develop it? Has it changed over the years?”

Let me say again, you guys are interested in some nitty gritty research stuff, that’s awesome, much appreciated. I’ve kept softcopy notes for almost 25 years, now – I did an undergraduate thesis at Berkeley on the American author Stephen Crane, and I’ve been keeping softcopy notes ever since then. At the top of each document, there is a bibliographical citation, in case I need to quote something, and all quoted excerpts in each document have page references, so I don’t have to track down the physical book again. That has been efficient. If I need to look up a quote I remember from reading Kant’s Prolegomena twenty years ago, got it.

For the podcast, I always have about twenty episodes cooking at once. For instance, with the upcoming season on early Islamic history, I have the whole thing largely written. As I wrote, for instance, Episode 125 on the hadiths, I learned stuff that was pertinent to earlier episodes in the series. Likewise, next month, when I’m recording Episode 111: Pre-Islamic Arabia, I’ll probably revisit material that I haven’t seen in a while and that material might travel forward and be relevant to a future episode. It helps me to have a lot of pots on the stove at once like that, but of course, I have to be organized and get stuff done ahead of time.

One thing that I also do, and I was looking for an excuse to tell you guys about this, is that since 2009, I have always responded to everything that I read. When I was younger, I used to read philosophy, and other dense texts, and just kind of think, “Huh, that was complicated.” Now I write about what I read, creating not only summary notes, but also personal, critical responses. I really, really recommend that – if you want to read certain kinds of things, it’s best to write back to them, as well. If you just passively read, say, the Book of Genesis, you’ll blast through it pretty quickly and away it will go, soon enough. But if you write a page or two for every, say, twenty pages that you read, though – that will be a better experience. If you’re planning to respond to something you’re reading, you pay closer attention to it, too, because you’re holding yourself accountable to summarizing it and evaluating it as you go through it. Since I’ve been doing that for so long – writing responses to things I’ve read, I actually have a fair amount of prefabricated analyses of books that I’ve worked my way through, and that’s helped me from time to time in Literature and History. I should also say there are books that I read and don’t take notes and don’t respond to that are just for fun, and you must do that, too, of course!

Next question: Hector from California, on Patreon, asked: “How often do you use contemporary sources for research on your episodes. I mean like Will Durant or someone like him as opposed to some scroll written by a monk in Latin.”

Well, yeah, Hector, any time in Literature and History that you hear me say, “Scholar X, Y, or Z, writing on the subject of A, B, or C states QUOTE” – any time you hear me say that followed by a quote, I’m generally citing modern academic scholarship from monographs, or journal articles, or ensemble scholarly projects. So, to answer your question, I use contemporary sources for researching every single episode, and quote contemporary scholarship in every single episode.

Next question: Huzefa from Mumbai, on Patreon, asked: “How often do you juggle/ration between reading the translated text and explaining the context and story of the literature?”

Hey, Huzefa, good to hear from you, man – you’ve been supporting L&H for damned near ten years, now, wow! So, how do we steer the course between summary and analysis – there’s another great question. I have to strike a careful balance. When I was teaching Shakespeare, and, say, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction to non-majors, I got a sense of what people basically need to know before a story begins. It helps to know the names and relationships of some main characters. It’s good to know the setting, and any unusual situational factors at hand. Hamlet is mad because his mom remarried, and the marriage was to his uncle, and it was under suspect circumstances. Richard III is the bad guy, but also the good guy. Benedict and Beatrice hate each other, but oh, boy, do they have some weird chemistry. Anyway, you get the point – I try to give just as much information at the outset as necessary for you to jump into the text at hand.

The retrospective analysis – I mean the analysis that comes after the story – that requires some careful thought, and often cutting some of what I wrote. Being that our podcast is called Literature and History, my main goal in the final third of an episode is to see if we can learn something about history from the literary text at hand. What does Virgil’s Eclogues teach us about the end of the Roman republic? What do the priestly portions of the Pentateuch tell us about the religious economics of ancient Jerusalem? What does Severus’ Life of Saint Martin tell us about fourth-century Christianity? I try to find a way to connect literature to history at the close of an episode. But teaching the text itself is always the first priority. Why would you want to listen to some guy connect a text to a period of history when you weren’t familiar with the text? If I ever have to make a call between offering a thorough summary of a text on one hand, and a historicist analysis on the other, I’ll usually prioritize summary. I presume you guys hit play on, for instance, my episodes on Homer’s Iliad because you want to hear about the Iliad, and not Doug Metzger summarizing secondary historical scholarship on the Iliad.

Questions about L&H Events, Travel, and Meeting Listeners

Next question: Mary from Madison, Wisconsin, via email asked about the research process for L&H, too, but I’ve probably talked about that enough. Mary also asked the following question: “Are you planning any events that bring your history-loving listeners together to experience the sites that you enliven through your work?”

Mary, yeah, thanks for reaching out and let me give you two answers to that question. The first is that my friend Jack from the podcast Ancient Greece Declassified hosts tours of Greece. I’ve been on two of them and both were absolutely terrific. Jack speaks Greek, has Greek family, has been to Greece maybe fifty times, and he also hires a professional Greek archaeologist to walk you through archaeological sites. They’re a stellar team, I recommend those tours, I’ll probably be on some of them on down the road and I’ll announce them when one is coming up.

And oh, my listeners, I would love to do a Literature and History related trip or get together. But I don’t see myself as a tour guide. I’m pretty busy with all the stuff I’m up to, and although I’ve traveled a bit, I’ve spent most of my life pinching pennies to buy books and keep up my modest music studio, so I’d have no clue of how to book buses and hotels and meals for a couple of dozen people the way that my buddy Jack does. With all that said, I’ve thought – just sort of fantasized – about some kind of event were we, the Literature and History people, just rented out a campground or ranch or some kind of convention space – something dirt cheap so lots of people could come – and then just kind of hung out for a week or so and chatted, played music, had some drinks, evening story time, did little day trips, and that kind of thing. I wouldn’t want to make any money out of it, because I’d be coming just to hang out like everybody else. That’s about as far down that path as I’ve considered it. You guys should know, though, that on the podcast tours I’ve been on, really half, and even more than half of the fun and the joy comes from the people on the tour – it is a very specific group who enjoys educational audio. So, if anyone has any ideas for a sort of comfortable Geek-fest, more of a Learning Man than a Burning Man, I’m all ears, and otherwise I’ll stick to what I know and perhaps see some of you on Ancient Greece Declassified tours.

Next question: Ming from Shanghai, over email, asked, “What has meeting listeners in person been like? Have you been surprised by them? Have they been surprised by you?”

Well, it’s been stupendous. About the only thing I don’t like about podcasting is that I’m a really gregarious, social person, and I used to love that aspect of classroom teaching – the social aspect of it. So meeting listeners in person helps fill that gap. In general, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how diverse the people who listen to this show are. There are some humanities majors, like me, but the audience is equally made up of people from other fields – science, medicine, law, business, and on and on. It’s fine by me. My dad and wife are scientists, and most of my teaching experience was lower division coursework taught to non-majors, so I love everybody. And have listeners been surprised by me? Not really. I mean you guys who have listened to the whole show, I think you have a pretty good idea of my personality. My friend from the Netherlands – I met her on a podcast tour my aforementioned friend Jack put on – she told me that she didn’t expect me to be such a dude, and so Californian, so maybe she expected more of an elbow-pads and tweed jacket type and less of a t-shirt, jeans, classic rock, skate shoes and cheap beer person.

Here’s another call in: “Hello Doug, this is Jennifer from Colorado. My question is about the trip that you mentioned with Lantern Jack from the Greece podcast. I would love a trip report, but specifically my questions are, what historical location did you enjoy visiting the most, and did visiting any of these places change or add to your feelings about the historical events that took place there?”

Well I went to Greece twice with Jack. Greece is hauntingly beautiful. It is relentlessly, pummelingly beautiful – every turn of the road shows you something that ranges from lovely to stunning. Some highlights included going up the Acropolis steps through the Propylaea and seeing the Parthenon and Erechtheion, of course – there it is – my friend was also there for the first time, and she said, “It’s real,” and that was just how I felt – incredulity. Delphi is a place that’s equally overwhelming, from the gigantic remnants of the main temple of Apollo to the Lesbian stonemasonry beneath it to the thousands of graffiti etchings, themselves from antiquity, all over the place – it’s a big site. Probably the deepest historical lesson I had was going to Eleusis, where the Eleusinian Mysteries were held for a thousand years. Eleusis is probably the most famous cult religious site in Greece, and hardly anyone was there – I mentioned that last time. That was weird. I think most of us still don’t really understand that ancient Greek religion was not Homer, nor Aeschylus – not a comic strip full of myths – but instead a set of liturgical practices rooted in specific locations with long indigenous histories. That’s really important to remember. Standing in the middle of the Eleusinian Telesterion – in the actual Holy of Holies or Anaktoron, with hardly anyone there, I thought, “Geez, people still think that ancient Greek mythology was ancient Greek religion, shucks, that’s too bad.”

But yeah, inasmuch as podcast tours in Greece involve learning and education, they also involve sitting on the beach and swigging wine, I mean, sipping wine, goofing around on the bus, pranks, idiocy, staying up to late, and having fun. One place we stopped was the Heraion, or temple of Hera at Perachora at the east end of the bay of Corinth, a place that has yes, an ancient temple complex, check, a gorgeous panoramic bay view, check, warm water to swim in, check, cliffs to jump off of, check, not even really crowded, check – anyway, thanks for asking about that, Jennifer – just talking about it makes me want to go back! To be very clear, I’ve spent most of my life as a broke academic and probably will continue to do so and I haven’t traveled much, so I’m easily impressed, but Greece will impress just about anyone.

Kelsey from Pennsylvania, on Facebook, asked, “I think in some of your older episodes you talk about your time as a professor. What was it like making the transition from professor to professional podcaster?

Kelsey, thanks for that question, and let me say this is one that I’ve been asked about before. Let’s be clear about my actual academic background – I don’t want to give you guys any smoke and mirrors. I was a graduate student instructor for most of my twenties, teaching lower division composition and then introduction to literature courses. Then I was a postdoctoral lecturer, and taught upper division literature courses. Then after that I spent a year as an adjunct, teaching lower division courses within a series called “Introduction to the Humanities.” That was it – about ten years of classroom instruction, and I never had the title of “Professor.” I applied to a couple of faculty positions, right after grad school, but I didn’t get them. The classroom teaching that I did do, though, especially the lower division courses, really helped me learn how to teach literature, and I absolutely loved classroom teaching.

I mentioned this in a previous episode, but I met my wife my third year of grad school, and when we finished our PhDs, we moved first once for her job, and then a second time for her job, and in both cases, she found faculty positions and I tagged along. And yeah, it wasn’t really what I had planned – especially during my final years in grad school, I wanted to be a professor. But also, my situation – leaving academia and doing other stuff – it’s really common, too. I’m sure there are folks in the audience who have X advanced degree and Y career, just like me, because that’s the way it goes. A lot of us have spouses, or family concerns, or we just really want to live in a specific area, and some combination of that outweighs our gunning for a dream job. But yeah, it can be tough – you asked about how the transition was, Kelsey, so here’s just a bit more on that question.

The hardest thing about leaving academia for me was actually just abandoning my finished doctoral dissertation and the specialization I had developed. When I finished grad school, I was a good specialist in nineteenth-century American realism and one of its subdivisions, and I was really proud of the book that I wrote about it. I can still smell the main stacks of Shields Library at UC Davis when I close my eyes, as weird as that sounds, the smell of aging paper and ink – that was the smell of my twenties! I still use my dissertation to find quotes pertinent to this podcast from time to time, and writing it was an awesome experience – I loved that process and it was really good for me – dealing with dissertation committee feedback was humbling and edifying and it made me into a better person. Man, do I envy you faculty members right now, whose dissertations led into a specialization that you’ve been pursuing ever since, you who had research work you were doing in your twenties that’s still informing your current work – I mean, that’s specialization, and that’s how the system is built to work, and academia is a magnificent system.

But anyway, side track, there, anyway overall the transition from academia to whatever I am now has been just fine. It was a little sad at first. College campuses are really nice places. I’m an extrovert, I like joking around in the classroom getting asked questions in real time, and hearing students respond in their various ways to stories and plays and poems that I’m teaching – all of that was great in my twenties. But I love doing my show – if I didn’t, it would have sputtered out years ago, and I am a pretty broadly curious person who enjoys generalization as well as specialization. It’s also nice to teach to a wider audience, even though, unfortunately, I don’t get to meet most of you in person.

Questions about the Scope and Eventual End of the Show

Next question: Jim, from Saint Petersburg, Florida, over email asked: “do you ever question your method and topics, by which I mean, are you ever tempted to skip past the more recondite subjects and jump ahead to the more familiar and popular? This is only a question, not a recommendation.”

Jim, that’s definitely a great question. I think I said in our previous episode that Literature and History’s strength and weakness was its slow, chronological forward pace. On one hand, a year from now, we will know how all of the Abrahamic religions were born and came to be. On the other hand, a year from now, we will still not have covered a single text in English. So, have I questioned my method? Oh, yeah.

Just yesterday, I did a little survey of what I guess you could call my competitors – what other history podcasts were doing. One had an episode titled something like, “How depraved was Caligula?” Another of this week’s releases, no joke, was something like, “The worst Roman emperors: Caligula, Nero, Commodus.” Another was “Why Shakespeare was the greatest poet.” Then there was one about Dante’s Inferno, a “journey to hell” or something like that. And look, it’s all good. There’s no right way to teach, no right way to listen, and we’re all at different points in our educations, and podcasters who are out there hustling more than I am are doing good work, too. When I get to Beowulf, I know I’ll start having more downloads, because I’ll be covering something that people have heard of, and of course I’ll go all out and do as best a job as I can.

However, I also have to be true to myself, and I know that in the coming year of shows on early Islamic history, as we learn about pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and the sixth century poet Antara ibn Shaddad, we’ll be covering something that is much more interesting than how many orgies Nero had (spoiler alert – we don’t know). I do plan to break the rules just once, and cover the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1300s), Water Margin (1300s-1500s), Journey to the West (1500s), The Plum in the Golden Vase (1500s-1600s), The Scholars (mid-1700s) and Dream of the Red Chamber (1750) in a full season on six classic Chinese novels – these will range from the 1300s to about 1750, and so that season will see us, again, breaking the rules, just once, stepping out of west Eurasia and and stepping out of chronology to learn some of the foundational texts of Chinese literature. I’ll also bend the rules a little to squeeze the great Persian poet Hafez into a season that’s on somewhat earlier Arabic and Persian literature.

But yeah, Jim, again, it’s a good question – have I ever fantasized about jumping past the poor old Isidore of Sevilles and Ausoniuses and just doing the arena-rock level texts like Paradise Lost and the Canterbury Tales? Yeah, I have, you bet and I bet you guys have, too. When we get there, though, we’ll have a really strong sense of how those works came to be, and I hope, that if this podcast stands the test of time, people on down the road will be able to take the same long, thorough journey.

Here’s another call-in, from Warwick in Sussex: “When you began, your intention was to trace the history of Anglophone literature, but recently you’re shooting off in side directions and side projects to history of Islam and Chinese literature, and why not, it’s fantastic, but would you say that your idea has changed or your target has changed over the years? [and] You’re never going to finish are you? I mean, how long do you think it will take to get to the end?”

Let’s start with question 1. Yes, the show’s forward progress has slowed and expanded to include a more panoramic array of stuff. I believe I said this in the previous episode, but my plan is to never stray too far from central and west Eurasia throughout our seasons on the Middle Ages, in spite of that one planned jaunt to east Asia for a future season I mentioned a moment ago. Anyway, you asked if my idea or my target has changed, but really, probably what’s changed is my knowledge. I just don’t think I can do a good job teaching the Crusades, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment without having offered some of the foundational history of Islam. I also, several years ago, saw just how little educational audio content there was available in English about foundational Arabic and Persian literature, and since Arabic and Persian literature of the Middle Ages comes from many of the same sources as European literature during the Middle Ages, it’s a story worth telling in our specific podcast.

As to your second question – whether I’m ever going to finish, let me say one of the craziest things I’ve ever said in Literature and History. Three of my four grandparents lived past the age of a hundred. I’m 43, I eat very healthily and exercise a lot, and if I’m ever able to make a living doing the podcast, rather than doing it on top of a full time job, I’ll have more time, still, to devote to it. The most difficult episodes to write and produce are mostly in the rear-view mirror, too. So while I don’t know what infirmities or family emergencies might crop up, I bet I can get us to at least the twentieth century.

The next two questions also have to do with where Literature and History will eventually end up. Tristan from Kent, in the UK, asked over email, “In the synopsis of the late Antiquity Season, you say this ‘season effectively completes the podcast’s first third.’ I am 58 and plan still to be alive when you finish. Since there have been 9 years so far – are we expecting the final show in 2043 and what might the final piece of literature be?”

And here’s a similar call in from Justus from Germany: “What would happen if you ever reached the 20th or the 21st century with Literature and History? In the twentieth century, there’s a lot of new media emerging that has a big influence on all sorts of authors – I’m always reminded of Franz Kafka, who was influenced by Charlie Chaplin – will the show feature episodes on films as well as literature. What would happen if the show reached the current day? Would it just end, or would it be you chiming in every few years after reading a book you think will go into the annals of history?” Listener Francesco on Patreon also asked a similar question about the show’s eventual destination.

And you guys, I hear you, and I’d be asking the same questions. Depending on how inclusive this show is, it could indeed go on for a long time. I’ve always, at the least, wanted to get to modernism. My own education, both formal and self-education, sort of sputters out around 1940, and so I always saw myself at least getting past literary modernism. I’ve taught it, I love it, I think that with some sound design I could do a pretty nice job presenting what are generally considered to be challenging modernist texts. Let me say two more things about the show’s eventual curtain call. The first has to do with Justus’ question.

I don’t have a hierarchized view of literature. I am interested in influence, and systems, more than greatness. So when we do get to periods with more media, really after newspaper becomes a powerful force in the middle part of the eighteenth century, it will be a part of the story. In the twentieth century, of course, film, television, song lyrics, movies, and later video games and the internet – these are all parts of the way that we tell stories and experience them. I’m comfortable getting us to the 1930s, but I’m also kind of an antiquarian, and so I think my education is probably best used teaching earlier literary history.

To go onto the second thing, while I have my limitations, other people do not. What I mean to say is that I’ve always hoped that somewhere out there, there is a Mandarin speaking scholar of Chinese literature, and a Hindi speaking scholar of Indian literature, who can start projects similar to this one, and of course, more besides those. Equally, I’ve hoped that academic departments would fund limited sequences on areas on which they have specialists. This entire podcast is very simply an old-school, historicist approach to literature, the vanilla ice cream of literary criticism. It’s labor intensive, but it’s also sensible, centrist, and straightforward in its own way. So we’ll see who else comes out of the woodwork in the coming years, too, because that will have some impact on what L&H ends up covering.

Next question: Malte from Berlin, via email, asked, “I wonder what your take is on the Nobel Prize for Literature? Are the honoured pieces of literature ones you deem influential / “important” enough that in a millennia one of your successor hosts of “Literature and History” will bring them up?”

I don’t follow the Nobel Prize for literature, actually – being honest – if you asked me to name any winner in the past fifty years, I wouldn’t be able to. I have genuinely no opinion on the subject.

Next question: Thomas Ölmelid on Patreon, asked: “In which languages can you read literature in the original (as opposed to translations)?”

Thomas, precisely one. My PhD was on English and American literature, not the literature of antiquity. For help with other languages, I call up my friends or consult with specialists. I sure wish I’d learned Homeric Greek and Biblical Hebrew and Attic and Koine Greek and Latin and Talmudic Aramaic and Classical Arabic, but there are only 24 hours in my day. A good modern footnoted edition usually has enough notes on translation to give me a starting point, but yeah, when I have questions or want to hear the text, I just ask for help. As we move into the vernacular European literature of the Middle Ages and the Arabic and Persian literature of the same period, I look forward to having specialists read some of these texts into the microphone so that you can hear what they sound like, and I’ll plan to get by with a little help from my academic friends.

And here’s another call-in: “Hey Doug, this is Ruan. The show focuses on Western literature. How are you preparing for the challenge of moving into the medieval period where written language diversity is going to increase considerably?”

Well, Ruan – good to hear your voice, by the way, man! – I think I’ve already prepared for that challenge. We’ve read translations of texts from gosh – twenty languages, maybe, and I’m so used to looking at translation notes at this point that it feels almost strange to read something in English. So yeah, same strategy as always – obtain modern scholarly translations, go through them carefully, reading translation notes, and then call or email for help when I have a question or need to hear something pronounced. It will take a while and be labor intensive, but labor intensive detail work is what this podcast producer is all about.

Next question: Jeremy from Lehigh Utah, on Patreon, asked: “Do you see any pathways where Literature and History is the only thing you do, versus, the thing you do when you have spare time?”

Jeremy, thanks for the question and thank you, especially for your support of Literature and History over the years. The honest answer is that I’m not sure. I produce a fairly academic podcast that moves through literary history, chronologically, and includes obscure stuff as well as famous stuff. The most popular history podcasts tend to basically go from Nero to Nazis to Genghis Khan, and I’m not going to do that. While I think Literature and History is as good as anything out there, I’m also realistic, and I understand that a lot of people aren’t down for a two-hour deep dive into literature, so there may be a very real ceiling for this show’s potential circulation.

Also, in some ways, I also haven’t done myself any favors. I haven’t been good at marketing the show or using traditional internet channels to tell people about it. Its current relative popularity is exclusively due to word-of-mouth, the occasional app recommendation, and two or three writeups in publications. I also, due to some pressing obligations in my own life, produced far too few episodes between 2022 and 2024, right at the moment when the show was already in a period of literary history that isn’t of much interest to most people in the first place, so again, there is room for improvement in my own work as a producer. I’m constitutionally optimistic, though. I’m going to make some real marketing efforts these next couple of years, and as I said in the previous episode, releasing one full new program a month will definitely be sustainable, barring any emergencies. All that will be good for the health of the show, I hope, and if Patreon support picks up, and one-off donations come in through the website, maybe I won’t have two full time jobs for the rest of my life.

Some Miscellaneous Questions

Next question: David Macher, in Murrieta, California asked, over email, “Have you considered publishing any of the podcast seasons in book form? The quality is so excellent I suspect the editing process would be comparatively easy. Nerds like myself would be delighted to purchase the books. As you may know, Peter Adamson publishes his podcast. I have every volume.”

Hi David, thanks for that question! I actually hadn’t really thought about that. I’ll tell you, one of the things I like about doing a podcast is that there are no length limitations or material concerns related to printing. Academic journals, literary journals, and publishers all – understandably, of course – have restrictions on word count, and any time you’re publishing something as a book, you have those concerns to deal with.

Anyway to actually answer your question, probably not any time soon. As I hope everyone listening knows, I release full, carefully edited, illustrated transcriptions of every episode on the Literature and History website, with all the notes – you know, the whole nine yards, and the whole website is searchable. I wanted to do that, for people who are using the podcast for more than casual purposes – researchers or creative writers or whoever who want to grab a quote that I quoted for use in their own work. It takes an extra full day of work per episode to get all of the online stuff sorted, and yeah, I’m probably shooting myself in the foot as far as releasing L&H in some sort of book form is concerned, but I want you guys to have the podcast’s full transcriptions available, so that’s why I do that. I always felt like I had this incredible opportunity to have cheap instate tuition at Berkeley when I went there, and then got a little stipend to go to graduate school at UC Davis later on, so yeah, I owe the world Literature and History, gotta give it back.

Next question: Here’s a call in from Abdul. “Describe in detail what an average day looks like in your life? And also, do you meditate? Why or why not?”

Abdul, it’s good to hear your voice, man. My average day is, for good or for ill, a pretty organized thing, and would be painfully boring to anyone who didn’t like reading, writing, and playing music. I get up early, especially in the summer. I make most of the food I’m going to eat during the day all at once, first thing – I’m secretly kind of a health food nut, so I make all of my special health food thingies. Then, I read and or write – starting before work. I especially like editing my own work at 5:30 in the morning or so. At that hour, I’m ruthless, clearheaded, and practical. If I’m lucky, I can get in a couple of good hours of podcast work, and then I go to work work. Meetings, emails, productive time at desk, etc. etc., and then at lunch break, I often have luck getting some of my own work done on the podcast, and then more meetings, emails, productive time at desk, etc. etc., until around four or five.

Then it’s exercise time. I like running and going to the gym to lift weights and stretch in the late afternoons and evenings. A lot of runners – maybe most runners, though I’m not sure – are morning runners. I like exercising in the late afternoons and evenings. The reason is that I’m naturally a pretty relaxed and happy person. If I go running or lift weights in the morning, then I’m so excessively relaxed all day that I don’t get anything done. Anyway, the rest of the day is spent variously on the podcast and practicing music. I don’t need too much of my brain to run some arpeggios to a metronome, and so music is often smooshed into the end of the day. That’s it. Pretty boring, honestly. And do I meditate? Not really. That’s a whole different can of worms, but on that note, two quick thoughts.

I live by a public land area and river, and so between jogging and walking the dog, I get a lot of time out in the grass and under the leaves and by the waterside. I also feel like with the podcast, I spend a lot time of time outside of my own head. I like that. Every day, I try to learn new things, to read, to write, and to play songs in ways I’ve never played them before. The learning – that makes me happy. Makes me forget about myself, and just kind of get lost in the cosmic dust of history, and when I’m out running my favorite trails and just thinking of faraway places and times, maybe that’s a kind of meditation for me.

Here’s another call-in, from Jon from Colorado: “I was wondering what you think the role of science fiction is in literature and history. I know you mentioned in a previous episode A True Story by Lucian of Samosata, but that seemed like kind of a one off, and I was wondering if you think the role of science fiction is – I know it’s maligned in the world of literature, but I was hoping to get your thoughts.”

Of course there is a role for science fiction in literature, and a huge one. Ibn Tufail’s Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, from the 1100s, is a thousand years later than Lucian of Samosata, and then ibn al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus comes along the next century. Those two novels, while not quite sci-fi in terms of lasers and robots and space travel, were influential throughout the second millennium, and helped spur modern philosophy and the scientific revolution. I mean two science fiction novels, Lucian of Samosata’s True History and ibn Tufail’s Hayy ibn Yaqdhan – these books had a gigantic impact on actual scientific and enlightenment thought, because science fiction sometimes turns into science fact, and science fiction is often an imaginative laboratory for playing around with intellectual and ethical questions pertinent to any period’s contemporary scientific knowledge, which in turn spurs that scientific knowledge along.

So I hope to do a decent job talking about how what we call science fiction developed and contributed to the development of science in the world – it’s a cool story to tell. And by the way, Jon, when I was a graduate student, and I think it’s even more the case now, science fiction was already being very seriously studied, critical schools like ecocriticism and posthumanism were delving into science fiction texts, and my friend in the office next door was writing her dissertation on cyborgs in literature – the point being that in the modern English department, it’s not all Shakespearean sonnets and Dickens novels – we love science fiction, just like everybody else does!

The next question is a call-in from Olivier from Ottowa: “How did you curate which authors are on the cover of the L&H album, and why does Emily Dickinson get the headphones?”

Hey Olivier, thanks for asking about that! I made that cover quite a while ago, and I think when I was making it, I basically wanted to show a sequence of authorial mugs that went from ancient to relatively modern, and display some recognizable faces, too. I hope that the podcast’s album cover conveys that it’s about literary history, and that it goes from the old days to modern times. There are a lot of my personal favorite writers on that cover – the nineteenth century is overrepresented, but, you know, it’s me. Anyway – what about Emily Dickinson?

There’s this description of Dickinson and Whitman in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry that says something like Dickinson and Whitman “all but invented modern poetry between them.” They were my two favorites in college, but with Dickinson it was a testy relationship, at first. Some of her poems are pretty dense. She has recurrent syntactical moves and truncations and a whole miniature lexicon that comes up a lot in her poems. She can be frustrating, and she was frustrating when I was seventeen – an R.W. Franklin edition of Dickinson I still have has teenage Doug swear words written next to one of her poems because I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. However, with time, over my freshman year of college, she became the poet who taught me to read poetry. She taught me to slow down, to look at clauses carefully, to annotate poems on the page, and even to make little synoptic drawings. She taught me that with just a little patience, a couple of lines of poetry can hold an awesome amount of meaning. She was always worth the effort – always, and she taught me that all poetry is rich, and that just beneath dry ink set down centuries ago, poetry is a condensed diary of the whole human species.

I don’t think she or anyone, really, is the best – I don’t have a hierarchical view of literature like that, as I just said, but you know, she’s close to my heart – I’ve read her so much that some of her lines are shorthand to the way that I think. That’s why Emily Dickinson gets the special blue headphones – a thoroughly personal, arbitrary and unacademic reason!

Next question: Nicole from Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, over email, asked: “Are there any pieces of literature and / or period of history that you are really excited to discuss? Any that you are not?”

Hey, Nicole, well, it depends on the day of the week and what else I’ve been reading. At the moment, I think I’m most excited about the upcoming season on early Islamic history. Free audio content on that subject, at the moment, seems to be either scattershot, or to be faith-based in nature, so I’m really excited to release a nice, straight ahead 30 hours on the subject that’s based both on early Islamic sources and modern academic ones. Candidly, my specific life really has made me want to do a good job covering the origins of the Abrahamic religions as well as I can – last time I mentioned growing up with a Muslim uncle and half-Arab cousins whom I kind of idolized as a kid, and I married a Russian Jewish girl from Odessa Ukraine, and in Northern California where I grew up we had Protestantism and Catholicism in various areas and I had friends from both, so anyway, nothing Abrahamic feels very exotic or unfamiliar to me – it all feels like family. For unusually personal reasons, then, I’m looking forward to offering a straight ahead history of how the final Abrahamic religion came to be.

What am I not looking forward to covering? Honestly, medieval scholastic philosophy. The great project of squishing Aristotle together with Christianity, as well as Islam, always seemed to me like trying to attach a boat to a car. You can do it. It’s just not something I’m very passionate about. Anyway, I hope to stick just a little more closely to literature as we move forward through the Middle Ages – we’ll take some side tracks in medieval philosophy, but I’ll also leave that to podcasters who are more devoted to, and enthusiastic about the subject.

And the next question is a call-in, from Thomas from Athens: “I wanted you to tell us, which span of episodes were your favourite to make and which one (if any) you didn’t like as much and why. Were you expecting this beforehand? I am not talking about the books themselves but the work that you had to do to convert them into episodes. Finally, which span of the announced future episodes are you the most excited about?”

Well, Thomas, yeah, I just mentioned that at the moment I’m most excited about the immediate upcoming season on early Islamic history. For me, the easiest episodes to do have been ones on epics and plays. Really, these shows almost write themselves. Literature that is intended for public delivery, and that includes epics and theater – it’s fairly easy to put into the narrative form of a podcast. As far as favorite shows, and I hate to give you this answer, but I like them all. The ones that I have been dissatisfied with, I’ve rewritten and re-recorded. I think the show hit some high highs between the poetry of Horace and that of Ovid, and the integrated history of early Christianity was something else I was also really happy with. But even the obscurer stuff that I had to work equally hard on – I’m glad to stand by that, too.

The hardest season to do has been the one we’ve just finished. Late Antiquity is absolutely the season I’m most proud of. It was also definitely the hardest season to write. Harkening back to earlier questions, Late Antiquity doesn’t have a lot of household names, and to boot, Late Antiquity has some really, really challenging texts – the Dionysiaca, the City of God, the Talmud, and earlier on, the works of Christian theologians like Origen and Tertullian take a long time to go through. Late Antiquity is in my opinion the single least studied period of cultural history after the Iron Age, so having done fifty hours of free, soundtracked content on it – I know in my heart that it was the right thing to do, even if it didn’t offer a lot of clickbait to podcast perusers. One thing we’ll see as we jump into early Islamic history next time is that everything we learned about Late Antiquity is exceedingly relevant to Muhammad and his world, because Mecca was not that far off from the old Roman and Persian worlds, so Late Antiquity will pay dividends for a long time.

Next question: Joseph Maltby, over email asked: “You clearly have an ethical point of view. Are there voices or perspectives you wonder if you’ve been unkind to, or too kind too, because of your own starting point?”

It’s a good question. I am biased. I tend to look for the good in a text, and in people. If I read something, or I go to a play, or something like that, I’m openhearted and really on the side of whoever is trying to put something out there. That’s just who I am. I see a local rock band play, and I want them to succeed, and I clap loudly when they finish a song, because they’re people, like me; you know, I see a basketball game, and I want everyone to play well, because they drove there, and laced their shoes up and dealt with the pre-game jitters and they’re doing the best they can. What I mean is that as an audience member for anything, especially literature, I’m not usually sitting back and trying to nitpick faults – trying to put something out there for the world is hard enough without people sniping at you from the sidelines, so, you know, I always try to look for the good.

I don’t always succeed. There have been a couple of people in L&H, namely Plato and Augustine, who have been subjected to drubbings from yours truly, because their very similar style of thinking is at loggerheads with my empiricist, humanist, egalitarian ideology to such an extent that it is hard for me to understand how they could be the way that they were. There have been some texts, like the Dionysiaca, and the consolations of Seneca, that I don’t, personally, find very appealing. However, it is not my job in this podcast to push anything on you guys, and I don’t like being a mean or a harsh critic, so I’ll always try to keep my own biases out of the story, inasmuch as that’s possible for anyone to do. Historicism – in other words using history to understand literature – always helps. In the case of both Plato and Augustine, we’re dealing with thinkers who lived in periods of terrifying instability, and so it makes sense that each would gravitate toward an ideology that promised him transcendence and meaning in a far from perfect world that must have felt like it was spinning out of control. In so many other instances, when we encounter literature or philosophy that’s out of sorts with what we believe, history helps us understand where it’s coming from.

Here’s a call in from Mike from Saint Louis: “I want to know more about the genesis of Literature and History. My question is: how much of this had up had you worked out before you ever came up with the idea of doing a podcast, and then when you first did sit down to record your first episode, how much of the podcast’s trajectory had you already worked out?”

Mike, most of what I’ve taught in L&H is stuff I’d read prior to starting the podcast. There were a lot of things that I didn’t do between the ages of 18 and 35, but one thing that I did do was read. Did I chart out the hundred plus extant episodes of L&H exactly as they are today? No, bro, not at all – they evolved a lot, and you folks who have followed the show carefully have seen that evolution take place. One thing, though, Mike – you asked about the genesis of the show – that’s kind of crazy is that before I ever started recording, I wrote the first 24 episodes – all the way to the end of the Old Testament. I really wanted to find my voice, and I needed to decide how deep I was going to get. I learned a lot while doing those, too, before ever even releasing anything – a lot of nitty gritty compositional and organizational things that are probably too detailed for anyone to be very interested in. Anyway, by the time I released the first eight episodes all at once, I basically had a game plan similar to the one I have. Ever since the Tower of Babel, I’ve at least planned to tell a pretty long story.

Next question: Nicole from Pennsylvania asked over email, “Have you ever thought about doing a special show that looks at the intersection of music and history or music and literature?”

You know, I generally try to stay in my wheel ruts. Some people have asked why I don’t include science in the podcast, or anthropology, or the visual arts, and when we come to a subject like the history of music, or musicology, that’s not something on which I have any formal education. I bet there are really strong music history podcasts out there – I haven’t tried looking for any, but it just makes sense that someone would knock that out of the park. I’ll always demonstrate reading in meter, and I did a demonstration of Pythagorean harmonic theory in a bonus episode – and if something else comes up where music is very pertinent to a show, I’ll be happy to do something similar. But, music history is its own epic saga, and one with its own specialists, so I’ll let them handle that.

Next question is a call-in from Jim from Seattle: “If you could pick any of the authors that you’ve covered in the show so far and bring them forward into the present, who would you pick, and where do you think they would gravitate to? For me personally, I would probably pick Ovid – I just know he would lose his mind in a Bath and Body Works.”

Hey, Jim, you’ve got a great voice for audio, man, better than mine! Out of everyone, I think I’d probably pick Aristophanes, though Ovid would be high on my list too – anyone whom you can tell liked to party. What would Aristophanes do? I bet he’d have his own comedy special, or comedy variety show, within a few years. The demagogues would all be terrified of him, just like they were in Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

If I could choose anyone from literary history, period, though, to bring forward in time, it would definitely be Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve been fantasizing about getting him forward in time for years, maybe when he was 35 or so, in the mid-1840s. I’d first give him a big hug. I would say, “Edgar, dude, you made it, you’re one of the most towering figures in world literature. Oops oops, put down the booze, no, you’ve made it.” Then I’d get him to detox, get him some comfortable clothing, spend about a year with him, feeding him like my Jewish babushka-in-law used to feed me. Make sure he got some sunshine. I’d say, “Edgar, welcome to California. This is a palm tree. Edgar, these are called flip flops. Edgar, this is a taqueria.” Then I’d send him back to his own era. That’s my number one time-machine-author fantasy, tacos with Edgar Allan Poe, because man, I wish that guy had been allowed some more miles on his odometer.

The next question is a call-in from Jesse from Upstate New York: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the episodes on Gregory of Tours were the dullest in the whole show so far. I understand why a historian of the period would data mine Gregory’s work, but why did you read him, and why did you spend two whole episodes on him?”

Hah, thanks, Jesse, for a more direct and punchy question, I appreciate that, too, and for all of you, if we’re going to be producing this podcast slash listening to it for years to come, please feel free to tell it to me like it is! For the record, I like you, perhaps, I also do not find sixth-century Merovingian history to be especially riveting, and generally, I think that tangled monarchical dynasties are difficult to explain in a podcast. I spent a fair amount of time with Gregory because first of all, sixth-century Europe just doesn’t have a great deal of literature that survived down to the present, and I couldn’t just cover Boethius and then skedaddle from the 500s. But there were two other reasons. First, Gregory, and the way that he writes history, is a case study of what we might call the de-secularization of European historiography. Later historians of kingly reigns and international affairs readily ascribed divine will hither and thither into them, and so Gregory was a sign of everything that was going to come along for a long time thereafter. Also, however, I think that the Merovingians, as we will see, are a sort of inverse of what was happening over in the Middle East at the same time. In western Europe, we see decentralization, smaller wars, constant fisticuffs between kings, nobles, and the clergy, and most of what would characterize the Middle Ages to come – basically, a clannish, decentered world. What happens during the mid-seventh century in Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia is a flipflop of that. The Rashidun caliphate becomes a new empire, and though Islam is at its core, it does not have a powerful aristocratic clergy like Europe’s and so it moves with the ferocious speed of Alexander of Macedon or Cyrus the Great. Getting to know Merovingian and Visigothic history at the tail end of our season on Late Antiquity showed us Europe slowing down and disintegrating. As we begin Early Islamic history in the next season, we’ll have that as a useful counterpoint to the more explosive events of the first two caliphates.

Here’s a call in from Marie-Louise from Aarhus, Denmark: “What do you think is the significance of having a dog by your side while doing your scholarly work?”

Hey Marie, I like that question! Anything that enables me to talk about my dog. I talked about him in the previous episode, and hey, look, I know not everyone loves dogs, and so I don’t mean to make a big fuss out of him. Anyway, he’s fourteen now! I think what he helps me do most of all is to constantly consider the world from a non-homocentric point of view. I imagine what it’s like to be him, a lot of the time, you know to have different morphology and senses. But he not only encourages me to imagine what it’s like to be a dog, but also other things. What about the little mushrooms he’s sniffing? What’s it like to be them? How about the moss at the bottom of an oak tree? How does that moss experience existence? Then he shakes off after coming out of the river, and I wonder, “What would it be like to be one of those little globules of water flying through the sun?”

I think he also just encourages me to take a breath and be present in a moment – a lot of people’s pets do that for them. That furry brown guy, when I see him lying in the grass, he is the lotus flower of the universe, perfectly content and sniffing whatever is wafting by on the breeze. I like modernity, don’t get me wrong – I’m not a Rousseauvian – but I think animals have a lot to teach us about our roots, and he’s the animal from whom I’ve learned the most. He’s also a foul little creature who eats nasty, undetermined things from the ground and tracks in mud from outside and looks very self-satisfied about it, too. But yeah, lying on the couch, reading a book with my dog snoozing in a slightly inconvenient but nonetheless endearing configuration – that’s what a day off looks like when I get one.

Next question, Sandra from USA, on Facebook, asked, “Have you studied drama or done any acting in plays?”

I have, just a little bit, Sandra, thanks for asking. I went through middle school and half of high school absolutely obsessed with martial arts – specifically jiujitsu. I was pretty serious about it – I had a heavy bag in my parents’ basement and I’d go to school all bruised up from sparring and felt pretty cool about it. However, my junior year of high school, I tried out for baritone choir the first semester. That changed everything. By the end of that semester, I was in acapella, and had auditioned for the spring musical. By the end of that year, I was in chamber choir, and I’d been in two plays, and had completely lost interest in jiujitsu. It became clear to me pretty quickly that I got to talk to girls more often in choir and drama than I did while having my face smashed in some guy’s armpit, and so I made the appropriate life changes. Senior year, I was the lead in the spring musical and I’d moved from bass up to tenor – I’d gone from being a martial arts bro to being a choir and drama kid, and that was good for me – it brought me out of my shell a lot.

I’m not saying I was skilled at any of it, by the way – though I love dancing, I was terrible at memorizing choreography, and just okay at acting. It was probably some of that that made me want to put just a little bit more life into reading quotes from primary texts in the classroom and the podcast. I’ve probably over-acted and under-acted from time to time in the classroom in years past and in the podcast, but, you know if you’re up there trying and you’re enthusiastic and your heart is in it as a teacher, people are generally going to be on your side. It was those years – especially in acapella and chamber – that I learned how to sing harmony, and I do that on the show in comedy songs and in gags all the time, so that really has come in handy.

I love theater, though – my wife and I have season tickets to three different little local theaters this year so we’re always supporting the people who live around us. Whoever’s up there, whether it’s scrappy locally written stuff done by volunteers or modern emergent stuff done by pros – I just love live theater, though it’s definitely best that I’m in the audience rather than onstage. Support your local theaters, though, everybody! It’s fine and well to listen to some podcast dude from far away, but there are also so many talented actors and set designers and artistic directors likely living right there in your area!

Questions about the Music in Literature and History

The next question is a call-in from Nick from Copenhagen: “Who were your musical heroes, and what was the first record you bought?”

Hey Nick, thanks for asking that! My musical hero growing up was my mother. She was a professional classical pianist and piano teacher for her career. She had a particular affinity to romantic and impressionistic composers – Rachmaninoff, Ravel, and above all Debussy and Chopin. When I was a little kid, I would sleep under her grand piano sometimes when she played, and I’ve looked up to her as a musician ever since. She has perfect pitch, and so when I was a kid, playing something, and I hit the wrong note, or I was looking for the correct chord, she would shout “Ab” from across the house. It was humiliating and awesome. She’s turning eighty this year, and she’s still a terrifying monster. She plays by ear, and modulates easily, she’s a tremendous sight reader, she improvises well, and she sings. She has all strengths, and no weaknesses. My older sister ended up being a professional musician – also a classical pianist, and she always put me to shame, too.

Interestingly, though, back to my mom, and to the subject of the first record I ever bought, and I think this is sometimes the case with career musicians, she’s never listened to a lot of music, and my dad hasn’t either. So the first album that I ever bought – this was something that changed my life. There’s a flea market near where I grew up. I was putzing around various stalls there, and I saw a guy was selling a bunch of cassette tapes. I was about nineteen, and to be clear, this is really weird, I had hardly listened to any vocal music, even though by that point, I had been in choir in high school. Due to my upbringing, I had this misguided sense that vocal music was unserious fare for the masses, and instrumental music was where it was really at. Anyway, a guy was selling a bunch of cassettes, and he said, “Hey man, I got a bunch of classic rock.” He was a stoner or something. “Hey man, I got Beatles, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. Fifty cents a tape.” I shrugged. I had a tape player in my car. I said okay, and picked one of the bands at random, and then ended up walking away from that guy’s stall with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a Beatles album – I forget which – and then Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. I put in Houses of the Holy when I got in my car, and an acoustic number called “The Rain Song” came on. It changed my life. I started playing acoustic guitar within a few days after that – I’d played piano my whole life, so fingerstyle guitar was natural for my right hand. That opened up the whole world of popular music to me, after a weirdly sheltered youth. Within a few years, over the course of college, I’d amassed a big tape collection. CDs, by the way, were what was actually popular at that point – I’m not quite that old –but I always liked tapes when I was younger – they were a commonly buck, which was a good price point for me, seventies hard rock just sounds gritter and more buttery on analog, and early hip hop, too.

The next question is a call-in from Ellie from London. “I’m interested in your musical background, and the way that you put those songs together – there are often multiple parts, and voice parts as well – I’m assuming most of the instrumental music is from a synthesizer, but I’d be really interested to learn more, and whether there are other people who are involved in the music for the songs that you record.”

Thanks for those questions, Ellie! So, as I just said for Nick’s question, I grew up in a house where classical music was always going on. My sister ended up getting a doctorate in piano performance and she’s a professional musician, and so I really won the musical lottery, growing up – I got to hear not only etudes and mazurkas and so on, but also students practicing scales and drilling measures again and again. All of that really put the building blocks of music in my head. Anyway, I could talk for hours about music, so I’d better make it pretty quick.

None of the music in this show is AI or fairy dust. All of it is me. I play piano, guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, accordion, and harmonica. I even have a little lyre, now, that I bought and tweaked that I tune to specific tunings to make ambient lyre music. Every time you hear a piano being played, that’s my fingers on the keys, with something original that I’ve generated. Every time there’s a guitar part, etc. etc., that’s me, actually playing a physical musical instrument. About the only thing I use VSTs, or virtual instruments for is cello and contrabass and drums – I don’t play those, and occasionally if I’m making a big orchestral theme, I’ll score VSTs on a grand staff or what’s called a MIDI grid to create a fuller sound.

Almost all of the show has music behind it, even if it’s just a quiet Rhodes piano or ambient synth to add texture or flavor to a long voiceover. I compose an original instrumental theme for every episode – those are released on Patreon as extras. I’ve always heard music in my head, any time I’m conscious, and when I read literature I hear music, too. Being able to actually record the music that I hear in my head – to stick a condenser mike next to the piano or guitar after reading something – is something I really enjoy doing. I can think, “This piece is what Saint Jerome sounds like.” [music] Or, “This is what Aristophanes’ The Birds sounds like!” And there they are – they’re recorded! I think a lot of people might not realize that about this show – that the background music is written for specific pieces of literature. I also keep the mix volume pretty low, and because so many of us listen to podcasts while in the car, or on the train, all the instrumental music I’ve agonized over just gets buried by road noise or wind smacking against headphones. At this point I have no idea of how many original instrumental pieces and interstitial breaks I’ve composed for L&H, but yeah, for the record, those are all very deliberately composed and chosen pieces, intended to help me tell the stories at hand.

Years ago I was at a podcast conference at Harvard. A kid there wanted to start a history podcast and he knew about my show, so he was picking my mind for how to get started. He asked how long it took to set up the website. I said just a couple of weeks – anybody can build a website. He asked, “How long does it take to learn recording software.” I said for basic stuff, just voiceover, probably just a couple of weeks to amass the gear and get your mix levels and room setup together. He wanted to know, how long did it take to get the feed for the show up and running? I said you could do that in just a couple of days. He said how long did it take to learn to do the music? I said, oh, about thirty-five years. My meaning, as any other musicians listening well know, is that doing what we do takes a long time to learn, a lot of knowledge, and a lot of work to keep up.

Next question: Malte from Berlin, over email, asked: “My question is how long it takes you to prepare the wonderful and funny songs at the end of each episode – and who is playing all these instruments?”

The comedy songs. Oh, man, I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about the comedy songs into a hot mike at all. Malte, let me give you some background on that. I was the youngest in my family. My mom was a musical colossus, as I said, and my sister not far behind, and I was, compared to them, a little peon. There seemed to be little point in learning Bach’s Chaconne or Rachmaninoff’s second concerto when the ladies of the house were pounding those out with gusto. I always played, though. And soon I learned – as a child – that it was possible to get attention from adults by noodling around and making up silly songs. The first songs I ever wrote were absurdist little numbers that I did so that I could be a little sideshow.

Later I got more serious about music. Started playing acoustic guitar at about 19, and that took over everything else, and I recorded a non-comedy album in my mid-twenties with original vocal songs and all that – that was a folk album – then I got into jazz later in graduate school. But for some reason, comedy always seems like a natural direction for me to go in with music. People don’t really think of comedy when they think of music. When someone tells a musician, “Play with feeling,” the feeling in question is always somehow presumably some sort of passionate catharsis –the anguished singer or instrumentalist is releasing heartbreak or self-assertion or undying love – I mean that’s what most pop music is about, and it’s what most non-musicians think music is and feels like. Sometimes you can play with feeling, and the feeling is silliness, or exuberance, or whimsy, or agitated staccato, or glib legato, because human beings indeed have more than one emotion, and music can express all of them, just like language can. If you listen to the greatest American musician who ever lived, Louis Armstrong, you will notice that his playing evokes a giant spectrum of emotions, ranging from passionate and serious to goofy and just plain weird, just as Mozart composed everything from parodies to requiems. Anyway, I’ve gone off on a tangent here and not answered your question.

A comedy song will take anywhere from two hours to a full day, to go from beginning to end on, depending on the length and the format. I play everything and / or arrange everything – there are virtual instruments – in other words sample banks that you can arrange with scoring software, so if I need a French Horn, or drums, or some obscure 1986 synthesizer, I can use those, though I again I have to arrange them, and most often I’m on piano, guitar, and vocals in those tunes.

Next question: Christian on Patreon, asked: “What post-show song is your personal favorite? (I have to go with ‘Boom Boom Boom Sea Monster.’)” David on Patreon also asked a very similar question.

Thanks for listening to those, Christian and David! That’s one I wrote about the Book of Job, which sort of poked fun at the fact that the Book of Job really doesn’t address the Problem of Evil, other than the fact that it degenerates into God bragging about beating a sea monster to death, which is great, but yeah, still doesn’t change the fact that Job suffered for absolutely no reason. Some of the Literature and History comedy tunes are neat like that – in that they engage with the text in a critical way, or call attention to some paradox, or hypocrisy, or oddity in ancient literature or history. The song I wrote about Saint Jerome, the barbershop I did on ancient Roman conservatism, the satire I did on John Milton – these are tunes that genuinely have some critical and analytical ideas that they express. Satire has always been a part of literature and music, so I’m happy to try and carry on the tradition. I always enjoy doing them, too – we literature people can be a little bit too stuffy sometimes, and I think it’s important to be able to laugh and sing songs together.

My favorite – man, I don’t know, I really like this song called “Cyclops Power Ballad” that I wrote about the lovelorn cyclops in Virgil’s Eclogues – it was actually kind of a cute song in that the poor Cyclops expresses his sadness, but then kind of rallies and felt better after the guitar solo. I don’t know if that’s my favorite. I like the rap songs I made up about Cicero, and the song I wrote for an Augustine episode called “Insert Ideology Name Here” – that was pretty good. Runners up would be “Interview with Dionysus” in the episode on Euripides’ Bacchae and “Too Cool for the World” in the episode on Gnosticism. I’ve written some pretty mediocre tunes, too – I appreciate your patience with that. For all the times I’ve made an ass of myself, the internet has been surprisingly kind to me.

The next question is a call-in from Ruan: “Do you have any musical goals apart from Literature and History?”

Sure! I’m always trying to be a better chord melody jazz guitar player, I’m going from Scruggs style banjo to playing a lot of clawhammer, too, if that means anything to anyone, and have been playing a lot of stride piano this year. You know I think a lot of people are like me – a lot of you listening surely are. We’re not just one thing – we have multiple sectors of interest, because that’s just part of being human. I feel like I could spend my whole life playing any of the instruments that I play, and be perfectly happy – I don’t know if I’d be any good, by the way, but wow, that would be a fun life!

With the time that I actually have, most of the musical goals I have are related to the podcast, and none of them are really outlandish or ambitious. I’d like to record a few videos of me playing the best comedy songs, just for the podcast’s YouTube channel. I’d like to record some more jazz standards, maybe video and audio, playing all the parts. I’d also love to put the best Literature and History instrumental themes on YouTube with nice nature footage related to them and make a couple of playlists. I really wouldn’t expect anything out of this, by the way, this would just be something nice that I’d enjoy doing. I’ll probably record a couple more non-comedy albums of vocal songs before I die, but again, really just for me.

The next question is from Mike on Patreon: “How did you learn to be a one-man band? When I first listened to your show I thought you had a band and sound crew. . .and then I realized it was just you. How did you learn to do that?”

Mike, I guess the answer is that I really like the physical, expressive, and harmonic possibilities available through playing different instruments. On the piano, you can play multiple complex parts simultaneously, and gorgeous, close-voiced chords that are impossible on the guitar. On guitar, you can vibrato, bend pitch, play artificial and natural harmonics, and do all kinds of expressive things that are not possible on a piano. A banjo, with its reentrant tuning, is just a firehose of eighth notes coming from all over the place – in bluegrass it’s a machine gun of triplets – anyway, I guess I just started playing all of these in my early twenties because I was interested in them – they were exciting and they sounded neat and they worked differently – and I went forward from there. Singing was like that, too – I sung in acapella and chamber in high school and got a sense of how to sing harmony, and harmonic intervals are intrinsically beautiful!

In my twenties, I finished college and then went to grad school in literature, but, you know, I still wanted to play even though I was pretty busy with academic work. So it made sense for me to do multitrack recording as a hobby when I had multipart folk instrumentation in my head. I had a band for a while late in graduate school, but then later in life, when, after a couple of moves, I’d left all my bandmates behind, in my early thirties I wanted to make multipart music but didn’t have my usual collaborators around, so I did everything myself because it made sense at the time. To be clear, everybody, I don’t think I’m anything extraordinary musically – I wish I had a better singing voice, and in a different life I would have loved to really become a virtuoso instrumentalist or at least try, but anyway, I have a lot of fun, I have a good moment now and again, and I’ll always be a musician.

Some More Miscellaneous Questions

Here’s a call-in from Jacob from Japan: “Just wondering if I’ll be able to buy the Season 6 Late Antiquity episode songs?”

Of course, Jacob, you bet. They’re up there now – and if anyone should want to buy all of the L&H comedy songs, you can get them in the Bonus Content section of the website.

Here’s a call-in from Jonas from Germany: “My question to you is if you have read any works by Grimmelshausen, and to hear your thoughts on him.”

Yes, Jonas, I believe we will do a Grimmelshausen episode when we get to the seventeenth century. Simplicius Simplicissimus is up there with the general pantheon of Lucian of Samosata, Swift, Voltaire, and company. So, let’s do it – it’ll be a little while.

Here’s a call-in from Julia from Brazil. “I’d like to ask you if you plan to cover any Portuguese language authors in upcoming episodes? Also, if you could give a shout-out to my friend Juliana – she introduced me to your podcast, and for that I’m eternally indebted to her.”

Yes, thank you Juliana! Word of mouth has been this podcast’s lifeline, since its host has little flair for marketing otherwise, so thanks from Doug as well as Yulia. And yeah, at least Camões’ Lusiads, probably a few texts from every century, and I want to cover The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis – sorry if I’m mispronouncing that. Portuguese literature is a gigantic subject, L&H has a fair number of listeners in Brazil and Portugal, and this podcast’s host did not want to leave Brazil after his contract there expired and he returned to where he was living in Oregon at the time. Anyway, short answer, always, if the question to Doug involves the word Brazil, the answer is yes!

Next question: Ryland from Durham North Carolina on Patreon asked, “Once you get to American lit do you anticipate covering any indigenous mythologies or story cycles?”

Ryland, thanks for supporting the show – you’ve been backing L&H for a long time, I know. And the answer is yes, absolutely. I had pretty good Native American Studies coursework as an undergraduate at Berkeley back in the day, so I’ll be glad to try and pass on what I learned in this show.

Here’s a call-in from William from Dublin: “What did you enjoy reading when you were a child or in your teens? Was there anyone who strongly influenced your choice in reading?”

Hey, William, great to hear your actual voice after various back and forths over the years. I read everything that every kid was reading in the US in the 1990s, basically. Fantasy. Sci Fi. Horror. Thriller. Mystery. Adventure. And then more canonical literature, too. When I was about nine, my mom told me that she would buy me whichever used book I wanted from our local book store, provided that I’d finished the previous one that she had purchased. Oh, man, I made her regret that. I was an almost obsessive reader by eleven and twelve, so it’s a good thing that used paperbacks in those days were $0.50 or $0.75. Anyway, I loved everything, yeah, and again, very normal 1990s junior high to high school stuff for an American kid – Michael Crichton, Tolkien, Stephen King, John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, Dean Koontz, Anne Rice, Asimov, Le Guin, Robert Jordan – stuff that all the kids and adults were reading, and then high school teachers nudged me into the gateway literary stuff that a lot of us encounter – The Catcher in the Rye, Huck Finn, I read a lot of Toni Morrison in high school, the dystopian trio of 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, then I got to like Dickens and Jane Austen and Twain because they were funny, so yeah, my path to becoming an English major was a very ordinary one.

Here’s a call-in from Kathrin from Germany: “My questions are: Are you still able to read for leisure and pleasure, or do you always feel compelled to evaluate your reading material in regards to your podcast? And my second question: Which book, or which books, would you like to re-read, as if you had never read them before – delete all memory of the story so that you could read and enjoy it again as if for the first time.”

To question 1, hell yes, I still read for leisure all the time. I use an app called Libby – everyone in the US listening should get that right now, by the way – hit pause, go to the App store, and download Libby, just do it now, and then hit Play in a second – it allows you to check out e-books and audiobooks instantaneously for free from your local library. It’s just fantastic – again, e-books and audiobooks, for free, and many of them at a time. Sometimes I’ll just look around bestseller lists on Libby and see what everyone else is reading and then jump on the bandwagon. I like e-books and hardcopy books both, by the way – makes no difference – I know some people prefer one or the other, but yeah, if I didn’t still read for pleasure myself, I’d feel like a real poser doing this show, that’s for sure! So, yeah, Kathrin, I can definitely enjoy potboilers and comic book movies, I like it all. I think books can be great in so many different ways – you know – a fantastic plot is a fantastic plot, an appealing romance is an appealing romance, a great story can be a great story even if it doesn’t use highfalutin language. There’s a switch that comes on in my brain when I’m working on the podcast where I get a little more critical and attentive, but otherwise, I’m just like anyone – I like explosions and car chases and cute romcoms and books of all configurations as long as there’s something special or engrossing about them. You can’t go through life analyzing everything!

Which book would I like to delete from my memory banks and re-read? This is a weird one, but the collected works of Ibsen. I always thought Ibsen did really, really good plots – unlike ancient Greek tragedies, for instance, when you’re reading an Ibsen play you do not know what kind of craziness is going to blow up by the end of the story. Having read I believe all of them, I’d love to have them wiped from my hard drive so I could go through them again and have the same “Holy cow” moments of experiencing them for the first time.

Questions About Doug’s Favorite Books and Theorists

Next question: Andrew, from Delaware, on Facebook, asked: “What’s your favorite book? Or if you can’t narrow it down to just one, what are a few favorites or at least a favorite kind of book?”

Andrew, I have hundreds, but let me name three. First, Middlemarch, by George Eliot, published in 1871. I read that novel at 21 in the midst of a BA that had me going through a lot of Victorian novels, and it’s an earth-shatteringly great book, even if people’s attention spans are shorter these days and we don’t like intrusive narrators who tell us, “Dear reader?” etc. etc. I absolutely love Middlemarch, and George Eliot – the pen name of course of Marian Evans. The last two paragraphs of that novel are the most profound and complete things I’ve ever read about being a human – I read those and I thought, it’s over, philosophers, put your pens down, we’re all set folks, she’s just expressed what it means to be a human.

Number two, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, published in I believe 1944. Long story short, midway through grad school, I’d been slapped and spanked with various readings by postmodern theorists and later twentieth-century philosophy for several years. Then I read The History of Western Philosophy, got my bearings, and realized who I was intellectually. I came to understand I’m an empiricist, an epistemological materialist, and that I believe in the aggregative improvement of the species through collectivism, collaboration, and intellectual work. I learned that I had been born dispositionally closer to Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and English empiricism than continental rationalism, and that all of that was okay – I wasn’t a weirdo because certain rationalist and a priori schools of thought didn’t appeal to me. I read that book at I think 27, doing all the response notes I mentioned earlier, and it was really good for me. The book also served as a model for this podcast, too. A single narrator, going through a huge swath of intellectual history – that can be a useful thing. I didn’t think Russell was perfect, and I knew he left things out, and that he had his biases, just as you guys know I have my various shortcomings. But I also overall found Russell to be clear, organized, and useful, which is above all else what I hope to be.

Number three, Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s not for everyone. More people have attempted it than can probably realistically enjoy it. But at its high moments, it’s unlike anything else I’ve ever read. I read the Ellman Joyce biography one December and the next month took an outstanding grad seminar on Joyce’s Ulysses – thanks, Professor Greg Dobbins! – and he was pretty much all I could think or talk about for about three months. I like that novel so much that I feel like a lot of the later formally experimental fiction of the twentieth century was just rehashing things Joyce had done, only with less humor and less panache. That’s one I just grab off of the shelf and read parts of for fun.

Next question: David on Patreon, asked: “Are there any literary theorists, or pieces of theory that have especially influenced either your general thinking or your podcasting? [and] Since you’re also an expert on 19th century American lit, any novels that anybody reads that you think everyone else should be reading?”

Alright, David, to start with literary theorists, I always liked Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, I liked the quantitative work Franco Moretti started doing in the late 90s – I haven’t followed him much since – in my own field of specialization I have a lot of favorite critics and scholars on whom I wrote and in some cases met. But if you’ve listened to L&H, you can probably guess that I am just not a person very passionate about theory – you don’t hear me quoting literary theorists very often. I like literary theory fine, and studied it a lot, kind of got fond of a movement called Object-oriented ontology and the modern philosopher Graham Harman late in grad school, but you know, literature is my domain, and I’m more fond of individual trees than theories that try to explain all forests – it’s just who I am – no idea why.

To answer your second question, two authors from the US come to mind who are inexplicably obscure. The American novelist Harold Frederick published a book called The Damnation of Theron Ware in 1896. It is one of my favorite novels in all literature, and it’s remained in purgatory for more than a century, published in a modern Penguin edition, but still, barely read or assigned even by Americanists like me. There’s another figure whom everyone ought to know about, and this is the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. He lived from 1839-1914. Bertrand Russell called him “certainly the greatest American thinker ever,” and I agree. Peirce was so far advanced, and his philosophy was so marvelously, practically humanistic that he was ahead of a lot of the twentieth century, let alone the nineteenth. We don’t talk a lot about nineteenth-century American philosophy in the academy, and I’m not being patriotic here, but the US actually came up with some tremendous stuff the second half of the 1800s, and Peirce is the very best of it. Anyway, I’m not going to give you a lecture on Charles Sanders Peirce, but those are my two answers for unsung heroes of nineteenth century America – Harold Frederick, author of the novel The Damnation of Theron Ware, and then the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Next question: Francesco on Patreon, asked “If there is an opportunity, would you want to, do something like Rad Greek Myths again?”

Yeah, Francesco, I’d love to do that project, thanks for asking about it. Just because I assume a lot of folks won’t remember, I did a bonus sequence called Rad Greek Myths that was about 30 hours long that had original fictional adaptations of the main ancient Greek myth cycles not extant in the literary record, so, Perseus, Theseus, Daedalus, Orpheus and Eurydice, etc. I enjoyed that project a lot. I think most people who listen to L&H are here for the historicist scholarship rather than Doug Metzger doing fictional adaptations, but I love writing original stories, too, and there are a lot of Greek myths I didn’t adapt.

Next question: Abcd-1

Abcd-1 on Patreon, you asked a lot of questions, and many of them were basically geared toward wanting to know how much non-Anglophone European literature of the Middle Ages Literature and History will cover – you mentioned Celtic, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. If you go to literatureandhistory.com/upcoming-seasons, you will see the plan in detail. The short answer is that from Anglo-Saxon, which is itself Germanic, to Old Irish, Middle Welsh, Old French, Middle High German, and Old Norse, we’ll be buzzing around with a lot of European vernacular languages, because at certain junctures, one or another regions of Europe really takes the lead in literary history over the course of the Middle Ages.

Next question: ABCD-1 on Patreon also asked: “Would you consider making a bonus series on famous historians? Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Procopius (etc.)?”

I wouldn’t rule it out, but at the moment, here in March of 2025, I’ve just been keenly missing literature. Your suggestion is a good one – I mean, those historians you mention – they are influential within literary history, and one of the strands of ancient Greek and Latin prose fiction comes directly from classical history writing, so ancient historians, in a way, are literature. However, in the interest of going forward and staying in my own lane just a bit more for the purposes of expediency, I’m planning on the next few bonus sequences being focused on literature, rather than anything else.

Next question: Matt from Michigan, on Patreon, asked: “Given that some of the oldest manuscripts of both the Old and New Testament can be centuries younger than when the texts were originally written, do we have any confidence that we know the original contents of these texts? Would we be able to tell if/how much they changed between the original versions and the versions that have survived?”

That’s a big question, and of course the Bible is not one thing, but instead an anthology of documents that changes from religion to religion. Going from memory, the Masoretic Tanakh – the oldest Hebrew Bible, dates to the 1000s. The main source against which the Masoretic text has been cross checked has been the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, among numerous pieces of the Hebrew Bible, contains the entire Book of Isaiah. If I remember correctly, there were some variances between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic text, but they were pretty minor – syntactical changes or an occasional word difference here and there – again, going from memory, nothing of great theological consequence. The Dead Sea Scrolls, by the way, are very roughly dated from year 1 to year 300, so they are at least 600 years younger than the oldest parts of the Old Testament.

I’m again going from memory here, but when we come to the subject of the New Testament, there are fragments that survive from the second century to year 350 or so, plus all of the quotations that survive in early church fathers. The real answer to your question is probably a book length work that takes into account hundreds of papyrus and parchment fragments, hundreds of extant quotations, together with their textual history, and that kind of thing, but to kind of cut to the chase, I think manuscript evidence, especially of Matthew, John, and Acts, suggests that the New Testament was pretty stable from the second century onward. The Old Testament is just so much more ancient, and so much longer, that trying to understand its stability prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls is a much greater challenge. It’s a great question, and I feel reasonably confident saying that the modest amounts of evidence that we do have suggest that books of the Bible, especially the New Testament, have been pretty stable, and that, for instance, the Book of Acts never talked about trips to the moon, or anything like that. The Gnostic scriptures did!

Next question is one last call-in, from Eric: “In what decade of the 22nd century do you think you’re finally going get to Hamlet?”

Eric, I’m thinking maybe the 2160s – that’ll be the 600-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, and although we could shoot for the 2060s and hit the 500-year anniversary of his birth, I like to aim high. If there is some sort of an afterlife, I’ll be happy to talk about books with you guys in the great beyond, as well. [music]

A Final Thank You and Moving on to Episode 111: Early Islamic History

I want to go back to the beginning, now, and sum this interview session up if I can, with a word about this podcast’s audience – you guys listening. I had fifteen or twenty people ask me what’s been the most surprising thing I learned while producing L&H, and I offered you some answers. One answer that I didn’t offer, though, was that it’s been surprising talking to so many of you over the past nine years. Because I’ve met a lot of educational podcast listeners – at conferences and other events, on tours, and of course over email and social media, I have a pretty good sense of who listens to shows like Literature and History. And I wish sometimes that I could give a Literature and History podcast episode as a giant lecture, somehow bringing this show’s whole audience together, not so that you could see me or vice versa, but so that you could meet each other.

I was an educational podcast listener before I was an educational podcast producer. When I careened out of academia, more due to the buffetings of fate than by some conscientious choice, I was still hungry. I wanted to learn more, but I was going through some phases of my career that were absolutely steamrolling my energy, and yeah, things weren’t great. I was down. I felt like I’d worked my ass off and devoted myself to studying literature, and yet there I was, with a career that used about ten percent of my brain and the other ninety percent buzzing around and intermittently gnawing on itself. During some of the worst months of those years, working a job I wasn’t crazy about, I started listening to history podcasts and audiobooks in the small amounts of time I had to do so, and they helped. If on an unmemorable Tuesday, I at least listened to something educational on lunch break, and then a bit more after work – even if it was just seventy minutes – you know, at least I’d done something – at least there was some sparkle of learning in an otherwise drab week. It wasn’t a magic wand, or silver bullet, but I was at least making some progress on something. I bet all of you know exactly what I mean here. Life requires us to keep up practical routines, to go to work, to commute, to have careers that we are fine with, but maybe not in love with, and to check boxes off of lists, but it doesn’t always offer a sense of furtherance, accomplishment, and understanding.

What we have in common as a group is a certain healthy restlessness. If you were sitting next to other educational podcast listeners in an auditorium right now, you would see that, and it would make you feel a sense of companionship. You’d know that you weren’t alone. People like us want to know more. We want to know how stuff works. We want to learn because it brings us some of the purest and most indomitable joy we know. The smartest people I’ve ever known are also some of the happiest. Rain or shine, their minds have a lot of faraway places to go, and they find understanding complexity to be an exquisite pleasure, rather than a burden. The Bible, I believe, tells at least one definite lie, and that is when Ecclesiastes says, “In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” I don’t think so, you world-weary, Persian-period chump. I think ignorance is not bliss, that he who increases knowledge also increases fun, that we are all doing something very special with independent educational podcasts, and episode after episode, as a kindred spirit who’s been on both sides of the microphone, I’m still honored that you’re here.

[“Too Cool For the World” Song]

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