Wonderful! - Wonderful! 103: Candle Coitus

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Griffin's favorite music-making activity! Rachel's favorite burning smell! Griffin's favorite digital background! Rachel's favorite abstract poem! Music: "Money Won't Pay" by bo en and Augustus - https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Do you feel it? Do you feel the energy in the room, Rachel? No. Do you feel it? No, not at all. Oh, join me. Do what I'm doing. I'm doing a little flamenco. Do it with me, audience. This is my new thing. It's just a little sort of... You haven't described yet what you're doing. Oh, I think I have. A little flamenco. You can hear it in my voice. It's just arms up, just sort of grabbing the podcast juice out of the air and wringing it dry.

This is wonderful. This is a podcast where we talk about stuff we're really into these days. Stuff like flamenco energy weaving. Griffin snapped before we started, and it really rubbed me the wrong way. Oh, it wasn't like I was snapping. It was like a, here it goes. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? I thought it was like a here it goes yeah you know what i mean i thought it was like uh in the podcast you go now no no i would not hey no i would never there are a small handful of reasons i would ever snap at you one if you got in a really good dig

if you got a really good dig and you burnt me up good i would oh um if i am trying to give you the tempo of the barbershop duet That we're doing It's an unconventional size For a singing group And then if I'm trying to scare you You'd snap at me? I can snap really loud I can snap really loud too

Let's do a contest Audience you ride in Text 444-24644 And let us know who snaps louder Go You should announce yourself They us know who snaps louder. Go. Well, you should announce. Just go.

You should announce yourself. They'll know who's who. Oh, damn. That is really loud. Look at this. Look how big your waves get, babe. I told you I can snap really loud. Daggum.

Daggum. Is this the intro or do you think we should do something? Well, maybe we can salvage it. Do you have any small wonders? I like that I get to go first because then I can say killing Eve. Oh, man. Yeah. We're real late to this party.

Yeah. But we're glad we came. We just watched the season one finale. We were extremely late to this party. But boy, howdy. What a tense one turns out really good show turns out good show nobody knew who knew that murder was so compelling what about you small wonders ah shoot you really got me off guard there uh beef jerky it's a topic

of jokes on my brother my brother me recently and i don't really know why i think it's just because i've sort of been more vocal about my love of this dried up meat. Your brothers are not reliable narrators because can I tell you what? I have heard Justin McElroy say he doesn't like root beer, and I just like, I don't even know where to start. Yeah, I know.

Me, I like a jerky float. That's a horrible soup I make. That's a dance move too. Yeah, it is. it is it is it is it's like the flamenco it's a lot like i add flamenco elements to it but there's more knees i'm not sure i know what flamenco dancing actually is well i mean you know they're snapping it's too late now i go first this week okay i had a hard time thinking of a thing. Folks, as long as we're being vocal about stuff, sometimes it's hard to think about a thing to talk about on the show, which is not to say that there's a dearth of good things in the world

or that I am not thankful for those good things. That's not true. But if we're going to fill a good seven to eight minutes of podcast with something that's going to be fascinating and true and powerful there are so many good things i have thought of researched and realized that i can't talk about this for more than two minutes just can't do it i had one today i can't remember what it was but i was like working on it oh it's to-do lists i was like gonna do a thing on trello because i like trello a lot it's a piece of software that helps you stay on track with things. But then I was like, that's boring as hell.

Yeah. Anyway, one of the things I'm bringing, this thing, my first thing is incredibly like personal. Nobody else is going to be able to. Well, very few people are probably going to be able to relate to it. But is it being in love with Rachel McElroy? It's being in love with Rachel. And being married to her and having a child with her yes what's your first thing no i i was trying i mean i am but i i was uh yeah so like i was you know struggling and then i was like well what am i into lately and then the answer to that was you know what i've spent the

last couple weeks doing uh which is writing a theme song for the new season of adventure zone and so my first thing is writing a theme song for a thing writing a theme song for a thing and again not super relatable but i thought maybe i'd share my perspective just writing music writing music's great right writing specifically soundtrack music is great i i do not know where i would start writing non-soundtrack music. Like I need that jumping off point of, you know, here's a stressful scene with spooky stuff in it. Okay, well then let's write some stuff around that. But writing a theme song in particular has its own set of like constraints and challenges that makes the process of like figuring it out

like this musical puzzle and it's so freaking satisfying to like chip away at that puzzle until you come up with something that like fits this myriad list of requirements um when you're doing this are you like listening to other theme songs? Do you pull up Happy Days and spend a lot of time listening to Happy Days? I start with Happy Days every time. Because that's Mondays, Tuesdays, Happy Days, Wednesdays, Thursdays. And I think that's the piece going. Hey, you know what? Actually, that's the worst theme song ever.

Okay, the show is called Happy Days. And I need something. Oh, shit. Three minutes from now okay what are the days um monday tuesday rob's day no that's not one of them shit um yeah i mean i listen to some if i'm trying to so like one of the things that i have to write for is like the tone of the like story and the genre of the story like both kind of necessitate their own sort of thing right and so when one of the stories that we did on adventure zone was dust which was like this

uh supernatural like monster wild west inspired thing and so like trying to write a wild west song was like really hard especially when it had spooky gothic elements like those two things are very that's a weird needle to try and thread that's the kind of puzzle that i'm talking about is like having all these constraints not to mention like the usual stuff of like okay you know i've probably only got like 16 measures to really like make it stick and there should be like a lead in and a drop and there should be like a long tail that i can fade out over. But really, I only have like a few lines here to like, you know, to make it pop, make it happen. Yeah, I really have no idea how you do that.

Like, it's the same thing where in high school, some of my friends started taking private music lessons and they could like improvise. Can't do, I can't do that. But I mean, what you're doing, I recognize it's not on the spot. Right, it takes you two weeks. But you're making like I recognize it's not on the spot. Right. It takes you two weeks. But you're making like something out of nothing. Yeah.

I usually, I just need to find the first thing that like helps it. So like with that Wild West one, the theme song that came to mind was the Westworld theme song. And I listened to that a lot. And really the only thing I got from that is like spooky drawn out minor key piano chords like that's probably that's the backbone of it and then everything else kind of like fell in line so like it's like a snowball effect like once you figure out the first thing the new theme song i've been working on is like way more upbeat and fanciful and carefree than anything we've like done in the past and so like trying to write a happy adventurous playful proper mostly acoustic like

all of these different like keywords like trying to write something that is fun and loose but also kind of adventurous and badass and action-y like trying to make all those things come together into one thing is like i don't know it's it's it's tough i i really don't want this whole segment to be like check out how smart i am because it's taken me it is taking me literally two weeks of just constantly shaving away at this thing to like come up with it um can i share when you were writing music for your dad's oh my god what he said to you that we found so funny the miserable jag look the note he gave me he he was asking griffin to write some music for his uh game that he was gonna run and he gave griffin this particular note which i found

humorous go ahead go ahead um he asked griffin if he could come up with something kind of john williams-y which is is awesome. Totally, totally. Just real casual, just like, oh, you know, oh, who is it, who is it? Oh, it's like the, maybe the most well-known composer of, you know, soundtracks. Yeah, be that. Just knock out some real Aaron Copland shit, like, and we need it by next week.

So can you make that note? Not a joke, and I'm not gonna put anybody on blast but that note was also bandied about for this theme song and I told them to literally eat shit did you learn nothing from dad's superhero I think it's a big compliment because it shows that they think you someone with little to no musical training could just could produce that on your own yes that's that is fair uh do have i gotta put the caveat in that justin did write the theme song to taz elementary that wasn't that wasn't me he did that all on his own he did a great job uh if you don't listen to adventure zone you can find them on soundcloud if you just want to listen

to music or whatever which i haven't updated at all lately but yeah i just thought like couldn't think of anything that i really wanted to like talk in depth about and then i was like well what about the thing that i've been doing that i've been really really really really enjoying no that's a good point that's a good point because i think a lot of times we try and think of something that's going to be more universal but a lot of times the things you're most excited about are the things that are most interesting to other people and then like i'll take a break and i'll leave it for the day and then come back the next morning and listen with fresh ears and be like okay no no no this part doesn't work this part is good this is just dogs singing

christmas carols how did i do it again uh hey what's your first thing i think my thing will be a little more relatable okay but. But pretty small. Okay. It's the smell of an extinguished candle. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Is this the poetry corner? Because that hit me a little poetic.

You know what I'm talking about though. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. What is that smell? Is it salt? Well, I can tell you. I did a little research. Now the research I did. Is it saltpeter?

What's in there? Can you tell me what Salt Peter is? No, I only know it from 1776. Salt Peter. Pins. Pins. Abigail. Sit down, John.

Hey, I know what I'm talking about next week. Different song? Yeah. Well, I know. I'm doing a medley. So, I love the smell. Yeah smell it's great because you get one smell with the candle right and then you go to put the candle out and then you get that other smell and you think birthday cake oh is that where you go that's where i go immediately i say it smells

like birthday cake because that was my early exposure to candles being blown out yeah i'm just realizing that i have this chemical response in my brain anytime I do smell this smell where reflexively I go, did you just blow a candle out? Because the other option is our house is burning down. You know, if our house was burning down, it wouldn't smell. It wouldn't smell like that. This is what our house would smell like post being burned down. Okay.

So I did some research. I couldn't find a lot of sources on this. So I'm just going to say what I found. Okay. And assume that it's correct. What is a match? Did you please learn how matches are made? It has nothing to do with a match, Griff.

Oh, I guess it's just a- It's a wick. Right. In some wax. Okay. Goes out. Right. There's a little smoke and a smell.

I guess I'm just assuming the match smell is the same smell. So when the candle burns, the wax starts to melt, but also the liquid wax rises up and vaporizes in the heat of the flame. Okay. So kind of what you're smelling isn't just the melted wax, but the melted wax kind of rising up into the air like vapor. Okay. Is that not how it's stink is traditionally transmitted?

Well, I think so, because you know how they make those little scentsy things? Right. You melt the wax and you plug it into the wall. So I think maybe some people think it's just the hot wax. Oh, I see, I see, I see. So when you blow out a candle, the top of the wick remains hot. It is still hot enough to vaporize wax and also continue reacting with the oxygen in the air. The blackened wick is effectively a piece of charcoal.

So without an actual flame, most of the vaporized wax doesn't burn. Instead, it condenses in the colder air around the wick to form the first mist of tiny liquid wax droplets and then solid particles. So the smoke that you see is wax droplets and then solid particles. So the smoke that you see is primarily unburned wax particles. Wow. There are little tiny translucent spheres that float around like dust particles. They have a strong smell that most of us find irritating. No, what?

Not true at all. Who's who? What monster is like, oh, God, this candle smells so good. But the last thing I want to do is blow it out and smell that irritating smell a lot of people apparently get annoyed at the the black smoke and the smell associated with it i personally like it just that's the you know that's the cigarette after candle coitus that's so horrible although what yeah? Yeah. Yeah. What would a coitus scented candle look like? No.

Oh, oh. A coitus scented candle. You want me to answer this, baby? I don't know if I do. No, I don't want you to have asked it, but here we are. Here we are. I just couldn't. I mean, something about the phrase coitus candle really did something for me. Yeah. And now I'm deciding if I want to explore it, and I think I couldn't. I mean, something about the phrase coitus candle really did something for me.

Yeah. And now I'm deciding if I want to explore it. And I think I don't. Well, there's lots of time for us to talk when we're not recording our voices for other people. Okay, we'll return. So when I was researching this, I found a lot of guidance on extinguishing a candle. Ooh, how to do it cool and sexy? Well, how to do it to preserve the life of your candle.

Oh. This is not going to be especially interesting, but I found it kind of interesting. Okay. How should I be extinguishing my candle? How have I been doing it wrong? Well, first of all, if you blow out a candle before the entire surface is melted, what will happen is that you'll create a tunnel. Oh, no.

Do you know how sometimes if you blow out a candle, it just goes further down into the candle when it melts? It continues to melt in that reservoir. Oh, I hate that. So you got to let the whole top burn. In fact, I saw that you are supposed to let a candle burn for at least one hour per inch of container diameter. So if you bought a new candle that is three inches in diameter, you should burn your candle for at least one hour per inch of container diameter. So if you bought a new candle that is three inches in diameter, you should burn your candle for at least three hours, though not more than four hours at a time. Wait, hold on. My candle's five inches in diameter.

What the fuck? Am I just up shit creek? Well, I don't think you see a lot of candles five inches in diameter, maybe for that reason. Hmm. they would have to be a multiple wick situation wouldn't they they would oh now we're talking how many wicks per square inch diameter of the circular candle um so a lot of the things i said don't a lot of the things i read said don't blow out a candle and they the reason they gave is that you would potentially spray wax out when you blew out the candle. Done it. You have? Powerful lips. That has never happened to me.

I did not think that was an especially common thing. It didn't seem like a good reason to me. You're having a fight and or a fright. You're having a fight with a friend or you've had a fright with a skeleton and you go aggressively like and you go to can release not today derrick and it relaxes all over my my coffee table that's why we need these little brass cups like a little gentleman would use with the long sticks a little snuffer a snuffer just a little i did read a lot about snuffers i mean i didn't like learn the history of the snuffer but a lot

of the sites i read recommended a snuffer that's that's fucking wild i read another piece of advice that said use the tip of a screwdriver to dip the wick in the wax to extinguish then use it to straighten the wick out for the next burn. Oh, that's a lot of business. Yeah, I know. I thought so too. That's a lot of business. You just have a screwdriver out next to your candle all the time?

Yeah. I'm going to put that third behind blowing it out and having a snuffer. Because that's wild. If you are having a dinner party and you're like, oh, yeah, thanks for coming, guys. Yeah, I should put out these candles. Hold on. Let me get my toolbox out. Now I'm going to stab it. No, hold on. I got to fish this little sucker out of there. Please don't leave yet.

I also read about how if you don't trim your wick, there's problems associated with that, too. But I decided it wasn't really related because what we're talking about today is how great the smell of candles are. Let's get ourselves a snuffer, baby. Let's live that good life. And then it can also be a little tiny hat for a cactus. Oh. Yeah. Oh, babe. What's it like in there? I wish I could jump in there there jump in that brain space and live

in its folds for a bit what would i see do you think all kinds of wonderful new shapes it's a little bit like ariel combing her hair with a fork you know there's a lot of that in there you think about ariel combing your hair with a no i think about how something could be used for something else that would be potentially more adorable well okay let's do it let's let's explore that all right that's not that's not ariel's fault it's a fucking bird's fault you were gonna i thought you were gonna give me a challenge oh no i got really excited no i'm about to i'm about to shit on this pelican because like or what was he what was that bird that shithead bird that was like oh this is a seagull yeah i forgot my birds for a second but listen let's focus on that fucking seagull for a second it's not ariel's fault that she's brushing her hair with a fork because she

doesn't know anything she's a fish and this bird comes around like oh that's not a fork that's a that's a comb for your hair he he should know better and if he doesn't he should keep his fucking beak shut. Because he's going to make her look like an asshole when Prince Eric's like, why are you doing that? I mean, he's just mansplaining, Griffin. He's birdsplaining. I hate it. Yeah.

Hey, can I steal you away? You better, because I'm so PO'd right now. Hey, can I read you a personal message? Yeah. This is for Austin. It is from Esther. Hello, love. By the time you hear this, we will both be in the thick of new jobs and internships.

I am so proud of you and I'm so excited to watch you grow into an even more wonderful counselor. Thank you for always loving and supporting me and for making even the most stressful days better. Every day is better because I'm with you. That is nourishing. That's darling. Nourishing. I feel like I got vitamins out of that one. I feel like I got vitamins and minerals out of that one. I got E and zinc. Thank you, Esther and Austin for your love. It's made me strong. This is a message for Doris. And here's, uh, you know, who it's from is Bay. And Bay says to Doris, first Hamilton. And now this guess I'm just good at winning drawings to buy things i wanted to say i love you and that you're one of the many wonderful things in my life

thanks for your friendship my cat and for harassing me non-stop until i finally listened to taz and got just as obsessed with macaroy content as you you're a cool gal and a great friend wow that's a lot of good things hamilton tickets yeah it sounds like bae is crushing it like won that won the lottery i thought it was all and don't tell him i said this i thought it was all a hoax and it was staged and the people they said won were just people in the cast who got all excited in the crowd because think about that they must be taking a bath on that and so you'd see like jonathan groff and a big mustache and you'd be like oh yeah my wife's gonna love this one i'm a winner just i'm just saying people run the numbers on it

add the math that's not what people say. There's nothing quite like sailing in the calm international waters on my ship, the SS Biopic. Avast! It's actually pronounced Biopic. No, you dingus! It's Biopic! Who the hell says that? It's Biopic! It's the words for the biography, and picture. All right, that is enough. Ahoy, I'm Dave Holmes. I am the host of the rebooted podcast formerly known as International Waters,

designed to resolve petty but persistent arguments like this. How? By pitting two teams of opinionated comedians against each other with trivia and improv games, of course. Winner takes home the right to be right. What podcast be this? It's called Troubled Waters, where we disagree to disagree.

Can I hear your second thing? My second thing is, and you're probably going to tell that I've been locked to my computer writing music for the last two weeks, because my second thing is desktop backgrounds. I like a good desktop background and for as long as I have been a computer

or like hardware with a screen user that you can customize that shit, I take great pride in customizing that shit and I make a big deal out of having it just right because this is a picture you look at or a you know a nice you know gradient that you can look at uh you know a lot of the time I look at pictures on my desktop background more than I look at any other pictures so you gotta make it good I don't know what's up there right now can you right now it's just one of the apple apple has

a gradient that changes colors as the day progresses. And it's supposed to simulate like sunlight. And it's really nice. That's kind of sad, though, a little bit. It's a little bit sad. If I didn't have this also door behind me letting in beautiful sunlight from the outside, it would be a real shame. But I like looking at that.

It's nice. It's soothing on the eyes. I just got the new iPhone with the preposterous camera on it because I like taking pictures of our child that we have. And I took a really good picture of him down at the thinkery and put it as my desktop background or my phone wallpaper. And it just makes me so happy to see it. And I like that we have all this stuff that we have to interact with all the time. You know, that's whatever. stuff that we have to interact with all the time you know that's whatever but every time i pick up my phone to see what time it is or to check my text that i just got or whatever there's my there's

my there's my boy in a nice picture i took i like that i can swap that out if i get bored of that picture because he's you know you know being a real stinker or something that's awful i'm making it sound like on a day where he is not behaving well i'm changing my phone for you from the lineup you're back in business sonic and then like you can get like apple has all kinds of cool like uh when you unlock my phone and you get into it then there's like a neat little gentle background with these soft lights that move around in the background behind all my apps i like like that. I like that you can customize that. And I love it. I had a Zune. I was an early Zune adopter. And this is when I

was going through my Jackson Pollock phase. So I had Jackson Pollock backgrounds on everything. I didn't know you had a Jackson Pollock. Sure, sure. Dude made a great Zune background. And that made me feel erudite every time i looked at all of my you know songs that i was into back then i could look at my jackson pollock art and feel good about it i just like that this is i actually did something similar at my work computer i took a piece of art that i kind of wanted to buy but didn't want to pay for and just made it as my desktop background so i get to see it every day that's it um so i was looking into the history of uh desktop backgrounds of computer wallpapers i'm lumping in phone stuff too but this was sort of the origins of it was uh there was a an operating system early operating

system in 1985 called x window uh that was like uh you know pre-windows so it was very patchwork and you just had to like do all the the ui shit yourselves uh and they had a program for it where you could set a an image as your background this was in 1985 the image did have to be a solid color or a binary image x bitmap file so i can't imagine that that is the most high def image around uh but then four years later the x window operating system updated and they started letting you use more and more image formats i learned a lot about old image formats today uh and then like pretty much in the the 90s the the world was your oyster windows 1990 dropped out windows 3.0 of course and they were like do whatever y'all get put whatever the fuck you want on this desktop background that's also where they started to

use the term wallpaper to describe it they were the ones who coined that uh and in 1990 windows 3.0 only worked with 8-bit color bmp files which looked like uh absolute garbage this took me on a fucking trip trying to remember all of the like really really old desktop backgrounds we had on like my computer growing up at home justin installed a bin folds five like skin on the computer that would change the icons to stuff and the desktop background was like a album art i had one of those for peewee's playhouse and it also had like the error noises were switched out so i'd play like little clips from uh i remember there was uh from i forget which song it is uh fighting the battle of who could care less there's a bit where he says oh well maybe not try again that was like if that was the error message so if like a thing crashed you would hear

that and now that part really annoys me actually because it made me think of all the times that everquest crashed on me wow i just went on a whole thing there by myself uh and then macintosh started out with those you ever see like a i don't know if you had a mac or knew anybody who had like an old old mac but it was i had that eight by eight like pixel patterns of just like black and white diamonds and it was all like very gray scale like patterns of stuff i mean this could lead us down the path of screensavers but i know that's oh no that's a whole nother thing i could go on and on about that pipe screensaver which was on like every school computer i grew up with um now what is the most common and most famous desktop background when i say you walk

up to a computer say say at a school, and it's new and you turn it on and it's like nowadays, or you know, aughts, sometime in the aughts, you turn on the computer, what do you see on that desktop background? Describe to me the image.

Close your eyes. Go on this visual journey. So it's not a solid color? Not a solid color. It's an image from Windows XP on. It was introduced in Windows XP. Is it like a leaf or a flower? No, it isn't. It's an image from Windows XP on. It was introduced in Windows XP. Is it like a leaf or a flower? No, it isn't.

It's a field. A field of green, green grass beneath the bluest sky you've ever seen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I learned about this image today. This image is called Bliss, which is very nice. That's the name of the desktop background. It is the most observed image on Earth. And it was introduced in windows xp it's just a picture of some nice ass grass on a field under a beautiful

blue cloudy sky what you're talking about you see it and you think oh uh here i go on a journey to the napa sonoma sonoma county line just looking at this that's where the photo was taken it's taken by a dude named charles o'rear this freaked me out because i was like oh yeah i guess somebody somebody took it i guess oh i always assumed it was like totally computer generated no this was this was windows xp this was like the year what 2000 or something they didn't have that kind of technology this is a real photo taken by a dude and there was an interview with him i was reading i forget where where he was like talking about how you know you you see a picture of a computer lab in north korea and like there's the photo i took back in 1998 uh 1998 charles o'rear was uh driving back from visiting his girlfriend now wife uh he was in the napa sonoma county line and he just passed this big open

field between these vineyards and he was like oh that looks nice and he took the picture sold it to a stock images company that stock images company was owned by bill gates and when they were trying to release windows xp uh this was the image that they chose to demonstrate the raw power of this new operating system so they're, we'll buy it for six figures. Send us the original. But no shipping company would insure a six, 600,000 or whatever, six digit amount photo purchased by Bill Gates.

And so they had to fly him out, like with him holding this image the whole time, his brittle, brittle hands uh and yeah i thought that was an interesting story of him see i am anything to drink sir no i don't fucking want any please get those liquids away we're assuming he's on a commercial flight which i think is cute but i also like the idea of somebody next to him being like oh it's a cool photo don't look at it don't look at it achoo no look at it. Achoo! No! This is for Bill. If you look on every desktop background of Bliss, you'll see a little bit of... Little sneeze.

Little sneeze juice. What's your second thing? My second thing is a long-awaited return to the poetry corner. Oh, my God. I feel like I can breathe again. Are you going to do my song? Oh yeah. Waiting for tonight.

Whoa. I've wanted Poetry Corner so long. Waiting for tonight. A little different than what I'm used to, but I mean, I like it. It's been so long, I don't remember what I usually did. I thought it was waiting for tonight. Usually it's a little jazzier. And there is actually snapping.

Oh. You've already gotten your theme song out of me. Oh, okay. Is that it? Is that what I get? Well, that's the thing. I love writing theme songs, but it's so exhausting. I know.

The poet I am bringing to this episode is Michael Palmer. I don't know that one. I really have thought about doing E.E. Cummings just to like go. That would be the worst audio poem ever. Well, and to go head to head with you. Yeah. Just like you sharing your E.E. Cummings knowledge

and me just sharing mine. I feel like I can walk down that path in my mind. Like I can play that chess game out like 60 moves ahead and it's gonna end with your fart I carried in my fart. And I can, I can play that chess game out like 60 moves ahead and it's going to end with your fart. I carried in my fart and I don't want to go there and I don't want to take you there. Uh, okay. Michael Palmer, um, born in New York. Uh, he's 76 years old. Currently he came up, um, learning about poetry during the confessional movement, which was like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, all the poets that are writing these like very personal,

emotional poems. And he kind of went against that. He was really influenced early by Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, these poets who were more interested in experimentation than in emotion. And so he's often associated with language poetry, which I've talked about on this group before. So Charles Bernstein is a poet I've talked about on Poetry Corner before. I thought this description was really appropriate. It says Palmer's work confronts notions of representation and habits of language and examines the space through which poetry acts. feeling and more about like, I'm going to, you know, kind of play with your sense of language and how sentences are constructed, which I find really interesting. I don't know if this is the kind of thing where you have to already like poetry before this will appeal to you, or if

you can just start day one with this guy, but he's somebody I got to see read at University of Chicago. University of Chicago had this great poetry series called Poem Present. And they would bring in somebody every month, if not twice a month, to read poetry into a cover book. Wow, God. And so it was just a tremendous education for me. And he was one of the poets that came in. He's a real impressive guy, not just because he is a great poet, but he's also collaborated with dance companies and visual artists and composers.

I couldn't really figure out how this was happening. My sense is that he is writing and they are performing. In front of him while he writes. He's like, this is great. This is great stuff. That dance makes me think of a new fun word. He's also won a lot of awards and grants. He's received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.

And then from 1999 to 2004, he served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He currently lives in San Francisco. And I wanted to read one of his poems. Yeah, please. This is called The Village of Reason. This is a glove or a book from a book club. This is the sun or a layer of mud. This is Monday.

This is an altered word. This is the village of reason, and this is an eye torn out. This is the father or a number on a chart. This is a substitute. This is the thing you are. This is the varnished picture or else an accepted response. This is the door and this is the word for door. This is a reflex caused by falling and this is a prisoner with an orange. This is a name you know and this is the poison to make you well. This is the mechanism and this is the shadow of a bridge. This is a curve and this is its thirst. This is Monday. This is her damaged word. This is the trace and this the term unmarked. This is the sonnet and this is the burning house.

You are in this play. You are in its landscape. This is an assumption, the length of an arm. This is a poppy. This is an epilogue that was hypnotizing i feel like you i've just been activated i'm not joking i was like sitting here like okay but what's that okay but how did it remind me of like song lyrics from like a like a 90s weird, like if this was the lyrics to like a REM or like a They Might Be Giants song, like I would not be surprised by it. Yeah, I don't usually bring poetry that's that abstract or inaccessible.

But I find it really powerful because I feel like you forget that you have total control over the words you use and you can use them in any context. Right. And you can say it any way you want to. And that poem really reminds me of it, of he's just creating things. You know, he's just like conjuring these images like a magician. Yeah. Just like, oh, hey, this is an orange i just made it it is wild to think about that like if you were to say like try and think of two words you have one second to think of two words together that have never been used before and my mind immediately

like i was trying to do that and i came up with monster truck that's a thing that's a thing you You do it now. You have one second. Say it. Yellow tambourine. That sounds like yellow submarine. I feel like that's how you got there. I mean, typically poets aren't doing it under that kind of duress. That's a fair point. I don't imagine that, you know, one of these composers was standing over him like, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going.

You got to watch a badass visual artist to get some wild thoughts like that. Got to get some visual artists up here in the studio. What would they do? Visual art? Just while we were recording her podcast. This man is covered in paint. Okay. Now here comes a new joke.

A new kind of joke you've never heard before. Well, look at that dance crew outside on our front lawn. I'm going to say something smart no one's ever said before. It's so inspiring. See, I can't even say I can't make that shit up because we don't have the visual artists. We don't have the dance crew. We're on a shoestring budget here folks if you know any visual artists who will work for peanuts hit us up I'm more concerned that they would paint in reaction to what we were saying oh we don't want that and that makes me uncomfortable I have submissions here

this one is from Emma who says my wonderful thing is the duolingo app i think it's just so cool that anyone can learn a new language for free if they have a smart device oh gosh i get in moods right when i'm like i i have nothing to play on my phone i got so much time to kill wouldn't it be nice to do something productive and i'll jump into duolingo and be like hey it's been a year and a half do you remember any of these uh japanese katakana and i'll be like oh no i don't bye i did spanish for a while and i got pretty far right and then i just then it was all gone you know yeah from spanish is weird for me because i studied it for like god seven years in high school and college and i am fairly like i know what people are saying and i am completely incapable of speaking it which makes like trying to relearn

it so frustrating yeah they they need to teach foreign language in a way that makes you a less anxious person because i feel the same way i went to france and i took french in high school and i did fairly well and i could hear people saying things and I could think of the words that I was supposed to say back, but I was terrified to say them. Yes, yes, yes. What they should do is,

like when we were going to Japan for our honeymoon, I knew that the language barrier would be pretty significant in certain places and we'd be in a lot of trouble if we couldn't communicate some basic ideas. That's what they gotta do to you in high school is just like you have to this class is for six weeks and then we're just gonna like go you know drop you in you know across the the atlantic ocean somewhere and then it's on you at that point good luck uh here's another one this one's from colton who says my

wonderful thing this week is little caesar's pizza it's not fancy but for five dollars it's a great tasty dinner especially while watching the voice on the cable i steal from my parents big aesthetic huge aesthetic on colton it's a whole story right there it's a whole story one submission it's a story is it a story or is it a memory oh boy colton taking me back do you remember your first introduction to Hot and Ready? So, I mean, Hot and Ready wasn't invented until I was like in college, right? But then like once it was introduced, I was hard pressed to eat anything else. No, no.

This stinky, spicy, garlicky pizza. I'll go to bat for Little Caesar's pizza. Those $5 Hot and Ready's, they got something going on where it's not good pizza but it is like viciously flavorful that's true it's like dusted with like doritos locos dust or something you eat it you think i am eating something i am eating something and you can crush it like i am i can't eat more than two slices of pizza right my my that's about how much my tum tum can fit inside of it and then my tum tum's like you're gonna be sick stop no room for three i can crush like half of a little caesar's pizza in one sitting and it's five dollars you're in college like you can really spread that out that

can be lunch and dinner for two days if you're smart about it oh and it's only one trip out of the house damn little caesar's i want to crush a Little Caesars $5 hot and ready. Not me. This is going to be Griffin's journey. I'm debating, because it's going to make me feel so bad. Yeah. But I do want it so bad. See, I associate it with a sad time in my life.

I'd rather not go there. Yeah, I think for me, it was just like my fun years in college. And then I've done done it i did it a couple times here in austin i remember we told some friends we were gonna get them pizza they helped us move and then a lot of them showed up uh and so we did get a nice couple of pizzas and then we did like fill in the gaps with some extra five dollar hot and readies and guess what people went crazy for the five dollar hot and readies because they're not special this is turning into my third segment thank you so much to bowen and augustus for these for our theme song

money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description and uh you can go to maximumfund.org for all kinds of great quality comedy programming yeah like switchblade sisters and minority corner and story break story break mission to zix yes sir all of them at maximum fun.org we got other stuff too at macroy.family don't we yeah i mean there's there's merchandise there's video content there's information about tours shows yeah episodes yeah got some shows coming up i don't know if there's tickets available because i don't go to my own website. That's a little too highfalutin for my taste. I want that traffic number to be exactly accurate. I do not want to be accused of padding it by visiting the site. Oh, the little counter at the bottom it's got the little guy with the hard hat chipping away at the bottom of the web page as if to say we're working on it folks it's got fun songs it's got fun songs by the all-american rejects on it

i love this website and you're gonna love this outro. Goodbye. My heart. My heart. My heart. Maximumfun.org. Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Listener supported. I listen to reading glasses because Bria and Mallory have great tips. My suggestion for book festivals

is just go for one day. I listen for the author interviews. I was a huge Goosebumps fan. Oh yes! R.L. Stine was totally my jam. I don't even read. I just like their chemistry together. Literally, if on the back it said, like, this book made me shit my pants, I'd be like, that's, I'm buying this book. Yeah. Like, I think the problem with blurbs a lot of times. I like

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