Conversation #54: The Elric Chronicles (September 16, 2018)

This week, we didn’t have a political topic prepared, so after grousing for a while about the week, we just spoke about some current events: Hurricane Florence and the news-making news coverage, the anonymous op-ed entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” that appeared in the New York Times, and Steve Bannon’s scheduled appearance at the New Yorker Festival. We didn’t really plan to talk about related topics, but all three of these things raise troubling questions about the media’s role in generating news, rather than reporting news. And in some cases, they are clearly organized and deliberate psy-ops.

Next, I’ve finished six volumes of Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories, and so I feel ready to recommend a reading order, which skips right over most of the material from the seventies and eighties, focusing instead on the exciting and inspired early novellas, and the much more recent novel Daughter of Dreams, from 2001. I also talk about different ways that good work can be written, and what it means when we say that an author has developed a “late style.”

How to Listen

You can find the MP3 file here.

The Podcast feed is here.

The Podcast channel on YouTube is here.

More Information

• That Weather Channel guy
• That New York Times editorial
• That New Yorker Festival controversy
• My blog post from the week ending September 1st includes notes on my recommended reading order for Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories. A number of recent weekly posts talk further about Moorcock.
• Here is a link to Edward Rothstein’s review of Edward Said’s book On Late Style.

This Week’s Music

No music this week.