Episode 48: Transcript
Our Opinions Are Correct
Episode: 47: Pulp Fiction
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:09] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who's in love with science.
Annalee: [00:00:14] She is… you’re going to get married to science eventually.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] I am totally, I mean, I’m already married, but, I can be married to—
Annalee: [00:00:17] It’s gonna be a heteronormative wedding.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:21] —a person and a concept and I think—
Annalee: [00:00:23] Oh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:23] —science is definitely, science cleans up real good.
Annalee: [00:00:27] Yeah. This is the future. Marrying concepts.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:29] Yeah, for sure.
Annalee: [00:00:31] Once they, once they let us gay marry, we're going to just start marrying ideological constructs.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] Oh, for sure, that’s, you know. There's just no stopping that train.
Annalee: [00:00:37] This is the problem. Okay. In this episode we're going to be talking about pulp fiction, not the movie from the 1990s but the actual phenomenon of people publishing work on pulpy paper that was cheap in the early 20th century and what that kind of fiction has left to us as its legacy, where it came from. And also we're super lucky to have with us one of the world experts on the history of pulp fiction. We have Jess Nevins who has written encyclopedias related to pulp fiction. He's a librarian. He's a historian of pop culture, and he's a writer.
[00:01:18] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:46] So welcome to the show, Jess.
Jess: [00:01:47] Well, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here.
Annalee: [00:01:51] So I wanted to start out by asking you just what the heck is pulp fiction? We hear about it a lot in science fiction and fantasy as kind of the deep history of our genre. Is that accurate? What does it really mean and when did the term start getting used?
Jess: [00:02:06] The term came into use in the ’39, ’40, ‘41 set of years. There are actually two definitions. There's the really boring technical one, which is that a pulp fiction is fiction published in magazines, which had what wood pulp paper and were a certain set of dimensions, something six by nine or eight and a half by 10 and a half, something that.
[00:02:30] But more broadly, pulp fiction is fiction that takes a certain approach to the stories themselves. And if you’ll indulge me, I’ve got a long definition here.
Annalee: [00:02:43] Oh yeah, no, we’re here to indulge you, Jess.
Jess: [00:02:46] Oh, great. Thank you. Pulp fiction, regardless of genre has some easily defined characteristics, an emphasis on adventure and drama, and an avoidance of mimetic mundane. The privileging of plot over characterization, use of dialogue and narration as the means for delivering information rather than displaying authorial style. The regular use and exploitation of the exotic with a racial, sexual, socioeconomic, or geographic. Simple emotions strongly expressed. The repeated use of common tropes, motifs and plot devices to the point of rendering them clichéd, the adherence to the real or perceived limits of specific genres with the concurrent lack of literary experimentation. And good always, always triumphing over evil.
[00:03:36] So the latter long definition is, I think, the best way to look at what pulp fiction was historically.
Annalee: [00:03:47] And when does it get started? You were saying that the term kind of came into vogue in the late thirties and early forties but a lot of the so-called golden age of pulps is before that, right?
Jess: [00:03:57] Right. The first pulp, by sort of universal acclaim appeared in 1896. The year that there were finally more pulps published than there were dime novels was 1920 and it wasn't until 1953-1955 where the pulps really began to die out for good.
Annalee: [00:04:22] And so when you say more pulps are being published than dime novels, you just mean more kind of fictional writing appearing in these pulp magazines than there were, by volume or by mass, or something.
Jess: [00:04:34] Well, more titles I should say.
Annalee: [00:04:37] Okay.
Jess: [00:04:37] 1919, 1920 is really the tipping point where there were more authors submitting to the pulps than to the dime novels. There was more fiction being published in the pulps than in the dime novels and the weight of popular culture was finally shifting from the dime novels to pulps.
Annalee: [00:04:54] That's so interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:56] So before 1896 there were still a lot of serialized adventure fiction, right? Was it just in other forms or was it really not as much of a thing?
Jess: [00:05:06] We've had serialized fiction and fiction serials since the 1840s in the United States. We've had dime novels since 1860 and the impetus and the weight of popular, serialized, popular fiction was in the dime novels pretty much from 1860 to the end of the century, and for a few years after that. So America sort of inherited the idea of serialized heroic fiction and fiction serials from the British, but we ran with it and made it our own.
Annalee: [00:05:40] So what are some of the, you mentioned, in the sort of second part of your description of pulps, you mentioned that there were a bunch of tropes that get used and certain kinds of, I guess you could say heightened realism. What are some of the main tropes we see in early pulp fiction, that kind of defined the genre other than the fact that it's printed on pulp paper?
Jess: [00:06:05] The various tropes and motifs, and [inaudible] really varied according to what genre the story was, what genre the pulp was.
Annalee: [00:06:15] Sure.
Jess: [00:06:15] It's fair to say what are now clichés appearing in everything from the romance pulps to the railway pulps to the sports pulps. You read them now and you can see how they were fresh then. But if you read them today, they're, in a way, they're pretty tired just because we've seen the happily ever after ending for the star crossed lovers so many times. We've seen the heart boil detective get worked over by the mob bosses, bad guys, but come off the asphalt to slug the main bad guy in the jaw. I mean we've seen all these, all these clichés over and over. But really in a lot of ways the pulps were introducing them and so it's kind of hard to nail down one trope or one cliché. But also I think pulp is as much the state of mind of the writer and the requirements of the editor as it is the content.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:19] So roughly, what percentage of the pulps were science fiction or fantasy or horror and did that change over time? Did it become more or less?
Jess: [00:07:28] I'd say roughly 3% of the pulps were science fiction or fantasy. It increased slightly at the high point of the pulse, which was 1939 or 1941 excuse me. You had I think it was up to about 8%, but it never got higher than that. We all love our science fiction genre. But in terms of the pulp industry, science fiction was very much a tertiary concern compared to romance palms in westerns and detective pulps and adventure pulps.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:04] Interesting. And was it just about the printing press or was there some socioeconomic kind of factor in the early 20th century that really supercharged the rise of the pulps?
Jess: [00:08:15] The various economic depressions of the 20th century before, during, and after the Great Depression had a lot to do with the demand for cheap entertainment that could be handed around to other people. We've all seen the pictures of the GIs handing out comic books. Well, they did that with the pulps as well. It was very important, both in the 19th century and in the early 20th century, that a group of guys and groups of women as well, there'd be one pulp magazine which could be handed around to everybody so everybody could read it.
[00:08:54] What we've got now is essentially free TV. Well, the pulps were as cheap as they could make them. Just the dime novels were as cheap as they could make them. It still cost a few bucks in modern prices, but it was, there was a demand for it. And so people got their 25 cents or their dollar, or whatever and paid for the pulp.
[00:09:16] It should be remembered that the people in the early 20th century didn't have nearly the options that we do for leisure and they were desperate for it. You've got radios coming along and providing this new world of entertainment. Well, the dime novels and the mainstream magazines and the pulps were filling that niche before radio came along. Everybody wants something to kick back and relax with, well, the pulps filled that need pretty much.
Annalee: [00:09:49] And so I wonder if some of the themes and the tropes we see in pulps the really escapist themes, do you think that's also a response to the fact that they grow out of these economic depressions and war?
Jess: [00:10:02] I've never been able to decide how much of the content of the … also the approach to the pulps is meeting a demand or creating one.
Annalee: [00:10:14] Fair enough.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:15] That's always a good question.
Jess: [00:10:17] Right. People want cheap, relaxing entertainment that is unchallenging in certain ways, but when you condition the audience in the way that the dime novels did, and the pulps did, that becomes what they expect of their entertainment. The better writers in the pulps, a lot of them were not as successful as someone Seabury Quinn who was a fantasy horror writer back in the ‘30s and ‘40s who cranked out dozens of really atrocious but extremely popular stories. Clark Ashton Smith, he did okay. And he was infinitely Seabury Quinn’s superior, but nobody… Everybody wanted Seabury Quinn, and nobody wanted Clark Ashton Smith.
Annalee: [00:11:02] We had sort of begun earlier to talk about some of the tropes in the scifi, horror, fantasy pulps. And so now that we've brought up Seabury Quinn, can you talk a little bit about some of the tropes that we might have started to see in those pulps back in the ‘20s that are now just something that we think of as just so tropey it's just built into the genre.
Jess: [00:11:25] Sure. Space opera and more generally any story of science fictional exploration, exploitation, and conquest. That's right out of the pulps. White men romancing alien women with all the symbolism that's tied into that, that’s right out of the pulps.
Annalee: [00:11:43] So you're saying green skinned women started in the pulps, basically.
Jess: [00:11:48] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:11:48] The Star Trek green skinned woman.
Jess: [00:11:50] Right. Well and before that you had John Carter of Mars going to Mars and romancing Dejah Thoris. You had the threat of others, alien invasions, ethnic and racial and sexual others. Always very threatening. My favorite was science being spelled with an exclamation point and all capitals.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:12] Wait, so an exclamation point instead of the I or at the end of the word?
Jess: [00:12:15] At the end of the word. So science is actually Thomas Dolby style.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:19] Nice.
Annalee: [00:12:19] Right.
Jess: [00:12:20] Scientists being two fisted action scientists rather than people in lab coats.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:24] That seems accurate.
Jess: [00:12:27] Yeah. You've got masculinity defined through violence and white hetero patriarchy. I think in this case it's very much the ideology of the pulps consciously or not on the part of the editors sort of defining masculinity for the masses.
Annalee: [00:12:47] So that's why scientists have to be action heroes cause there was no trope of the heroic nerd quite yet.
Jess: [00:12:53] You can always find forerunners, but the pulps are where these tropes really became reified. You had femininity defined through modeling in fictional form, very retrograde social roles, attitudes. And in general the idea that the future was going to be like the present only with spaceships and blasters and humanoid aliens.
Annalee: [00:12:53] Yeah, that is kind of, it feels those tropes are still with us. That we are still imagining that the future will be kind of just a version of the present, but with really awesome phones or whatever. What were some of the pulp magazines that these stories were appearing in that we might know today?
Jess: [00:13:35] Astounding and Amazing were the two major ones. What's fascinating to me is that numerically the science fiction appearing in Astounding and Amazing was smaller than the total science fiction appearing outside of what we think of as the science fiction pulps. But everybody has managed to forget about the science fiction outside the science fiction pulps. So what we get today is sort of regurgitated Hugo Gernsback science fiction and John W. Campbell science fiction, but there was this whole alternate take on the genre that has been buried.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:17] And where was that alternative take appearing exactly?
Jess: [00:14:20] Railway pulps, sports pulps, the mainstream pulps, the mainstream magazines that they called the slicks because the paper quality. Airplane pulps science fiction is all over the place in the oughts and the tens and the twenties and thirties and forties. There was a recurring character in the railway pulps, a wacky inventor who's always trying to come up with new ways to make the trains run faster and safer and he always—
Charlie Jane: [00:14:48] So he only worked on trains.
Jess: [00:14:50] Right? Well, it was a pulp about railway stories. So, you know he's doing what the editor required of him.
Annalee: [00:14:58] I love that there's a whole lost genre of railway pulps and railway science fiction. I want there to be more railway science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:08] Definitely.
Annalee: [00:15:08] What is the future of trains, we don't think about that enough.
Jess: [00:15:11] Right. There was really only one railway pulp, but it lasted until 1979, I think.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:16] ’79! Oh my God. So you're saying this is what led to Snow Piercer, basically.
Annalee: [00:15:25] That is modern day railway pulp.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:27] It really is, God.
Jess: [00:15:28] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:15:28] I was going to say before we cut to a break and talk about modern day pulp fiction, I wanted to talk about Weird Tales which I think for people in science fiction today and people writing horror today that is kind of the forerunner of a lot of the work that people are doing. There's in fact a whole new sub-genre called the new weird, which Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have really helped to popularize. This is of course the pulp magazine where HP Lovecraft was published and who also is, I think one of the few pulp writers whose name is really remembered today.
[00:16:05] Why do you think that people are so focused on Weird Tales and HP Lovecraft when, as you've already indicated, they would have been just this tiny piece of a percent of a percent of the pulp that was being published.
Jess: [00:16:19] I think part of it is the history of… what we might call the historiography of Lovecraft. So you've got Lovecraft, the keepers of the flame of Lovecraft at Arkham House in the ‘40s and then the ‘50s, and then the big Lovecraft revival in the ‘70s. And so you've got this constant reprinting of Lovecraft where all these other authors just don't get reprinted or get reprinted in anthologies that nobody reads. And I think it's not so much Lovecraft's inherent quality though there is some, so much as just pure availability.
[00:17:01] One thing I'd compare it to is women writers of horror fiction in the 19th century. There were dozens of them, many, many, many both in the United States and in England, but nobody reads them now and nobody knows who these writers are because the male anthologists focused on a limited number of male writers.
[00:17:28] So something 70% of the writers of horror in the 19th century were women, but you'd never know it reading modern coverage, modern criticism, modern scholarship. It's the same way with the pulps. People focus on Lovecraft cause he's easy to get ahold of. Whereas Clark Ashton Smith is a lot harder to get a hold of even though he's a superior writer to Lovecraft.
Annalee: [00:17:48] Do you think there was something about what Lovecraft was writing, something about the tropes that he originated that really resonated with people the publishers at Arkham House or people who kept him in print?
Jess: [00:18:00] Yeah, there's a certain mentality that really responds to Lovecraft's philosophy. That came out more negative than I really intended, but.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:12] It's okay.
Annalee: [00:18:13] I mean, white supremacy is a big American tradition and Lovecraft really participated in it.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:20] It's a hell of a drug.
Jess: [00:18:22] Yeah. And, really. The, the whole Lovecraft philosophy of, oh, there is no God, they're just alien space monsters, but really we know that so we're superior to everyone who's diluted by religion, etc, etc.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:37] You fools!
Jess: [00:18:37] Yeah. That has an appeals to a certain kind of science fiction and horror fan that more difficult horror and science fiction of the time maybe didn't. I'm losing fans just by saying this, I know. People are probably turning off the podcast.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:58] We're watching your follower account just tick down.
Annalee: [00:19:01] Yeah, all those Lovecraft fans on Twitter.
Jess: [00:19:04] Right. I think a lot of it is attitude and they're responding to Lovecraft’s attitude as a writer and the attitude of his stories as much as they are to the content. And I say this is someone who was reading Lovecraft hardcore when I was a teenager, but I think what resonated with his readers was more attitude and imagination and ideas and imagery than themes and characterization and all that other stuff that appears in stories by better writers.
Annalee: [00:19:43] Okay. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about modern day reception of pulp fiction.
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Charlie Jane: [00:20:03] Pulp fiction obviously is everywhere, including a lot of superhero tropes are directly inherited from pulp fiction. Where do we most see the influence of pulp fiction continuing into the 21st century?
Jess: [00:20:17] I think we see it most in comics, but as you said, it's everywhere. Fast and the Furious is pure pulp. The Star Wars extended universe novels are pure pulp. So many mystery series could have stepped out of the pulps, could have appeared in the pulps.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:33] Are procedurals pulp, I mean like procedural TV shows?
Annalee: [00:20:36] Yeah, like the CSI shows or…
Jess: [00:20:39] I'd say so I think maybe the biggest difference between pulp and not pulp is aesthetic and artist intention. And with a very few exceptions, anything that's cranked out to meet a time limit is going to be more pulpish. I wouldn't call Legion pulp, but I would call CSI pulp.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:07] Huh.
Annalee: [00:21:08] And is that because the production values are higher on Legion or because it's more literary or what?
Jess: [00:21:14] I think it's more literary. They're aiming for something higher than just getting weekly. There are certainly pulp writers who are trying to do something interesting and aesthetically worthy with their writing, but a lot of them were writing for pay. Were writing to meet a deadline, were writing because the editor asked them to write a certain story or a certain plot.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:42] There's that whole famous thing where it's we have cover art and we want you to do a story that's based on this cover art.
Jess: [00:21:48] Right and no myth, that happened and they sold tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies. So they are clearly meeting a market need. What appears in the more respectable mainstream magazines is a bit more aesthetically and literarily worthy.
Annalee: [00:22:07] I wanted to follow up by asking about a couple modern day stories that self-consciously fashion themselves as pulp fiction. So one is the movie Pulp Fiction. The other is the TV series True Detective and both of those present themselves as being in the mode of, of pulp or in the mode of these true detective stories that were kind of also popular during the pulp era. Do you think those are the inheritors of pulp? Because to me they seem too literary to be actual pulp.
Jess: [00:22:38] I would agree. I think Pulp Fiction, the movie was Tarantino trying to homage something that he imagined. I don't think he had any real experience with pulp fiction. I think he had experience with movies from the ‘30s and ‘20s and ‘40s and thought, well magazines must've been the print version of these movies and so I'm just going to call it Pulp Fiction.
[00:23:07] I think that True Detective is a little too high-minded to be pure pulp. There was the Robert W. Chambers King in Yellow influence in the first season, and so that's outside the pulps. It's sort of pulpy or pulpesque without being actual pulp. I think that was written for better intentions than just making a quick buck. And so I'm not sure I'd call them pulp, either of them.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:39] And that's interesting that the idea that if you self-consciously try to homage pulp,, but in a very literary fancy way, it's going to be the same thing. It's going to be something transformed. So transformative I guess. Right.
Jess: [00:23:49] Right. Although, a few years ago Michael Chabon wrote a book or serialized a novel in, I think it was the New York Times and published it as The Gentlemen of the Road. And that was very pulpy, but it was literary and intelligent, I call it half pulp, at best, but a very entertaining half pulp.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:13] Right. There have been, I think especially 15 years ago, there was this generation of novelists who really wanted to pay homage to pulp. I think Jonathan Lethem comes to mind too. And Michael Chabon put out that volume of Thrilling Wonder Tales that were sort of pulp inspired, I think.
[00:24:29] I was going to ask. Okay, so, to some extent comics kind of took over where the pulps left off it feels is. And how do these tropes change when they go into comics?
Jess: [00:24:38] A lot of them become more juvenile just because the presumed readers for comics are kids and teenagers, whereas the presumed readers for the pulps were adults. So you've got the spicy pulps which are pretty drenched in sex, which superhero comics, which are most of the industry, superhero comics would never do anything close to spicy pulps. Would never do any horror. There was a sub-genre of horror pulps that got as gory as they could, according to the limitations of the market at the time. Super hero comics are a lot more limited than that.
[00:25:20] As much as I love superhero comics, most of them are aimed at kids with the sort of kid mentality. We can always name exceptions, but I think the tropes get, in some ways dumbed down. And also those tropes that sort of present a counter-narrative to patriarchy and white supremacy and sexism in the pulps sort of don't appear in the super hero comics, at least not through the first 50 years or of superheroes.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:54] What are the tropes that counter white supremacy and patriarchy, in… if you can name a couple that the comics left out.
Annalee: [00:25:59] Yeah, give us some subversive tropes from the pulps.
Jess: [00:26:05] Okay, there are a surprising number of protagonists of color in the pulps. You could say they're white and all but name and personality, but I prefer to think of them as deliberately written so as to avoid every contemporary stereotype. You've got the same thing with female protagonists. The pulps never tackled anyone on the QUILTBAG continuum, but there was a definite sense with some of these heroes that if the writers could have snuck it past the editors and the postal censors, they would've made gay and lesbian and trans characters.
[00:26:44] Yeah, the pulps were… some of the pulps were very liminal in the way they straddle the requirements of genre and the requirements of non-white non-hetero, non-male audiences. You've got, in the westerns, the cowboy romance pulps. It's influenced by The Virginian rather than by John Wayne. And if, for those of you out there who don't know, basically The Virginian published in 1903 was this landmark cowboy novel that in many ways created the cowboy novel genre. Except that the main character, the narrator, is clearly in love with the cowboy and says among other things, as, “He gave her a look and if I had been in her shoes, he would have been able to do with me what he wanted.”
Charlie Jane: [00:27:43] And this is a male narrator.
Jess: [00:27:44] The author deliberately wrote it that way. And so you've got these occasional stories where the cowboy protagonist is a lot more sympathetic and sensitive and progressive in modern terms than really appears in superheroes for decades.
Annalee: [00:28:04] I am excited to know about the gay origins of the Western.
[00:28:07] I wanted to just finish up by asking you whether you think that, the new generation of self-published authors and people doing low budget film or low budget streaming or those people inheriting the pulp tradition because they're writing for very little money. And the whole point is just to get as much content out there as possible.
Jess: [00:28:31] I tend to think that your average low budget film maker or self-publisher is… In a way, they're sort of transcending what the pulp authors did because so many of the pulp authors were just writing for the paycheck, writing to support themselves. Whereas the filmmakers and the self-publishers, they're writing for their audiences, but they're also writing to satisfy themselves. To achieve something artistically, and with most pulp authors, I don't think that.
Annalee: [00:29:03] Yeah, that's really interesting. That makes sense, yeah. Writing for an audience is really different from writing for an editor who will give you a paycheck.
Jess: [00:29:10] Right. There are a bunch of authors who call themselves new pulp who self-publish stories and serials and novels. They want to be the new pulp writers, but I don't think they quite succeed at it because many of them are imitating hero pulps, which were not representative of the pulps at all. They will create knockoffs of Doc Savage and The Shadow and The Spider and Domino Lady.
[00:29:38] They're not really writing using the pulp approach, they’re writing essentially superhero stories. There's a Mark Twain story about how his wife wanted him to stop cursing. So she one day recited back to him all the swears that he’d been saying, and he said, my dear, you have the notes but not the music. That's sort of how I feel about new pulp writers.
Annalee: [00:30:02] That's interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:01] That’s awesome.
Annalee: [00:30:02] Okay. Well thank you so much for being with us. Can you tell our audience where they can find your stuff?
Jess: [00:30:09] Sure. I've got a book coming out in January called The Horror Fiction of the 20th Century, which is going to be… it's from Prager who's an academic publisher, but you should be able to find it in your better class of book store and on Amazon and Powell’s and Barnes & Noble. And that's a history of horror fiction in the 20th century. And I'm going to be self-publishing a second edition of my Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana probably sometime late December or in January. And that's going to be available through Amazon.
Annalee: [00:30:44] Do you have a website or…
Jess: [00:30:45] My Twitter is @jessnevins all one word and my website is JessNevins.com.
Annalee: [00:30:52] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:53] Thank you so much for joining us—
Annalee: [00:30:55] Thanks for being here, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:55] —and enlightening us about this, it’s so awesome. Thank you.
Jess: [00:30:57] Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Annalee: [00:30:59] We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, what we're obsessed with.
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Annalee: [00:31:18] Okay. Charlie Jane, what are you obsessed with right now? This second.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:23] I'm obsessed with the new Buffy, the Vampire Slayer comic being published by Boom! Studios with writing by Jordie Bellaire and art by Dan Mora and David Lopez. And it's just so freaking good. It's making me remember why I loveed Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the first place. It's a new version of Buffy where it picks up with her brand new in high school meeting Willow and Zander for the first time. It's an alternate version of that story, which doesn't kind of get bogged down in the continuity of the original TV show and all those sequel comics, that Dark Horse published and it's just everything is updated. They all have smart phones but also the politics are just a lot zippier and Willow is queer from day one. She has a girlfriend in the first issue and she's already kind of interested in wicca.
[00:32:12] It feels like their evolution has been jump-started. Zander is actually a kind of a more interesting character and Spike is around and he's a little bit more cool and interesting and Anya has a whole kind of cool thing going on. It just feels like all the stuff that I remember loving about the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but just kind of updated and souped up.
[00:32:34] And Jordie Bellaire previously had written an amazing horror comic called Redlands, which is about a matriarchal community in the Florida swamp where basically sinister things are going down and it's kind of scary, dark horror, and I loved that. But her Buffy comic is even better. It's just, it's just giving me so much life.
[00:32:54] What are you obsessed with, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:32:55] So I'm obsessed with two historical dramas that are now available for streaming. One is Gentleman Jack, which is created by Sally Wainwright and it's a mini-series that was, it's a BBC-HBO co-production, but it feels very BBC and it's basically the retelling of the life of Anne Lister who was living in the early 19th century. And she was an open lesbian. She managed her own estate and she kept voluminous diaries, which she partially wrote in code. And the sections in code, I think about a sixth of them were in code, and the coded sections were all about her lesbian conquests.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:41] Whoa.
Annalee: [00:33:42] And so the thing I love about the mini-series is that of course it has hot lesbian action and it's all about the main character, whose name is Anne, but she's nicknamed Gentleman Jack. Anne is trying to basically find a wife and she's wooing this young woman, but it's also very Jane Austen in that it's also about money and who has money and how, partly Ann Lister is able to be in this position because she's wealthy and she's kind of a member of the titled aristocracy. But also if she's going to make a match, she has to think about this potential wife's income.
[00:34:24] And so it's this amazing sort of alternate reality Jane Austen story where she's trying to figure out her household finances and enter into a deal with some local coal miners to extricate coal on her property. But also hot lesbian romance.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:42] Yay!
Annalee: [00:34:42] It is, just if you love heron hat dramas and stories about people struggling with money and also love, it’s great.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:50] Who doesn't.
Annalee: [00:34:52] And the acting is fantastic. The other thing I'm really obsessed with is the series Dickinson, which as far as I can tell, is the greatest thing on Apple TV.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:01] It is one of the greatest things on television generally, I think.
Annalee: [00:35:04] Admittedly, it's the only thing—in general, yeah. So this was one of the many shows that Apple TV kind of dumped when they said, look, we have a bunch of content and you might've missed it. You might've blinked and missed it. It's retelling the story of the mid 19th century poet, Emily Dickinson from Amherst, Massachusetts.
[00:35:22] You probably were forced to read Emily Dickinson's poems in school, but I bet you never thought about the fact that she was probably also a raging homo—
Charlie Jane: [00:35:31] Yay!
Annalee: [00:35:31] —who was fighting against the strictures of her time. And this is a series that is very anachronistic in that it's full of modern music. I should say, that makes it sound like it’s full of modern classical music. It's full of contemporary hip hop and rock and the characters all talk like modern teenagers. So when Emily Dickinson's mom tells her she has to go fetch the water because her brother doesn't have to do that, it's a girl's chore to fetch water. She's like, this is some bullshit. And it's just amazing and delightful. And for someone who grew up like I did, as a budding English major loving poetry and being kind of goth, it's amazing.
[00:36:15] It's Emily Dickinson as lesbian goth, she gets to like hang out with death in her fantasies. And so it has a huge element of Emily Dickinson just having fantasies that turn into poems. And finally, I will just say that it also makes you really appreciate Emily Dickinson's poetry in a new light. Each episode is structured around a poem and we hear her writing the poem in her head and we see what events in her life might've inspired the poem.
[00:36:41] And it really, it sent me back to reading Emily Dickinson. I pulled out my Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson and started rereading them and it really did give me a new perspective on her work. So yay. Good job. Apple TV.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:53] Awesome.
Annalee: [00:36:54] And so definitely check that one out. It is unbelievably cool. Created by Alena Smith and Emily Dickinson is played by Hailee Steinfeld who's amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:06] She is awesome.
Annalee: [00:37:08] She really knocks it out of the park.
[00:37:08] All right, so that's what we're obsessed with. Thank you so much for listening. You have been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:15] Or have you?
Annalee: [00:37:17] I'm not really sure. I'm, I'm super bad at these outros. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Libsyn and anywhere where fine podcasts are streaming. Please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts because it helps people find us. We have a Patreon, which you can find under Our Opinions Are Correct at Patreon.
[00:37:36] We really appreciate your support. It's what helps us pay to produce this show and to get coffee when we're recording. And you can follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. You can find us on the web. Have you heard of the web?
Charlie Jane: [00:37:49] The web.
Annalee: [00:37:49] OurOpinionsAreCorrect.com. Apparently the web is still a thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:53] Apparently.
Annalee: [00:37:54] So thank you so much for listening and we will—
Charlie Jane: [00:37:56] Thanks to our amazing producer, Veronica Simonetti at Women's Audio Mission, without whom none of this would be even remotely possible.
Annalee: [00:38:03] It's really true.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:06] And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music, and thanks again for listening. You are the best. Bye!
Annalee: [00:38:08] Bye!
[00:38:15] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.