Hello friends, we're back again with another podcast. This time around, Living Prose and The Curmudgeon talk about a whole bunch of stuff, from Top Gear (sort of) to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure...again. This was a super fun one to record and the conversation was wild. Enjoy! For more, here's Living Prose's review of Generation X.

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Douglas Coupland is that strange kind of book that quickly becomes iconic, epitomising an era in the minds of everyone who reads it, before drifting into relative obscurity as the time it depicts slides away into memory. And Generation X was iconic.  It lent its name to the age group it writes about, the oft-overlooked Gen-Xers who were born between 1965 and 1980. The book skewers American culture, politics and commercialism of the time with extreme enthusiasm, and coins terms such as: McJob - “A low-pay, low-prestige, low dignity, low benefit, no future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one”, Boomer Envy - “Envy of the material wealth and long-range material security accrued by members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate birth”, and Historical overdosing/underdosing - “To live in a period of time when too m...

“In the once-upon-a-time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most prized possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for—so the stories go—once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again.” So begins True Names , Vernor Vinge’s 1981 cyberpunk tale in which protagonist Roger Pollack, aka the hacker ‘Mr Slippery’ finds himself under threat when his real identity is revealed to the ‘Great Enemy’, aka the American Government. If this opening strikes you as surprisingly fantasy-flavoured considering its otherwis...

Millions have been infected, countless routines have been disrupted, and many thousands of lives sadly cut short. The Covid-19 pandemic is inarguably one of the most significant and dreadful events in the lives of most of us. It may seem sometimes that it is impossible to imagine a way out, and the world can seem full of uncertainty and fear. These sorts of huge, tragic events are fortunately fairly rare in modern times, but when they happen, they leave an immeasurable impact on society. In the aftermath of such events, there is often a flourishing of literature which attempts to deal with the impact of that event. Authors attempt to understand what was lost, what was changed, and what this disaster meant to them personally. For the sake of this article, this genre of fiction could be called ‘Post-Crisis Fiction’. But knowing this, how can we know where the world of literature might take us after the coronavirus pandemic is over? In order to predict this, we must unde...

  Picture this: You go about your daily business as usual, doing the things you always like to do, and going to the places that you have always gone. Suddenly the whole world stops with a shudder as your muscles begin to fail you, and a searing headache accompanies the encroaching darkness as you black out. A stroke. Waking up, twenty days later, you find yourself unable to move at all. The doctors tell you that you have ‘locked-in syndrome’; you are effectively paralysed across your whole body. Your world has ended, you might think. On 8 December 1995, this is what happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby , the then-editor-in-chief of French magazine Elle . Waking up in hospital in the northern French coastal town of Berck-sur-Mer, he found himself “paralysed from head to toe, his mind intact yet imprisoned inside his own body, unable to move or speak.” The only way he could communicate, or even move, is through the blinking of his left eyelid. Devastated, he discovered that he was,...

How to Travel with a Salmon  (1992) is a wonderful book, although many people may be surprised to hear it unless they know the author - Umberto Eco. Books subtitled ‘and Other Essays’ such as this one have a more challenging task of attracting readers than, say, a novel. This is because the word ‘essay’ sends shivers down spines and sends grown adults into Vietnam-style flashbacks about their school days. And that’s a shame, because frankly there’s a much wider and more exciting world hidden behind that word. Beyond the banality of the mandatory 1000-word essay on the causes of World War I, there is a universe of stirring ideas and vibrant personality. As Aldous Huxley once wrote in the preface to his own  Collected Essays  (1958), “The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” The late Umberto Eco was one of those people who clearly took this notion to heart. Where some would leave nothing but dry dullness, he was clea...