We continue Bagg’s “Revenge of the Jock-Nerds” series (the last series of Season Three!), with David Halberstam’s The Amateurs, which tells the story of four men competing for the single solo sculling spot on the 1984 Olympic team. Halberstam, who usually worked on more popular sports and in bigger political arenas, offers a nuanced glimpse into the small, hermetic, oral world of American rowing, where athletes compete in a sport where “the rewards cannot justify the efforts.”
Tag: nostalgia
Episode 94: “Chewing Glass” or Tim Krabbe’s The Rider
Tim Krabbe’s novel is barely a novel. It is a thinly veiled autobiogrpahical essay, with fictional details and composite characters, allowing the author to navigate his story just to one side of the fiction/nonfiction divide. The lads ponder why it does not fall into the “bike porn” genre, and why the images of teeth and glass continually emerge.
Episode 87: “A Dude who Made a Dude,” or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Part I
Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein, which many consider the first science fiction novel. Over the next twenty years, she revised the book several times, and the version she left behind remains a remarkable work of imagination. Shelley is amazingly inventive and talented, but the lads find th novel to be hard going, and a slow starter. They wonder at the use of framed narratives, and how long the book takes to give Frankenstein’s creation a voice.
Episode 86: “A Study in Structure,” or Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet
The lads go bananas over Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes mystery, “A Study in Scarlet,” published in 1887. We meet the mercurial Sherlock Holmes and his by turns skeptical then credulous biographer, Dr. John H. Watson, late of Afghanistan. The short novella or long short story wastes no time in driving towards the solving of its central mystery, but then makes a strange swerve into the American West and a bout of extended exposition. Chris and Jesse spend a rollicking hour discussing the book and excavating its odd structure. The final verdict? Two pills up.
Episode 84: “Unnatural Intimacy,” or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Part I
Neither of the lads had read Stoker’s classic gothic novel, published in 1897, and they suspect that many readers are in the same boat. Over 100 years of vampiric pop culture have made Stoker’s masterful compiling of folklore fade into the background, but the book that launched a thousand bites is bracing, inventive, funny, haunting, and innovative. Chris and Jesse talk about atmosphere, forced intimacy, the anxieties of Victorian society, and the grand missed opportunity of Dracula’s cancelled cooking show.
Episode 72: “Red Herringfest?” or Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest
The boys hop to it, chum, and talk about Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 debut novel Red Harvest. While the socialist connotations of the title never truly materialize (“Communism was a red herring”), leaving the lads scratching their heads, Hammett definitely crafted a new sound and a new genre. Jesse and Chris find the jaunty dialogue compelling, but both speculate as to why audiences of this period seemed to just love lots and lots and lots of plot.
Digression: Underdogs, Comebacks, and Seafood Substitutes, or Baseball Movies with Jason Herbert
Jason Herbert, from the Historians at the Movies community and podcast, joins us to talk about favorite baseball films. We share an uncomfortable moment when Chris learns who Jason’s favorite team is (hint: pinstripes), but settle into a rollicking, nostalgic, nerdfest. We discover a surprising shared affection for a certain Charlie Sheen film from the late 80s, and both Jesse and Chris hurl their picks from deep into Left Field.