Into the COLAverse – Episode 24: Rebecca Falkoff

[0:00:01 Frederick]  Welcome to into the verse A podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama. As we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It is my great honor to be here with Rebecca Falcoff, assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian. Welcome, Rebecca. Thank you. It’s

[0:00:31 Rebecca]  wonderful to be here.

[0:00:33 Frederick]  Oh, my goodness, Rebecca really like looking at all of that you have done, accomplished all you’re like poly lingual, you know, you know, German and even, you know, if I got it right Armenian to a certain a Albanian fluent, you know, Italian French. Oh, my goodness. All of this. Well, but, but before we go down that path, tell me like, how, what, what brought you to a Comparative Literature and Theory. Bachelor’s degree at U Penn in 1999 I guess. Yeah.

[0:01:13 Rebecca]  Yeah. It was sort of unexpected. I, I went to Penn expecting to be a math major because I loved math in high school. It was really fun, you know, math when you, when you understand why and you’re not just doing the calculation, it’s just exciting. And then it just, it, it wasn’t as fun in college. I took one class and, and it was taught in a way that was really all about the calculations. But more importantly, I took a lit theory class my first year and fell in love with it and just kind of kept on taking literary theory classes, cultural studies, literature and, and quickly moved into comparative literature and haven’t ever left. And it was well, I think my first semester there were, there were three really influential classes I can think of. One is I took a comparative seminar on the figure of Faust. And it was really, you know, i it’s one of those things, I don’t know how I ended up in that seminar, but I really liked reading different ways of, of telling the same story. And another was a film class called Women who Kill. It was about, you know, women who kill in, in cinema. But the professor was a, a lake and I was kind of interested. I was fascinated by the way this name kept being thrown around and it seemed to have this incredible currency that I didn’t understand. And so I, I tried to understand it. and, and then just started reading Leon and psychoanalytic theory and and then the other was the lit theory class with Jean Michel Rabo and we read a lot of art which was really fun. And so,

[0:03:04 Frederick]  yeah. Yeah, Rebecca is that when you also became more say serious if you will about languages or had you already started collecting languages, you know. Yeah, and why, why, I mean, why I guess on that same point, like, you know, I was just telling my students this morning in class, like, look, you need go take advantage of study abroad but don’t just go to a country where, you know, you’re familiar with the sights and the smells and the sounds, go to a country where you’re really, like, kind of turned upside down a little bit and, and, you know, learn a language immerse yourself. why language is for you and generally. Yeah. Yeah.,

[0:03:49 Rebecca]  sorry, my cat is howling. I don’t know, it’s fun. but, the LA languages are really fun and it’s exciting when you kind of, when, when some idiomatic expression clicks or something. I mean, the, when I started I’d taken French all through high school and I never, I mean, it, it was fine but I, I never, had the same kind of experience I had when I started learning Italian in Italy, when I went to Florence after my sophomore year and it was just so much fun to sort of hear these bits and pieces of language that I couldn’t understand. And then, you know, after six weeks of being there, be able to, to think, oh, that’s what they were saying when they said that strange thing., so it’s, it’s always, it sort of makes everyday life a fun puzzle. And, so that’s really exciting. I wouldn’t say, I mean, I started studying Albanian because I was really interested in Albanian immigration to Italy and when I started going to Italy, it was, it was sort of in the late nineties and there were a lot of recent Albanian immigrants in Italy. And, just, it was so shocking the things that people said to me about Albanians and, you know, just the, the, there was a lot of discrimination. It was, it was sort of astounding. and I wanted to understand it better. So, my studies sort of moved in a different direction but that’s why I studied Albanian. But I should, I, I kind of wish I studied Armenian as well because I’m from Watertown, Massachusetts, which is, like, I think maybe it now has fewer Armenians than Fresno. But, it’s sort of the east coast capital of Armenian culture,, in German. I just wanted to read, Freud. Yeah. Wow.

[0:06:00 Frederick]  Yeah, that is, that’s quite a, commitment. yeah. No. Amazing. Absolutely incredible and amazing. And we, we need languages in our lives. We need to know many languages. as you and I both know not only, to read but also to, for us to really engage and understand other, other people that make up this planet. Absolutely. you went on it to Italian.

[0:06:29 Rebecca]  It does really help you think differently, I think. and it allows you to almost be a different person. I mean, at first it’s, it’s, it’s difficult to feel like you speak like a toddler., and so in order to, to make better friendships and interact with people in a more substantial way, you wanna be able to speak more like yourself. But in another language, but inevitably as you grow up into a different language, part of you is different or, or it sort of opens up this new part of your personality. That’s pretty exciting.

[0:07:09 Frederick]  Yeah. Amazing and so important. Tell me, I know you also do work in translation but maybe we can use that also to kind of segue into,, a more form focused study in Italian studies, you know, that you pursued at Berkeley. that led of course to some of the incredible work you’re doing today. But, yeah, translations, you, you’re a translator. Yeah,

[0:07:37 Rebecca]  I’m a translator. I might be too indecisive to ever be a good translator. Like I can translate short things. But it’s, I don’t know, I’ve translated with Steliana Milko who is a brilliant translator and it’s really good to be able to sort of talk through the complicated decisions about translating. I mean, yeah, it’s, it’s making these difficult decisions about which word to use. Every word is a different way of interpreting the text and can change so dramatically the way that it, it reads. So I’ve translated some short things and I’ve, I’ve never kind of got to a kind of artistic level with translation where I could, I would say, well, I really read the text this way and I’m gonna translate it to highlight that. Like, I don’t think you know, I’m, I’m not a very accomplished translator, but I enjoy, I enjoy the challenge. Yeah, I enjoy the challenge but it, it’s, it’s also painful to have to, I mean, I, I think, you know, in translation, there’s always this sort of spectrum between like freedom and fidelity and, you know, you, you literal translations in most cases are terrible. That’s not what you want to do. But it also feels very painful to, to make sacrifices.

[0:09:09 Frederick]  Yeah, that literal translation, you know, in a way, you know, it’s the kind of thing that perhaps is safeguarding us from the Google translation. Bots and the A I bots, right? That’s true. You know, I was thinking when you were talking about language and a certain discomfort, but then kind of a, a rediscovery of yourself, you know, through learning other languages and immersing yourself in other cultures. And I was thinking about Jim Lahiri’s first novel do do. and then the way, you know, she talks about how she translated this into English.

[0:09:54 Rebecca]  yeah, I think, I put that on the syllabus now. I’m not sure which course it’s on the syllabus of, but I think that’s a great, or I think, in, is the first book that, and it’s sort of part memoir but there is also a short story in it and, but it’s been fascinating to, to sort of watch her writing change as she begins working in another language. And yeah, she’s, it’s really, she’s, she’s an incredible presence in Italian literature.

[0:10:32 Frederick]  Yeah. Remarkable. So, speaking of Italian literature and culture and, well, comparative literature and cultural studies you published in 2021 your book Possessed, which is also an audio book which I’m fascinated about. because there’s a certain kind of maybe could we call it translation from print, alphabetic to audio?

[0:11:00 Rebecca]  Yeah, I haven’t listened to the whole audio book of Possessed yet because, you know, it’s scary to go back to your own work. But I’ve been enjoying audio books so much recently. And the one that really, actually, it, it, it has to do with translation, the one that really kind of made me love audio books is Claire Danes, reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey. And I just started listening to her translation of the Iliad and I, I’m just at the introduction now. But it brought, it brought the Odyssey to life for me in an, in a way that it never had been a lot before. so that was, yeah,

[0:11:41 Frederick]  thanks for the tip. I’m gonna go there for sure.

[0:11:45 Rebecca]  Is also, I just want to say it’s also a free download. So it’s really cool. I got a grant that made it so that, you know, it’s, it’s free. You don’t have to buy a physical object. Even though it’s fun to buy physical objects. But if, if you’re, if you don’t have enough space on your bookcase and you want to read it, just download it.

[0:12:06 Frederick]  In other words, if you’re not a hoarder of like physical objects, like me and my comics and comic books, and books in general, then there’s also a way to digitally like, say, you know, hoard or put into a safe place on your computer. Yeah, I did notice that and I was, I was I have it, it’s on my computer. So, thank you. Thank you. So really fascinating. And, you know, I think we all have the hoarding tendency. Maybe some of some of us express it more than others. My, my dad in Mexico was a big hoarder and, you know, it comes in different kind of shapes and sizes and I know that possessed you go into this remarkably expansive and deep history. Different countries from flea markets to, people hoarding books to, oh my gosh, so much, so much going on. and what, what is like, what did did you discover there? That might not be so obvious? But even before that, like, what is that, why, why do we want to hoard?

[0:13:30 Rebecca]  I mean, so hoarding may be, I will never understand. I’ll answer that que I’ll, I’ll sort of give a provisional answer to that question. I mean, I started by asking not, you know, why, why do we want things, why do we hoard? But why, you know, why at certain historical moments do people talk about hoarding in certain ways? So what is hoarding as a cultural discourse? Why are we talking about hoarding now? Why in 2000 and, you know, the first two decades of the 21st century, did it, it seemed to be everywhere? Was it, you know, did it have to do with just the, the sort of developing genre of reality television that made a kind of ghoulish fascination with others? you know, mental health, something that, that was on everybody’s radar or is there something more specific about ecological crisis, the conflicting ideas about waste? I mean, everybody knows it’s wrong to waste, you know, and, and even so much that one’s kind of ethical way of being in the world could be. a lot could be said about it based on, you know, the care with which one, produces or doesn’t produce a lot of waste. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot at stake in thinking about waste and everybody, you know, and then, and then yet we don’t quite know what is right. We know that to some extent, the sort of,, interest in recycling is, is the result of corporate strategy to displace responsibility onto the consumer does. It’s not to say that recycling, you know, one should still recycle. But it’s so wildly complex. And you know, one of the, one of the ways that hoarding gets defined is as an aversion to wasting, you know, in many narratives, we, we’re all sort of first to wasting, I mean, often it’s a kind of moral, it’s considered a sort of moral failure to be wasteful. So there’s, and then I also became, I mean, there’s, there’s that mode of hoarding. One thing that I started noticing about it is that it seemed to be, it seemed to sort of be one of those discourses that went across the political spectrum. So, you know, you could be saying, capitalist, we’re a capitalist country, we consume too much. It’s, it’s wasteful, we should save more. Or you could be saying like there’s why are you holding on to something that’s trash, throw it out, buy new stuff. I mean, that doesn’t necessarily align precisely with one political orientation or not, but it seems to embody a lot of contradictions in the way that people talk about hoarding. So I was interested in that, I mean, I think in terms of a, another thing about hoarding, which makes it hard to answer the question of like why this desire is that it’s the basic principles of hoarding are things that we all share. I mean, you know, we probably all have some sort of a attachment to some objects. We might see them as more valuable than other people do, perhaps because they were gifts from people or, you know, they remind us of something or there are all kinds of reasons that people have attachments to objects. And yeah, so, so to some extent, I think that the relationships between people and objects are as complex as the relationships between people and people. And so a whole kind of, you know, psychic profile can be expressed in any number of ways with regards to external objects, external people. And, and that complexity is too much to get to the bottom of, of course, so it’s, it’s more about sort of what is hoarding as discourse mean and what I ended up, what I ended up doing in the, the book. And there are, you know, there’s so many, I mean, it’s one of those things, I think everybody who starts writing a book realizes that their book is kind of everything about everything and it’s hard to narrow it down. That’s perhaps more true when you’re writing a book about hoarding. But one of the things about horning is that it’s just kind of, to some extent, it’s this perverse doppelganger of all of the most esteemed, kind of all the forms of modern genius, like the detective, the poet, the artist, the collector, you know, there are a lot of ways to do what hoarders do a little bit differently that make you a genius artist, detective. You know, it’s, it’s a slight disruption of that, that, that turns one into hoarder rather than these prized figures. So I, I kind of am looking at that boundary in a lot of cases between, you know, refined collector or detective who zeroes in on marginal details and sees things that other people don’t see and recognizes their value. I mean, it did just make a story.

[0:18:59 Frederick]  Mhm Yeah. Yeah. No. Really interesting. I’m also on a really kind of basic level, my brains thinking the librarian or the curator as a self disciplined hoarder that’s accepted versus the kind of reality TV shows that we were getting that you had mentioned of hoarders and the way that that’s framed as completely undisciplined. Mhm

[0:19:33 Rebecca]  In a way, you know, in a way the librarian or the museum curator is a, is a good figure because they’re, it’s somebody who acknowledges that a single person that I mean, I think to some extent, if you could also boil hoarding discourse down it into some kind of anxiety about the individual because the idea of not wasting is heroic. The idea of standing up to a culture sort of dominated by the functional imperative and planned obsolescence is heroic. But to think that one person can salvage all the debris accumulating, you know, from the storm of progress is clearly, it’s sort of a tragic and futile endeavor. And you, you can’t do that alone. It’s hard to know how to do it collectively. It’s hard to know. Yeah, how, how to sort of come together. But certainly a librarian and a museum curator would be people who have a kind of institutional support and philosophy and, you know, committee of partners with whom they’re trying to figure out what a good conservation plan would be or, or, you know, how to avoid saving everything. But, you know, they, they also often make decisions that come to look like bad decisions 100 years later. And there’s, you know, a lot of, a lot of recent scholarship kind of rethinking museum collections and what they mean and, and the kinds of power systems that they reproduce. So there’s a lot at stake, but librarians and museum curators at least are kind of endeavoring in a way that’s a lot more realistic than just like saving every newspaper in your house or, you know.

[0:21:29 Frederick]  Mhm. I was thinking too about the detective or the, you know, Arthur Conan Doyle and how back now this is me getting nostalgic but, you know, back in the day, in the, in the archives in Berkeley as an undergraduate and often finding,, you know, going through the index cards and then going into the stacks and finding not the book that I wanted, which I did find. But it wasn’t actually the book that I actually wanted. Once I started, you know, thumbing through it, it was the book on either side or up and down from that book. and how, you know, these, these sort of disciplining or disciplined hoard kind of hoardings, turn us into, you know, many, you know, detectives,

[0:22:16 Rebecca]  right? I mean, that’s also a cool thing about hoarding that there’s, you know, one way to distinguish between collecting and hoarding would be, intentionality and contingency. So if you go to the library and find the book you’re looking for, you know, there you’re, you’re sort of amassing a collection of books relevant to your research project. But as soon as you’re distracted, but, you know, we, we know that we learn so much from those distractions and to contingency is, is essential to this artistic or scholarly process. I mean, part of why it’s so hard to write a prospectus is because you set out to do one thing and then your sources change the project. So being open to the contingencies is absolutely necessary. And that, I mean, I think that also kind of gets into the fear of an increasingly data driven world. There’s no freedom there. You know, it seems to kind of eliminate such contingencies. I mean, it’s nice to, to have book recommendations or music recommendations. But there’s also a kind of, and, and those might be experienced like a contingency because the, the process through which the algorithm comes up with these recommendations is so opaque. But yeah, there’s, there’s a joy in sort of seeing unexpected things,

[0:23:46 Frederick]  speaking of contingencies and seeing un the unexpected, of course, I imagine your articles have grown from, you know, re maybe you were, had a primary kind of research area and then you found something and decided to write on it, whether it’s, you know, how to make bread from Air literature from Science or your new book projects. One on eligibility and the other. like, yeah, the Make Bread From Air and Italian fascist strategy. Maybe you can just share a little bit of, you know, these other like wonderful projects that research projects that have led to published articles that are leading you somewhere new today.

[0:24:30 Rebecca]  OK. I mean, the, the eligibility I came to through this, this Italian writer named Georgio Mangan, who’s whose work is so, you know, he’s often labeled illegible. because most of his work is very difficult in a way, I mean, he’s using words, some of the words are made up. He’s using a lot of archaic words and dialect words and but he’s sort of amassing in such an overwhelming way and the intricacies of the sentences are such that, you know, that it’s, you get lost in the, in the language. And that’s kind of the beauty of it. But one thing I was noticing as I, as I read Mangan is that it’s almost an exercise in sort of writing about, let’s say masturbation in a way that is so opaque and so kind of in such an obscure difficult language that you don’t realize that’s what it is. But so some of it is sort of by, by creating this illegible text, you set the reader up for the challenge of decoding, which may be a kind of unveiling of some hidden kernel meeting underneath or maybe it’s a new way of thinking about literature. You know, there you, you force readers to find other ways to read, which is exciting in the case of, of Mangel, you know, I I found that the, the sort of use of illegible obscene, which is kind of a contradiction because, you know, the whole idea of the obscene is that it, it is, it provokes offense. And so if something is a legible, who is it offending? I mean, it, it could offend because it’s illegible, but that’s not the way that he was doing it. So that, that was one thing that was kind of interesting to untangle in Manganello. But also just the sort of great freedom in a way given to the reader when confronted with the text, that’s illegible because, you know, you’re, you’re sort of unbound by convent, you know, ways you know how to read, you have to find a different way to understand the text. So that strangely enough and tell me if, if it’s, if I’m not making sense, but I think that that’s kind of a similar logic to the idea of fixing atmospheric nitrogen to make bread out of air. Like, and it’s the same as hoarding where you get these sort of great tensions between a scarcity and an abundance that are related to various ways of a kind of material and immaterial. I mean, it could be, that’s just everything again. But that’s how I see this sort of hoarding relating to the eligibility and to the nitrogen capture and the way that I came to the nitrogen capture is through this contingency. I mean, I knew nothing about nitrogen capture, but Carlo Milio Ganda writes about it in and this is a an Italian writer who’s kind of considered like the Italian James Joyce. And he was very enthusiastic about fascism in the twenties. He was broke in the thirties and wrote some kind of fascist articles that are scientific and technical articles so popular, divulgate articles that explain scientific concepts to a popular audience that are very much in sort of support of the regime’s initiatives. So, you know, they, they had, they’re kind of the articles that you would go to if you were interested in understanding the extent of God does attachment to fascism, which seemed like, you know, it seemed like an important thing to do for me because it’s always, you know, I always ask when I read like, what are the political stakes of, of this? And it’s, you know, so, so I went to those writings and he has these essays about nitrogen capture and through those essays and those essays had always been sort of treated as by criticism as like Gada in his most delusional deranged fascist moment. And they, he is, you know, expressing ideas that are quite sympathetic to fascism at that moment, but they’re not in terms of the science, it’s not delusional. That’s what nitrogen capture does you take nitrogen out of the air to make fertilizers? So you can make bread. And that was kind of what I mean, I think that, that, that powered the kind of grandiose ambition of Italian fascism, the idea that suddenly, you know, they can, they can have a demographic campaign and ask people to have more and more babies because they can feed Children with the air and then they can with all these Children who are being raised on bread from the air, they can make them soldiers and go take, you know, colonize Ethiopia and Eritrea. And so there’s sort of a, a logic of fascism that is possible because of this. It’s not unique to Italian fascism. Like, you know, that it’s, it’s modernity. But I do think that this close coincidence of, of something that allows you to, imagine incredible abundance from immaterial, from something immaterial, even though air, of course, is material. But we don’t experience it that way. I think that powered Italian fascism. And sometimes I wonder whether like the rise of fascism in the last, you know, 20 years could have a similar, could relate in a similar way to the, the sort of sense of the de materialization of, of culture and life because of digital technologies, whether that creates more room for manipulation between like fantasies and the real conditions of existence is that,

[0:30:57 Frederick]  yeah, really amazing. So kind of like make and then fill in the blank instead of bread from air. So we would be, you know, make human relations, intimacy, maybe from air or into thin air, right? With social media. There’s all sorts of ways, yeah, we could think about this.

[0:31:22 Rebecca]  But also, I mean, so our, our fantasy life is always there. You don’t need the internet to get our fantasies. you know, to, to think about fantasy instead of, let’s say materiality. But there’s a way where you could the possibility of of a kind of theory as, as strange and deranged as like the pizza gate stuff or, you know, can be so you can sort of believe in something that is so dislocated from a material reality and there’s room for that momentum for it.

[0:32:03 Frederick]  Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. so we’ve been talking up, about just now about this kind of discomfort. of course, fascism is more than that. It’s, it’s a kind of violent discomfort. But, in your course, your survey course on Italian literature, you actually take the students on a journey through the lens of love lives. And especially Dante Petra and Boca. So tell us what, you know, what your, where your, your students are going and how kind of love features in a course like this.

[0:32:44 Rebecca]  Well, I mean, it’s funny, you know, I’m not a medievalist. I love Dante Petro and Bocao. And I, and in a survey course on Italian literature, it’s, it’s more sort of, I was thinking about the exigencies of, of the course where I wanted to choose a theme. And there’s, there’s a lot of great and beautiful writing about love in the Italian tradition. you know, in the medieval period and there’s a lot of really interesting contemporary work. And I, you know, there, there were a few examples I wanted to focus on like in in Inferno five. What Dante is thinking about to some extent when he meets these two lovers who were reading when they, when they kissed. And then now they’re, they’re stuck in hell for eternity and they’re sort of stuck to each other in hell for eternity just being batted around by the winds. But, some of what he’s doing is sort of teaching us how to read ethically and how to, so even though it’s about this moment of love, it’s also about,, how we read the world and, and how we read books. And, then I was also, I also was over the summer, I was thinking a lot about that. There’s an episode in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso where a knight is offered to drink from this Chalice. And if he does, he’ll be able to find out whether his lover is cheating on him. And every night before him has always drank from the Chalice and it destroys their life. I mean, I think there’s, there’s lots of variations of this story, but I think it’s an, an interesting thing to think about given how kind of astonishingly pervasive surveillance technologies are today and how, you know, it becomes easier and easier and more and more disturbing to not trust, but there’s some kind of fundamental necessity of trust. So that was an episode that I really wanted to read with the students. So, that was part of it too. I mean, some of the way that the course I haven’t worked much on love before, you know, another thing that got me thinking about love is just a brilliant writer whose, whose work I adore named Merve M Ray has written a few recent articles about love that just, made me think about it in different ways and I wanted to explore some of that with the students. So, I mean, I love teaching courses like this survey and Italian literature because to some extent I just get to, add the things that I’ve been reading and thinking about and fascinated by and then talk about them with the students.

[0:36:00 Frederick]  Mhm. Yeah, I know. It’s amazing. I remember taking Dante a course with Jeffrey Schnapp at Stanford on Dante and it just completely blew my mind. I loved it. And of course I’ve read Calvino and Echo and Levi and Pasolini and, and, you know, I mean, you know, it’s talk about a rich tradition of, you know, just exquisite literature and all you have to do is go to go to your Italian, you know, your, your hor my horde of Italian novels, right? Yeah.

[0:36:44 Rebecca]  And Elena Ferrante now,

[0:36:47 Frederick]  it’s

[0:36:48 Rebecca]  been, you know, a lot of, there’s a lot of new interest in Italian literature because of the wild success of Elena Ferrante. So that’s been exciting to see and, and I love her work.

[0:37:02 Frederick]  So this, you know, I, I’m gonna, we’re gonna get back to the kind of proverbial bedside table readings or viewings that you’re kind of doing right now and it sounds like one of them you just mentioned. but is you stand up comedy? Oh, yeah. Can you tell, tell me a little bit about that? That’s really awesome.

[0:37:24 Rebecca]  It’s awesome. It’s really fun. It’s, so I do stand up comedy. I haven’t done it in Austin yet. mostly I did it in New York. I was living in the West Village so there were, you know, 20 comedy clubs within a 10 minute walk. And, it was, it was sort of, I mean, it’s scary. It’s fun because I’m not good at it. And that’s ok. I mean, it’s sort of fun to do something that is just, you can keep working on and trying to get better and better. But,, you know, I’m never gonna try to make a living as a comedian and, it’s, it’s fun also to kind of work on like, perfecting like three minutes of material and to go to the same open mics and see the same people telling the same jokes over and over again and see what changes make them work or not work. And I mean, it’s a kind of obsessive art. I also like the social aspect of it where I was really busy. It was when I was finishing my book and, it was a nice kind of low pressure way to be social because it’s not like I had a plan you know, I didn’t plan to meet people there. It wasn’t a real,, if I had time and felt like going I could go and I would see a lot of friendly faces and people I knew, but it wasn’t a kind of big commitment. so I enjoyed that aspect of it and then when I was writing it was really fun to think about language in a different way. where, you know, every word matters so much. And you can start to get into the same kind of obsessive editing and reediting that you would do in a, in a longer form. But yeah, it’s just, it’s a, it’s a totally different way of thinking about what you can do with language. And I think it might have made some parts of my book a little more old or creative or, you know, it, it just was a nice balance, the, the high pressure of finishing a book with a deadline and then the low pressure of, of, I mean, high pressure because there’s an audience. But then again, who cares if you do a bad set at an open mic, you know, there are, there are 20 open mics every night. Who cares? And it’s not a paying audience. So,

[0:39:59 Frederick]  I don’t know, I thought, I don’t think I’m there yet.

[0:40:02 Rebecca]  It’s really, it’s so fun. And if, you know, you can, you can start at a low pressure, low pressure plates I mean, I signed up for actually, I started because I had always wanted to try it. And I invited my mom to come stay with me over March break one year and take a class with me. So I, I had my mom there with me, which made it easier, but then she went back to Boston and I stayed in New York and comedy.

[0:40:32 Frederick]  Wonderful. So you mentioned the f as someone that’s really exciting for you right now. And I know that, you know, in my, in my kind of Netflix Binging, I think I’ve come across was my brilliant best friend. Was that a,

[0:40:49 Rebecca]  it’s an HBO

[0:40:50 Frederick]  series? Ok. HBO, right. And, but tell me, tell me, may share maybe a little bit more about Elena or not or what, whatever is exciting for you. Right now.

[0:41:04 Rebecca]  OK. I mean, Elena Ferrante somehow, you know, these, these books are just extremely powerful and kind of hit you emotionally in a way that, you know, other, other novels do occasionally. But I it, I hadn’t felt that way in a, in a long time and kind of connect you to a sort of Rage and Pain and they’re, they’re really riveting books. Both the Techology, which is the four book series of my brilliant friend. And then the three short, no, that preceded the Techology. So, I mean, I think they’re also, you know, a kind of sweeping, beautiful history of Italian Postwar culture. So in that way, there, there can be useful also kind of in teaching a, a, an Italian cultural history class. But mostly I just really loved reading them and it’s sort of, I mean, you know, I love God be Mangel in a way too, but I don’t connect to them so kind of with such immediacy and it does feel a little different thinking about how to write about texts that you really just love. I mean, it isn’t, I don’t think that the role of the critic is to kind of you know, tear down or like critique with a hammer. But it’s, you know, sometimes I feel inarticulate when, when talking about Ferrante because I don’t know, I don’t know if I want to sort of protect the power of the words and the, the sort of emotional resonance of them or what. I mean, that’s it. I talk about her all the time so it’s not really fair. But so then the other, the other thing that I just read that I really enjoyed and it, and this is something I listen to. I’ve been listening to audio books, like, while I make sourdough, there’s still like a little bit of the pandemic that lingers in my lifestyle, I suppose. But I listen to Naomi Klein’s Dobel Gager, which is so good. And just really smart and, ethically engaged and, it’s, I loved it. I, I didn’t think I was going to be so interested in the topic but she just does. It, it’s really, it’s really good.,

[0:43:47 Frederick]  well, I’m gonna have to, you know, move beyond my HBO, you know, watching of Elena and now read the novels, and add the NIA clone Cline to my, this has been really incredible, Rebecca. I mean, we’ve, you’ve taken us from this excitement and around these, you know, this course on iterations of Faust and literary theory to language and languages hoarding in the kind of disciplined ways undisciplined ways are, you know, making bread from air and fascism, political studies or political ways of reading that might rub against the author’s politics to these beautiful recommendations that you just made. So, thank you, Rebecca. Thank

[0:44:46 Rebecca]  you so much. It’s was really fun. Thanks

[0:44:53 Outro]  into the verse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find into the coli verse podcasts on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time