The Kingless Generation

China as #1 in Japanese Literature: Battles of Coxinga, pᵗ 1 (Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 1715)

In part one of this second installment of our series on China as a silk road great power in pre-modern Japanese literature, we read Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaem

China as #1 in Japanese Literature: “Taishokan” [PREVIEW] (Kōwaka ballad, by 1553)

Next in our ongoing series ReOrient-ing early modern literature across Eurasia, we discuss the most widely visually represented of the sixteenth-century Japanese short-fo

Dethrone the Dictaphone

A chatty hangout episode on recent events, the class politics of fashion in our post-cultural moment, and an American (...?) Broadway musical from the End of History as p

An Infant ‘West’ meets a Middle-Aged ‘East’ [PREVIEW]: Galland’s retelling of Shams-al-Nahār & Ibn Bakkār (1704–1717)

In this final episode of our first series on the 1,001 Nights, we take up Frenchman Antoine Galland’s adaptation, where we see a Europe that has only begun to see its nea

Oriental Despotism comes w/ Occidental Colonization: Ibn Bakkār & Shams-al-Nahār in the Calcutta Ⅱ Nights (1839–42)

In addition to filling in more background knowledge from a scholarly article that I did find on this tale by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, as well as some musings on the format

Truth and Testimony, Drugs and Attachment in Bourgeois-Revolutionary Baghdad [PREVIEW]: Re-Orienting Ibn Bakkār and Shams-al-Nahār in the Arabic manuscript of the 1,001 Nights

I dust off my Arabic for some weird scenes in Silk Road–era Baghdad: a story of drugs and ego death, deadly secrets and the workers who keep them. The only tragic love st

1,001 Nights: A murdered ancestor to European Romance

One symptom of the neglect in Anglo-Zionist historiography of Arabic literature and culture—despite its role as the main heir to axial-age Mediterranean and Persian cultu

Eranos 4 [PREVIEW]: It was us (all along)...

In anticipation of future outings on some of the more interesting figures we've met thus far, we bring our introductory series on the Eranos milieu to a close with a disc

Eranos 3: Mircea Eliade, Mellon Fellow of Death, w/ Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eranos pᵗ 2 w/ Scott [PREVIEW]: Furio Jesi vs the Satanic-Orientalists

More ideological and world-historical groundwork, as we introduce, for me, the real hero of this story, the Jewish Italian Communist mythologist Furio Jesi (1941–1980), a

Aether Whores: Eranos and the 20th-c liberal-bourgeois vanguard, w/ Scott of the Dustlight Archives

From 1933 to 1988, the liberal spiritualist wing of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie had something of a think tank for spiritual and cult technology and grand strategy in t

(15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England

We continue our study of Elizabethan England, which is often mistakenly treated as an origin point of bourgeois revolutionary culture but which I hope to show is actually

(15)90s Kids Know: Lizzie’s bois, overture

Building on our discussion of the Water Margin (the most important surviving versions dating to the 1590s), we go “back”—notice the scare quotes!—to what is usually at le

Casual chat, core content [PREVIEW]

I swore I wasn’t going to do a chatty one but rather a hard core cultural-historical content for the next premium episode, but I just gave myself podcaster’s block again

Weebs of the Ages: Lafcadio Hearn, the “Brownie” who taught Japan to want whiteness

Living in Japan, the dominant image of Lafcadio Hearn is something like: he’s that white man who came to Japan and told us he believed in us—he knew we had it in us to be

Organizing Bourgeois Revolution in East Eurasia [PREVIEW]: The Water Margin (水浒传) w/ River

First externally attested in 1524, the Ming-dynasty Chinese novel Water Margin collects legends about a band of merry men of genius who love righteousness, and who fight

Organizational Proprioception w/ River

Seasoned organizer and noided leftist River from River to Reality joins us to share their theoretical concept of organizational proprioception: just as our nervous system

A Holiday Ramble in Hibiya Park [PREVIEW]

A quick, chatty, catch-up episode recorded in a park in central Tokyo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Left=Noided, Noided=Left: w/ River (featuring Fire in the Minds of Men)

On this podcast I have often argued against the “anti-conspiracy left”, but now that everyone and your mom can’t help but be noided, the relevant question is no longer, “

Britain is a Figment of the Crusader Imagination [PREVIEW]: King Arthur as Farang Mahdī

Much modern scholarship on King Arthur has revolved around the question of his historicity and origins, the recent greatest example being Higham’s magisterial 2018 survey