The Swiftie and The Scholar - Folklore as a Unified Literary Work | Wrapping Up Folklore: Part 2

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

We did it! One album down, lots to go. Uncle Jerry takes us through alllllll the unifying themes, devices, questions, and more (13 to be exact) of the folklore album as a whole. Thanks for coming on this journey with us!*Links with an asterisk are affiliate links, which allow us to make a small commission on your purchase at no cost to you. Thanks so much for your support!Works Cited:Sonnets from the Portuguese 20: Beloved, my Beloved, when I think – Elizabeth Barrett Browning*Aurora Leigh: A Norton Critical Edition – Elizabeth Barrett Browning*Morphology of the Folktale – V. Propp *The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales – Bruno Bettelheim*Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion – Jack Zipes*Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale – Jack Zipes*The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales – Jack Zipes *The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: A Norton Critical Edition – Jack Zipes *Literary Theory: An Introduction – Terry Eagleton*Witches, Ogres, and the Devil's Daughter: Encounters with Evil in Fairy Tales – Mario Jacoby, Verena Kast, Ingrid Riedel*Retelling / Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times – Karl Kroeber *Linguistic Criticism – Roger Fowler*From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers – Marina Warner*No Go, the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock – Marina Warner[anyone lived in a pretty how town] – e.e. cummingsThirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird – Wallace StevensMaslow’s Hierarchy of NeedsLore & LyricsUlysses – James JoyceA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce*Slaughter-House Five – Kurt Vonnegut*The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger*Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark TwainHilary Duff is trying to listen to the healthy part of her brain – Los Angeles TimesThe Swiftie and The Scholar Grading MatrixFollow Us:Patreon⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠Reddit⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠Threads⁠Angela’s Instagram⁠Uncle Jerry’s InstagramAngela’s YouTube Channel

Welcome to the Swifty and the Scholar, the podcast where we examine the lyrics, lore, and literary legacy of Taylor Swift. I'm Angela McDowell, the Swifty. And I am Dr. Jerry Spengali Coates, the Scholar. My Uncle Jerry. Spengali, I'm going to reveal it all today. Okay, we are back with part two of Uncle Jerry revealing all of the secrets of folklore. And you are so lucky to be here. Okay.

I don't know if they're all the secrets. So many secrets. Well, I kept reading them and reread. As I said last time, I ran off all the songs without my note, without my original notes to get a fresh look. And I kept, I keep seeing new stuff. Yeah. Want to hear? Yeah.

So it's like, so we're not, this is not the formal start of the podcast. Just a little extra. This is the preface. Oh, of course. Yeah. Prolog. Prolog, yes. So in the one, the very first three words are, I'm doing good.

Okay, so what does that mean? Do you understand it's ambiguous? Yeah, because it's like, I'm doing well. Yes. Which is how it should be said. Or? Or like, I'm doing good things. That's right.

And the question is, which is it? So she could be doing good things and be completely screwed up inside. Okay. Or she could be like feeling great but reeking havoc. Right. Yeah. She could be exactly. I just think, you know, I think that's really interesting. In Cardigan, I noticed the chorus begins with, but I knew you. But I think that's ironic. Did she really know him? I know. I know. And then when I was reading the lakes, I noticed that phrase. you know, my beloved. And it always bothered me because I thought there is a poem that starts out, my beloved. And I could not remember. And it hit me. The poem is, in fact,

sonnet number 20 from the sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Brownie, someone whom I know she must admire. And it begins, beloved, my beloved, When I think that thou wast in the world a year ago, what time I sat alone here in the snow and saw no footprint, sitting in the snow, it kind of echoes some of the work here. Yeah, of ice frozen ground. Yeah. Heard the silence sink no moment at thy voice, but link by link when counting all my chains, as if that's so they never could fall off at any blow struck by thy voice. possible hand. So she is chained to her life and he hadn't come into her world yet. And she's waiting for him to come and break these chains to help her escape this snow, this landscape.

See my heart from the fate of Ophelia. I know, isn't it? It's just like I hear echoes of her work all through this. Why, thus I drink of life's great cup of wonder, wonderful never to feel the thrill the day or night with personal actor's speech, nor ever call some prescience of thine with the blossoms white thou sawest growing. Atheists are as dull who cannot guess God's presence out of sight. So she believes they were fated to meet.

By an invisible string. God had paired them a year in the future and she didn't realize it. But I just think it's a lovely poem. Interesting. I know, isn't that fun? Yeah. And it's like, oh, I should have brought that up with the lakes.

And we could have talked about its echoing resonance with other works. And I don't know. Well, now you get to do it right now. You just did it. I just did it. Wait. You tricked me. So what are we doing today?

Yeah. This is, you know, last week, if you missed last week, we, We dug into, we finished folklore, all the songs on folklore, the poems on folklore. Last week we dug into the prologue, the imagery around the vinyl and the CD and all of that. And now we're digging into the work as a whole, I believe. That's right. Okay. I titled my notes, Folklore as a unified literary work.

Okay, yes. Yeah. Now that's the title of this episode. Thank you for that. Okay. Sometimes that's hard stuff. I know. I always like, sometimes I look at it and go, oh, that's really clever.

And then it's something you said. No, I'm not used. Probably something I quoted. Most of the things that sound really good are things I quote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm still resonating inside from that poem I read.

That's so good. I love Elizabeth Barry. I need to, like, get the sonnets from the Portuguese and really dig into that. It's lovely. I mean, you know, yeah, everybody quotes Sonnet 43, you know, let me count the ways. Oh, yes, it is. Yeah. And I love this line that she loves him in her childhood's faith with a childhood. You know, you know how we think of God when we're children. Yeah. You know, we think purely, perfectly, without a doubt, you know, and she says that she loves him with her child. childhood's faith. It's just a beautiful line.

It's beautiful. She's a wonderful writer. She writes Aurora Lee, by the way, which is a semi-autobiographical work. And it's really worth reading. It's a poetical novel. Okay. And there's a really nice Norton

Critical Edition that you can get if you're interested. I'll try to find that and link it in the description. And buy it for myself. Okay. Yes. Take it away. Are you ready? Teach us.

Teach us about folklore. Folklore as a unified literary work. Okay, so I have to show a whole bunch of books to begin with. Okay. Is that okay? Yeah. So I don't make this stuff up. And I don't pull it out of my own head often.

It's because there are a lot of foregrounding authors, a lot of foregrounding thinkers whose works I am indebted to. When it comes to thinking about folklore, when it comes to thinking about literature, And I just wanted to pay tribute to some of those. And I mentioned some of these before, the morphology of the folk tale. Yes, this was like, I think, in our first episode, you brought this. Yeah, the Vladimir Props morphology. And it's not a great read exactly, but it does introduce you to the fact that folklore, folklore, folk tales and fairy tales have specific patterns that they create. that they, as structures, they fall into one of hundreds of categories,

and sometimes overlapping categories. And there are people who study those things and who will organize them all in the charts and things like that. And this was a seminal work in my understanding of folktales. One that I really like, that I always encourage, and I love this one, because I had a paperback, but this is the first edition. of the uses of enchantment, the meaning and importance of fairy tales by Bruno Bettleheim.

And I know you probably linked this before. Yeah, for sure, like, early, early on. Yeah, Bruno Bettleheim's work is really foundational, and people have written about it since he came out with it, and there have been people who agree with many parts and disagree with other parts, but it's certainly worth a read. Like I said, foundational. if you're interested in folk literature or fairy literature.

And there's a guy named Jack Zipes, Z-I-P-E-S, and this is Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. Oh. So, yeah, how do fairy tales attack cultural norms? Interesting, okay. Yeah, or folk tales. How do they tell stories that we can't tell if it's us, right? We can't say, this is what I'm really thinking right now.

Oh, that feels very appropriate for this conversation. Yeah, yeah. It's truth in another way of speaking. It's essentially as she says, truth blurred with fiction, right? Reality blurred with imagination. That's what she says in the prologue, as you remember. Zipes has several books. I mean, I have fairy tale as myth, which is really good.

Myth is fairy tale. I have the Oxford companion to fairy tales, which is really good because it gives you, like, like if you ever want to look up something, it's in here. Okay. And this is edited by our friend Jack Zipes. Of course. Yeah. The fairy tale king, apparently.

And this is the Norton edition of the great fairy tale tradition. And so it, you know, people have asked, you know, how do I know, how do I know so much about Nordic fairy tales or Icelandic fairy tales or Asian fairy tales or African fairy tales. They're in the books, people. Yeah, I love to read these and I've studied them. I started to write my dissertation in English about fairy tale origins of the English novel. This is selected and edited by a guy named Jack Zipes. Got the idea he's pretty important.

Yeah. So when it comes to literature, Terry Eagleton's Literary theory and introduction is really foundational. Yeah, if you want to know how English people, how, you know, the people who study literature, not just English, but literature of all types, how they think, how they organize their thoughts or approaches to literature, this is a really good introduction. That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, it talks about structuralism and post-structuralism, and it talks about semiotics,

and reception theory and reader response theory and all the different ways of approaching literature. I'm tossing some aside. Just a few more. When we looked at Mad Woman the first time around, I actually went back and looked at this book. It's witches, ogres, and the devil's daughter. What an incredible title.

I know. It's just really fascinating. And I also looked at re-reading and re-telling and re-reading, which is about how, it is the fate of storytelling in modern times by Carl Krober. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, and it's interesting because, you know, Swift encourages us at the end of the prologue that the poems are now ours and we need to retell them.

And every time you retell, you make it your own, right? You insert yourself somehow. you know, and I'm going to talk a little bit about disnarration today. Okay. Because that occurs in several spaces. And where do I get all those terms? Roger Fowler's linguistic criticism. Okay.

So again, this is, it's getting to be aged now. My copy's all yellowed. The text is so small. I know. I need the old person in coffee with the big. It's so packed. And I've got all these, you know, dovetailed pages.

But Roger Fowler's work is an early work in linguistic criticism. And so he looks at the language, the semantics, the syntax of what goes on in a work. And, you know, when I talk about things like disneration or when I talk about free and direct discourse or direct discourse, that's all in Fowler's linguistic criticism. And finally, I'm going to show you one of my favorites. and this is someone I've mentioned before. This is Marina Warner. I love everything she writes. This is Beast to Blonde of fairy tales and their tellers.

And, you know, if you love the story of Beauty and the Beast. Yeah, if you love you. Yeah. Don't read this. Because it tears it a part. Oh, no. Yeah, it's wonderful. You will learn things that you never thought.

Interesting. Yeah. And this is one, just because I love the title, No Go the Boogie Man. But Marina Warner is... Some of these titles are incredible. Yeah, aren't they fine? She's a fun writer and speculates on the nature of folklore.

So I just had to throw some of those at you before I got started talking about it. A lot of what I say and do is actually based on their work. Okay, so, no, I'm not an original thinker. Okay, I mean, I have a thought. Maybe sometimes. I have a thought from time to tell. But really what I want you to understand is that there's a lot of training that goes on into speculating about these things. You know, it's like hiring a plumber or an electrician, maybe most specifically an electrician.

You know, you want to get someone who is well trained. Yeah, you can't just do, you can't DIY the electrical. Right. I mean, I've installed a ceiling fan. myself, but when serious electrical things happen, I back away and call the electrician. Yeah. You know, there is a lot of training that goes in. Okay, so folklore.

The album, you know, is it a unified literary work? Okay. Okay. So I wrote an introduction. Okay. I also wrote a conclusion for this one. So you're going to get my last statement on the album probably in three hours or so. I won't be three hours.

Okay, I think folklore isn't merely a collection of 17 separate works. Okay. Rather, it is a linked story cycle populated by children, lovers, ghosts, survivors, betrayers, historic figures, and perhaps most importantly, by people searching to understand their past. Right? Because so much this memory, and so much of it is looking backward, I need to know, you know, how do I assess who I am without assessing where I came from? Right.

And then maybe, maybe even getting a projection of where I'm going. Right, right. Yeah. Throughout the works, Swift poses several questions for the reader. The most important of which may be, you know, again, this is my speculation on what's really thematically important to her. how do human beings turn experience into stories and how do those stories influence us and change over time, memory, and retelling? Yeah.

Okay, she wants us to think about our human experiences. She wants us to identify with these characters and she wants us to understand how our assessment changes in our own memories of our own lives and how our assessment of her works change over retelling. Interesting. So there are many other questions for us to consider.

I made a few, a few of which I'll try to answer here. Okay. Since the work prompts us to try to find our own individual answers. So I made a little list of questions. What can we do with the past? You know, where does it belong? What's its function? Why do we have memory?

You know, all those questions have. having to do with our past. Can a person escape the story others tell about them? Oh, okay. Okay. And you know where I'm going, Rebecca Harkness and other places. Yeah. Yeah.

Can you escape the stories other people tell? Yeah. And like Inez talking about James and Betty and August. Yeah. Exactly, yeah. Inez is over there chattering away. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Is love something we choose? something that happens to us or something we remember into existence. I know I'm particularly proud of that one. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. Do we choose love? Do we say, oh, that's the one? Is it something that happens to us either happenstantially or by fate? Is it the invisible string?

Is it Robert Frost's poem design? Or is it something we remember into existence? You know, does, I'm going to use the word again. Does Valentina even remember me? Oh, no. Right? I remember the night I envisioned her in our living room. Her hologram stumbled into your apartment.

Right. The hologram stumbled into my apartment one night when my parents were off at church. on a Sunday night and I was watching Bonanza and thinking about Valentina. Right. And does she even remember me? You know, I mean, could she even say who I was now? Right.

Right. Or do I just remember love into existence? Oh, dear. Can we, and I'm thinking specifically now about poems like Cardigan, you know, does she remember, is, you know, she's looking back 20 years ago. go now and did it happen the way she remembers it and if it did does the other person remember it the way that she remembers it and does she even remember it with truth fact or reality or does she remember it with fantasy and imagination you know and i'm pulling all these words from the prolog yeah

exactly yeah right and can we ever truly know another person's version of events You know, she hands these stories off to us and tells us, make them your own and retell them. You know, and she can't know. She can't know what I'm going to think or say. I mean, you know, hey, Taylor, if you're listening, you can't know. Well, I mean, you will because I'll talk about it. You can watch these episodes. Yeah.

But even then, I'm going to, you know, we're going to turn off the camera and you're going to edit. And so it will become another version. Right, right. Yeah. Just by editing it, you're going to change it. And then we're going to throw it out there and people are going to listen to it. And sometimes they're going to say, well, you know, that guy's an idiot, you know, or some of them are going to say, he's the most brilliant person ever. You know, I don't know.

It's going to change with every retelling, which, again, echoes her preface. Yeah. And finally, what remains after love? or childhood or innocence or certainty disappears. I didn't know it was going to be getting like having existential crises. Yep. Well, that's what these poems are about. What happens when love disappears?

Yeah. What happens when you have left childhood behind? You know, what happens when your innocence is disrupted? Maybe not gone, but certainly disruptive. Or what happens when the certainties that you hold disappear? Right? I mean, you've had that moment where you absolutely knew something or trusted something,

and then it evaporates or it violates you, and you don't know what to... How do you assess it when it disappears? Yeah, because, like, the truth of that maybe has shifted for you or something. Right. So these poems help us or challenge us, maybe both, to answer these questions. And I'm sure you guys can think of other questions, right? Because you're supposed to personalize this. You know, I admitted last time that I did not listen to the whole album.

I just treated it like literature and I went back through all my printed copies without all my notes, you know, just to get a fresh feel. and, you know, bringing myself as a new reader, you know, as a reborn reader after a year of working with her stuff. But, you know, what do you think about these things? And you guys have listened to them again, again, again, again, but do you still hear new things? Yeah, I was just going to say that because, you know, I've listened to folklore probably hundreds of times. And this past week, I've been listening to it more and more to prepare for this episode. And I was actually trying to listen, you know, because after a while, you're listening to these songs and you're not really like hearing them anymore. They're just in your head and you're singing along, but you're not like thinking about what's being said.

And this week, as I was listening to Invisible String, because I had just edited that episode, all of our conversation was like top of mind. and I was just like, this is the best thing I've ever heard. You know, like, it totally changed, and it was like making me think new things, even though I've loved Invisible String since 2020, but it was, like, new to me. And so that's just, like, another way, like, delving into these is, like, another way to change them, like what we've done here, I'm sure I have to change some of these songs for people. Yeah, you know, I mean, I, when we do these songs, and I always say I spend two or three days, and I read them and read them and read them, must read them a hundred times.

Some passages, some words, I go over and over and over and I think about. And yet as a fresh reader, I come back and I still see new things. I think that's a beauty of it. Retelling isn't just you telling me or me telling you. Retelling is also a re-experiencing in our own head. Exactly. Yeah, because like in 2020 when this came out, we were all probably in a way different part of our lives than we are now.

You know, and like even without the pandemic, if we take that away, which I don't think we can't take it away, but even without the pandemic, six years is a long time. Yeah, yeah. You know, to, and then, you know, we're going to listen to this again in 10 years, and there'll be something completely different because it changes for us as well, because we change. Yeah, it's so funny because our, you know, we live through the pandemic,

and everyone has his or her tale of the pandemic. You know, everyone walks their own commino. I remember seeing newsreel pictures of Italy where, you know, some of the streets are very narrow and people live in apartments or in these old buildings that are very close, and they would lean out the window and talk with one another. I remember seeing that too.

You remember seeing? And they were like singing and stuff together. Yeah, they would sing together. And sometimes they, like during festivals where they would all, be together, they would get pans and whack them. Just to make noise and have fun and communicate. It's like, I'm here, I'm still here. You know, and you forget those things, you know.

And it's funny how, you know, this is an E.E. Cummings poem, you forget to remember how soon you forget to remember with upso floating many bells down. Yeah, it's anyone lived in a pretty how town. I know I'm always thinking of poetry. I don't know. That just reminded me of Home Alone 2, The Pigeon Lady. I quoted a multi-pullet surprise winner, and you're talking Home Alone 2. The best movie ever made, Home Alone 2.

I don't know what you're talking about. It's a fine piece of art. I think it's great that you're, yeah. So you're retelling. Keep going. Yes, it says. So, you know, Kevin brings her the turtle doves. And she, before that, she's like, you know, you won't remember.

me and he's like, I will remember you. And she's like, don't make promises you can't keep. And then he brings her the turtle doves at the end of the movie and she's like, he says, I won't forget to remember you. Oh, that's so sweet. Yeah. I have never seen Home Alone 2. I'm serious?

I know. Sorry, I saw Home Alone 1 and I was full up. Oh my gosh. Homeland 2 is like literally my favorite movie. Not just Christmas movie, like favorite movie. Wow. I will watch that year round. I watch it every year while I actually watch both Home Alone one and two while I'm putting my Christmas tree every year.

Oh, yeah, classics. Yeah. I can't believe you've never seen Hall, too. Okay, maybe a Patreon episode is going to be us watching the Home Alone Two together. We'll just be going on. Sounds great. Okay. So we're going to try to answer questions.

I really took us off of this. I don't know. It actually reminded me of a passage in The Odyssey, but I guess I will. I won't go further down that. When Odysseus says goodbye to Nalsica, yeah. She says, you'll, you know, you'll never remember me. And he says, goddess, I will always remember you. You know, he addresses this 14-year-old, 13-year-old girl and says, goddess.

It's just beautiful. Okay, well, okay, let's consider some literary principles and unifying devices in folklore. Okay. With all those questions in mind. Okay, yeah. Okay, so I listed 13 of them. Oh, my goodness. I know, I stopped at 13 in reverence to one of my favorite poems,

13 ways of looking at a blackbird by Wallace Stevens. I thought it was because Taylor loves 13. Oh, she does. That was a little Tevoodoo that made you stop at 13. Ooh, Tevoodoo. Tevoodoo is very powerful. Is that right? Yeah.

Is it really very powerful? If you wrong Taylor, that Teifoodoo will eventually come get you. Yeah, I guess that's why I stopped. No, if you've never seen 13 ways of looking in a blackbird, Wallace Stevens writes a poem where he looks at blackbirds, but he imagines different, has little two or three line images of them. Okay. And I just, I love it.

Yeah. And because Taylor loves 13. Okay, number one. Yes. One of her important literary principles is stories are never finished. Mm-hmm. Right? And that's the cool thing about folk tales and folklore is, you know, when I was talking about Invisible String, I mentioned, well, there's one tradition where he does this. And there's, there's a Chinese tradition where it's tied around an ankle and a Japanese one where it's tied around the little finger. And yeah, so they're never finished. People will retail and retail and retail. And I have just a few examples. Okay. In the one, you know, the one asks what might have happened.

Right? Cardigan remembers a youthful experience from a later advantage. So the story isn't finished, right? She's remembering it now 20 years later, and what's going to happen next year? Or the next year. She's going to keep remembering. Right, you're going to keep remembering. The poem 7 reconstructs childhood through the imperfect understanding of an adult.

And I say imperfect because the adult does. doesn't know all the facts of the childhood friend's life. But as an adult, the narrator can interpret them more willingly and clearly. So being an adult gives you a more perfect understanding, but memory creates a more imperfect understanding. And the story's not finished. Right. We don't know what happened to the friend. Yeah.

August remembers a summer already lost. Right? What happens to her afterward? Yeah. This is me trying. Interprets failure after damage has been done. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. What happens afterwards? Yeah. Illicit affairs shows her repeatedly dying, right? She's dying in memory and experience. And so does she give up the affair? Said. No, it's ongoing.

Not for you. I've ruined myself a million little times. So the story keeps going. Invisible string traces a present relationship backward through either coincidence or fate. It's up to us to decide. She kind of thinks that there's an invisible thread that attaches them, that red thread. But is there. And, okay, you've gotten this.

far now what yeah right it does beg the where else is the string that's right it does beg the question now what um betty attempts to revisit the past and change its ending right yeah epiphany turns toward memory as a refuge from trauma right now we know that the soldier or the COVID victim will pass away You remember they, the caretakers say that they are going out. But what happens to the caretakers? Right.

You know, how does, because the trauma goes on. The trauma does not end with the death of the victim. Yeah. Because we are all are witnesses to that trauma. Right. And so we carry that forward. And we just talked about that, right? We just talked about COVID memories.

We talked about, you know, people banging pots during celebrations, people talking across windows. Yeah, we carry that. trauma always with us. So the trauma does not end with the death of the victim. Or in hoax, we remain trapped in that aftermath of betrayal. Yeah, so again and again and again, she's saying that the story that she's telling is an ongoing story. It has a past and a present and a future, which I think is really cool. So the collection, it like intentionally or fundamentally is about, narration after experience after events have occurred but narration that can go on

right almost disnarrative it's almost projecting into an area that we don't know right but we can speculate about because we get to retell the story very few of these poems resolve right they don't say and so I was happy we lived happily ever after Literally never. Right. Right. They don't resolve. The characters themselves are constantly asking unresolvable questions.

Like they ask things like, and I made a list of the implied questions that the characters ask. What really happened? I love this. I mean, Scott, like, really happy. This is really fun. Sorry, go ahead. I mean, in how many of these poems, does the narrator ask what happened? Mm-hmm.

Or what really happened? And you remember the prologue, she says her intention is to blur the line between reality and imagination. You know, what really happened? Well, what do you imagine happen? Right. Right. What do you remember happen? And can you trust the memory?

You know, how many of these poems can you do that? I mean, you can name them right now. Yeah, I mean, it's like the whole, the love triangle is like, am I remembering this? Right. You know, especially Cardigan. It's like, I'm remembering this thing that happened to me when I was a teenager. And August is like, you were never mine, like, but were you? Like, are you going to call me when you go back to school?

Like, you know. What happened to that? Yeah. Yeah. And the one is like, that would have been fun. But you probably aren't the one, but like maybe you actually are. You know, like you just, you know, the, the nature of the one is, if you're not at the end of your life

there could always still be time for the one to show up and even in a historically based poem like the last American dynasty we have Harkness we have stories about her told by the townspeople is that what really happened

right right you know or is that just gossip yeah she painted a dog lime green she's a lunatic is that what really happened okay we know it was but I mean you know historically but why did she have a reason? And do we know the reason?

Right. Was it a good reason? Was it a crazy reason? Yeah. I always think of that one too as like Taylor saying, okay, this was the life that this house lived before me because of this woman. And I showed up after 50 years.

And so then I kind of feel like that song is Taylor asking when I'm out of this house for 50 years, what are the people going to say about me and what I did at this house? Yeah. And what really happened? Yeah. Yeah.

Was she just insane on Fourth of July parties? You know, were they all running amok? Yeah. Or was it just a party? Right. You know, I mean, we have a Fourth of July get together here. Yeah. You know?

And sometimes we get loud. Okay. Another question. Characters have that are unresolved. What did I know or understand at the time? I knew you. Yeah. I knew you.

Did you know him, you know, or did you understand her? You know, what did you understand at the time versus how time changes? Because time, as you know, is curious. Time is mystical. Wondrous. And it's wondrous. Yeah. Another question they might have asked, what do I know or understand now?

What did I know then? What do I know now? Yeah. And could I or should I? Could you shoulda? Could I or should I have acted differently? Right? Should I have avoided this affair?

You know, should I jump off that cliff? Right. Right. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Was there a way to avoid some of the, fates or some of the causal instances or some of the happenstance moments that have invaded these lives.

Right. And what might have happened instead? So if you had redirected, if you had nipped that invisible string and what might have happened instead, you know, where would my life be? And I think she asked that in Cardigan, you know, where would my life be? you know um so often characters live in a kind of what if world you know we pointed this out in our discussion how many times do you see the word if right and this is back to our linguistic analysis this is the world of disneration okay right disneration is uh telling the story that didn't happen right you know if i had only done this maybe that wouldn't have happened right if I had then if I had then you know there might be an actual world of what happened

and then the characters imagine and sometimes wish for a world that might have happened so the story's not over right the tantalizing thing is she gives us tales that we can apply within our own lives retail and they go on just because our own lives go on right Yeah. Okay. Second. Okay. Remember we have 13 of these, so that's a lot. The most unifying device is storytelling itself.

Okay. Yes. Okay. And she kind of says that in the prologue. She says, I have a new method. I'm going to have an image that I'm going to create, I'm going to be curious about the image, going to think about it, that I'm going to create a character, and then I'm going to build a story around the character.

And so it's about storytelling. Okay, so ask yourself if these are true swifties regarding Taylor Swift's work, how are you going to approach folklore? Folklore consists of stories that survive because people want to keep retelling them. Right? Now, if you're a swift, you probably listen to the song, as you said, over and over and over and over again. And then you have it your head. Like you said, I can't get that song out of my head now.

So you're going to replay it over and over and over, retelling it to yourself. Stories change from person to person as they are retold. So I don't know if I got the true version of Home Alone 2, with the dove and all that. I don't know if there are other elements that I should consider that she omitted from the retelling of that story. Were there facial expressions by McCauley Coffin that I should have seen when he hands the dove to the woman, right? I don't know. I haven't seen the movie. Okay, and we have to fix that. So the boundaries between fact and fiction between truth and imagination of the way.

unclear and all the versions, ideas, and interpretation become part of a collective effort and a collective memory. Okay, back to you, Swifties. So when you are writing in the comment section or when you go to Reddit and you post your comment in Reddit, you realize you're engaging, you are playing her game. You're engaging in exactly what she wants you to do. You are retelling the story, but retelling it to people who, who know another version of story, their own version, and you are creating your own version.

And then as the Reddit trail continues, or as the comments load up, then, you know, you've seen how one person will make a comment and another person will say that. Another person will say, well, I think that, you know, is there right and wrong, a fact and reality? No, she says it's all imagination and fantasy, and that's what she wants. So, in fact, she wants that discussion. She wants us to create our own version of the story. So by golly, if you want to apply biographical criticism, that's up to you.

Go for it. That's you. Yeah. Okay, so consider the different types of stories she tells. The genres, the stories include things like personal memory. Mm-hmm. Right? The one, cardigan, seven, August, invisible.

string. They include historic narrative. The last great American hero. Right. Or Epiphany. Epiphany. Yes, exactly. Where she's telling a kind of historic tale

with her in imagining Guadalcanal, imagining a soldier, imagining what really happened during COVID. She tells, imagine character studies. Betty, illicit affairs, mad woman, right? Those are character

studies that she is creating stories around. She does use confession right. Confessionalism. Mirror ball. Right? I mean, I think that's symbolically about how we shift and reflect

ideas in our own lives. About how we all want to be performers. About how we all need acceptance. That's on Maslow's you know, hierarchy. Yeah, we need I always told students that, you know, that I always taught class, according to Maslow's hierarchy,

you know, that we have plenty of fresh air in the classroom. I allow them to bring in drinks and food so they can remain sustained. But on Maslow's hierarchy is the need for love and exceptions. I need love and acceptance. Yeah. Mirabal, however, is also confessional. You know, she wishes she were performing. This is me trying.

Could be confessional. Yeah. Peace could be confessional. Hoax could fall into that genre. Some of them are dialogue or conflicting testimony stories. Exile. Oh, yes, yes. All right.

Betty Cardigan August. Some of them are clearly mythic or symbolic narratives. Epiphany or The Lakes. I think that's very clearly kind of symbolic or almost mythical where she wanders into the lake. She goes out to Windermere. She goes past Dove Cottage. And it's almost like she, you know, in movies where they walk through this like filmy barrier, it's almost like she's into another time. She wants to know what her words worth.

Yeah. She asks us to consider who gets to tell the story. Okay. Right. It's about storytelling. Yeah. Betty's memories of James and Cardigan. Betty tells the story.

James explains himself in Betty, right? James tells a story. Augustine, whatever, whatever, we need a name. Augustine's longing in August. You know, what happened? Two estranged speakers in exile. Rebecca Harkness's public legend.

with dialogue from the townspeople. We actually get, you know, we get literal storytellers. The persecuted female figure of madwoman, you know, she tells that story. We get it from the side of the mad woman. And we talked about the ambiguity of the application of the word mad. The invisible public performance of the narrator in Mirror Ball. Right. Right.

The private unheard. heard confession of this is me trying. Right. And the narrator searching for retreat, retreat into nature and retreat into another time of poetry in the lakes, our concluding poem. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, those are all different narrators.

And if you count them up, that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, to ten different narrators. Wow. That's fun. That's a fun little fact. It is. Like all these different narratives who she uses, you know, what she's doing is she's exploring the art of storytelling. I think fundamentally this collection of poems is about storytelling.

Right. Okay. She explores interwoven narrative with multiple perspectives. I mean, the obvious example is a trilogy. Okay. So we have Betty's story in Cardigan is shaped by memory, betrayal, maturation, and retrospection. Uh-huh. Right.

She's, she has this experience, and now she's much older, and now she's looking back at it with the understanding that's gained by time, curious time. Augustine's story in August. It's a story of desire without possession, right? Her tragedy is different from Betty's. She may have experienced genuine love, but her love existed in a relationship whose performance she misunderstood. Right. Right. Her symbolic condition is temporariness. Oh, right? She did know that like the month of August, the relationship would be passing.

Yeah, just slipped away. It would slip away not to be regained. So the month is full of heat, but it soon chills. Yeah. Right. So August, I mean, it's beautiful in part because it soon disappears. peers. That's the beauty of the month. And I think kind of the beauty of the narrative. Right. And then we have James's story in Betty, which is filled with excuses, uncertainty, conditional language, apology, hope. He said, you know, if I show up at your party, will you have me, will you want? Yeah, I'm standing at your door, what happens if I knock, you know.

You know, I didn't really do this, but I kind of did. But I was thinking of you when we were doing it. Anna. It's like, he's a crappy, I mean, come on. He's a crappy apologetic. But he's learning, right? He's a kid. It is above all that naive language of youth. Right. Right. It's innocence. It's, you know, it's not, it's sexual, but it's not sexual from sin. It's sexual out of, he just doesn't know what that he's doing. He's so inexperienced, you know. And so those interwoven narratives that occur are really cool. You know, the important, takeaway is that Swift doesn't let one narrative control the story. Oh, right, right, right. We get the, like, we get the accumulation of events from

their perspective. And you realize that perspective is not just shaped by memory, but it is shaped by time since, you know, James' experiences a little more immediate. Augustine's experience takes place after August, and then

Cardigan, that experience occurs 20 years later. Right. You know, in deep retrospection. So we have this time slippage. James says, I was young and made a mistake. Betty says being young didn't prevent me from understanding what you did. And Augustine says, you are never invested, even though the experience was emotionally real to me.

Yeah. So I think a big motif is what does it take to tell a story? Interesting. Yeah, she's looking at genre. She's looking at voices. She's looking at the shape. She's looking at the nature of memory. Just lovely work.

Yeah. Three. Yes. You guys, you do have something cool to drink and maybe a snack. Yeah, maybe a snack and like a nice cup of something. If it's cold where you are, maybe something warm, if it's still hot. Three. We have unity created through shared literary devices.

Okay. Like this, yes. Yeah, I mean, I talk about metaphor all the time. I talk about how often that metaphor is extended into a conceit. She gives us abstract psychological experiences through physical items that she describes. I think the best example is mirror ball. Okay, yeah. Okay.

You know, here she is the ball, right? So it's a metaphor. But performance is the ball. Right. So it's a metaphor that's multi-sided. Oh, wait. So is a mirror ball. Right.

It and she reflect on others. Uh-huh. Right. And she changes depending upon who's watching. And just like folk tales are intended to change with each new telling. Interesting. Yeah. So the mirror ball as a metaphor and a conceit throughout the entire work is also a metaphor for the entire album.

Yeah. The whole thing is a mirror ball. The whole thing is a mirror ball. She, you know, the narrator, I was going to say Swift, the narrator exists to entertain just like this collection of poems. Interesting. Right. Wow. Yeah.

So the whole work is a mirror ball. So you also see that metaphorical extension in the Great American Dynasty with the house. Mm-hmm. Right. So the house is a metaphor. Right. The house is a container for memory. it withstands time.

Right. The structure also represents reputation. Right? People just look at the house and they say, what's the reputation of the owner? So the house becomes the owner. The owner's reputation becomes the house, or the lack of reputation.

And you're doing all those eyes at people and you're going to tell me that's reputation. Is that an album? Yeah. Okay, good. Okay, good. Okay. I didn't think of that when I was writing.

Yeah. It was just like, my mind is like exploding right now. Yeah. The house also represents inheritance. Uh-huh. You know, right? What do we inherit from the previous owner? You know, the character of the house, the character of the owner is always imbued on the property.

Right. And so when you bought your house, you walked in and you saw elements of the previous owner. Some of them you rejected immediately. All of them. But some of them you may have kept. Yeah, I mean, sure. Yeah. The house is still there.

Yeah, the house is there. We painted every wall. We changed on every lighting thing. Well, there you go. I know. We're thinking about repainting, actually. It's going to be a project. Yeah.

Yeah, so the physical property represents the life and attitude of the owner. Okay. And it represents female. male dominance. Yeah. You know, self-assuredness. I think it represents rebellion. You know, she owns it.

She owns her life. It's hers to live. I will do what I want in this house. That's right. This house is me. I'm a, you know, I do what I want. That reminds me of a Taylor quote from Miss Americana,

which is her documentary that came out in, I think, 2019. and she's in her, like one of her homes, and she's talking. And then she, like, I can't remember maybe she gets, like, really animated or something. And she, like, apologizes for being too loud. And then she's like, oh, sorry, was I too loud in the house that I bought with the money that I made from telling stories about my life? You know, she's just like, it's really sassy for a minute. That's great.

And then it's like, it's very much like the last Green American dynasty. She's like, this is, I've earned this. Like, I'm going to do what I want. Well, that's what it feels like. It feels like, oh, I'm so sorry, but you can suck it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think that house is that, you know, that edifice on the hill that says, you know what? Here I am, babe. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Come get me if you have to. And remember, we also see a literal and metaphorical house in seven. Uh-huh. Yeah, the house is haunted. Yeah, and that's an interesting shift, right?

So the metaphor doesn't always have to mean the same thing, right? Like sometimes a rose is beauty, sometimes a rose is doomed to fade and die. So it's a symbol of temporality, and sometimes a rose has thorns. Can I sing it again? Every rose has its thorn. Yeah. So, you know, it can be danger. hurtful. So the rose

can mean a lot of different things. The house can mean a lot different things. In seven, the house is a symbol of repression, captivity, right? Oppressive spirits, ghosts. Yeah. The child's in the house. She hides in a closet. And the closet is like confined life within the house. Seeking safety, but there is no escape.

Interesting. Yeah. So the house can be different things. She loves to pair up her metaphors. Right. of the cliff right right in hoax she stood on the cliff side screaming just give me a reason and in this is me trying she pulls the car off the road and look down down down yeah could have followed my fears all the way down that's right so the cliff is that that edge of resistance that precipice the where you're looking down and you're thinking about ending your life or you're just sick and tired of everything's gone before or you just want to scream

give me a reason and hope that something echoes back. All you're going to hear is yourself. Yeah. Right. You know, and how many times does she refer to films or roads or cars? Yeah, it's just every song, right? It has one of those. Yeah.

So, no, I did not catalog every single metaphor she uses, but I did want to throw some good example. I love the film one. Yeah, there's like so many, I think I've seen this film before. You're a flashback on the film reel and the one screen in my town. Like, it's very, almost like the films are the memories, you know? And so that is, you know, you talk about memory so much, and now Taylor has started talking about memory, which beyond.

But, like, the films are like the movies that are playing in her head as she's, like, telling these tales. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the film is the real of your life, you know, R-E-E-L. Yeah, yeah. But it could be your real life. You know, it's funny because I had a friend who was an RTF major at UT,

radio television film, and he used to say that everyone he met was in the movie of his life. Yeah, yeah. I used to tell him that was pretty egocentric. It is, but it's also like, I mean, it kind of is true. Like, you're living your own movie. Yeah, it's funny how you meet people. People, they become great friends of yours, and then they move on outside of your movie,

and your movie keeps going, right? And that goes back to my very first point that the stories are ongoing. Keeps going, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I like all the references to Rhodes, because Rojo, that journey of life, that, you know, when you come to the crossroads, the decision-making process, the never going back again. Yeah, there are lots. I kind of feel like cars are sometimes.

houses to her, you know, confining, but also, you know, methods of transportation. Yeah, she always, like, in a car, like in the safety of a car, but it's moving forward. Right, to move on. Yeah. Yeah. So there are lots and lots of metaphors. My intention wasn't to catalog them all. I think that would be an entire episode.

Yeah. Yeah. And also, just a quick plug for the website, LaurenLyrics.com, if you all haven't been there. Our friend Helen has created this incredible website where you can. can go. It is kind of crazy. Yeah, and you can type in any word and you can type in house or home or cars or roads and you can see all of the times that Taylor has talked about those things and the songs that we've covered so far and some that we haven't yet and like you can see how she uses them and it's fascinating. So go, I'll link it in the description of this, but laurin lyrics.com.

Okay, four. Yes. Fourth unifying, interesting literary factor that, that has an impact on folklore. The natural imagery. Yeah. Right. Nature is never just a background. Right. Okay.

Again, weaker writers just say, there are beautiful trees in the distance, and the trees are just like, okay, there's foliage, you know, and they don't use it. You know, there's no real impact on the story. She repeatedly uses lakes, water, rivers,

ocean, rain, trees, forests, gardens, flowers, summer, winter, sunlight, snow. Okay, so I'm not going to cover all this. Let's take water. Okay, okay. Okay. Yeah, that's good. Right.

Water suggests, metaphorically, symbolically, memory, right, the flow of memory, danger, immersion, cleansing, distance, emotional depth. Right? So lots of different things. in seven, I'm swinging over the creek, right, becomes part of the movement between fun and fear. Yeah, it's fun, but it's dangerous, right? And it's between danger and rescue. It is the flow of memory because she says she's remembering the narrator is remembering back to when she was seven.

And, you know, there is that old saying that you never step in the same river twice. So it's a symbol of how the water goes on and you're living a present life and whatever it was you remembered is always and only inexorably in the past. Think about Cardigan. She talks about running like water at the end of the poem. Again, the flow of memory. But also she uses the word running, like fleeing from the relationship, abandoning hope. or memory of coming to life again. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Running like water. In peace, the narrator is fire, but he often is covered by ocean waves blue. Yeah. Cascade ocean wave blues.

Right. Yeah. In invisible string, getting lunched down by the lakes. So here we have placidity, you know, a sort of pastoral. natural, you know, image of happiness, image of rest and peace. In my tears ricochet, of course, the tears are water, right, contrasting with her claim that she is, quote, on fire, another if statement, right? But the tears douse the flame, and the battleship sinks beneath the waves, an ocean

of water that consumes emotion, right? So we've got a whole new meaning for water. In the lakes, we have Lake Windermere. Again, placid, beautiful, and escape from society. And, you know, she's looking, you know, she runs into the person who says you look like a pop singer. Right. Someone who is so distant, she doesn't even, she can't even acknowledge she's a pop singer. You know, she's escaped.

So the lakes are an escape. So we have, you know. But also in the lakes, water freezes. Water does freeze. The ice frozen ground? Yeah, the ice frozen ground. So, yeah, I mean, it's got so many interesting metaphorical elements, and I think that she is exploring them. Remember, she says in the prologue, she starts with an image.

Uh-huh. Okay, so she's like taking the image of water and seeing all the different ways that she can use it in all the different forms. She says in the prologue, the next step is curiosity and imagination. Okay, that's fun. Yeah, so start with the image. and then curiously imagine its uses. So water, how can I use it in all of these stories, in seven different poems? Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'll give you another one. Trees and forests. Okay, yeah. Likewise appear again and again, and they suggest transformation or escape or danger or childhood imagination or secrecy. And you can just go through the poems and take a look and see how each one of those things appear. Or the seasons, right?

Summer represents youth, passion, freedom, temporal impermanence. You know, because a summer will pass. Don't just think about August, but the tea of summer of seven. Oh, yeah, sweet tea in the summer. Right, sweet tea in the summer. It was sweet in the summer. Yeah. Yeah, just like childhood.

All of this conversation is making me think that I knew it. I knew you, the Toy Story song, like, fits really well with all of this. Yeah, it does. There's grass, there's remembering, there's the like I knew you that are in that and in Cardigan. And then, you know, it's like the, you're talking about youthfulness being summer and you're, in that one, we're talking about grass. And I don't know. Yeah, it's clearly like the importance of the image as, as a, you know, like it's an image forward way of writing and thinking. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think I knew it. I knew you really like. into all of these well, which she did like mash it up with August recently. Yeah. Yeah. So we, you know, like here we have all the seasons, right? We have summer. We have winter, winter, coldness, emotional separation, loss, isolation, aftermath. I think the change of season reinforces that big theme that nothing remains forever. Nothing is fixed. Emotions change. Circumstances change.

Yeah. Lives change. Who, number five. Number five, unifying facts. factor. Color imagery, this one's going to be pretty quick. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on color imagery and the symbolism created by visual language. Just a little word about it. I mean, you know all the colors. We see teal and blood red. I mean, we have the green of invisible string. I love that opening. Oh, man, that's so good. The bleeding and wounded imagery of hoax, the silver white reflection of a mirror ball, the dying of the dog, lime green. It's not just green, but it's lime green.

So normally you think of green as being, you know, a resurgence of life and beauty. Lime green? Yeah, it's different. That's just somebody that's being a little cuckoo. That's whimsical. Let's give Harkness the benefit of the doubt because she loved dance and so do I. Whimsical. She just had some whimsical.

Yeah. Rust on the door in August, that red almost, it combines a visual color with that tactile feeling of rust that comes off on your fingers like powder. The flames in Mad Woman, the reds and yellows mixed together, and fire generally used in several of the poems and the ocean blues. Yeah. Yeah. She loves to use color. She loves to tantalize our eyes. But remember, that's the easiest thing for a writer to do is to use visual imagery. Right. Yeah. And so she does the harder thing, you know, when she says ocean blues, she's talking about not just the color, but the emotion. Right. And when she says rust, she's talking about not just the color, but the dusty feel, the antique, the oldness, the unkeptness.

Yeah. And the smell in the air from the salt. air that's causing the rust. Right, right. Yeah, she never, she doesn't leave it alone. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, she used a lot of color imagery, but she doesn't do it in isolation. Right. Number six. Okay. Homes, rooms, halls, and domestic spaces.

Yes, love this. I'm excited. Yeah, we have porches, houses, closets, halls, windows, gardens, rooms, parks, beds, cars, bars, parking lots, and schools. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Did I go through all the songs? Oh, my gosh. I just, I don't know.

I love it. I just kept like tearing after page after page after page and page. Oh, there's another one. Oh, there's another. And I probably missed four. Yeah, there's probably so many. But that's like, that's a crazy list to think about like the, you've talked about this a lot, like the spaces, like the spatial imagery that she puts in.

her songs. Yeah, how does she use space? And we talked about the home in great American dynasty. And, you know, it justaposes with a symbol of change in permanence and the repository of memory. Okay. But in Betty, the porch becomes a boundary between separation and reconciliation. But it's like it's public guilt. It's private guilt. You know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was shamed in front of her or her peers, but also he's filling his own guilt. because he's done stuff. You know, and he's guilty about his past actions,

and he's looking forward to a future of maybe changing, maybe a new outcome. So the porch becomes a kind of passage of boundary. Right, yeah. It's a threshold. Threshold imagery is very important to the collection of poetry, and you can see it in all kinds of different boundaries, transitions, and I made a list.

Childhood and adulthood, one lover and another. public and private identity, memory and present. What might have been, what is, and escape and return, you know. So you just think of all the boundaries, the doors where people stop, you know, the hallway that people open to, the closet that people go to. You know, space is an important and unifying factor across several of these songs. Yeah. Number seven. Okay.

Oh, we passed the halfway point. Okay. Okay. I found this to be really interesting. One ironically unifying factor as a literary work is that time is nonlinear. Okay. Okay. Interesting.

For me, this is a big one. Okay. She uses flashback and retrospective narrative and memory and counterfactual history. Uh-huh. Right, which can be called disnarration, and she uses repetition. You know, the one imagines what might have happened, right? It's a disnarrative. And then, can you tell me what is strange about the order of, or what is interesting about the order of the trilogy in the collected poems?

Okay, yes. Okay, so it starts with cardigan. Yes. And which we know is is the latest one to happen. And then we go to August. Which is, I think

technically, like, would be the first in the story. And then we go to Betty. Yeah. So she jumbles the chronology up. Interesting. Time is nonlinear.

Yeah. Yeah. She starts Okay, so why would she do that? Why would she go backwards, forwards, backwards? Think about it. What's one of the major thematic elements? What's one of the major motifs she uses across not just this album, but all of her albums. You said it.

Memory. It's memory. Yeah. How does our memory work? Not in a linear fashion. Non-linear, right? We go, when we remember, we remember the first time you met. And then maybe you remember, you know, something that happened two months in.

And then you remember what it was like before you met. And then it's like, oh, what am I thinking now? Right. Yeah. So memory is kind of yo-yo's in non-linear time. I think that's really something. That is interesting. Yeah, I didn't realize it.

I mean, until you gave me the whole album to look at it. Right, yeah. Right. So I just looked at when you gave it to me, you gave it to me Betty August Cardigan So when we did it We did it in really almost

Chronological order But in the collection It is non-chronological Right Yeah That's interesting I thought so too That's why I really struggled

With how to give those to you Yeah I was talking to them I'm like guys what order do I do these in I don't know Right And nobody had the same answer You know

I think as a storyteller most of us want to tell the story in a, you know, in a chronological sequence from beginning to end. Yeah, you feel like that's what makes sense. Right. But you think about great movies, you know, like Quentin Tarantino's film, Pulp Fiction, it begins and ends at the same chronological moment in time with things happening out of water throughout the movie. Right. And one of the fun things, one of the charms of the film, he does this and kill Bill 1 and 2 as well,

is the non-chronological element. It does keep us wondering. Yeah, you have to figure out the sequence of events for yourself. Right, you have to reorder it in your head. I think that's one of the things about she mentions, in the prologue, I didn't mention stream of conscious. She mentions using some stream of conscious narrative. You know, that is also stream of conscious.

Right, because it just, however it's coming out, is how you're putting it down, not necessarily the correct order. Yeah, you know, if you've ever read something like Ulysses or the portrait of the artist as a young man, Portrait of the artist, you know, you've got this guy, Stephen Dettelous, and he goes back and forth in time, you know. He'll be standing at a sink as an adult, and he's brushing his teeth, and he pulls a plug on the sink, and the water goes around, and he says it makes a sucking sound, and he says, suck, and then he says, you suck, and so. Suddenly he's 12 years old on a soccer pitch and someone's yelling at him. You suck.

Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, so he uses the swirling water to transition. It's like I've mentioned Slaughterhouse Five before where Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time. And someone mentioned in the comments every time someone dies, it's so it goes. Well, and he has that attitude because he's unstuck in time. You know, for him, there is no beginning and end. Right, it doesn't really. Yeah, so end of life, no, that doesn't make any sense.

It's just, you know, it's a continuum. Okay, back to time is nonlinear. Invisible String. It traces love backwards. Right? It goes through apparently unrelated events to say, oh, we were tied together all along. Right. Because when I was this age, you were doing that.

And when I was that age, you were doing that. went, yeah. Right. I think that is so fun. That's one of the joys of the work. Agreed, yes. Last Great American Dynasty moves historically from the past to the presence. So it's more of a chronological tale.

Uh-huh. Right. So she's exploring all the possibilities. All the different ways. Yeah. And in Epiphany, she's got two different traumas, one in World War II, one in 2020. And she is telling this, she's going from stanza to stanza back and forth, right? So she's time slipping so that we can see that both traumas are, share commonalities.

Right. Yeah. So essentially, she's exploring the nature of time. As a matter of fact, you may even remember, she says, time is curious. Time is wondrous. Wondrous. It's mystical. Yeah, yeah, she's saying that time like memory goes backward and forward and it defies our

expectation. You know, we don't need chronological order for a story to be real or impactful to us. Wow, that's nice. Number eight. Okay. Common themes of youth and loss of innocence is so common in literature. I mean, this is Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. This is Huck Finn, you know.

Yeah, common themes like the second. You know, it's the pure exploration of childhood. Childhood isn't always happy. Childhood is imagination, freedom, friendship, fear, domestic darkness, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So she's looking at youth and she's looking at it as innocent but or innocent and. And yeah.

Yeah. And dark and scary and scary and ghostly and angry. Yeah. Yeah. In Betty, youth isn't an excuse. Youth is learning, right? James can claim ignorance, but he's full of backpedaling and excuses. And he's learning how to say, I'm sorry, I was wrong, right?

That's hard. Yes. Even as an adult sometimes, it's hard. Yeah, and that's like the hardest lesson of life, probably. It is. Sometimes it's hard to go to my wife. and say, I'm sorry, I was wrong. And I don't know why that's so hard, you know,

because you want to hold on to your rectitude. Yeah. Yeah. If I could just manisplain it to her one more time. No. That's not good. Just say, don't do that. I'm sorry.

I was wrong. Yeah, Cardigan, youth is something to be remembered and reinterpreted. In August, the affair feels useful, but it's lived in the present with a kind of intensity from learning. Yeah. Right. And this is me trying. Loss of innocence becomes the realization that adulthood hasn't turned out like I expected. Mm-hmm.

Right? So, yeah, there are several of those that touch on the nature of innocence, lost childhood. I do have an interest, like something. to say about that and that is that I feel like a common critique of Taylor Swift's work is that she is like she's stuck

in writing songs about high school and everybody's like well you know that's when she got famous so she's like emotionally stunted and she can't move on past that but I've always understood it to be

more of a here's a thing that we all experienced that I can like couch so many lessons in in a way that people will get in like so many stories in a way that people will understand. Okay, so I think that's one response and I think that's a valid response, you know. I'm not patronizing. No, yeah. Yeah. Sounded a little.

Okay, good. Yeah, I would say and, and she does other things, you know. I think that's pure defecation. I mean desperation or deprecation. I think that's wrong because I think she just proves it in this album. Yeah, like there's this like, you know, that's like a time that we're all, you know, you're coming up on being an adult, you're like learning, you learn so many lessons throughout your teen years.

Yeah. And it just feels like a. perfect place to return to, like, make sense of things that are happening to you in adulthood. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think that illicit affairs absolutely belies that critique, right? I think that's a highly impactful poem. I do, you know, it hit me.

And you just want to, you know, when you see people whose lives are spiraling into wrong, I'd say wrong directions because that that's passing judgment into directions that you yourself could not go you know you just want to you just want to yell stop it you know but you forget that that sex addicted drug addicted people alcohol addicted people are addicts you know and stop it is does it's nothing no it's it's um inefficacious

yeah it's it's not helpful So, yeah, I think that that belies that critique. I think the Harkness poem, you know, runs past that. I think that, you know, the poem where she introduces her father, I mean, grandfather as a kind of character, the health care worker in COVID as a character. I think seven belies that description. Yeah. So she's going before and afterwards. Yeah, your whole life.

Right. Because she's just like so like I feel like of what we're talking about here and like what we've been talking about for the past year is like all of these are like couched and memory and she's looking back and she's being like retrospective about her own life and about other things that have happened. And part of that just includes high school. Yeah. Yeah, it does. It touches on that. I think that a lot of people make make something out of the fact of that she has a high school education and she has no college. And yeah, I mean, I'm guilty of the same.

thing. You know, I believe that degrees are important and time spent in the classroom is important and you know, it was to me, but just because it was to me doesn't mean it is to someone else. Yeah, it doesn't mean that that's the only way that you can

obviously that's like a way to learn and a very structured way to learn but like that's not the only way we learn. Right. I was reading poetry this morning by a modern poet who came up on my, you know, phone feed, and I thought, oh, I ought to take a look at her.

And I looked her up on poetry.com, and there were some of her poems there, and I'm reading through, and I'm going, well, this is fun. And I better go back to work on the Swiss stuff. You know, so, yeah, we do read outside of classroom. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just, you know, if as Taylor Swift, I think, explores in this body of work, if time is non-linear, then she should be free to slip back and forth from seven to illicit affairs to Rebecca Harkness, to her grandfather.

You know, she should be able to slip back and forth. It's the nature of memory. Okay. Okay. So quick. Well, mostly because I didn't fill out with all kinds of different examples. I'm just going to throw them at people. Yeah, they can fill it in for us.

Sure. Yeah, you guys do. Come on. You got to do some of the work. Don't make me do all the work. Number nine, the repeated trope of the unreliable narrator. Oh, okay, yes.

And you can list that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, think about all the narrators who don't even understand their own lives. You know, not just the adolescent narrators of the Love trilogy, but, you know, the narrator looking back at seven is in some ways not reliable

because she only has her memories. She doesn't have her friend's memories. Right. And like memory, I remember reading this a while ago, and it's stuck with me ever since, and I think about it every time we talk about memory on this podcast where your memory works in a way, like your actual brain works in a way

where you're not remembering the actual event. Right. You're remembering the last time you remembered that event. Right. Yeah. So every retelling is different. Yes. So like, even our own memories become our own folklore because they change and like the color of them and everything changes like as time goes on. Which is why sometimes we have like rosier memories of a thing that was actually pretty bad, you know? Or like, or we have or our memories have been clouded by something that happened past. that memory where it changed your idea of that person or that situation.

You know, like everything just kind of, like your own brain is creating your own folklore. And so you become an unreliable narrator of your own life sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I can think of so many personal examples where, you know, according to my current attitude, I change in the way that I think about a past event. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, to be specific, I had a, my second year at UT, I had three roommates in an apartment,

in a two-bedroom apartment, and, you know, two of each in each bedroom. And one of the guys was kind of a disgusting human being. Well, you know, we were all 19 or 18. Most of us males are pretty disgusting at that age. And, you know, sometimes my memories of him are, man, oh man, how could I put up for that? And sometimes they are, that dude was so much fun. It was just insane. Yeah.

You know, and depending on how I'm feeling. Mm-hmm. You know, and sometimes I'll touch on one memory of him that was actually pretty funny. And then sometimes I'll touch on another memory of him that really left me like. Yeah, and you're like, how did I? Why did I? What in the world? Yeah.

Yeah. So, so yeah, it does, you know, it goes back and forth. Mm-hmm. Okay. Number 10? Yes. secrecy versus exposure. Oh.

Right. Okay. I'm hiding in a closet because my father's mad. Uh-huh. Right. I'm Rebecca Harkness. Yeah. I'm not hiding away.

I'm not hiding. I'm out there, you know. I'm having an illicit affair. How do I do that? Okay. Well, hide the perfume. Put your eyes down. Keep your eyes down.

Be sure and have some kind of a hoodie. Yeah. You know, tell your friends you're jogging. Yeah, lie, lie, lie, lie. Right, take lies and just stack them up. Yeah, secrecy versus exposure. Interesting. Really interesting, unifying theme that sort of runs through several of them.

I'm thinking of Inez again, because, like, James had a secret about August, and Inez was, like, telling everybody. Well, and that backs us up to number nine again, the unreliable narrative. Yes, right. Which story is Inez telling? Yeah, yeah. And it says most of the time it's not true, but this time. it is. Yeah, right. So we're combining

unreliable narrative and secrecy and exposure. Yeah, that's interesting. Number 11, this is one of my favorites. Female reputation as a recurring narrative. Right. I'm sure everybody immediately thinks of Rebecca Harkness, but think about the madwoman. Yeah.

I mean, the mad woman is caught in this circular system, in this you know, masculine hegemony, society provokes her. And then she responds the way I think any of us would, you know, with scorpion stings. And because of that response, society calls her irrational. And because society calls her irrational, she gets mad. She turns into irrational.

Right. And so her reputation becomes the evidence against her. Yeah. Maybe we have to go to reputation after this. Yeah, well, I mean, think about that cycle. I mean, how do you break out of that cycle? Yeah. Yeah, you know, especially, you know, as a woman, how do you step out and say, well, that's not me?

Well, then you're just whiny. Yeah, nobody believes you anyway. Right, yeah. And you want to be, you want to be Rebecca Harkness in her. own damn house, you know? You know, who gets to control the narrative when it comes to women's lives? Yeah. That touches, is touched a little bit on, I feel like, in My Tears Rcochet as well.

Like, yes. And maybe that's like more of an iceberg situation where it's maybe not explicitly like told. But like, yeah, she's like, I, you hurt me. And so now I'm this like crazy hysterical crying woman, you know? and so I'm going to, like, sink your battleship and go even crazier, you know. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's this, it's this almost unremovable cycle, you know. And I think that what Swift is touching on here is we, that cycle works in our culture today.

Right. I mean, you know, you think about strong women who speak forthrightly, well, they're a bitch, you know. I mean, they get labeled, you know, in a way that, you know, why? Because men can't cope with her? I mean, you know, and I'm sure Taylor Swift has been labeled in that kind of manner. Yeah, she talks about that in that same documentary I was talking about. Well, then as a woman, how do you respond to that? Well, you just get angry and you actually turn into a bitch. Right.

You become the mad woman. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. You know, and so you're spiraling in the, you know, and so you're spiraling in the, you're, this cycle, and I don't think you're spiraling down, maybe you're spiraling up, you know, in this cycle. How do you break that cycle, you know, that society has laid upon women in our culture? And I think in a way she's exploring that.

Yeah. Number 12. Okay. Fate versus choice. Or maybe fate and a choice. Okay. As Forrest Gump would have it. Yes.

I think it's both. Yeah. I think it's both. No forest. It can be both. Yeah. Is it, is the world determined? Is it a deterministic universe or is it all just happenstantial universe? You know, we talked about this extensively in a recent episode. Invisible string. In invisible string.

But it is something that she looks at elsewhere. Yeah, well, like, that's like the one, you know, just starting us off. Like, just just the concept of having. Having the one is like an invisible string. Like, this is the one person for me. And so I'm tied to them no matter what, you know. And like it would have been fun if you were the one. In the list of affairs, you know, was I fated to do that?

Is it my choice to do that? You know, is it my choice to take drugs? Is it my choice to have that relationship? Yeah, or the driving up to the cliff. Exactly. You know, what am I supposed to jump off? of this cliff right now or am I supposed to get back in my car and turn around?

You know, even in tears ricochet, you know, do you choose those tears? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, how do you respond? How, you know, when life gives you, you know, joy, sadness, happiness, gifts, punishment, hurts, injury, whatever it is that life gives you.

When life gives you these things, how do you respond? Mm-hmm. You know, is it up? to you? Is it your choice? Were you faded? You know, is it just because we're human? Right. Because we're human, we run into these things. And number 13.

Okay. All the other stuff. Please realize that I have only barely skimmed. I've been throwing a stone across the surface of her metaphorical water. Mm-hmm. You know, think about all the poetic devices she uses. Think about how we could have talked about the beauty of her assonance. The loveliness of her alliteration, right?

And you can see patterns of alliteration where she uses language, harsh sounding consonants in harsh situations, soft consonants when she's in the lakes, right? I mean, you can just go through and start circling repetitions of consonant sounds and see how she uses consonants. or alliteration. You know, look at her use of Ishaura, you know, look at her use of enjambment, see how she puts lines together. We didn't talk about her rhythmic patterns. You know, when does she use this type of rhythmic pattern? When does she use those, you know, those galloping antipests? Or when does she use those soft convincing IMs? When does she use those threatening trokeys? Because she does. Yeah. When does she use anapra? How does that repetition of the beginning of the line or at the end of a line, how does that impact us or influence our understanding?

We didn't talk about any of that. And, you know, I mean, it would have taken me a year. I really stressed. I know you did. I'm going to have to, maybe I'll put up on the screen right now, the picture you sent me of your office, like, exploded with papers and all of these were just everywhere. And you're like, Angela, I can't, I don't want to do this anymore. I had all 17 songs, all of these poems laid out.

And I'm going, okay, there's an Afra, here's an Afra, here's an Afra, here's an Afra, how's she using it here, which pronoun there, which one? Okay, this is all eyes, this is all yous. You know, I know. So there is so much richness here to talk about that we could not possibly have covered it in, you know, in a single day or a week or three weeks. And I'm sure if you go to Google Scholar and just start Googling, looking up different things that people have written, articles,

theses, I think I could write a thesis about any one of the 12 prior thematic or unifying elements, plus all the other stuff. I mean, we mentioned film that I've been. barely scratched film is imagination. It's hidden life. It's alternative life. It's a mirror of real life because it's not real. It's flickering. It's light on the stage. It's like a mirror ball.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just think about how you could take any one of her images or symbols and trace it through, weave it through four or five of the songs. Put them together. Write your paper. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I said to my wife this morning, I said this is so, first of all, it's so different from her, from the confessional poems that we have read. And it's also very different from other songwriters. Right.

You know, other songwriters don't write like this. You know, I started off by reading something from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning, you know, I hate to set up. poets like racehorses and yell, go, and somebody wins. I think she is the superior poet, but she's a different kind of poet. And, you know, I do think that Taylor Swift does something that other songwriters do not do. You know, if I can list 12 things and then say 13, I missed. Who knows how many?

Like a laundry basket full of other things because I just will run out a voice, you know, then she does things that other songwriters do not do. Yeah. I keep bringing up really. It's so funny. Like, allow me this aside for a second. But like, we called this the Swiftie and the scholar. And it's just funny the way that that I think comes out in all these different ways,

not just with like my knowledge of Taylor and your knowledge of literature. but like you have all of these like great like academic like beautiful literature references and I'm like talking about friends and home alone and now Hillary Duff I'm about to talk about but um it's just funny the way that those like labels like manifest in other ways as well I like I like Duff beer um Hillary Duff was a um a pops like so she had her her show on Disney channel but then she also had some music like before Taylor Swift was started her career. And Hillary Duff recently

came out with a new album and she's been like, it's been so well received and it's so fun to see her like thriving again. But she talked about in a in an interview that she was asked about her songwriting and how it's different now than it was back then

and she said, well, when I started, that was before Taylor Swift. And so everything was different then. And she was literally saying it's like before Jesus and after Jesus like before Taylor Swift and after Taylor Swift That may be a little reaching But she's just saying like the way that things changed in the

In the songwriting world Before Taylor like nobody really cared what the songs were saying They just needed to like sound good and be poppy And the lyrics didn't even really need to make sense And then Taylor came along and really like up to the game And so Hillary Duff was saying that writing these Her album now was like a couple of completely different experience.

Yeah, that's interesting. And that's, I mean, that's kind of what you're saying here is like, Taylor's not in Elizabeth Barrett Browning, you know, but she's also not just a regular pop songwriter. Right. You know? Right. She's somewhere carving out her own path, you know.

Yeah. And the path is filled with, for me, interesting literary devices and thematic ideas and challenging discussions. and sometimes very old discussions, you know, causality, you know, versus happenstance, you know, all those old discussions. Yeah, but sometimes very modernist discussions, you know, what's the role of women? What's the role of men? You know, what's the nature of women's reputation? How, you know, how do items become the things? You know, how does a house become me? Right. Yeah, she's consummately more interesting. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Let's hear that statement. I wrote a concluding statement. Oh my goodness. Okay. So Jerry's conclusion to all these meanderings on the nature of folklore. The greatest common element among all the poems in folklore is not a character or a device or a storyline. It is the shared understanding that human beings live inside their stories and the stories they retell.

So I'm echoing her prologue. Okay, yeah. Yeah, think about the stories you tell most often. There are stories about people whom you love or have loved. There are stories about people or things or moments that have hurt or challenged us. There are stories about what we used to be or what we want to be or what we should have been. These stories are about what we did or might have done. or what might have happened.

They examine why people misunderstood us or accepted us or rejected us. They examine why and how we survived and what we have become. Swift's recurring devices, extended metaphor, natural imagery, symbolism, color, illusion, all those beautiful sound devices all serve a larger purpose. They transform private emotions into, shareable stories and elicit from us our own stories. This collection's deepest cohesion comes from the movement from the particular to the universal.

Yeah, I really, really lived by that. You know, I think she's telling us a story of a guy on a beach or a story of a girl hiding in the closet, but what she really wants is for us to think about them as a universal as extensions of ourselves. After all, a cardigan is just a sweater until it becomes a symbol of being forgotten or remembered. A summer season is just a season until it becomes a symbol of love that could not last. A house is just a house until generations of gossip turn it into a legend. And a single thread becomes an entire philosophy that justifies the nature, the power, and the inexorability of fate.

17 poems become a folklore body in which the individual lives overlap, contradict, haunt, revise, and reinterpret one another. These works do not need to share a single plot. They share a common world. Each touches on moments of the shared human experience. That's why we call it folk lore. kind of want to like stand up and clap a little like i'm feeling the urge to like give you a standing ovation thank you very much that's very kind just give me a dove oh goodness okay i did my best um or at least

for right now you know i can revisit this and see a zillion other things you know i didn't try to systematize her allusions you know there were so many things you know there were so many things that I chose to kind of straddle or step by and that's my choice right and you guys as you retell and rethink these stories you get to choose other

rubrics of understanding that's the that's the loveliness of the work so fun okay yeah like we can't grade folklore as a whole can we no I don't think so we already have the grades

Yeah, you got the grades, you know. I do, as I was revisiting the poems, I thought, wow, a couple of these are really so good. You know, they are, you know. Some of them are just so good. Exile is so good, you know. But, and the lakes, it still perplexes me a little bit why she added it late, you know. is she just, is she like taking a short respite after all the energy it took to produce the first 16? Oh, maybe.

And then it's being like, okay, now I want to go away. Yeah, now that I've told these stories, I need a moment. Yeah, maybe so. And it's true of all of us. Now that we lived all these stories, maybe we just need a moment. Yeah. Maybe I'll take a vacation in Cornwall. That's a great idea.

Yeah. Okay, this is fascinating. I feel like, yeah, like this is like so deep, but also I do feel like there's probably so much more that we could. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And we need to hear your thoughts like maybe in like a month or two on the actual music. Well, maybe so, yeah. I need to go back and listen to the album.

I did, I thought about doing that. You know, we talked about it. And then I said, no, I'm just going to step away from it and treat them like 17 poems in a collection. and think about how they resonate, communicate, you know, jostle with one another. Yeah. And then we can tackle the rest of it at another time. Right. After we take a trip to the lakes, so to speak.

Or Cornwall. Or Cornwall. If y'all are in Cornwall, you've already missed him. He's already back home. Yeah, probably am. Yeah, but I'll be there. Okay. All right, this was really fun.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm sorry for the stress that it caused you the past couple of weeks. But this is a fun conversation, though. It has been fun. I spent more time with it rolling around my head, you know, and then just this intense, furious, flurry of, you know, dividing them all out, looking at them and going back and forth and, you know, trying to think about them holistically and separately and how do they work.

how you yeah okay well I have no idea what's coming next oh okay I never like know what the right choice is I think we'll go back to like picking and choosing and then maybe we'll find something that will you know

come up out of the ground like folklore did for us and then we can trace that but yeah this is really fun I'm happy that we got we got one of 12 done yeah we are we are one 12th 8% of the way there.

Oh, gosh. That's a crazy thought. Oh, no. I have to go through this 11 more times. And one of those is a double album. And Red also has like 30 songs. Oh, God. You know.

No. Well, I ain't doing that. I'm out of here. Take your vacation. Okay. And then maybe you'll come back, refreshed, and ready to hit the ground running as you taught us. Okay.

Okay. We will see. you back here next week for something different. I don't know what song we're going to tackle, what album we're going to tackle, but we will be here. I know that much. So make sure you're following along everywhere. Make sure you're subscribed wherever you

watch your podcasts. Rate and review us on those if you would be so kind. And then you can follow along on social media at Swifty and Scholar Pod. Dr. Uncle Jerry, Angela Wyatt McDow. She's asking you to retell our story.

Yes. Turn us. into folklore. Okay. See you next week. Bye.