Episode Notes

The protagonists of The Grapes of Wrath continue to question the police, Steinbeck prophesizes the inevitable triumph of the proletariat, and I wonder why on earth they not only let us but MADE us read a book that specifically applauds Marx and Lenin in American public school.

This one has some important content warnings. Midway through the initial recording, someone started having a loud, shouting mental breakdown outside my apartment. I cut out as much of that as I could and muted audio where I could but there may still be faint audible sounds of distress that may be upsetting. A portion of the podcast from there is also me working through my own distress and thoughts about the mismanagement of the housing crisis in Seattle. This podcast is also a political one, partly because I'm hitting some very polemical passages in the book itself, and I talk a lot about the dismal feeling state of the american federal government, and the possibility of a "great crackup". Also there continue to be content warnings for the contents of The Grapes of Wrath including animal and family death.

If you want to skip over it, the discussion of homelessness and this particular incident is from about 26 minutes to about 29 minutes.

There are things from the overall project that I've cut or redone for various reasons but I decided to let this stand because I don't think of this project as an essay or a polished Entertainment Product TM but an audio documentary. The intent was to have it be a documentary of me encountering a classic work of literature and trying to make sense of it live, without the filter of an essay format that would let me portray myself as an expert who has "solved" or "completed" the text. But inevitably as the project went on it's turned out that a documentary of my experience with a book is also a documentary of the reality of my life in this city, and in this country. The ethics of this kind of exploration are a consistent theme in the novel, and in this podcast, moving forward.

This episode was originally published on my patreon last year for $3 backers.

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