What is the purpose of love letters? What is the language of love?

What does being political have to do with emotions?

What is the power of metaphor? The danger?

Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

For these eight weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

The imperative of reading is metaphorically embodied and promoted by the postman himself. Mario, who, upon Neruda’s request, reads one of the letters addressed to the poet that he delivers, secured his proximity to Neruda and his mail by claiming he could read, that he was literate. However, as the narrative progresses, the postman reveals his illiteracy and the misreading of his world which leads to his untimely death. Mario’s metaphoric illiteracy is illuminated by his cinematically textualized consciousness which compels him to plagiarize Neruda’s poetry in order to seduce and procreate with Beatriz. Neruda’s advice correlates with his poem “Ode to the Sea.” Becoming a poet requires one not simply to see, but to read or interpret the “movement of the sea,” or of the seen/scene, and to read it as insisting that metaphor is all pervasive in everyday life, that it is not simply a matter of words or language, but of conceptual thinking and human action as well. In order to become a poet, a writer, one must first become a reader of the world and looking at language one must perceive, as Darwin, Neruda, Shelley, Nietzsche, and Heidegger did, that our conceptual system is full of inescapable figurality, that the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is, ineluctably, to a considerably ambiguous degree, a matter of figurality.

Biopoetics and Hermeneutics: The Postal Metaphor in Il Postino (David S. Randall)

Keywords:

* Neruda

* blending fact and fiction

* metaphor

* politics

* love

* art as life’s work

Texts:

* film - 1994

* novel - Ardiente paciencia

* film from 1983

* A Postman, a Poet, an Actor’s Farewell (NYT)

* Massimo Troisi: the postman who always delivered (Guardian)

* Randall, David S. “Biopoetics and Hermeneutics: The Postal Metaphor in Il Postino.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 19, no. 3 (2017): 345–71. https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.19.3.0345.

In what ways do letters help advance a friendship, even when one hasn’t met in person?

How do you know if you can trust the receiver of a letter? Should you worry about it falling into the wrong hands?

In the art of letter writing, how should one structure one’s composition? How should one flow from topic to topic?

Happy New Year! I’ve just arrived back in London after a wonderful trip to see my family in Boston. I wish all of you the best for the new year.

Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

For these eight weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

Keywords:

* friendship

* McCarthyism

* publishing world: editors, collaborators, etc.

* art of cooking / language of cooking

* the form of letters

Texts:

* Mastering the Art of French Cooking

* As Always, Julia: the letters of Julia Child & Avis Devoto

* Julie and Julia

Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

For these eight weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

What can a personal letter reveal about someone’s intentions? How might it deceive us?

Can letter writing be enough human connection for an isolated person?

What are the pros and cons of the wait time in letter sending and receiving, and what might it affect?

Keywords:

* Encountering the text - French crime TV!

* Pronunciation

* Van Gogh, the letter writer

* Human connection

* “Remedy against suicide”

Texts:

* Van Gogh’s letters

* Painting at the Kröller-Müller Museum

* Pronouncing Vincent Van Gogh

* L’art du crime - Le testament de Van Gogh

* Letter to Theo about his neighbor

* Life in the Yellow House

* Dickens’ remedy against suicide

What is the purpose of writing letters to people whom we see all the time, in intimate spaces?

How can a personal letter also be political?

Why might a letter allow us to include more emotional knowledge and personal feelings than an essay or article?

Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

For these eight weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

Excerpt from Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015, USA, pp. 91-2):

One afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a preschool. Our host took us down to a large gym filled with a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children. The children were running, jumping, and tumbling. You took one look at them, tore away from us, and ran right into the scrum. You have never been afraid of people, of rejection, and I have always admired you for this and always been afraid for you because of this. I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, "We don't know these folks! Be cool!" I did not do this. I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew that there was nothing noble in it, that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed.

Keywords:

* Black American literary dialogue

* Bodies

* “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” (7)

* Bildungsroman

* Freedom and shame

* Prince Jones

* Dreamers

Texts:

* Prince Jones (1975-2000)

* Book / Coates’ website

* American media and the Dream (Boston University)

How can a frame narration provide both further truths and spark unreliability?

What is the effect of only reading one side to a story?

How do people change stories once they retell the narrative in their own words?

https://thematterhorn.substack.com/

Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

During these seven weeks, I bring you texts related to the topic. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

Why do we write letters? How do they differ from email and other forms of communication across space?

What do we lose if we stop the ability to send letters by post?

How much of the letters you write are fictions, fact? Contain some kind of truth?

Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

https://thematterhorn.substack.com/

For the next six weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

Today’s podcast is part of a series to accompany my current serialized novel, An Interpreter in Vienna, as we investigate the truth in fiction. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. As always, feel free to share any of your work related to the conversation. Thank you!

https://thematterhorn.substack.com/

A full AI-created transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

Keywords:

* The Apartment Ellipsis

* Apartments in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock

* Apartments in An Interpreter in Vienna

* Chronotope, everyday life, city culture, layers of the city, identity creation…

* Hope

Considerations for your work:

* How do your characters interact with their domestic spaces? Are they spaces of their creation or are they at odds with them? Are they safe or dangerous places?

* To what extent do the interior domestic spaces in your fiction reflect culture? Consider the culture of the setting as well as other cultures the characters may bring into that space.

* How does the apartment living space offer a way to understand at once your character(s) within it and the city in which it resides? How does the rest of the building affect the individual?

Feel free to share your related work or recommendations in the comments.

Texts:

* Graham Greene - Brighton Rock

* The rest of the references are listed in my work which I read from; free download here from HKU Scholars Hub

* Kafka - Before the Law

* My lecture at Pratt: From Theory to Fiction