1storypod

NYC-MICHIGAN — Sam Pink is the author of the novels Person (2010), The No Hellos Diet (2011), Rontel (2013), Witch Piss (2014), Garbage Times / White Ibis (Soft Skull, 2018), and the collections Ice Cream Man and Other Stories (Soft Skull, 2020), Early Stuff (11:11, 2020)—which includes his 2009 debut I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It—and 99 Poems to Cure Whatever's Wrong with You or Create the Problems You Need (Clash, 2019), among others. He slangs his paintings and early books via IG. # CONTENTS 3 min - pod start 4 min - We out here. In the world 6 min - on how so prolific 9 min - You can’t say everything (anything) say one thing 11 min - on concision / chopping up 14 min - on talking through your stories 19 min - SP a journal writer / journalist / confederacy of dunces 21 min - mythical stories are all mish reports / Rontel as an Odyssey 22 min - swording / shielding up ⚔️ 25 min - BBDB / McFlurries / hashing shit out is generative 29 min - writer vs. word-scratcher Solibo Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau / humility 31 min - Being a writer not bein a mystical god its being a plumber 32 min - obligatory Bolaño rant 36 min - Animals / empathy / Levinas 39 min - reliance on / detachment from the ecosystem 41 min - Animals as symbols 44 min - Thoth / Ibis / pea head 48 min - current work 50 min - evolution of online lit since aughts 59 min - sharing art is shooting out sonar signals 1 hr 2 min - Early Stuff 1 hr 7 min - Humor 1 hr 8 min - McClanahan 1 hr 12 min - ‘you gotta wanna be good but you also are only whatever you are’ 1 hr 13 min - important to indulge the asshole in you 1 hr 19 min - bravado underrated when you need it 1 hr 23 min - Keith! 1 hr 34 min - pod end # Sean Thor Conroe lives in NYC and tweets @stconroe https://twitter.com/stconroe http://1storyhaus.com/index.html

NYC / HAWAII — Tao Lin is the author of Leave Society (2021), Trip (2018), Taipei (2013), and other books. For this episode, I read The Chalice and the Blade (1987), a nonfiction book by Riane Eisler that Tao references in Leave Society. We talk about autism, leaky gut, organ meats, liver king, lashing out on friends, and whether partnership societies had MMA. Leave Society dropped 1 year ago today: https://www.amazon.com/Leave-Society-Vintage-Contemporaries-Tao/dp/1101974478 Sean Thor Conroe is the author of Fuccboi: A Novel (2022).

SOUTH PHILADELPHIA — Zac, 26, born in Denver, Colo., grew up in Houston, Texas, Sydney, Australia, and Hickory, N.C., and now fundraises at an art museum in Philadelphia. He first encountered the My Struggle series a few years back, upon finding Book One on the floor of his then-girlfriend’s apartment. I first encountered My Struggle on the recent-release shelf in a bookstore, drawn by how out of place Knausgaard’s self-portrait looked on the cover. I initially scoffed at it. It wasn’t until I heard a podcast with Knausgaard (with novelist Jeffery Eugenides, by the New York Public Library) that I was compelled to start reading. Karl Ove Knausgaard, 48, was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1968. He began writing the series, which is 3,600 pages long, in 2008, six years after the death of his father.

HARLEM / ORLANDO — Cavin Bryce Gonzalez is a storywriter and editor and curator from Orlando, Florida. He is the editor-in-chief of Back Patio Press. He got mad quick hitters available online here: https://neutralspaces.co/cavinbryce/ Cop his recent flash fiction collection, I COULD BE YOUR NEIGHBOR, ISN'T THAT HORRIFYING (2020): https://backpatiopress.bigcartel.com/product/i-could-be-your-neighbor-isn-t-that-horrifying Sam Pink is the author of many many fire books including Garbage Time/White Ibis (2018), Witch Piss (2014), Rontel (2013), The No Hellos Diet (2011), Person (2010), and Ice Cream Man And Other Stories (forthcoming Soft Skull 2020)(https://softskull.com/dd-product/the-ice-cream-man-and-other-stories/) I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It (2009) is an early collection consisting of collected writings from 2007-2009. His early hitters are available here: https://www.amazon.com/Sam-Pink/e/B007IDUP5M%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share Or via dm: https://www.instagram.com/sam_pink_art/ Sean Thor Conroe lives in Harlem. http://1storyhaus.com

Ep. 80: With philosopher, author, and Auerbach scholar Matthias Bormuth (b.1963), a professor of Comparative Intellectual History at University of Oldenburg. On Erich Auerbach's MIMESIS: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), and how it was influenced by the great Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico's NEW SCIENCE (1744). I first met Matthias at this Phillip Roth festival in Newark I wrote about back in March for the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/04/19/reading-myself-and-others-roth-festival-dispatch/ Giambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668 and was a relatively unknown Professor of Rhetoric at the city's university. He'd work on and revise his ambitious work NEW SCIENCE throughout his life, publishing preliminary versions in 1725 and 1730, though it wasn't till his death in 1744 that the third and final version appeared. Vico's text, most of all his literal and historical view of Homer, would go on to hugely influence James Joyce's writing of Ulysses (a literal retelling of the Odyssey), along with other modernists. Erich Auerbach's 1946 work of literary criticism MIMESIS treats canonical texts from the Bible to Homer to Dante to Don Quixote to Zola up to Virginia Woolf as literal-historical writers trying to understand their time, only speaking from their provisional perspective, rather than as deific texts to unpack as divine providence. A German-Jew who fought for Germany in the first World War, Auerbach worked at a library from 1922-1929, during which time he translated Vico's NEW SCIENCE into German for the first time. Matthias and I try to unpack the connection between these two texts, and to find the relevance between them and our current age. Some notes: Overview of Giambattista Vico (4:22); Auerbach’s early years following World War One translating Vico (9:24); Auerbach on Zola’s Germinal (40:22); Matthias’s critique of Heidegger (50:22); writing as Letter Writing / Auerbach’s letters (1:07:33); Matthias on Knausgaard (1:11:55).