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Book Club is somewhat dominating my time at the moment. I did an interview this morning with the very modest Marina Hyde and read a third of Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind (sadly it’s about Medusa, not about stone clearing) for a podcast we’re recording on Sunday and listened to a big chuck of Joe Tracini’s “Ten Things I Hate About Me” for a record in another week or so. The good news is that we should soon have Book Club Podcasts to take us right through to the end of October, but it feels like I’ve done enough work to keep us stocked up til Christmas. The turnaround is fast, but the podcast is a delight.
Do check them out if you haven’t already. A very funny one with Fergus Craig is going up this Friday.
I have to reiterate that I love this podcast incarnation though and how it’s turning my work time into leisure time (except when so many podcasts happen in a short period of time) and what a thrill to talk to Marina, who is consistently excellent at dissecting British politics, entertainment and sport. And Natalie’s interpretation of the stories of Greek myth, with a modern and feminist twist (though it totally makes sense given the outrageous and sexist behaviour of the Gods) is gripping. It’s weird to think that Gods can just fall out of favour or that at some point around the 9th Century pretty much everyone had stopped believing in the crazy deities of Mount Olympus. How do Gods go out of fashion? I suppose by other gods becoming more popular, rather than people realising that the idea of gods is a bit unlikely in the first place. The selfish Greek gods who care more about their own priorities and getting their end away even if they have to turn into water to do it, do make more sense of the way the world is than the one loving God who somehow drops the ball so much. Natalie’s book is about how Medusa wasn’t a monster at all, telling the story from her perspective and it is hard not to see her as very hard done by. Medusa and the Cyclops really grabbed my attention as a kid and Greek myth is full of fantastic creatures and moral quandaries. I wish people who went to seek the advice of oracles wouldn’t always try to trick their way out of their inevitable fate. Either you believe in it or you don’t. And how many times do you have to see someone who has tried to change the future by doing away with someone who will kill them, only to find out that those very actions have led to them achieving the predicted fate?
Our household seems to be turning out about ten podcasts a week and Catie was out doing Drunk Women tonight. Phoebe even got in on the action, using her puppetry skills to open tonight’s Twitch of Fun, where we finally heard what the Duke of York was thinking at the end of a turbulent week. There’s not much point watching after the first three minutes. It’s all downhill from there.
