Tag / Satire

by Edward Champion

Zuleika Dobson (Modern Library #59)

Max Beerbohm’s singular novel remains a lively satirical masterpiece, with its musings on romantic obsession probably just as relevant to our time as it was during its original 1911 publication.

(This is the forty-second entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Moviegoer.)

Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson — a wildly enjoyable and erudite sendup of romantic obsession that is astonishingly peerless and more than a little punk rock in its originality — was included on the Modern Library list, but this Beerbohm stumping was not without modest controversy. Judge William Styron — fulminating in the August 17, 1998 issue of The New Yorker — dismissed Zuleika (as well as The Magnificent Ambersons) as a “toothless pretender.” A novel in which nearly all of the characters commit mass suicide at the end is “toothless”? It does have me wondering if Styron ever dismissed Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre, and Martin Amis’s Money or what he would have made of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels or Alissa Nutting, Angela Carter, Anne Enright, or Mary Gaitskill at their fiercest. Styron was certainly right about Tarkington, who stands now with the sturdiness of a tray of blueberry muffins baked during the Obama Administration, left for decades on a kitchen island to attract generations of flies and rot into dowdy dust. Of Beerbohm, however, one can only conclude by this ridiculous and unwarranted dismissal that Styron was having a drunken or depressive episode.

As Beerbohm biographer N. John Hall has pointed out, this mustached satirist — who was friendly with Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Edmund Gosse — was brilliant enough to attract the attention of William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson singled out this passage:

Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid’s bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson’s cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of.

Of the “trifle,” Empson commended the ambiguity of not knowing whether to be charmed or appalled by the detail. Of the “No apple-tree” and “no wall of peaches” (and even, I append to Empson’s consideration, Beerbohm’s “not discreditable bow”), he praised Beerbohm’s negatives for casting doubt upon the lush imagery. Of “imitation-marble,” he rightfully asked whether Zuleika’s neck was imitating marble or imitating imitation marble. And he likewise called Zuleika’s professed beauty into question, pondering whether it was unique or conventional. Zuleika’s comely qualities are certainly impressionable enough to drive numerous Oxford students mad, leading many to commit suicide. Empson concludes his analysis by writing, “I hope I need not apologize, after this example, for including Mr. Beerbohm among the poets.”

Empson is recused. There are layers within layers here. And Zuleika Dobson is the rare satirical novel of this type that beckons you to read it again, if only to sort the real from the zany. Beeerbohm was a poet of the dandy comic strain — in addition to being a meticulously devilish satirist (“The Mote in the Middle Distance” is unsurpassed as the definitive sendup of Henry James’s hideously bloviated late career style), a formidable caricaturist, and an unexpected radio star in his later years. The language itself, with its recondite words (“chevelure” and “gallimufry”) and its potent phrases guaranteeing rich dopamine hits to anyone with true literary taste (“a dark upland of misrule,” “an anarchy of small curls”), surely reaches the heights of poetry. T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden were just two prominent poets who sang bountiful praises to this “prince of minor writers.”

Even so, Max Beerbohm’s legacy in 2025 is quite possibly in shakier eminence than the underappreciated and veritable genius Henry Green. If Green was a “writer’s writer’s writer,” then surely Beerbohm is a “writer’s writer’s writer’s writer,” enjoyed only by those of us who still schlep dogeared paperbacks of John Barth and Robert Coover and who revere perverse and playful postmodernism even as we feel the hairs bristle on the backs of our necks as some doltish Goodreads sniper targets anyone with bold and subversive taste within their hopelessly unadventurous crosshairs. Even so, Beerbohm is still nestled enough in the canon to have inspired a high schooler to opine last month that she found the narration shift near the novel’s end to be “excitingly strange.” Let us not forget that great literature, even works published more than a century ago, can often be potent enough to stir vital and newfound passion within the young. And in our presently bleak epoch, we need all the good faith exuberance we can get.

That sudden transition to first-person after so many close third-person passages is indeed a thrill. I would likewise contend that the men who get so worked up over Zuleika — to the point of coveting a desire to unalive themselves over her — are still reflected today within the mythical “male loneliness epidemic” served up by wildly obnoxious MAGA incel types as the casus belli for their failure to find any woman who will endure their incessant mansplaining and their monstrous entitlement. Zuleika is rightfully bored by these hopped up doofuses and Beerbohm serves up some dependable zingers over how graphene-thin their souls are (intriguingly, the emphatic allcaps is in the original):

And oh, the tea with them! What have YOU been doing all the afternoon? Oh John, after THEM, I could almost love you again. Why can’t one fall in love with a man’s clothes? To think that all those splendid things you have on are going to be spoilt–all for me. Nominally for me, that is.

And unlike prolix and condescending nitwits like Arnold Bennett (his reputation rightfully destroyed by Virginia Woolf, with only imperious Tory scumbags like Philip Hensher eager to embrace this ancient sexist fiction better used for lining the bottoms of birdcages), Beerbohm is also surprisingly forward-thinking in 1911 when it comes to Zuleika seeing no difference between older men and youth who “fatuously prostrate to her,” inuring her of any deference she could possibly feel for them. At the end of the day, Zuleika, like so many of us, just wants someone to love. And when she does go gaga over the Duke, Beerbohm describes her soul “as a flower in its opetide.” Yet this is a “love” rooted on the Duke’s physical appearance. She is more transfixed by the “glint cast by the candles upon his shirt-front.” And Beerbohm doesn’t stop there. He compare the two pearl buttons on the Duke’s shirt to “two moons: cold, remote, radiant.”

It’s tempting to rope in Zuleika Dobson with Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. While the two novels are entirely different in tone and sprang from the two writers observing wildly contrasting social milieus, they are both strangely mesmerizing about that one singular feeling that hasn’t yet been hammered out of the human race, even as our dating app age appears primed to reach a natural close: the mad claptrap rush of superficial attraction followed by an obligation to care for an increasingly wilting flower perceived to have lost its bloom. If anything, the 21st century has revealed that all of the social media layers intended for “connection” only buttress the primal superficiality that lurks beneath us all when it comes to matters of the heart and loins. It is the failure to consider some lover or this week’s main character as a palpable human being. True love — predicated on a physical, emotional, and intellectual connection of substance and depth — cannot hope to push past the solipsistic D.H. Lawrence nonsense that remains in place among many Feeld and Fetlife users today. Zuleika Dobson reminds us of the vital need for coruscating wordsmiths to send up this selfish stupidity from time to time, if only to preserve some hope for those who remain committed to the attenuating possibilities of real and enduring romance and the fulsome belonging that naturally emerges from it.

Next Up: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence!

by Edward Champion

Main Street (Modern Library #68)

Sinclair Lewis railed against institutional trappings and landed a Nobel Prize for it. But does his work hold up more than a century later?

(This is the thirty-third entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The House of Mirth.)

Evelyn Waugh, Erskine Caldwell, Iris Murdoch, Nathanael West, George Orwell, Joseph Heller, James Joyce, Rebecca West. They — and so many other writers — were far nimbler in their shellacking of institutional norms than Sinclair Lewis ever was. Yet it was Lewis who won the Nobel Prize. And they didn’t. Why? Likely because the Nobel Prize Committee had it in for Edith Wharton and the Norwegian cultural oligarchs may have secretly believed they were correcting a “wrong.” Just nine years before, Lewis quietly seethed after the Pulitzer Prize Board changed its mind and awarded the Fiction Prize to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence instead of Main Street. It was an appropriate correction. Not only is The Age of Innocence a far superior novel to Main Street, but this was also the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded to a woman. And Edith Wharton could write Sinclair Lewis’s wino ass under the table. (Meet me in a coffeehouse and I will argue this point for hours! I am Team Wharton all the way!) We also know from Hermione Lee’s biography that Wharton, who was tremendously gracious and got along with nearly everyone, became disappointed in Lewis after he revealed himself for the self-serving drunk he truly was. She wrote to Gaillard Lapseley that Lewis was “utterly unperceiving, & frankly interested only in the sale of Arrowsmith! What a queer product — for he really is an artist, though he is so unaware of it.”

Wharton was being kind. Sheldon N. Grebstein suggested that Lewis’s clear disinterest in style is one of the reasons why he is not more widely read today. And even Grebstein, who was in the tank for Lewis, pointed out that the Minnesota bard was not exactly your goto guy when it came to unpacking the complexities of human behavior. (Main Street, in particular, fails on this front. More anon.) But Grebstein also held up this absence of eclat as a virtue, for Lewis’s primordial approach liberated him to explore chance and contrivance. And when his id was hitting the right targets, he could be just as efficiently brutal as any twentieth century writer. (Lewis’s line in Elmer Gantry about the preacher flunking Greek, but winning a ten dollar prize for “Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt” is a genuinely funny one.) Perhaps this is one big reason why Gore Vidal declared Lewis a romantic.

But ultimately Sinclair Lewis’s visceral qualities are often vitiated by his limited understanding of human behavior. Jealousy is one of the cornerstones to the Sinclair Lewis formula. Martin Arrowsmith hates the starry-eyed men who fawn over his wife, as well as the success of his associates. In his 1930 Nobel lecture, Lewis was to invoke jealousy as one salient reason for American literature being poorly regarded in Europe. In his biography Rebel from Main Street, Richard R. Lingeman makes a persuasive case that Lewis’s late-life romantic relationship with Marcella Powers was cemented in jealousy. It’s certainly true that jealousy can take you far in life. Sure, you may end up looking and behaving like Emperor Palpatine near the end of your days. And you probably won’t have a sense of humor. And countless people will secretly hate you even after you achieve a modicum of fame and renown. But, by Jove, you tripled down on your reach and you got somewhere! And in Lewis’s case, it landed him a Nobel and a slot on the Modern Library list.

Lewis’s canonical “importance” has been greatly inflated because Lewis cloaked his privilege in Midwestern roots. Even those who were enlisted to stump for Lewis in his prime did so with great reluctance. (In 1961, Mark Schorer wrote a Lewis biography for the money and dreaded every minute of it.)

To my mind, Lewis’s strongest novels are Babbit, Elmer Gantry, and the underrated It Can’t Happen Here. All three of these books document the peculiarly American dangers of obsession and conformity. Read this triptych today and you feel that Lewis was writing from a place of great urgency. Read his other work and you will find slipshod prose (Lewis was an alcoholic and it has been suggested by a few scholars that he wrote most of Arrowsmith completely blotto), rambling and often incoherent narratives (particularly in his later work), and wildly inconsistent quality. To write well, Lewis needed beastly instinct and emotional angst. And when he didn’t have that, he floundered along with bloat and bitterness.

Sadly, Main Street is the only Lewis volume represented on the Modern Library list. And the unfortunate truth is that this is a vastly overesteemed, doughty, and ponderous volume — not entirely without merit — that will surely fade from public memory by the middle of the 21st century. Its attempts at Minnesota vernacular feel belabored rather than felt. (“W a’n’t it in 1979?” “Why no ‘twa’n’t.” Yeah, whole pages like that.) Yes, Carol Kennincott does try to bring culture and progressive values to a town steeped in bland vanilla values. But her calls for revolution are unpersuasive:

We want our Utopia now — and we’re going to try our hands at it. All we want is — everything for all of us! For every housewife and every longshoreman and every Hindu nationalist and every teacher. We want everything. We sha’n’t get it. So we sh’n’t ever be content —

Frankly I’ve heard more convincing platitudes from some “mic check” kid at a protest

Granted, Lewis is very good at showing how the town of Gopher Prairie subsumes Carol’s identity and erodes her standards. These uneducated Caucasian hicks — the great grandparents to today’s right-wing morons who rapturously pay attention to Tucker Carlson and other hate merchants with a bafflingly big draw when not donning their red hats and fascist paraphernalia and claiming to be victimized by critical race theory even as they espouse racism — truly believe that they are remarkable (Mrs. Ole Jenson’s “thoughts” on Shakespeare are the apotheosis of incuriosity and are truly more pitiful than a poorly sourced Wikipedia entry) and that they are “just as good as anybody in Minneapolis.” Midway through the novel, Carol and her husband actually make a trip to Minneapolis (the only place to see happening new plays and buy fashionable new threads) and we see just how residing so long in a backwards town has altered her:

She felt rustic in this once familiar city, after a year an a half of Gopher Prairie. She was certain that Kennincott was taking the wrong trolley-car. By dusk, the liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing-shops, and lodging-houses on lower Hennepin Avenue were smoky, hideous, ill-tempered. She was battered by the noise and shuttling of the rush-hour traffic. When a clerk in an overcoat too closely fitted at the waist stared at her, she moved nearer to Kennincott’s arm. The clerk was flippant and urban. He was a superior person, used to this tumult. Was he laughing at her?

As someone who spent half his life slowly migrating his way from the colorless doldrums of the California Central Valley to the thrilling possibilities of New York City, Carol’s uncertainty and anxieties truly resonated with me. When Lewis juxtaposes Carol against the relentless judgment of Gopher Prairie, Main Street is good. Carol can’t even have a quiet moment of joy to herself without inciting the judgmental scrutiny of being a doctor’s wife. She can’t be anonymous. Her every move is written up with illiterate relish in the local newspaper. (These days, the libeling and shaming and speculation can now be found on the great hellscape of social media, where your residency in a big city or a small town no longer matters to the twisted hateful losers who condemn you for living a fun and interesting life clearly beyond their talent and initiative.)

Yet despite Lewis’s attempts to show how Carol is victimized for being a woman, the sad irony is that Carol is less of a character and more of an object. We really don’t have a strong sense of what attracts Carol to her husband Will other than his neck. (Look, I’m not going to kink-shame. But seriously? One of the interesting eccentricities about Main Street is its relentless neck imagery, applied equally to humans and horses. When Lewis preposterously described how Carol is attracted to “the last light brought out the planes of his neck, his flat ruddied cheeks, the side of his nose, the depression of his temples,” I laughed so hard on the subway that two otherwise indifferent New Yorkers shot me disapproving glances. Even accounting for the unconsummated lust that Carol is acting out in this late section of the novel, it’s abundantly clear that Lewis didn’t really understand what women are attracted to.) We are told at the start of one chapter about how Carol suddenly loves her husband Will — this mediocre scumbag who won’t even give her enough money to buy groceries — but why? Then when Carol pops out a baby, we are told that “she loved him with all the devotion and instinct at which she had scoffed.” Sinclair, buddy, put the bottle down and give us more than these superficial details!

I didn’t outright hate Main Street, but I was greatly disappointed by it. After a hundred pages of this, all the potshots at Gopher Prairie locals feel like Lewis shooting monkeys in a barrel. Sinclair Lewis either lacked the desire or the talent to portray small town people as anything other than caricatures. But three years ago, the town of Sauk Centre erected a statue to the man. And in the immediate wake of the book’s publications, many rural Minnesotans proudly called themselves “Main Streeters.” Either they missed the point of the book or, more likely, they never bothered to read it.

Next Up: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness!

by Edward Champion

The Day of the Locust (Modern Library #73)

Published eighty-three years ago, Nathanael West’s masterpiece is startlingly prescient about the trappings and contradictions of the American nightmare.

(This is the twenty-eighth entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: A Farewell to Arms.)

December 22, 1940 may be literature’s answer to July 4, 1826, the day in which John Adams rasped his last words on his deathbed. “Thomas Jefferson still survives,” he gasped, not knowing that Jefferson himself had passed away only five hours before. One hundred and fourteen years later, two towering literary titans, far more obscure in their time than Adams and Jefferson had been in theirs, met their end at a needlessly early age. On December 21, 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald collapsed inside a ground-floor apartment not far from the Sunset Strip at the age of 44. The alcohol had finally caught up with him. He believed himself a failure. He would never know that his tragically brief life and his coruscating work would be rediscovered only a handful of years later — not long after 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed to World War II servicemen. The next day, about two hundred miles southwest of Fitzgerald’s home, Nathanael West and his wife Eileen McKenney (whose sprightly spirit would be immortalized by her sister Ruth in a series of light but amusing New Yorker pieces later turned into a wildly successful stage show called My Sister Eileen) would be killed instantly in a car collision on their way back from Mexico. West was, by all reports, a notoriously awful driver and he was even younger than Fitzgerald. Just thirty-seven.

Both men had turned to screenwriting to stay afloat during the Great Depression. Both men had much to say about the traps and illusions of American life. But it would take longer for West to be reassessed and appreciated — in large part because he was arguably fiercer than Fitz with his fiction. He had his finger firmly on the troubling pulse of feral American life and he wasn’t afraid to use it with the other nine at his typewriter. In a short essay called “Some Notes on Violence,” West pointed to the idiomatic violence that had permeated every corner of printed media: “We did not start with the ideas of printing tales of violence. We now believe that we would be doing violence by suppressing them.” His razor-sharp satire featured philandering dwarves, skewered the hideous contradictions of gaudy Hollywood spectacle, and, in just one of many enthralling flashes of his grimly hilarious invention, depicted a dead horse serving as au courant decor at the bottom of a swimming pool. (In an age in which urine-drinking is prescribed as a COVID remedy and reality star Stephanie Matto makes $200,000 selling her farts in a jar, one wonders why the present fictional landscape doesn’t reflect our scabrous realities and why 85% of today’s gatekeepers are so hostile to such a necessary dialogue between fiction and life. But then this is the same universe in which Hanya Yanagihara’s excellent, quite readable, and wildly ambitious new novel, To Paradise, is framed by The New York Times in belittingly racist and sexist terms, assuaging an increasingly unadventurous bourgeois readership: “Can an Asian American woman write a great American novel?” (Well, of course, she can. Why even summon the rhetoric?))

West’s high point as a novelist was arguably The Day of the Locust — just as compact as Gatsby in its length and sentences, but more wryly surreal than ethereal. And he had a genius for fusing this talent with a theatrically visceral and often bleakly comic strain revealing the FOMO and desperate collective belonging at any vicious cost that one sees prominently among numerous Instagram influencers today. Consider this scene at a funeral:

He knew their kind. While not torch-bearers themselves, they would run behind the fire and do a great deal of the shouting. They had come to see Harry buried, hoping for a dramatic incident of some sort, hoping at least for one of the mourners to be led weeping hysterically from the chapel. It seemed to Tod that they stared back at him with an expression of vicious, acrid boredom that trembled on the edge of violence.

This is followed not long after by an old woman who shows up with “a face pulled out of shape by badly-fitting store teeth” whispering to “a man sucking on the handle of a home-made walking stick.” This close attention to background characters making do with either the remaining scraps they could cobble together or the insufficient products on sale at a store obviously sprang from the Great Depression and West’s own experience working at a hotel, where he undoubtedly observed a motley array of eccentrics and strange outliers. (Jay Martin’s excellent biography, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life, covers quite a bit of these hotel days and reveals West to be an impeccable bullshit artist in his life, wheeling deals to help other writers land rooms and constantly reinventing the details of his life to negotiate a failing capitalist system.) But West’s panoramic description also feels unsettlingly close to our present time, in which inflation, the supply chain, and an inept framework increasingly leaving Americans out in the cold produces the same plausible character types. And in another eerie parallel to the present, The Day of the Locust also includes a dismal romantic rival named Homer Simpson. The only song Homer knows is the national anthem

The novel follows Tod Hackett, an artist who has moved to Hollywood to find inspiration for what he hopes will be his masterwork painting, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” (I casually wondered if Rage Against the Machine’s album The Battle of Los Angeles took titular inspiration from West. But sadly no interviewer appears to have asked Zack de la Rocha and company this.) He swoons for Faye Greener after seeing her in the hall at a dismal complex called San Berdoo. But Faye can “only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her.” Tod harbors disturbingly intense and violent fantasies towards Faye. Is Tod mentally unbalanced? Or is this the inevitable byproduct of trying to find inspiration in a landscape of contradictions? West smartly leaves these questions open for the reader to infer.

One reads this masterpiece in 2022 greatly saddened by the possibilities of what West could have become. Would he have floundered like Erskine Caldwell or soured into a bitter reactionary like Evelyn Waugh? I don’t think he would have. West was committed to grim playful truth right out of the gate — as his scatologically driven first work, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, made abundantly clear. It says quite a lot about the bleak tenor of the prewar Depression period that so many wild and dark comic novelists flourished. Much as one reads the fiction published just before World War I and marvels at the flowing frankness that just preceded Hemingway permanently altering the English language with his declarative sentences, so too does one approach Tobacco Road, Scoop, and The Day of the Locust with a sense of what might have been in literature if the Second World War had never happened. One then turns to our present pandemic age and wonders why most of today’s contemporary fiction writers remain so spineless, so dully vanilla and offensively weak-kneed and uninventive, so hostile to serving up appropriate pushback against our present devil’s bargain of late-stage capitalism and all of its concomitant horrors.

West would have been canceled quite swiftly if he were starting out today. Joe Woodward’s biography of Nathanael West, Alive Inside the Wreck, points to a fascinating review from Ben Abramson that appeared in Reading and Collecting in which he suggested that West’s books should be reviewed two or three years after publication so that they could be reviewed on “merits” rather than “merchandise.” Indeed, it is the mercantile thrust of vapid careerist “critics” on social media these days — the type epitomized by so many mediocre Twitter addicts who wouldn’t know, appreciate or stump for bona-fide punk rock even if they traveled back in time and became desecrated by excrement while standing in the front row of a GG Allin show — that motivates their own sham criteria and their head-in-the-sand approach to our societal ills. But eighty-three years after The Day of the Locust‘s publication — well past Abramson’s prescription for proper consideration — The Day of the Locust says more about the eternal and seemingly unfixable ailments of American life than most of today’s writers can summon over the course of a career. Despite being cut down in his prime, Nathanael West still survives.

Next Up: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas!

by Edward Champion

Audio Drama: “Pattern Language: An Iris for Emily”

The next episode of our audio drama has been released. It’s a media sendup that’s part Annie Baker character study, part demon story, and part bold Ballardian experiment.

We recently released the third part of our four-part Season 2 finale, “Pattern Language.” This is the fifth of six new episodes that we are releasing biweekly this summer, representing “Phase III” of the second season. This story is part of the second season of The Gray Area. You can follow the overarching story through this episode guide.

Here are a number of useful links: (The Gray Area website) (the iTunes feed) (the Libsyn RSS feed) (the Podchaser feed)

Here’s the synopsis:

Emily McCorkle has landed the media appearance of a lifetime: a guest spot on the most respected talk show in America. But why is the host so concerned with her private details? And why are so many skeletons from her past making guest appearances? And who is the strange man with the hot dogs? (Running time: 38 minutes, 1 second.)

Written, produced, and directed by Edward Champion.

CAST:

Emily McCorkle: Belgys Felix
Ophelia Kakanakis: Carol Jacobanis
June: Monica Ammerman
The Fajita Demon: Pete Lutz
The Cunning Demon: Leanne Troutman
Morris Pressman: David Tao
Jimmy Markson: Heath Martin
Johnson: Hilah Hadaway
Emily’s Mom: Melissa Medina
Emily’s Dad: David Sirkus
Chelsea: Katrina Clairvoyant
Maya: Tanja Milojevic
Ed Champion: Edward Champion
Reporter #1: Glenn Bulthius
Reporter #2: Alice Fox
and Zack Glassman as The Receptionist

Creature Voices by Samantha Cooper and Rachel Baird

Incidental music licensed through Neosounds and MusicFox.
Additional music composed by Edward Champion.

Sound design, editing, engineering, and mastering by a bald man in Brooklyn who has become a TikTok junkie seemingly against his will.

Thank you for listening

If you’d like to support this independent audio production and learn more about how we made it, for only $20, you can become a Season 2 Subscriber! You’ll get instant access to all episodes as we finish them — months before release. Plus, you’ll get access to exclusive interviews and more than 400 minutes of behind-the-scenes commentary! Here are some behind-the-scenes photos and videos pertaining to this episode that we made during the more than two years of production we put into the second season.

Behind the Scenes:

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Part of my writing process involves performing all the dialogue out loud to make sure that it works. Rhythm, zest, and real emotion are all very important and this is really the only way to get it right! My bedroom is the venue for these strange one man shows (although I have sometimes taken these on the road to friends' houses to get feedback — one of my S2 stories caused a roomful of people who nudged me to read it to mist up, which was a huge surprise). I'm getting closer to finishing the season finale and here's a bit from it — oddly enough, this part was inspired by the idea of a two woman version of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE with a huge moral question at the center! I'm taking quite a few risks with this story and I hope I pull it off! (Incidentally, I watched MY DINNER WITH ANDRE three times before writing this section.) #writing #performing #dialogue #rhythm #zest #passion #art #mydinnerwithandre

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This morning, I recorded with the mighty @monica.ammerman. who is also working on a new web series called @someonenew.theseries. I met Monica in an improv class a few years back, knew that she had comedic chops, and cast her in Seaaon 1 as Henrietta, Queen of the Knights, in "Loopholes " But I also had the sense that she could do drama very well. Comedic actors are often underestimated and frequently untapped on this front and I'm the type of guy who likes to cast actors based on what others DON'T see. But Monica, who is super great to work with, brought a lot of wonderful understatement to this character that had me seeing how quietly courageous she was. Nuance that the two of us tweaked together. Monica inspired me to get us asking questions about this character's religious upbringing. And this turned out to be a fun and marvelous recording session! Thank you so much, Monica, for going along for the ride! This is a very bold and experimental story and I'm grateful to have such keen collaborators unpacking the emotional ambiguities, which are essential to creating something that packs a punch! Here's a clip of us layering a short monologue about forgiving people. The take we ended up using (not this one) is incredible! #audiodrama #acting #character #background #nuance #ambiguity #subtlety #dimension #comedy #drama #improv #forgiveness #monologue

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It's a wrap! Pardon my bad angle. But the Six Week Push is now at an end! Aside from some remote files I'm waiting on and a July weekend session, I have all of Season 2 in the can! Some 550 GB were recorded in the last year and a half. 120 speaking roles. 1,000 pages of script. Now I have to edit this thing. Many thanks to my stupendously talented cast, who brought so many surprising interpretations to these colorful characters and helped me to become a more daring and instinctive director. Pictured here are @belgys_felix and @caroljacobanis, who both did a terrific job recording today. Now I'm going to lie down for a bit! #wrap #production #audiodrama #recording #voiceover #actors #acting

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by Edward Champion

“I Have Friends” — The Trump Must Leave Remix

A remix for our dark political year.

I’m a huge fan of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Rachel Bloom. I’m also a huge fan of anything that will get the now gray-haired monster from 1600 Pennyslvania Avenue.

So with apologies to Ms. Bloom, here is a remix/parody of “I Have Friends” — a song that seems peculiarly applicable in this epoch of contending with a raging narcissist who can’t leave the White House gracefully.