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The History of Literature
697 Race in European Fairy Tales (with Kimberly Lau) | My Last Book with Rolf Hellebust
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Out here, there's no one way of doing things, no unwritten rules, and no shortage of adventure. Because out here the only requirement is having fun. Bank of America invites kids 6 to 18 to golf with Us for a limited time. Sign them up for a free one year membership, giving them access to discounted tee times at thousands of courses. Learn more@bankofamerica.com golf with us what would you like the power to do? Bank of America restrictions apply. See BFA.com golf with us for complete details.
- [00:37]
Kimberly Lau
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Jack Wilson
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Kimberly Lau
We help you Save valid to 423. Selection varies by location while supplies last. Discount taken at time of purchase. Actual plant size and selection varies by location.
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Jack Wilson
Excludes Alaska and Hawaii Hello. There's something ineluctably compelling about fairy tales. Einstein loved them and believed they held the key to education. Fairy tales crop up all over the world, adults telling them as bedtime stories, handing them down from generation to generation. Although as Tolkien and others have argued, to think about them as childish or suitable only for children is a mistake, they've also been used by authorities of various types and in various moral instruction, societal norm setting othering defining heroes and villains, creating a national or tribal identity, setting in place what we value in men and women, boys and girls. On the podcast today we talk about fairy tales with a scholar who focused on European fairy tales in particular, seeing how they morphed and changed and how ideas of race became inserted and were scrubbed out. What were they trying to do? Who was doing this and what effect did it all end up having? Kimberly Lau, professor of Literature at the University of California in Santa Cruz, joins us today on the History of Literature. Hello everyone, I'm Jack Wilson, getting ready for a much needed spring break. Anyone who lives in Crazy Town should be allowed to leave it once in a while. Is that a good principle to follow? I would ask my I would ask my crazy, my crazy fellow, my fellow crazy town residents, but they're all too busy putting up their houses for sale. It's always darkest before the dawn, people, but sometimes that darkness can last a long time. But let's look on the bright side here, which is that there will be a dawn eventually. The Earth keeps spinning at the incredible rate of 1,000 miles an hour. So dawn is on its way. But that, that rate is. That's if you're living at the equator. Doesn't it seem like the equator would be the easiest place to hang on if you're hoping not to fly off the world? Something that's spinning 1,000 miles an hour? I flew off a merry go round. It was probably spinning a lot slower than that. And yet if you're at the equator, you spin at a thousand miles an hour. But if you're at the poles, where one might think you. You could more easily just fly off into space if you're not careful, like me, not hanging onto that merry go round standing on the North Pole, you just. You just. At the South Pole, you just go plummeting into the void. Right. I know this isn't how it works. I know how gravity works. It's not like this, but it's still how I kind of imagine it. But here's what I'm not imagining. At the equator, you're moving a thousand miles an hour all the time. But at the poles, you move at a rate of less than one mile an hour. Much less. You move at a rate of 0.00005 mph. Effectively 0. Turtles can go 3 to 4 miles an hour. Sloths go less than 1 mile an hour. They go about 0.15 miles an hour unless they're at the equator. And then they go 0.15 miles an hour plus a thousand miles an hour. Sloths pace 0.15 miles an hour. They don't get much help if they go to the North Pole. The North Pole does not spin much. Luckily for the North Pole, it is also moving around the sun at 67,100 miles per hour. That's a pretty good hustle. It keeps up with the rest of Earth in that respect. So I suppose that sloth I was talking about actually moving about 68,000 miles an hour if it's at the equator, all things considered. And so do I. That's how fast I'm moving. Even just sitting here in my chair. 68,000 miles an hour. No wonder I feel so sick all the time. And here I thought it was from social media. Moving on. Things are not necessarily all doom and gloom. Not in the real world and not in the world of literature. Setting aside creeps and weirdos like me who kind of like literature when it's at its thorniest. Not straight out pessimism, but an acknowledgement that life isn't always as we want it to be and death is a horrendous little trick played on human beings. Our awareness of death. Well, that's why I like my literature to have a little bit of an edge. Chekhov makes me weep, and I've never felt better in my life. But I know that's probably not what most people have in mind as a feel good book. So let's do this. I did a little googling, looking for the top ten most uplifting novels. Couldn't we use that now? Someone must have made a list of those. And then I thought, well, let's compare that with the list of the top novels and see if people choose uplifting novels as their favorite novels as the greatest novels. We have a list of top novels. The one we like to use is preparedbythegreatestbooks.org which has compiled 551 best of book lists to see what books tend to come up the most often. So this is not just one person's opinion. It's not my opinion. It's not even some kind of false consensus. It's. It's 551 lists prepared by people of all types for all different reasons. And from that some books emerge, something has to be number one. Currently, it's the Great Gatsby listed at number one. Ulysses is number two. Proust's remembrance of Things Past, as I call it, you might call it In Search of Lost time. That's number three. 100 Years of Solitude is number four. And the Catcher in the Rye is number five. Will any of these be the most uplifting? Or in will they make our top ten most uplifting? I doubt number six will be that's 1984 by George Orwell. That's a pretty dark book. You have to be a complete cynic to find that book uplifting. Maybe if you're an evil genius or some kind of nihilist, you might find that uplifting. Okay, so I'm doing my googling, and here's the problem. It's actually not easy to find a list of uplifting novels. Most will just be uplifting books. Like it might be a memoir or a nonfiction book about how to lift yourself up, or a book of prayers, something like that. It might be books that nobody would really list on the best novel list. Like a nice romance, for example, a genre book where the man and woman fall in love and get married. Which kind of begs the question, is literature Just not something people turn to when they need to be lifted up. Is that just me? Is that only those creepy weirdos I meant who kind of like the darkness because you feel like it acknowledges something? I don't turn to a feel good, happy ending romance. When I need uplifting, I turn to Kafka. That lifts me up. That kind of thing. So I found an article from the Guardian. It's going to get me closer to what I'm going for here. This is novelists who chose books to inspire, uplift and offer escape. Novelists. This article is more than four years old. It came out during the pandemic, and the Guardian newspaper asked novelists from Hillary Mantel to Kazuo Ishiguro and Marlon James to Sebastian Berry, writers share their favorite literary comforts. So let's see what they say. These are literary people talking about literary comforts. How will their picks do? Will any of their picks land on our list of the greatest books of all time? Will anyone choose Fitzgerald or Ulysses, etc. So let's see. Curtis Siddenfeld chose Alice Munro, Wonderful Stories by Alice Munro, some of our favorites. You can maybe hear the sadness in my voice. We now have this complicated understanding of Monroe as a person that we have to unravel. I still haven't come to grips with that myself. But let's take Curtis Siddenfeld's word for it. She recommends hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage. Well, this book does come up for us on the list of greatest books of all time. It is the 1338th greatest book of all time. Not actually that high, although it is fourth on a list of what any library in Canada ought to contain and 23rd on a New York Times list of the best 100 books from this century. So, okay, not bad. That's literature. I think that lands on both. Sebastian Barry chose Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It's not a novel, but literature, certainly. And here we go. It is in the top 300 greatest books of all time. It comes in at number 299, score one for literature. Hilary Mantel chose the Women in Black by Madeleine St. John. Maybe you say St. John. It doesn't come up on any lists. And indeed that is the case for most of these in this Guardian article. So I'm just going to skip through and highlight the ones that do. Now let me explain. These have to be in the top 500 greatest books of all time, and they have to be chosen by a novelist, as pulled by the Guardian, who asked what book these novelists find most comforting or uplifting. They asked 25 authors for a recommendation. Did anyone choose a book that's in the top 100 greatest books of all time or the top 10? Wouldn't you think that the greatest books would be uplifting? Wouldn't you think novelists would find them uplifting? Why are they choosing books that are outside of of the list of the greatest books of all time? Or are they? So here we go. Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage and Silver Sparrow, chose Alice Walker's the Color Purple as her uplifting book, and that's on the list as the 102nd greatest book of all time. Bravo. Kevin Berry, author of Night Boat to Tangier, chose Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, which would be on my list, but it's not quite in the top 5,000 of the greatest books of all time list. But I'll pass along Kevin Berry's lines that he likes. That he says, let him fall into the sweat soak of Larkin's melancholia. And I wonder, should that have been sweet soak of Larkin's melancholia? For me that would fit better, but for him, I guess it's sweat soak. Anyway, these are the lines that come from Larkin's poem. The trees. The trees are coming into leaf, like something almost being said. The recent buds relax and spread. Their greenness is a kind of grief. Okay, so you can see that I've departed from what I said I was going to do. I said I was only going to take books that landed in the top 500. Or what did I say, 100 top 10 I was hoping for. Instead, this wasn't even the top 5,000, but I'm taking it anyway because what the hell, I love it. Feels almost Dickinsonian to me. It's kind of depressing, but actually this poem is uplifting. Let's hear the whole thing. The trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said. Their recent buds relax and spread, and their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again and we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh in full grown thickness. Every May last year is dead, they seem to say, begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Okay, that's not one of Larkin's greatest. I would say it's even somewhat pedestrian, except for two lines, maybe three. Like something almost being said is a great line, as is their greenness is a kind of grief. And I do like no, they die too. But the best line is the last line or the last couplet. Last year is dead, they seem to say, begin afresh, afresh, afresh. I will remember that when I look at buds on trees. So I will say that of the list, only two others chose books that were on the Greatest books of all time list. Someone chose the Sherlock Holmes stories, which is 139th. And someone took 100 Years of Solitude, which, as I mentioned, already was fourth on the list. I suspected that of the ones in the top 10, that would be the one someone might pick. I didn't think Gatsby would be chosen. Or Ulysses. We look for certain types of books for comfort and spiritual uplift, mood lifting. Not just protein, but a bit of whipped cream somehow in the mix. But ultimately, these numbers don't tell us too much, do they? What matters more are what's in the books and what they do for us. I'll be remembering Larkin's reminder to begin afresh, afresh, afresh a long time. It'll be there for me when I go outside today and walk through the trees that are budding near me. And it'll be there for me next spring and the one after that. I'll do my best to remember that green can be a kind of grief. But that's a good thing. It means that even when we have the naked, frozen boughs on our tree of life, the empty and barren spots that we all must endure, there will be green too. Somewhere, something will tell us, will remind us, will command us to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Kimberly Lau and European Fairy Tales, starting now. Okay. Joining me now is Kimberly Lau, who is a professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she specializes in fairy tales, monster studies, popular culture, and 20th and 21st century women's fiction. She's here today to discuss her book, Specters of the Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale. Kimberly Lau, welcome to the History of Literature.
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Kimberly Lau
Thank you so much and thanks for having me.
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Jack Wilson
So you note in the introduction that the world of the fairy tale is astoundingly white, and that a reader picturing himself or herself in such a world might be struck by the fact that everyone around you is white. And yet, as I learned from your book, the first European collection of literary fairy tales collected by Giambattista Basile, the Tale of Tales, which goes back to Italy in the 1600s, it has several stories featuring black characters, slaves, an Allah lover, and so on. So I guess what we're looking at here or My overarching question is, how did we get from Basile to the present?
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Kimberly Lau
Right. I mean, in many ways, that's sort of the whole story of my book. Yeah, it's a great question.
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Jack Wilson
Might be a little unfair to ask that. Maybe we should. Maybe we should break that down into chunks.
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Kimberly Lau
No, it's great. I think it is a great question. And I would say we got to the white world of the fairy tale from this very rich world in Vasile's collection through a lot of metaphor and literary borrowing. And so this literary tradition of the fairy tale, the European fairy tale, was really built on itself. So there are several canonical collections. They continue to develop and pick up the stories from previous collections and what we would probably consider plagiarism today, but a lot of tight intertextual illusions and borrowings. But what we see is that the very explicit racial designations from Basile's collection become increasingly metaphorized in very similar kinds of stories over the centuries, until we end up where we are today. Where I think if I asked you or others to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a fairy tale world, you would really probably be struck by the fact that everyone around you that you imagine is pretty much white.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah. Now, is this. I mean, was. What was the impulse behind this? Was it one of. I mean, I could imagine almost a. I could look at this generously and wonder if maybe they were saying, well, instead of having black characters be the villain, we will turn them into a wolf, or we'll turn them into something that isn't as explicitly racist. But I'm guessing, given the time period, that that wasn't necessarily what they were doing. They weren't trying to remove racist tropes, but there was something else at work. So what exactly was happening, do you think?
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Kimberly Lau
Yeah, I try to make an argument that. I think several people want me to be making an argument where I'm sort of saying, look at all the racism and look at all the bias in these fairy tales, which I won't deny it's absolutely there. But the argument I'm trying to make is that ideas about race that changed over time, that changed over the centuries, changed by geographical location and by culture as well as time periods, that those ideas contributed to the ways that the fairy tales were rewritten and reimagined. So in Basile, you know, we have this moment where slavery is going from a system of sort of, we could call the spoils of war, to a system of human bondage, a much more systematic system of human bondage. At the same Time that color imagery was really beginning to become racialized and mapped on to certain kinds of people. And I think that's why we see these explicitly marked black slaves in the tale of tales. And so that's in the early 17th century. By the time we get to the late 17th century in France, we have many of the same stories, essentially, but they're retold with, like, you're saying, the same characters who are metaphorized often in animals, but not just any animals, animals that resonate with France's colonial mission of the time. It's imperial sort of fantasies, especially in what would have been called New France, what we know today as Canada, and then later in the middle of the 18th century in France into the Caribbean. And we see very different racializations even in the French fairy tales from the late 17th century, where the metaphors of animality are much more aligned with ideas about the noble savage to the middle of the 18th century, where those animal metaphors are more resonant with ideas about African. African Caribbean slaves, or African slaves who are brought to the Caribbean, to France's colonial outpost there, and just were seen as much more of a threat. And so those animal figures and the tales are treated much more differently.
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Jack Wilson
Right. So what, I mean, I guess my question is how. How deliberate was this? Or was. Do you see it as. As authors having a kind of agenda, or do you see it as just the culture, this is the way this was? The air that they breathed was. Let's, you know, let's focus on the whiteness of characters. And. And we'll. When we need a villain, we'll reach for something that we all agree is a villain, which can be, you know, some kind of other, some kind of far off villain or someone from a culture that's not like ours or that kind of thing. Do you attribute this to some individuals or do you think it's just kind of the society is moving in this direction?
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Kimberly Lau
I think it's probably a combination of both in different circumstances. So I think there were some authors who had individual kinds of experiences in the French context in the late 19th century. I write particularly about the tales of Marie Catherine Dulnois, and she was herself a travel writer. Travel writing was very popular during that era. And so I think she was informed by ideas about the new world and ideas about travel and transport to these fantastic locations. But then when we get to the 19th century, for instance, and the Brothers Grimm and we look at that collection, I think, and we have textual evidence of the ways that the Grimm edited their tales over seven editions of their collection. So we can see the specific ways that they embroidered the tales. And I think there we can see some, a little bit more intentionality, particularly around antisemitism. And the way that antisemitism in the Grimm's collection, I argue is aligned with anti black racism.
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Jack Wilson
So we can. I mean, the way we often think about this today is one of representation and that the problem with having sort of all white fairy tales or children's stories is that there are some children who grow up and they don't see anyone like themselves in the stories. And maybe the only time they do that character is either a sidekick or some kind of stereotypical representation or the villain. And one way that the Disney's of the world today try to address this is they'll recast it and they'll say, well, here's a story, but we could have a black actor or a mixed race character in the cartoon. The cartoon, you can draw it any way you want and we can kind of recast. And these are still good stories, but we'll just make them so they're less exclusively white or problematically white. And it sounds like what you're saying is you see more than that in these fairy tales. You see a kind of politics or ideology baked into it that wouldn't change necessarily just by having different actors play the part, so to speak.
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Kimberly Lau
Yes, I think that's right. Although I do think that trying to expand the field of representation in visual productions or even in illustrated volumes is not a bad thing, for sure. And I'm really interested in that because with Disney's efforts to do that, there's been also huge backlash, as I'm sure you know. So when Disney made a live action version of the Little Mermaid, they cast Halle Berry, I think is her name, I always get her confused with Halle Berry, but a young African American actress as the Little Mermaid. And there was huge backlash. And right now there's a Disney live action Snow White with Rachel Ziegler and there's a lot. Earlier on there was a lot of similar backlash about how people thought she was too dark skinned to place no white. Now the controversy seems to be a little bit more about some of the things that herself has said about the other changes to the narrative sort of making Snow White a little bit less of a passive character and making the film a little bit less of a traditional romance story. But to your question, I think that there are many ways in which whiteness is embedded in the structure of the fairy tale because the accumulation of these ideas over time. So, for instance, we have many, many stories about a false bride and a true bride, or the good girl and the bad girl, or, you know, the kind or the unkind girl. And those are completely marked by whiteness and blackness. So the true and the false bride, there are versions where there it's actually called the white bride and the black bride. And the black bride is often made black, either literally by God because of some transgression that she's done, or she's made figuratively black by tarring or having some other, you know, metaphoric but darkening happened to her. And so those kinds of stories, it would be very difficult to. You could certainly change the actors or the people portraying them, but the deep belief of the goodness associated with the white characters and the badness associated with the black characters, I think is part of the structure of many of these tales.
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Jack Wilson
Right. And the kind of. I don't know if cruelty is the right word, but, you know, the victory of the ruling class or the, you know, not wanting to disturb the status quo and the kind of embedded colonialism that's often in the stories, it seems like they can almost be like a how to guide for maintaining your superior position in the world.
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Kimberly Lau
Right, That's a great point. I certainly talk about how the whiteness of the European fairy tale contributes to the ongoing sort of hegemony of whiteness in Western culture. But there are, like, you're suggesting very specific kind of how tos in some ways. And so this part I don't talk about in the book, but they're excellent scholarship on how the Nazis used the Grimm's collection, for instance, for those very purposes to get people to understand this is how you behave. This is how you respect authority, this is how you fall in line. And then here are these other ideologies that also are consistent with that. And so in many ways, the Grimms was almost like a mini primer for national socialism.
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Jack Wilson
Right. So let's talk about a couple of alternatives that we might have to the kind of Grimm's Fairy tales and that whole tradition of European fairy tale. One is the Arabian Nights. And you kind of raised the question for me of what would it be like if we viewed the tales in the Arabian Nights as the fountainhead of our understanding of fairy tales? How would that change our perspective on fairy tales and how they're viewed in our culture?
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Kimberly Lau
I think that is such a great question, and it's really complex because the night as we know them, and that's how people in the west were introduced to them. Was really through an already Orientalist frame. So the first version that were familiar with. Of course, they existed in parchment and in fragments and in manuscripts and things. But they were, we could say, loosely say, translated, they were brought to a European readership by Antoine Gallon in the late 17th century and really embroidered and elaborated specifically for Western readers, for French readers first. And there was already a mindset about the Orient. He had been stationed in, quote, unquote, the Orient. So he had some familiarity. And then he also collected some stories and he retold those. And so the Arabian Nights as we know it now is all part of that legacy. And so it's hard to separate out what would it be like if that were the fountainhead of our tradition. And that Orientalist frame is, I would argue, just a different kind of racialization. And I don't know that the history would be all that different. The Arabian Nights did lead to another kind of trajectory, which is called the Orientalist tale. So this carried through until, I would say, probably the late 19th, early 20th century. But some people would still argue that even contemporary writers who are trying to write in this fairy tale, like language, but with that subject matter, are still reproducing the Orientalist tale.
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Jack Wilson
And what are the features of the Orientalist tale?
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Kimberly Lau
Sort of the mystique of this other culture, the kind of romance of it, the sort of almost a romance of a different kind of violence, perhaps. Right. But one that seems to be naturalized or understandable. You know, you'll remember from the Arabian Nights, the frame tale involves a sultan who's been cuckolded and so then marries a different woman every night and kills her. Right. And that's what leads to Scheherazade coming forward to tell the stories. And so it's that kind of death thought. Right. Or that kind of extreme action and violence that would seem ostensibly so foreign to us in the west, but kind of romanticized. Right. Or kind of naturalized as not unusual for the East. Right. Idea of multiple wives of, you know, the harem, the magic, the genies, the gins, we would call, you know, so those kinds of elements, the kind of mystery and mystique of the setting, I think, which is a slightly different kind of trajectory than ones with fairies and animal helpers and the ones that we're more familiar with in the European fairy tale tradition.
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Jack Wilson
Right, okay. Let me ask you about another work that I wasn't as familiar with, which is the colored fairy books. Who prepared these and when and what exactly were they?
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Kimberly Lau
Great. I love this question, because the colored Fairy books are attributed to Andrew Lang. His name is on all of them. And it was a series of, well, collections of fairy tales, very broadly defined. He had some classical myths in there, as well as some other kinds of stories, but for the most part, he called them fairy tales. They were produced in the late 19th century and then into the early 20th century, I believe. The last one was published in 1910. And the reason why I say they're attributed to him and his name is on them, which is all true. And he was the editor. It was really his wife, Nora Lang, who did most of the work. And he acknowledges this in several of the introductions or the forwards to these collections. She did a number of translations. She was fluent in half a dozen languages, so she translated. But she also highly edited many of the tales specifically for children in the uk. They were. The Wangs were. He was actually Scottish, so, you know, from the United Kingdom. And they. He. Andrew Lang in one of the boards actually says Mrs. Lang edited these so that they would appeal to white readers. He's basically saying, like, she took out stuff that we know white readers wouldn't like, and she changed them to the taste of white people so that white people would like them. And because as the series went on, it included more and more tales that were being collected by early anthropologists, for instance, or missionaries. So tales coming from places like Africa, the South Pacific. Those are ones I think of in particular. Oh, also the northwest coast of North America. So some indigenous. Some were collected in indigenous languages. And they took these tales from often anthropological journals and then edited them for the taste of white people and especially white children. And I make an argument that this colored fairy book series was really a part of empire. So this was a moment when empire, you know, the British Empire, some felt, was beginning to wane. There was some anxiety about that. And this was a way to consolidate the British Empire by universalizing the fairy tale and making it sort of a part of the British tradition that children could have and could collect. And it's very consistent with this other practice of the time, which is the children's geography primers. And Nora Lang had produced one of these herself. And the geography timers were basically teaching children, this is how this tiny island nation conquered the world. And here's a little bit of facts that you might need to know about some of the other people around the world. And they would have these very strange ethnographic tidbits, like, these people are industrious and they're good shipbuilders, and they eat each other. You Know, like totally random kind of crazy things. And Lang too, in his board uses similar ethnographic bits like that. So he'll say he really believed in this social evolutionary theory. So he felt like, okay, the stories that we have that we tell as fairy tales, other people in the world now savages, tell them and they believe them. They believe that magic, they believe that people could really become invisible or have these magical powers. And as they evolved over time, they'll go through the same evolutionary, cultural, slash, social, evolutionary steps that we Britons have gone through and they'll reach the similar level of civilization that we're at. So he would talk about aboriginal Australians or African children or native children, and he would say these things like they're filthy or they, you know, eat each other, or they're not allowed to touch each other, brothers and sisters can't talk to each other, but in very passing, kind of one or two sentences and that's all. And so this was kind of the framework for the colored fairy book.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah, it's really incredible when you think about it, because, I mean, is there no awareness on his part that if you were to take the European fairy tales and ascribe a literal belief in them to the people who are telling them and the children who are listening to them, that Europeans would seem just as gullible or naive or primitive or whatever word you want to use to believe in things like a girl could get swallowed by a wolf and a hunter could come along and chop the wolf open and the girl and her grandmother could emerge and live happily ever after.
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Kimberly Lau
Right? Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of blind spots among the editors and collectors and writers of these fairy tales.
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Jack Wilson
Right. But you can see how it works. You can see, I mean, he sounds like, he's explicit about it to kind of say, well, we're going to read these for children and say, aren't you glad that you live where you live in a place that's so enlightened and isn't, you know, as, as foolish or, or as backwards as those, those far off people? And it, it can help train you to, to not question the system and to not say, well, is this really fair? Is this, is this just, Are we stealing from these countries? Are we taking something that isn't ours? You know, you grow up thinking, well, this is the way it is and it's good that it's this way and someday they'll catch up to us.
- [41:32]
Kimberly Lau
Absolutely, absolutely. 100% what you're saying. And that's the rationale in my, you know, in my thinking for how these collections like the Children's Geography Primers, authorized or justified European British Empire, right. The the continual need to civilize these other groups of people, right, who weren't so fortunate to have cleanliness and soap. And you know, soap was a big thing during the 19th century as a big agent of colonialism. So this idea that, you know, very paternalistic obviously, that Britain, this tiny nation, had to this tiny island nation, you know, go out and save the the world or bring civilization to the rest of the world.
- [42:37]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and we're going to talk about a couple of stories that Kimberly Lau has chosen for us. If you are interested in conversations that go beyond the page, then I've got the perfect recommendation. The Webby Award winning podcast Totally Booked with Zibby formerly called Moms don't have Time to Read Books. It's hosted by Zibby Owens, the powerhouse bookstore owner and best selling author. Dubbed NYC's most powerful bookfluencer by Vulture, Totally Booked. It delivers daily interviews with acclaimed authors and storytellers, bringing you insightful, engaging conversations you won't want to miss. Not sure where to start? Check out the recent episode with award winning Irish author Colm McCann where he discusses his latest novel Twist, which explores undersea fiber optic cables responsible for transmitting 95% of global communications and how this hidden infrastructure serves as a powerful metaphor for human connection and vulnerability. With Zibby, you're not just listening, you're part of the story, so don't miss out. Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on your favorite podcast app right now at the Home Depot Shop. Spring Black Friday savings up to 35% off select appliances plus free delivery from top brands like Samsung. Get tech you can trust to simplify your daily routines from all in one washer dryers to smart refrigerators with family hub. Upgrade your kitchen and laundry with trusted technology from Samsung, ranked number one in customer satisfaction. Get Spring Black Friday appliance savings and free delivery now at the Home Depot. Visit jdpower.comawards for more details. Free delivery on appliance purchase. Purchases of $396 or more offer valid April 3 through April 23 US only C store online for details. This episode is brought to you by Chevy Silverado. When it's time for you to ditch.
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Kimberly Lau
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Jack Wilson
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Kimberly Lau
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Jack Wilson
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Kimberly Lau
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Jack Wilson
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- [44:53]
Kimberly Lau
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- [44:55]
Jack Wilson
You'll just be getting started. Visit chevy.com to learn more. Okay, we're back. So, Kimberly, you suggested a couple of stories for us to look at in particular. I don't know if I should call them favorites of yours, or maybe we can, but we should drill down into what that means. Are they favorites because you like reading them the most or because they're the best at exemplifying certain themes and issues that you find interesting to talk about?
- [45:35]
Kimberly Lau
That's a really great question. I think they're favorite because of some of the action that trying to tap in these tales that distinguishes them from more conventional romantic fairy tale stories. And I have to say I. I came to literary European, literary fairy tales through Angela Carter's work. And two of my favorite of her adaptations or retellings are the Bloody Chamber story and what I call the Wolf trilogy, the last three stories in her collection, the Bloody Chamber. And those align with Bluebeard and Red Riding Hood. So I think that's part of it also.
- [46:21]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay, so let's start with Bluebeard. What is the story there?
- [46:30]
Kimberly Lau
So Bluebeard is a little bit of a gruesome story. It's about a widow who has two daughters. And, you know, she's in pretty bad financial straits. And this sort of outcast, very wealthy outcast, comes to her and offers to marry one of the daughters. And he has them over and entertains them. And the younger daughter thinks, okay, that might not be so bad. He's quite wealthy. And really the. His most defining feature is that he has this blue beard. So she marries him and moves into this enormous mansion. And he quite soon after has to go away on business, I guess. And he says, I have to. I have to leave. And I'm leaving you in possession of the keys to all of everything in this castle, and it's all yours. But here's this one key to this one room. Do not use it. Do not go in there, you know, And. And he goes away. And the girl, the young woman explores the castle and, you know, eventually her curiosity gets the better of her. And she goes into the forbidden room. And what she finds there are all these corpses, presumably his former wife. And there's blood pooled all around the floor. And she's so frightened, she drops the key. And then she picks it up and runs out of the room. And she tries to wipe it off, but the blood won't come out of the key. And at the same moment, Bluebeard returns from his travels and says, give me the keys. And he sees the key and he knows that she's been in the chamber. And he says, go prepare yourself. I'm going to kill you. And she says, you know, let me pray first or let you know. And he says, okay, so go prepare yourself. And she goes up into this tower, ostensibly to pray, but she calls to her sister, sister Anne, sister Ann, and the sister miraculously comes. And apparently there are two brothers they accompany and they come and they kill Bluebeard and they save the girl. And she uses all of his wealth then to procure military appointments for the brothers and also to marry her sister and herself. Well, so that's how she uses the money. And then in Perot's version, which is the version that most people know, there are two morals. And the first moral is about female curiosity. Basically, like, women are just so curious and they. That gets them in trouble. It's a real problem. And the second moral is, wow, this guy seems really violent and has an outside reaction to this transgression. But that's way in the past and men aren't like that anymore, mostly because women are so nagging, get on their cases so much that they couldn't be so violent anymore. So both morals end up being criticisms of women, even though the second one seems like it might be trying not to be that.
- [49:52]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, yeah. I was so struck by these. These twin morals. I mean, as you said, I mean, the story really is about curiosity. It's like the. I mean, we're. It's like we're back with Eve in the garden. It's. Here's one room I don't want you to go into. And by the way, here's the key to that room. I'm going to leave that with you as well. And you know that it's this moral of curiosity. He says curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures. The moment it is satisfied, it ceases to exist. And it always proves very, very expensive. But it's a weird thing to sort of put the blame on her for her curiosity when the guy has got corpses that are hidden in this room. I mean, you could say that curiosity was. Was a good thing to learn the truth or, you know, before he had a chance to make her the next victim. And then. Although I guess there is this implication of, well, he would only kill her if she proved herself unable to resist the temptation of going, you know, he was punishing her curiosity. But that's a strange thing to kind of credit him with.
- [50:59]
Kimberly Lau
Right. And what about the first wife?
- [51:01]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right, right. And the very first one. The second moral is, is it is so strange that it sort of says no modern husband would dare be. Dare to be half so terrible. Nor to demand of his wife such an impossible thing as to stifle her curiosity. I mean, it makes it seem like women are just out of control with curiosity and you just can't get in the way or they can't resist it. They have no power over this powerful curiosity they have. It's. It's like humans are curious. It's just a natural. But people have it in natural proportions. You know, some people have an excess of it maybe, but that could be boys as well as girls. But then he says, be he never so quarrelsome or jealous, he'll toe the line as soon as she tells him to. And whatever color his beard might be, it's easy to see which of the two is the master. And so it's.
- [52:01]
Kimberly Lau
It's kind of like women are so nagging.
- [52:04]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And in the good old days, you know, men could kill their wives, lock them up, and if a wife was too curious as to open that door, she'd get what was coming to her as well. But here in the modern day, women have taken over again and, boy, you just couldn't even keep a good secret. Like having killed all of your former wives from. From these incredibly curious and powerful women.
- [52:32]
Kimberly Lau
Exactly. Yeah. It's such a warped story. It really is. And the morals are really what make it so interesting to me and such a fascinating story. But I think one of the other things that I love about it that makes it, I guess we could say one of my favorites is that she does transgress. She doesn't follow the rules or his authority. And in the end, she actually does quite well for herself. Right. She's rewarded ultimately for that. So, yeah, I like that story a little bit. You know, it's gruesome and violent and terrible. And yet she prevails. Yeah.
- [53:14]
Jack Wilson
Now this one seems to me to be much more about gender than about race. And maybe a kind of moral of trying to get little kids not to ask so many questions or something. And it has commentary on curiosity. But I did see something that I wanted to ask you about, which was there is this moment where Bluebeard, at first, everyone is kind of suspicious of Bluebeard because he's got this kind of shaky track record with his previous wives that have gone missing. But then he comes in with all of his wealth, and he's offering himself up to these daughters. And it said everything went so well that the youngest daughter began to think that the beard of the master of the house was not so very blue after all, that he was, all in all, a very fine fellow. And it kind of made me wonder if you would look at that and say that this is telling a society, beware of the other. You know, beware of the stranger who might come from another place and look differently from me and you. And especially if they're bearing gifts or wearing fine clothes. That doesn't mean that they're not harboring some dark secrets.
- [54:32]
Kimberly Lau
Mm, absolutely. And I haven't done work on Bluebeard, but Bluebeard in the late 18th and 19th century was also represented as a quote unquote Turk and with a scimitar and very orientalized ways in tantamines and in chat books and things like that. So Bluebeard was racialized after this moment when of Perot's story. But there's also this kind of folk idea or folk belief that when certain dark complected men have, like a five o'clock shadow, it's called a Bluebeard, apparently. So I think there may be some slight racialization there. And I, like I said, I haven't done work on this, and I'd have to trace it into the historical French context as well. But I was also talking to another folklorist, and she was telling me that. And Iceland, as well as in Scotland, where she had traveled and where there are a lot of sheep. And they were looking at sheep and wool, that the sheep with the black wool are called blue. And so there. There is this association between the blue beard and some kind of, like, black wooliness and things like. And also dark complected men. So I think you're absolutely right to cite that line. Right. That's suggesting, like, this person is probably a foreigner. Right. And became less so seeming as his wealth or as the youngest daughter got to know him. Right. If we're doing a more generous reading of the younger daughter. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're totally right there.
- [56:14]
Jack Wilson
And of course, it's the youngest daughter, the one who doesn't know anything, or the one who's the easiest to persuade because she's young and naive. Okay, so let's move to Little Red Riding Hood. You actually had sent me a couple of versions of this to read. One was Charles Perrault and one was the Brothers Grimm. So I think everybody is probably familiar with the story, but what are the differences between the Perrault version and the Brothers Grimm version.
- [56:46]
Kimberly Lau
Sure. I think the biggest differences, I would say, are in the opening in the Grimm's version, where the mother is explicitly saying, don't do this, don't do that, don't do this. Right. Go off to Grandma's house, but don't leave the path. Don't dilly dally, don't do anything else. Whereas in the Perot version, she just sends her off to Grandma's house with. Just off you go with the cake and the pot of butter. And then at the end, of course, which you've already referenced. So in the Perot version, they go through the ritual questions, and then the wolf gobbles up Little Red Riding Hood, and that's the end of the tale. And then there's a moral. All of Perrault's tales have morals. And there's a moral about staying on the path and being a good girl and all that. In the Grimm's version, the wolf first eats the grandmother, then gobbles a Little Red Riding Hood, and then falls asleep, snoring and snoring so loudly that the hunter thinks, oh, I better check on the old woman who's snoring so loudly and goes in and I guess, assumes what has happened. I don't know how. And so carefully cuts the belly open. And then, as you mentioned, out pop Granny and Little Red, wholly intact, and they fill the wolf with stones. And as he tries to run away, of course he's full of stones, and he dies. And then they all live happily ever after. Yeah.
- [58:08]
Jack Wilson
I'm so struck by the Perrault version. Again, the moral that it has. It is really interesting to read these stories and to. You know, we're so used to reading them or recalling them and then having our academic brain kick in and say, oh, well, you know what that was all about? That they were trying to tell little girls to be obedient and little girls not to, you know, that they should be chaste and they should not fall for the slick tongues of the handsome young men that were gonna be coming and trying to steal their virtue and. And so on. But we do all that work for ourselves. And here, Perrault, he does it for us. He basically. He says it straight out. And then what's interesting is you can read that. And when you read it, after reading the story, it becomes clear just how didactic the story is. And as you disagree, maybe you disagree with the moral and think, well, this is kind of absurd. It makes you realize the story was pointing us Toward this, the story is absurd and we're being spoon fed this lesson. I mean, in this one, Perrault says, the moral says that there are real wolves with hairy pelts and enormous teeth, but also wolves who seem perfectly charming, sweet natured and obliging, who pursue young girls in the street and pay them the most flattering attentions. These are the most dangerous beasts of all. It's like saying, you know, stay home and be wary of men.
- [59:48]
Kimberly Lau
Absolutely. And Perrault tales were also read out loud in salons and in court. And my colleague Christine Jones has done a beautiful reading of the French. That word for street is actually ruel, and it refers to a street, but it also refers to a small space near, like a bed or a couch where people would have been reclining in a salon. And so it has even another resonance that I wasn't aware of before I read Christine's work, where it's really a very specific warning to young women in aristocratic society too, where these wolves are especially prevalent. Yeah, I thought that was a beautiful reading and thing for me to learn.
- [60:38]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, yeah. Now I guess in some ways, I mean, we kind of, we chafe a little bit at the idea of, you know, that a young woman's job is to protect her virtue at all costs and that kind of thing. But. But when you think of it that way in terms of a French court reading things to one another, I'm thinking of John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons. And I think, well, actually it might be good if people were warning themselves against a guy like that.
- [61:07]
Kimberly Lau
Right, right, absolutely.
- [61:09]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so Little Red Riding Hood has an incredible number of versions from other cultures. And do we have the original tale or are you aware of sort of an Ur version of the story?
- [61:29]
Kimberly Lau
I don't know if there's an Ur version, but there is a big oral tradition. And the tale that we're most familiar with from European oral tradition is this one that's often called the story of the grandmother. And it involves again, an encounter with a wolf. There's no Red Hood usually, but it's essentially the same story. The girl is off on her way to grandmother's house and she encounters the wolf. And they have an exchange. But he says in all of the versions, what path are you going to take? The path of the pins or the path of the needles. And whichever one she says and she says tends to say the 1. The path of pins. He takes the other, gets to granny's house first, kills the grandmother, but cuts up her flesh and drains some of her Blood into a bottle. And he puts that on the. In the pantry. And then he puts her clothes on and gets in bed. And when the girl arrives, she comes in and he says, eat some of that meat that I have over there and drink some of that wine. And there is a cat in the cottage who says, a slut is she, who eats the flesh of her grandmother and drinks the blood of her grandmother. And then it goes on to the questions, you know, the ritual questions.
- [62:53]
Jack Wilson
What big eyes you have and that kind of thing.
- [62:55]
Kimberly Lau
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:56]
Jack Wilson
What big teeth you have.
- [62:57]
Kimberly Lau
Yes, all of that. She pretends that she has to urinate, you know, so he ties the string to her leg, and she goes outside and she ties it to a tree, and she runs home, and he chases her once he figures out what happens. But she usually makes it home in time. There was an anthropologist who did some absolutely fantastic ethnographic work in the regions in France where this tale was primarily collected. And it turns out that young women around the age of 15 are often apprenticing themselves to seamstresses. And then when they begin to be courted by boys, they will give them their pins as a sign that they're kind of hooked up with them, I guess, at dances and things like that. So Yvonne Verrier, who is the anthropologist who did this work, you know, has a whole analysis of this, the coming of age story where she meets the wolf slash man in the woods. But the path of pins and the path of needles then begins to make a lot more sense to us. Right, as something of specific cultural relevance and helps us make sense of the tale, too, as a story of maturation.
- [64:08]
Jack Wilson
Right. And what is the cognate of the tale that we get from China, Japan and Korea?
- [64:17]
Kimberly Lau
Yeah, it seems like a sort of a blend of Little Red Riding Hood and this other tale that we have. And I think it's called the Goat and the Kids, but it has a similar. Basically, in the Asian version, and there's a beautiful children's book called Lom Popo that was illustrated by Ed Young, who's a Chinese American painter. And it tells this story. Basically, the mother is leaving the house to go visit the grandmother and leave the children at home and says, don't open the door for anybody. And the wolf is nearby and overhears this. And as soon as the mother goes away, you know, tries to disguise itself and knocks on the door and says, let me in. It's your grandmother. And they're saying, no, mom. You know, our mom went to visit you, and she said, oh, well, you know, we must have brought our messages across, but I'm here now, so let me in. And they kind of start asking like, well, why is your voice so strange? And there's an excuse for that and put your hand, hand in the, through the door slot or whatever. Why is it so rough? You know, that's not what grandma hand feels like. And all this. And the oldest daughter figures out what's going on and so they trick the, the wolf and, and they say, oh, you know, there's this special nut, this ginkgo nut, and it will make you live forever, but it's at the top of the, this tree, so we're going to go pick some for you. So they all climb up there and the, the wolf finally figures out, oh wait, something fishy here and goes outside, really want saying, throw down some nuts. And they're saying, no, you have to come up here. But the wolves can't make it up. So they start, they throw down the rope and start pulling them up and they drop them halfway and they say, oh, you're too heavy for just me. Like two of us will try and they do it and they drop it again and then three of us will try and they have, they pull the wolf up and they drop it and then he finally dies. And so they come back down, they're safe, and the mother returns home. So that's that version that does seem to have some familiarity with Red Riding Hood.
- [66:22]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So why do you. What should we make of this, that these Little Red Riding Hood stories are so popular and so widespread?
- [66:33]
Kimberly Lau
That's a great question. I think in the Euro American context, in terms of the popularity, I actually think there's something about the kind of subconscious desire that we recognize or are the way that we subconsciously recognize maybe a desire between red and the wolf. And that seems kind of exciting. So that might be way off. I'm sure a lot of people might not like that is the reason why this is a popular story. But I feel like that's something there. And we see that in a lot of the illustrated history, the kind of flirtatious wolf. And Angela Carter really brings that out. And then of course, hers is a love story between the wolf and the girl. But the, the question of why is this a global tale? Like, I don't know, you know, I think there are in some ways we have these tale traditions all over the world. And I think it's part of at least what Andrew Lang tried to do to universalize the fairy tale as a genre by saying, look, we have this tale. And you have this tale all over the world. And so almost amalgamating certain tales that have similarities to a European tale tradition like Red Riding Hood. People have done this with Cinderella, too, where there may be, like, one or two features, like there's a lost slipper or print or maltreatment by a stepmother, which is pretty common across many cultures. And then there's this attempt to kind of universalize the fairy tale even as a genre where there might be native genres in other local cultures. And so I'm. I'm never quite sure the degree to which these tales did circulate, which they absolutely could have. Through trade and early travel and missionary work, they absolutely could have traveled and been adapted. And some of the themes are, I think we could say, common enough, you know, like, protect yourself against strangers and things like that and try to be clever. Now, they could also have originated. We see certain kinds of resonances, and we've done the work of putting them together in the same tradition. And I don't really. I've never really felt like I've had a good, satisfactory answer for that kind of question.
- [68:57]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So as someone who does this for a living and has a professional career that. That can benefit from your knowledge of fairy tales and just your. Your general intellectual curiosity and. And what it's doing for you. Do you feel like that gives you some agency over fairy tales and their power that you can kind of see behind them and. Or I'm wondering if you look at the. The sea of fairy tales out there and. And you think. But everybody is reading. Everybody's still reading them, and they don't understand them this way. They just read them and they kind of take these. Some of these crazy morals and. And it kind of. It's. You can only do so much, you know, that the fairy tales are. Are so powerful and ubiquitous that everybody is. Is. You know, we haven't mastered the fairy tale. The fairy tale, in some sense, has mastered us.
- [69:58]
Kimberly Lau
I think that's true. That's definitely true. For myself, I feel like, yeah, easy to deconstruct these. And they're so odd. You know, like, you and I were laughing about some of the details in them, and then when I teach this material, I sometimes say they are full of these odd details. But sometimes those odd details, when we read them in their historical and cultural moment, they can actually make sense. Right. That they help us decode what's going on there. Not. Not all the time, I think, like sewing this wolf up with stone. Well, first of all, cutting Them open with scissors and grandma and red pop out intact. You know, like, there's just oddities like that. But, you know, I guess my hope is that over time, people become more and more culturally savvy as readers or. Or storytellers. But I don't know, we're living in a moment where we're not really encouraging that much. So it's hard. You know, I. I do have students. I teach an intro to the fairy tale class, and they're constantly like, oh, my God, I. You know, never thought about this before. And I. It's completely mind blowing to them. And then I think, okay, well, if you have younger siblings or if. And when you have kids, maybe you'll have a different orientation to the fairy tales that you share with them. And, yeah, that's kind of all I can hope for it. You know, it's a monolith in some ways. Like, you're saying the fairy tale has really mastered us in a lot of ways. And. And I think right now we see in the culture wars there's so much resistance to any change. Right. That's the point I was making about the Disney live action versions. When you read the comments online after some of these news articles, it's like, this is. Why are we trying to ruin our childhood? And why all the wokeness around the. So there's absolutely such strong resistance to any change there.
- [72:02]
Jack Wilson
Mm. It's the reminiscent of the newscaster who said Santa Claus is white. He just is. Okay. Except that he doesn't exist, does he? Spoiler alert.
- [72:18]
Kimberly Lau
Right.
- [72:21]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [72:22]
Kimberly Lau
Well, I haven't heard that, but that's great.
- [72:25]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. A good place to start in all of us as we learn more about fairy tales and what's underneath them would be your book Specters of the Marvelous Race and the development of the European Fairy Tale. Kimberly Lau, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [72:43]
Kimberly Lau
Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun to talk with you. Marvel Studios Thunderbolts will take the world by storm.
- [72:59]
Jack Wilson
Yes.
- [73:01]
Kimberly Lau
There's some big right out there and.
- [73:03]
Jack Wilson
You'Re going to help me stop it.
- [73:04]
Kimberly Lau
Us.
- [73:05]
Jack Wilson
Why? You got some place to be on.
- [73:06]
Kimberly Lau
May 2nd Avengers, you're gone.
- [73:08]
Jack Wilson
No one's coming to save the day their time. I think we could be the people that are coming has come being the hero There is no higher calling. Let's do this.
- [73:19]
Kimberly Lau
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts only in theaters May 2nd. Get tickets now. Rated PG13. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. 24 chefs 24 culinary showdowns for 24 hours straight. Which chef will out cook, outpace, outlast the competition? No chef escapes the clock. Season Premiere 24 and 24 Last Chef Standing Sunday, April 2020 7th today see it first on Food Network Stream. Next day on Max.
- [74:03]
Jack Wilson
And finally today, Rolf Hellebust was here to talk about some Russian masters, those titans of the 19th century. After he and I talked about that and what made literature, Russian literature great, I asked him a special question. Would he answer with a favorite Russian writer or novel? Tolstoy, perhaps, or Pushkin? Where we headed for Crime and Punishment? Anna Karenina, maybe A short story by Chekhov like Gooseberries? Let's find out. Okay, we're joined now by Rolf Hellebest, author of the book How Russian Literature Became Great. Ralph, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [75:02]
Kimberly Lau
Okay, this is a scary question. We're all focusing on our mortality here, which makes me think, now the first thing that popped into my mind is I want to read a book entitled how to Get Reader Privileges at the Great Library of the Afterlife, which is sort of, you know, getting away from it, because that's assuming I will truffle off this mortal coil and then continue to read some. Some books in the great beyond. But if I have to talk about something that that's real. Oh, one thing that comes to mind. Oh, this is another sort of a tricky get out of jail free card. But James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake. Right. This great, impossible to read postmodernist masterpie. Why? Because it doesn't actually end the last sentence of that book. It ends halfway through the sentence and then the beginning of the book.
- [75:54]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So you could just keep reading that on a loop. Yeah.
- [75:58]
Kimberly Lau
If I have to expire after finishing reading Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, then it's sort of up to me when I say it finishes. And then I, you know, keep going around like that. It's sort of like, you know, Arabian Nights, Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade had to tell a story every night to avoid it being to avoid Executed by the King. I could keep reading Finnegan's Way. I suppose at some point I'd get tired of it and say, that's enough of my life. But it would be an interesting experiment.
- [76:27]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, that's interesting. Six, seven times through, maybe. And you feel like, all right, that's. I'm ready to go.
- [76:34]
Kimberly Lau
Well, I've managed once. I've managed once so far, so I certainly could do it again.
- [76:39]
Jack Wilson
You know, the first thing you said reminded me of that old Twilight Zone episode of the guy who all he wanted to do was read, and there's a. I think the nuclear bomb goes off or something, and he has broken glasses. And it's kind of like you can imagine thinking, oh, I must have arrived at heaven. I'm being taken to this wonderful library. And then someone's saying, you have no reading privileges. So actually, you haven't gotten to where you thought you would be. Okay. Ralph Hellevest, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [77:09]
Kimberly Lau
You're welcome.
- [77:16]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Kimberly Lau and Ralph Hellebust for joining me. Not a Russian after all. He went full Irish or Irishman in exile, at least. What's coming up? Oh, the craziness is flooding crazy town, people. I'll do my best to stay above the waterline or the crazy line, and I hope you will as well. I'll toss a few life preservers into the roiling seas in the form of podcast episodes. How does that sound? So here you go. As you paddle, your legs and arms furiously treading crazy as best you can, you can know that you'll have this on the way. Jane Austin. Mark Twain. Mark Twain again. Emily Bronte, John Keats, Herman Melville, some literature from North Korea, Arthur Conan Doyle and Amazing Worlds. I'm Jack Wilson, appreciator of Amazing Worlds. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. That finale of the Bachelor was ridiculous. Lest we forget this past season of Love is Blind. I know. At least there's always sex in the city to keep us warm and fuzzy at night.
- [78:55]
Kimberly Lau
Always watching it back 25 years later.
- [78:57]
Jack Wilson
Has been the best.
- [78:59]
Kimberly Lau
Mm. Why are we so obsessed with watching.
- [79:01]
Jack Wilson
People fall in love on tv? Every week on our podcast, two Black Girls One Rows, we break down your favorite TV shows centering modern dating, love, and relationships. Come ready to unpack the mess and have a laugh with us.
- [79:12]
Kimberly Lau
I'm Justine.
- [79:13]
Jack Wilson
And I'm Natasha. See you every week on all podcast platforms. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the news cycle, you are not alone.
- [79:21]
Kimberly Lau
I'm Emma Varvalucas, and along with Progress Network founder Zachary Carabell, I host what.
- [79:25]
Jack Wilson
Could go Right, a podcast that looks beyond the headlines to uncover progress happening.
- [79:29]
Kimberly Lau
In the world, even in difficult times.
- [79:32]
Jack Wilson
Each week, we sit down with experts.
- [79:34]
Kimberly Lau
To discuss today's biggest challenges without ignoring the hard stuff. We bring nuance, insight and a forward.
- [79:40]
Jack Wilson
Looking perspective to help make sense of the current moment. Fight the urge to do scroll. Tune in to what could go right instead. Wherever you get your podcasts.