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Is this the Most Violent Book of the Year? · Boomer Has It!

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello.
0:01
SPEAKER_00: Today we're reviewing the book Angel Down by Daniel Krause, which is an unmerciful and supernatural account of World War I and this year's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm Jim Jelamis in Brooklyn.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm JB Miller in London, and this is Boomer Has It.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: Set during the brutal final weeks of World War I, Private Cyril Bagger, a self-serving con man, and four disposable fellow doughboys are sent into the nightmarish terrain of No Man's Land.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Their orders are to mercy kill a wounded soldier whose shrieks are demoralizing the troops, except when they get out into the mud, they don't find a wounded soldier, but a glowing fallen angel that's been shot out of the sky.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: Realizing that this angel possesses reality-bending power, the men compete to extract her for their own selfish desires.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: And Bagger, our protagonist, is forced to navigate the moral chaos, not to mention trench warfare.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: And his goal is to protect the angel amidst the senseless slaughter that we know of as the Great War.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: The author is Daniel Krauss.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: He's a New York Times bestselling horror, sci-fi, and thriller author.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: He's known for a number of high-concept books.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: He has some involvement with Hollywood, uh gaming, and some nonfiction.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: So maybe we begin by asking, what can horror tell us about war?
1:54
SPEAKER_00: A horror genre writer tell us about war.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: Well, the the book is written in a very uh descriptive manner, which we will discuss later, but but it's um it's very graphic.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: Um I it somehow, I don't know how quite it combines lyricism with graphic, uh, with graphic writing.
2:15
SPEAKER_01: I think the graphic writing comes from, I guess his horror, his horror genre writing.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm not familiar with with those those books.
2:23
SPEAKER_01: I'd never heard of him until he won the Polar Surprise, and he suddenly came on my radar.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: And I was interested in the subject because I'm interested in the First World War.
2:33
SPEAKER_01: And um I was interested that a a novel set in the first war got so much attention and won the Polar Surprise, and it is written in one sentence, technically one sentence, in the sense that there's no there's no period um throughout the novel.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: It's written in in paragraphs, separated paragraphs.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: So it has a very um visual structure to it when you see it on the page.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, I have no idea if any of his horror books or his other books is uh so what are the genres he writes in?
3:09
SPEAKER_01: Horror and thrillers, horror.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he is a book about a man trapped inside a sperm whale.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you know if those are written also in a visually what used to think of kind of a version of concrete poetry that has a visual um cohesion on a page, you know, with the paragraph blink blink blink blink.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Have you looked through?
3:33
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
3:33
SPEAKER_00: I I do not.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: I do not.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I and I was wondering about this uh this one sentence um this one sentence feature.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Is it you know those types of things strike me as gimmicky, and I didn't mind it this time, and you know, why I don't know.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: I think maybe I was willing to go with it.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: I think you didn't mind it because it's it doesn't read as if it's one long sentence, not one long paragraph.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: I think the fact that it's broken up into paragraphs, and each paragraph begins with the word and so in a way it's one long run-on sentence, but I I didn't feel it was it was gimmicky.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: I mentioned it to my father-in-law, and he said he essentially said, Oh, it's like one of those novels where you know you leave out the letter P or something.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was French.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: It's a little like that.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: And then it's it doesn't really read like that, though.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's interesting because I think of another highly acclaimed author, Cormac McCarthy.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: And there are parallels with McCarthy for a couple of reasons.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Number one, um, he's you might call Cormac McCarthy a you know a genre writer.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: He wrote Westerns, famously extremely violent westerns.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: I'd say Angel Down makes Cormac McCarthy look like Jane Austen.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Um he also does something um with punctuation too.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: He omits quotation marks in dialogue.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: So you talk about Cormac McCarthy now.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I am.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: And and you know, and it's sort of the same way that you can interpret, you can interpret it without the required punctuation.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: In Angel Down, as you pointed out, there are spaces between paragraphs and the word and.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: So you don't need you don't need the the hard stop at the end, the end punctuation.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: And with Cormac McCarthy, you see the line breaks, you you kind of get it.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: He he was quoted as saying, I don't see why you have to junk up the page with all these little marks.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, punctuation is all this this stuff that just soils the page.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Um it's um it's got, I mean, the fact is there is um there is an angel in it, it's called Angel Diamond.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: For our for our YouTube viewers, gonna hold up the British edition, which has this contrasting white feather and an explosion, um, which under underscores the the some contrast in the book itself, which is very uh graphic about uh about um death and and um and injury and bodies being blown to bits, and this pure angel uh um that they find in the middle of of no man's land uh between the German and the American lines.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Um it's a very curious.
6:26
SPEAKER_01: I've never read a book like this.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: I've read a few novels and nonfiction books about the First World War, and this was unlike any of them.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: It has a um it has a very kind of percussive style.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: I should read, I'll read a short, a short paragraph just so people can get it.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, give us a lick.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: Give us a lick of Daniel, Daniel Krause.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: And it's only through the motions of inhaling that Bagger feels a brittle tightness.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: His face is glazed in dried blood, clearly not his own.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: And he orders himself not to imagine whose.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: It's best when blood is no deeper meaning than rain, especially in the Argonne, where so few trees remain to block the October wind that flash dries blood so rapidly to your skin.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: So that's one of the paragraphs, and it's uh I guess you could is that representative of it's got that that very um it's got I I I'm keeping using the word lyrical.
7:30
SPEAKER_01: Is that the right word?
7:32
SPEAKER_01: Lyrical writing?
7:34
SPEAKER_00: It I would call I think that's a good way of putting it.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: He he goes, you know, that that that passage you just read, it it sounds almost a little formal compared to other parts of the book, which which is a lot of casual usage and slang and swear words, uh, which we don't use on this show.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Um so it it's it's a very fluid style.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: It it it's I found it really thrilling through a big part of the book, sometimes fatiguing.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he because easily, I would say easily parodied too.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: You could easily parody this style.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, I I I hadn't even that didn't cross my mind, but he turns the language up to 11.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: You know, he he pushes it does go up to 11.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: He goes up to 11.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: So so so I wanted to contrast that with someone who was in the war, and that's Ernest Hemingway.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: I want to read just one paragraph from In Our Time, which was Ernest Hemingway's first collection of stories, and they're in between each story, uh a lot of them which are are based on his uh growing up in I think Idaho, no, Michigan.
8:43
SPEAKER_01: And and he has these interstitial, well, he lived in Idaho later, but I mean he grew up in Michigan, and um there were these interstitial paragraphs in between the stories that are said in the First World War.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: And here's one.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: We were in a garden in Mons.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: Young Buckley came in with his with his patrol from across the river.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: We waited till they got one leg over and then potted him.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: He had so much equipment on, he looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden.
9:15
SPEAKER_01: There were three more that came over further down the wall.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: We shot them.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: They all came just like that.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: So that's Hemingway's style, which is in marked contrast to Krauss's.
9:29
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he's he's evoking an experience that he lived through less than a decade earlier, probably about eight, seven, seven years earlier.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: And he was there, and he doesn't need he didn't feel the need to turn the his language up to 11.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: He turned it down to two.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, that's first of all, it's it's it's pretty jarring what you just read killing three men, seeing the expression on their faces, and it's nonfiction compared to what this adventure story, this this thriller that we've read, that we've both read.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: The other the other part of it is contrast the prose.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, when I was talking about parody, uh, you know, an easily parodied prose style, so is Hemingway's, um, for its plainness.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I'm not the only one.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's actually a bad Hemingway writing contest that used, at least it used to be once a year.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: I entered it and I entered it one year.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: How'd you do?
10:31
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: I did hear back, but I thought it was very good.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: I later published it in uh who why?
10:38
SPEAKER_01: But um uh yes, I that that doesn't just that they're the uh some of our greatest writers.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: You can parody pretty easily.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: Um that mean all it means is they have distinctive distinctive styles.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Um and distinctive voices, I would say.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's distinctive voices.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: I don't I I I'm not sure how um easy it would be to parody.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: I haven't thought of it.
11:06
SPEAKER_01: I used to write a lot, I have a collection of literary parodies that I published about 20 years ago.
11:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, The Satanic Nurses, who's written all these different styles.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'd have to give uh Daniel Krause's writing um uh some thinking too before I could even imagine parodying it or satirizing it is a nicer term.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: I I is that a you you brought that up almost as if that was a knock at his at his on his.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's it's so distinctive.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's electrically charged writing.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Like you said, it's it's turned up to 11, it's a high voltage style, it it doesn't take any breaks.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: There's never there's hardly ever a pause.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the continuous sentence, the pacing, it's a it's a little like maybe it's reflective of the war experience where you're never at rest.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh everything is uh is a is a is a form of trauma, maybe.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: Um that's why.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, all right.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean it has it has so many kind in interior contradictions in this, not not just in the style, but in the in the in the content and the subject in the story.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, as far as just the style, I mean there's there are sentences that jumped out at me.
12:22
SPEAKER_01: One I remember texting you once while I was reading it, this line, um, boots still potted with feet.
12:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's just so evocative.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's you know, that's a that's a brilliant phrase because it's it's it's lyrical and it's graphic and it's descriptive.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: But to my mind, the weakest aspect of the book is weirdly the description, because I think there are times when the lyrical, and I do use that word, lyrical writing, is at the expense of the visual description, to the point where the key, the key scene in the book, the or the introduction of the angel of the title, angel down.
13:07
SPEAKER_01: I couldn't visualize it, I couldn't picture it.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know what this angel looked like.
13:12
SPEAKER_01: It just seemed there was sort of sort of dissonance between the the lyrical writing and the the descriptive writing.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and but there, you know, I I I do think the the book probably uh rewards repeat reading.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: And I and because I noticed that when I was looking through it to find a paragraph to to read on the podcast about that, wow, this is there's some powerful writing in here, but maybe at the expense of the description.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: And if you can't visualize a scene, if you can't visualize the angel, I think that's a problem with the book.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a deficit in my in my yeah, it's it's it's definitely an oversight.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, that it's a pretty dramatic scene when they come across the angel, this supernatural being that's female.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: Um, she's in agony, trapped in barbed barbed wire.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: And we we sort of we don't have an idea.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: We we know she glows magically.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: They she's uh such a size that they carry her, which is kind of hard to imagine.
14:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, she must be either petite or maybe supernaturally small.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: And there it's much later, much later in the book, he makes an analogy to a painting from art history, which requires the reader to open up a second screen and and to to uh identify, and then you you actually see it uh in your mind, and it comes a little late, it's a little awkward.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: And uh so yeah, I have to agree with you that the that and certain other certain other descriptions were very hard to follow.
14:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I I actually wonder if that reference to that painting was was a mistake, because because if you do go to that painting and you you found you found that painting and you said you sent me a copy of uh you texted me the picture of it, and it it you shouldn't you shouldn't need, and you don't have to go to it, you don't have to look that up.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: But once you do, it just confuses matters even more so because it does look like an angel.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean it it's um you know the and and he sometimes he describes her as being in red and green, and other times he just or uh was it red and blue, uh, which is what a nurse looks like.
15:36
SPEAKER_01: So I I know that confused me, or all white as a as an angel.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: When I when I first read about the angel, I assumed it was uh, you know, a an uh allegory or the metaphor, um but it's not, it's a real angel, and um, you know, it uh it did go through the stages of each of the soldiers who were sent out to no man's land to retrieve her, um receive her, uh sort of impose upon her or project their own sense of who she is.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: Either she's a a lost girlfriend or someone they're in love with.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: So they they project um their their their what do we call it?
16:19
SPEAKER_01: There's ultimate theme.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Their ultimate desires, I think.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: I mean desires, I don't know.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: You know, they're traces of this book of sort of uh elements that you see in treasure tales where where the characters um their cohesion um the it's disrupted by their greed or their paranoia.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: And I I I always think of the the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh right, you have no, you have these three companions and things happen.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: And uh so that that you know it's a pretty typical story though, in you know, when it comes to treasure tales.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: So that yeah, and and it's but it's interesting because he the angel elicits these deep desires from each of these soldiers, and for it's it's to many of them, it's to their ruin.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, because they're they are brought down by their by their greed, um their narcissism, their their the their own desires sort of do them in.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: They're projected on this angel, but that does turn her into a symbol, so it's confusing.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: She's supposed to she is a symbol at the same time as she's real, and she changes the size at one point.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: She's enormous.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, I never fully fully and then she finally speaks.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: We hear we hear her voice.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: She speaks, she's silent for most of the book, and then she speaks.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: It's uh um it's confusing.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah.
17:51
SPEAKER_01: Uh do you think that was enough of a fault of the book that it it marred it marred the reading of it?
17:59
SPEAKER_00: You know, I when you when you read that passage to me, it it it impressed me all over again at at the pace of the writing style.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: It's you know, it's a very muscular writing style.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's it's also fatiguing, it's breathless, it's frantic, just just like with a war, I think.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just like the war experience.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: I have a selection.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: I have a selection I'll I'll I'll share.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: This is how he's good at describing people.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: Here he's talking about this certain major general who puts them uh who sets the command for them to rescue the angel as having adenoid eyes, a noodle neck, a matronly pelvic misalignment that sets his feet at 1010 configuration shortcomings that Bagger presumes originated from whatever defect blighted Reese's right arm, which all the boys snicker about.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, muscular, muscular writing.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: I think anyone who appreciates musk and I appreciate muscular writing, uh, can really enjoy enjoy this book.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: And I I think maybe it's is it maybe it's nitpicking to to criticize the uh this the the sort of visual element of it because uh I I can enjoy a book purely on the writing uh and on the humor.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: There isn't an and there is humor in there.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: There's very humor.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: There is humor, there's dark humor in this.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: He's not he's not without wit, he's not without humor.
19:33
SPEAKER_01: It's uh he's uh and I appreciate that about it.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: It's just very dark.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: Um there is also um it's very true to its time.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: He he uses the phrase Dunderhead, which you might have heard you know from a Laurel and Hardy movie or something.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think he references Mary Pickford as a no no theta barrage.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Theta Barra.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: I want to correct you on that.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: It's not Mary Pickford, it's Thetabar.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: I it was there was Mary Pickford mentioned.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: All right, I stand corrected.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: For sure.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: He also mentions Theta Barra.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: He uses language of the time.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: I think it's recently of the time, very consistently, which I know certain readers will appreciate.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: It might go over certain readers' heads.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you're reading on uh an electronic device, you can always look them up.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: That's what I did.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Um, there's also an element where he he bonds with a a young soldier who who uh fraudulently enlists at age 14.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: And they use a book called Son of Tarzan, which was and it that's a theme throughout the book is this reference to decisions made in the Son of Tarzan book.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: Um that I I appreciated.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: It was a it was a recurring element.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: The other element that's recurring is it you know, he's he has father turmoil.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: His father was an Episcopalian bishop of some kind.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we're not uh exactly sure if he's named a bishop from you know the Church of England or whether he's kind of a store window pastor who calls himself bishop, but he has this feeling in his body of a fly trapped in his chest, which represents his father, and he refers to him as Uncle Sam.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: And that that occurs throughout the whole book.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: He's with between son of Tarzan and this uncle Sam buzzing in his chest.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: We have this sort of you know since sensory reaction to his emotions throughout the book.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he and he uses a lot of sort of uh lingo, uh, you know, first of all, lingo and phrases that he doesn't explain.
21:43
SPEAKER_01: So it uh it it creates a real um sense of um of reality and that uh what's the word?
21:51
SPEAKER_01: This the the the bringing it.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, sir.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh but that reference to his Father, I think, is very important because I after a while I I saw the paragraphs, which are all more or less the same size as being sort of biblical.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: They reminded me of sort of Bible verses, and I and I think that may have been um intentional that that he carries a Bible around with him that his father uh father gave him.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: His father dies on the on the Lusitania.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: Um right, yeah.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: Another great historical reference.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: Another great reference.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:31
SPEAKER_01: It's if if I mean if yes, if there are history buffs, if there are first world war uh buffs, they will uh get a real a kick out of this book because it I I think he did all he did the he did the research for it.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: And I like I like the fact that he doesn't explain everything.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean it there's no glossary at the back.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: You just have to, it's like in in context, you can follow what what's going on.
22:52
SPEAKER_01: But I liked I like that the I like the terminology he refers to you know ordinance and and guns, and by the you know, what they called them, uh you know, the vicar's guns are various things.
23:03
SPEAKER_01: It's it's very the very similitude is very well done in this book.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: I'll give it that.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: There's a couple other stylistic things that I stood out to me.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: There was one where he he's in terms of the times of day, he describes the thin gruel of dawn, and I can't imagine any better description of looking up from a trench as the sun comes up and looking like thin gruel.
23:29
SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a great description, and the and the book is full of full of those things.
23:33
SPEAKER_00: I have another one.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's in no man's land, and he's that he says that gunfire passes so close it's like a piano string plucked against baggers' ears.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes, I remember that line.
23:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it that's evocative, that's poetic and evocative.
23:52
SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm saying about it's what I said before about that that that uncanny combination of lyrical and graphic writing.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: But to me, it works graphically in the moment and not with the angel, which is the major aspect of the book.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: But those those moments, the the minute to minute moments of being in a trench, being on the front line.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: Um in the it's in the last few weeks of the war.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: Remember that America's entry into the war was late.
24:26
SPEAKER_01: Um 1917 and um and then all of 1918 until the armistice, which was signed in uh is November 11th, 1918.
24:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, a lot of Europeans felt that was late.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: Americans were late in the World War II as well.
24:43
SPEAKER_01: Johnny, come lately.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: Where have you been?
24:45
SPEAKER_01: We needed you, but it was brutal on the front, and and um it's um it's it is very it is very evocative.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, I've you know I've known you for a long time, and I've known you to say that World War I is one of the most interesting wars, or more interesting than compared to than to World War II, the Great War.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: Why is it that you like, you know, why do you why is it so absorbing to you besides the Snoopy cartoon?
25:14
SPEAKER_01: There are two experiences historically of the 20th century that I think a lot about and I can't imagine myself in, even though, and I try.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: One is in a trench in World War I, and the other is in a concentration camp like uh Daco or um you know what one of those.
25:38
SPEAKER_01: It's um unimaginable horror, unimaginable horror.
25:43
SPEAKER_01: And and so if you read about these, um those two events, the Holocaust and the First World War, kind of are almost twinned in my mind.
25:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh they uh neither of them should obviously should have happened, they were both would were preventable.
26:00
SPEAKER_01: Um, and they were just sort of we would you we hear this term hell on earth sometimes as a as a saying, but that that's what I'd imagine those.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: And the the I I had an almost uh uh uh I had an uncanny experience once.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: I was at an antiquarian book fair in London about 30 years ago, and I and I saw on a table a big book.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: I opened it up, and it was full of photographs of severely wounded First World War veterans.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: These must have been taken by uh a hospital where these these these men were so facially um scarred.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they had parts of their faces, you know, missing.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: They were so scarred that I I imagine they they lived permanently in this hospital, in these hospitals.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: They they couldn't venture out, they would scare people.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: And as I was looking at these photographs, I could hear this incredibly cacophonous, loud.
27:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, I it's hard for me to describe, but I felt like I heard the the what it was like in the trenches.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: I've never experienced any other moment of my life.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: Like it was like a it was a weird when people say they've seen a ghost, I feel like I've heard a kind of a ghost.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: I feel like I've heard I can't, it's just really odd.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: It was just well, maybe maybe we've answered the initial question at the beginning of this podcast is why is a horror genre writer suited to write about World War One?
27:41
SPEAKER_00: But now I have another question, and that's why trench warfare?
27:45
SPEAKER_00: Whose idea was that to dig trenches and then attack each other?
27:49
SPEAKER_00: Have we done other wars like that?
27:51
SPEAKER_00: We didn't do it in World War II.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: No, it was uh it was a mostly a war of uh of stasis.
28:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh the other wars had more um movement, had movement in them.
28:05
SPEAKER_01: And I see the first world war got bogged down, and and they would they would win in yards, not miles, not countries.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: They it was a battle of yards, and it was the first fully mechanized war, and they had uh figured out how to brutally kill people in the most brutal uh manner possible, and it was guns fought, you know, shell fired maybe a few hundred yards away, and the first use, I believe, of gas, mustard gas, you know, and that's comparable too to um the you know the the death camps of the Nazis, that they would gasp, gasp the enemy soldiers.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the wind would blow it back and it would kill your own men, wound your own men.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: It was it was um, and it was it was, I think, um, you know, generals in uh you know field offices uh in miles away pushing you know little um representations of battalions across a board that showed the countryside and and just it was so abstract to them.
29:21
SPEAKER_01: And it was the numbers are just unbelievable.
29:25
SPEAKER_01: On the first day of the Sum assault on the Som on July 1st, 1916.
29:33
SPEAKER_01: This is before the Americans got involved in the war.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: It was supposed to be the big assault that would end the war.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: This it turned out being midway through the war.
29:42
SPEAKER_01: July 1st, uh 1916.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: I believe the Allies, mostly British, lost at 62,000 casualties in one day in the first 12 hours.
29:54
SPEAKER_01: It was it was just absolutely, absolutely brutal.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: The Battle of the Marne, um, you know, the French lost to what close to a million soldiers.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was the numbers are just staggering, just staggering.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: And it was almost almost entirely men.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: It was not as many civilians as World War II.
30:17
SPEAKER_01: By World War II they had invented or perfected um you know aerial, you know, aerial bombing of uh civilian targets um in London and uh famously in Dresden and in uh Hiroshima and Nagasaki, uh, you know, Berlin was so absolute rubble.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was the number of civilians killed in the Second World War is astounding.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: But first war was was uh just a very small part of Western Western Europe, and the guns were so loud, some of them, the canon, the the the the major guns that you could hear them in England, you know, where there was no war in England except for Zeppelins occasionally dropping bombs on London.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: I think I think you told me once that you met a World War I veteran.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: Is that true, or are you um were you imagining it like you were imagining the sounds of gunfire?
31:16
SPEAKER_01: I met I met a few first war veterans.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they were, you know, uh when I was in my when I was a boy in the late 60s, early 70s, there were, you know, that was only 60 years after the end of the war.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, there were a lot of uh first war veterans in the Royal Hospital, Chelsea.
31:34
SPEAKER_01: They would wear these red uniforms and they had caps, you'd hang out in the pubs.
31:38
SPEAKER_01: They would have been in their 70s then, maybe.
31:42
SPEAKER_01: Uh they were still around.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: But I I I met uh and spoke to First War Veterans as late as 1985, 845 in London.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: You could visit the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and you could talk to these guys and they would open up because um you know they they they these guys had lived by that point by 1985.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: These guys, uh maybe some of them were like retired to the royal to the hospital, but I I met one guy whose left hand was mostly blown off at the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle, 19, I think it's 1915.
32:22
SPEAKER_01: So he knew that was I met him 70 years later.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, he couldn't look at his hand without being reminded of that war.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: You know, this is something that stayed with him forever.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: And I was just fascinated.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and and as late as I think maybe 2006, this is when I returned to living in London, I believe an armistice day, um, November 11th, I think 2006, there were still three First World War veterans still alive who attended the memorial services on Whitehall.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: That's right near uh Downing Street where the Prime Minister lives.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: It's between Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: It's a very solemn occasion where the monarch at that point, it was Queen Elizabeth II and the Prime Minister pay respects and they ray elite, they lay a wreath.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: But they had three First World Reverends, one of whom, uh Tommy Patch, was 115 years old.
33:28
SPEAKER_01: And he was still, you know, he still had all his marbles and he was redo rediscovered.
33:33
SPEAKER_01: He was discovered living in a in a you know retirement home.
33:37
SPEAKER_01: Someone couldn't believe that there was this government.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: He was just not only was a surviving it fought in the trenches, not only had Tommy Patch survived um the trenches, but he could remember it.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: He there was a documentary they made it, they interviewed him, and there was a book that came out.
33:55
SPEAKER_01: It was just fascinating, and that kind of brought the war a bit closer.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh and now and now in 2026, we're experiencing you know the the last of uh Second World War, you know, veterans, um, the last survivors of the Holocaust.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: You know, this is Tommy Patch give any advice on his longevity, smoke lots of cigarettes, be in the war.
34:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure he was asked that.
34:19
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh I I did I did meet a 101-year-old, this was only a few years, three or four years ago.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: I met a 101-year-old uh veteran of the Second World War, and he was in great shape.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: And I did ask him, I said, How did he have he lasted so long?
34:36
SPEAKER_01: And he said, I volunteered for everything.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: I said yes to everything.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: If they wanted a volunteer, I was there, and he he was a uh a cook.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he was a cook on one of the wait.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: When you say volunteer, you mean during wartime or during both airtime?
34:57
SPEAKER_01: Both wartime and peacetime.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: Just you say yes.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, boomer has it.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: Listeners, there's some advice to live by.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: Say yes, don't yeah, say yes.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, that was he also impressed me because he claimed, and I'll I'll give him it.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: I claimed it he claimed he had seen the jazz singer when it came out in 1927.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: This is the first wide release of a sound picture, so it was a great of great interest to me.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Wow, he was an early adopter.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: Uh, he was.
35:31
SPEAKER_01: I met someone who saw saw the jazz singer on its initial release in 1927.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: And he said yes to everything, including when he was like four years old.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: He said yes to seeing jazz singer.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it he was impressive.
35:50
SPEAKER_01: But it but the anyway, get going back to this book, it's uh I it's interesting.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why Daniel Krauss took this subject.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: Something must have struck him about uh is a quite a departure for his subject matter.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh I have some um I have some a vocabulary quiz for you.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: So and this is another element of the book.
36:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, he sort of breaks rules that I don't mind.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: You know, I didn't mind the long sentence.
36:17
SPEAKER_00: Normally that kind of that kind of stunt annoys me.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: Um he also uses some very unusual vocabulary, vocabulary that I I have to look up, but the words are so interesting on the page that I didn't mind them.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: Um he talks about an exangu exang I don't know if I can even say this, exsanguinated corpse.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: Exanguinated means drained of blood.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: He talks about the eigengrau.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: It's the dark gray you see when you close your eyes in total darkness.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: Um he talks about a someone's brain, uh, the jellification of someone's brain, pretty self-explanatory.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: Umabulation, a tinkling sound, and crepitating, a crap, uh, a crackling sound.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: They kind of speak for themselves in a very way onomatopoeic.
37:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know how they do he was a little word drunk, and if you're gonna get drunk, get drunk on words, you know.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: Uh that's the best kind of drinking you can do.
37:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's the best sense.
37:27
SPEAKER_01: And and as you said, you didn't have to look all of all of these up in context, you could probably figure them out, and but also the the sound of the words, the you know, uh the automatopoeia of them, I think that's the word.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, yes, he is wonderful vocabulary in this book.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we are recommending it.
37:45
SPEAKER_01: I I would recommend it, but I would almost recommend you know there's certain films that make more sense the second time you sit through them.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: Uh, maybe this is a book that makes more sense the second time you read it.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: And there are a lot of rereaders.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: I'm not one usually because I'm such a slow reader.
38:02
SPEAKER_01: I I reread books years after I've initially uh you know read them, often because I've forgotten them.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, you you might not have to read again, you may be able to watch it because as we've learned, uh the book is um set for uh production at some point, or maybe not yet in the production phase, but there are plans to produce a uh they sold the film rights.
38:26
SPEAKER_01: I that doesn't always mean the film will get made, but but um no, maybe never.
38:31
SPEAKER_01: Maybe never, or maybe we'll get made.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: I can't quite imagine.
38:35
SPEAKER_01: I I this is one of those cases where I can't imagine a film of this uh of this book because you lose all the language, and to me, the book is language, and boiled down to its essence, it's plot, the plot in a way is the least interesting thing about it, I think.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
38:53
SPEAKER_00: In many ways, and then and there's a meta moment regarding some of the style, specifically the sentence.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: I I don't think it's I I don't think I want to say it, I don't think I would describe it, but there's one point in the book towards the end where the author pays attention, uh uh uh you know averts his eyes from the story and guides the reader to something happening, which is the sentence, and makes a makes a note about it.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: And I I found it again, I it was a meta moment that I think would have normally annoyed me, but I I went with it.
39:29
SPEAKER_00: So hats off to Daniel Krause.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a that's a that's a Brechttian, uh there's a term for that.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: I forget.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: There's that's a uh but there's that's a Brechttian moment.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh do you mean it it draws attention to the artifice of the of the work?
39:44
SPEAKER_00: Correct, correct exactly that.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if it's worth saying something about the Pulitzer Prize.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh again, it's sort of interesting to imagine what the Pulitzer board who selects the fiction prize, what how they deliberated over it.
40:02
SPEAKER_00: And as you know, it's an annual award.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: It recognizes achievements in journalism, but also literature, drama, and music.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: I I think it dates back to 1917 by a newspaper publisher eponymously named Joseph Pulitzer.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, until recently, it was a pretty strict prize.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: It was the journalism was only for print publications.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, but in recent years, it's expanded to online only news um like ProPublica, for example, or HuffPost.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: Um later, they only included later um magazine publishing in in in the years to come.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: Magazine, you couldn't be a Pulitzer Prize winning magazine writer.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, but now they have audio reporting, TV, audio, and broadcast.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: It's a good cause.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: It's not a massive award.
40:55
SPEAKER_00: I think winners earn about 15,000 bucks.
40:58
SPEAKER_00: So it's a pretty pretty modest.
41:00
SPEAKER_01: Um and you get to have to stamp on your book, Pulitzer winner, that's worth more than 15,000.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: That's worth more than that, but it's um, you know, uh in terms of the audio broadcast, you know, we can fingers crossed uh Boomer has it might might make its way to the running the Pulitzer the Pulitzer board someday.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
41:21
SPEAKER_00: Um have we done enough service for you know Angel Down or do you have do you have any other any other comments that anything that we might have missed?
41:31
SPEAKER_01: I think I think we've probably covered what we can cover.
41:34
SPEAKER_01: I I it's a it's a it's a real recommend from me.
41:37
SPEAKER_01: And and I think starting this podcast, I wasn't sure if if if it would be, but thinking about it, I I um it's it's like one of those books or films or plays that that kind of stays in your in your mind.
41:53
SPEAKER_01: Um you know, and it does stay, it does stay in your mind.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: It sort of burrows into your mind.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: But I I I think it's I think it's I think it's an interesting book.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:03
SPEAKER_01: Do you have a headquake?
42:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe let's just remind everyone what a headquake is.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: It's something that passes by our consciousness that gives us a headache or an earthquake, a mental earthquake, positive or negative.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: Mine was something that that that um I stumbled across.
42:21
SPEAKER_00: It's um, you know, speaking of Pulitzer Prize winning online news organizations, ProPublica followed up on a pretty disturbing story um a year or two ago.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: Um there's an author named Alice Siebold.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: She wrote a book called The Lovely Bones, which was an international bestseller and followed up with an international best-selling memoir.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the memoir is about her sexual assault, it's heartbreaking.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, and a couple years, a few years ago, um DNA testing revealed that the man she identified as her attacker uh was not the right person.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: And ProPublica did a painstaking follow-up.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: We should all allocate a little bit of our savings to ProPublica because of the good work they do.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: And what came out of the story that was so interesting was that Hollywood, um Jane Campion in particular, the director, and her screenwriter, were interested in adapting the memoir called Lucky for film.
43:29
SPEAKER_00: And in doing their initial research, they uncovered inconsistencies in some of the trial evidence.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: And they approached the the DA's office in Onondaga County, which is you know um New York State, uh, and and Syracuse, the city of Syracuse, and they they begged off from the project.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: Someone else got their hands on it, another another um producer, and he actually hired a detective to get to the bar.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Bottom of it, and it turned up more inconsistencies, which set Pope Pro Publica on the case.
44:05
SPEAKER_00: So this is one of those rare instances where Hollywood veers off from pure entertainment into investigation and uh um clearing people of their clear criminal conviction.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: No, no, it's that's an amazing story, and I think uh as you said, we should support ProPublica and also support Hollywood.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: You can do both by sending money to ProPublica and going to the movies, supporting the great moral guardians of our time in Hollywood.
44:53
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty fascinating.
44:54
SPEAKER_00: Um and it's tragic, all around and awful.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: And but you know, these elements where where there's where there's information, there's a way to absolution.
45:06
SPEAKER_00: Maybe I don't know.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, and with that heady thought, I'll pass it on to you for your headquake, hopefully something lighter.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: It is, it is.
45:14
SPEAKER_01: I have a light headquake.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it could be lighter than this, and that is I was inspired by a friend.
45:21
SPEAKER_01: This was just yesterday.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: She emailed me.
45:25
SPEAKER_01: She's a she's a movie nut like I am, although she knows probably a lot more about the movies than I do.
45:30
SPEAKER_01: And she said she had just re-watched Blazing Saddles we hadn't seen for years and didn't think much initially of, and she loved it.
45:41
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, oh, that's one to watch tonight.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: So last night I watched Blazing Saddles.
45:48
SPEAKER_01: That's a boomer, that's a boomer comedy, if there ever was one.
45:52
SPEAKER_01: It came out in 1974.
45:54
SPEAKER_01: Mel Brooks uh directed it and co-wrote it with four other writers.
46:00
SPEAKER_01: It's a film that couldn't get made today, probably, because uh of multi-use of the N-word, which in context makes perfect sense, it makes fun of everyone.
46:13
SPEAKER_00: Um not only that, a man a man slugs a horse, if I recall correctly.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: There is a and yes, you could not do that now.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: There's cruelty to horses in this that you could not get away with.
46:25
SPEAKER_01: But this man literally punches a horse, and I and I think I know how they did it.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: I think uh, but I didn't even want to say how they did it, but he does punch a horse and it falls over a a real horse.
46:38
SPEAKER_01: Um there's flatulence, there is famous flatulence, the bean.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: There's a scene where they're all cowboys sitting around eating baked beans, and there's farting that goes on for about 90 seconds.
46:50
SPEAKER_01: That's a it's a fan, which in the the television edit of it, they cut out the sound of the farting, which defeats the whole purpose of the scene.
47:00
SPEAKER_01: So you just see the cowboys sort of getting up when when they're so they can fart, but all you hear are horses neighing, and it makes no sense on the television.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: Listeners of Boomer Has It.
47:15
SPEAKER_00: This is the first time we've ever used the F word on our show, and we will never do it again.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: Our apologies won't be the last.
47:22
SPEAKER_01: So scene on DVD, which has the uh the unedited version, and it also has my version scenes from the uh they have the television edit.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Madeleine Kahn is hilarious in it.
47:35
SPEAKER_01: She plays Maria von Stuck, I think I was named, satire of Marlena Dietrich, and um she got an Academy Award nomination for it, and she's just hilarious.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: She Mel Brooks wrote a song for her called I'm So Tired, I'm tired of being tired.
47:57
SPEAKER_01: She's tired of men who are always coming and going and going and coming, and always too soon.
48:07
SPEAKER_01: It's just brilliant.
48:08
SPEAKER_01: So that is my headquake.
48:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh a uh recommendation if there ever was one, you boomers and and and other younger young uns, get thee to blazing saddles.
48:21
SPEAKER_01: You'll you'll be glad you did.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember that?
48:25
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember when he do you remember blazing saddles?
48:27
SPEAKER_00: What did what I remember when it came out in the theater at the lunch table, all the kids were talking about it.
48:33
SPEAKER_00: I remember I think uh Clevon Little is the gunslinger who rides in on the horizon.
48:39
SPEAKER_00: He's a sheriff, they make him share the sheriff, and he's to try to drive everyone out of town.
48:45
SPEAKER_00: And Gene Wilder is his partner, and we've been recently re-watching a show called Bored to Death with Jason Schwartzmann, who I it took me a while to realize it, but he absolutely, in his manner, his acting style, absolutely channels Gene Wilder.
49:05
SPEAKER_00: Really?
49:08
SPEAKER_00: Thoughtful way of talking and taking in the other the other person on the set, taking them in so thoughtfully, almost like a a priest or a rabbi listening and the talking with such care.
49:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a it's a very charming kind of style.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: Cleveland Little was uh you know great stage actor in his in his time.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: They they they wanted Richard Pryor, who's one of the co-writers.
49:34
SPEAKER_01: Mel Brooks wrote that part for Richard Pryor, who wasn't that well known then.
49:38
SPEAKER_01: He was he was only known for his stand-up in um you know LA.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: It was before he was really famous.
49:45
SPEAKER_01: And Mel Brooks wanted him, and they didn't cast him because he was not reliable.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, he was supposed to show up for filming and he didn't show up.
49:54
SPEAKER_01: And they reached him, he was in like you know, New Orleans or somewhere.
49:58
SPEAKER_01: He just left down and they realized they needed someone more reliable.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: So they they uh they hired Cleveland Little.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: You can't you actually can't imagine anyone else in that role.
50:07
SPEAKER_01: He's just so funny and so brilliant.
50:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh but it's a great cast.
50:12
SPEAKER_01: But uh but going back to your your reference point of uh Bored to Death, I think that's another uh series.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: It's a series we can recommend.
50:20
SPEAKER_00: Um was that on anytime we could recommend that anytime.
50:23
SPEAKER_00: It's about I think it's 10 or 15 years, at least 15 years old.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: But holds up terrifically.
50:29
SPEAKER_01: Ted Danson is one of the who's it?
50:32
SPEAKER_01: Ted Danson, Jason Schwartzmann, who's the other, who's the third?
50:35
SPEAKER_00: Uh Zach Galafanakis.
50:37
SPEAKER_01: Oh my god, an early Zach Galifanakis.
50:40
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that's quite a cast.
50:41
SPEAKER_01: And uh you can find that.
50:43
SPEAKER_01: What plat what platform could could our viewers and listeners find bored to death on?
50:48
SPEAKER_01: Because it wasn't shown here.
50:50
SPEAKER_00: That would be on uh HBO.
50:52
SPEAKER_01: HBO, right.
50:53
SPEAKER_01: I I bought American DVDs of it and had to watch it on one of my it's a very funny show.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: The characters are lovable, it's good natured, it's big-hearted.
51:03
SPEAKER_00: And what I like about it the most is it is just unabashedly literary loving.
51:09
SPEAKER_01: There are literary references, are references to cinema art all through the show, and it's created by uh by a novelist, by a writer, right?
51:20
SPEAKER_01: What's his name?
51:21
SPEAKER_00: The guy who wrote Jonathan Ames, who Jonathan Ames who has a couple, he has a small role in in the show, very small, but very funny.
51:29
SPEAKER_01: What he would look like.
51:29
SPEAKER_01: He wrote it, he came out with a novel, came out slightly before around about a year before my first book came out, so like late 80s, called I Pass Like Night, I think.
51:39
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember that?
51:40
SPEAKER_00: I I don't, but he's thinking we haven't heard much from him lately, but he he creeps into the zeitgeist every now and then with something very interesting.
51:50
SPEAKER_00: And uh haven't haven't heard much from him lately, but maybe we'll take a look and report back.
51:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Boomer has it, listeners.
51:57
SPEAKER_01: Channeling Jonathan Ames, where are you?
52:00
SPEAKER_01: We need you back, bored to death.
52:02
SPEAKER_01: High, high recommendation, highly recommended, absolutely.
52:07
SPEAKER_01: All right, well, I think that does it for us this week.
52:11
SPEAKER_00: Um, I am JB Miller in London, and I'm Jim Jelamis at home here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
52:19
SPEAKER_00: See ya, folks.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: See ya.
52:21
unknown: Bye.