Hi everyone!
In the pandemic, I discovered the podcast, Human Voices Wake Us, by poet Tim Miller. Tim is a very kind, wise literary person with a foot in history (and often pre-history), a foot in poetry, a foot in myth, and a foot in literature. So many feet!
That podcast, saved my pandemic. It was slow, thoughtful, considered, and it offered insight and sometimes just story, that went hundreds and thousands of years into the past. The opening of the podcast says “human voices are what we need” and shockingly, in an age of so many human voices (see: social media, etc.) I came to agree.
And so after merely thanking Tim for each episode, on Celtic mythology, or his tender autobiographical episodes, or the poetry of Louise Glück or whatever, we struck up a friendship, and now here we are, we wanted to speak in public about… well being guys, I guess.
Enter this podcast.
We joke in the first moments that the podcast might be called “How to not be an incel asshole” but really we just go on to talk about what moves us deeply in this world. And at least for me, at least, how it contradicts what I sometimes feel impulsively. (I will admit to being provincial and small-minded, motivated by fear and rage, while wanting mostly to just be allowed to take in the world gently.)
So, here is our podcast, episode #1. It doesn’t even have a title. Tim may post it with a different title.
Here are some timestamps:
00:00 How we didn’t wind up incels
03:18 Introspection, feelings, etc.
05:10 The act of creating and understanding creation
9:00 The love of horror novels, aggressive music
13:00 History and the long-term
14:00 Models of adulthood and manhood involving story
15:45 Internal space, following rewarding feelings
19:20 Drawing Peanuts, emotions in boxes
23:00 Navigating emotions through art, changing art forms
31:15 Rock bands and poetry readings
36:30 Tim on Mary Wollstonecraft, early feminist and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
39:00 Tom on John Darnielle, author
41:00 Salutations
42:00 Reading Corner: Tom reads 8 minutes of Master of Reality by John Darnielle
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