This post is a companion piece to this year’s Thanksgiving Special episode of Sophomore Lit. If you’re not a listener, why not give it a try? But if podcasts aren’t your thing, go read another post on this blog.
This Thanksgiving marks the 10th anniversary of drunken “special” episodes of my podcast, Sophomore Lit, featuring my brothers, Rob and Dan. Sophomore Lit is normally a podcast where a guest and I read a work of formational literature—often one that we were assigned to read in high school, or grade school, or college, but also simply works that young readers read. Then we discuss the work, but with the perspective of older readers. These special episodes with my brothers, however, are purposefully goofy, having as their subject pieces of culture that are obscure, marginal, and in most cases literature in only the loosest sense.
When I started Sophomore Lit, my concept was to humorously dissect the kind of book you only ever read in high school. I got the idea when one of my own kids had to read Lord of the Flies for their English class and I thought about all the books that are largely remembered today as assigned reading. Particularly A Separate Peace, which I think is a very weak novel, but which somehow won the lottery of staying perpetually in print because of high school lit classes. If you listen to the first dozen or so episodes of the podcast (I don’t recommend it), you can hear me trying to strike a comedic tone1. But as the show matured, I realized that my listenership was sincerely interested in discussing these works and nostalgic for the kind of discussion that only happens in the classroom. I remember a comment from a gentleman thanking me because he had never gone to college, but hearing books discussed was a way for him to partake in literary discourse.
As the episodes piled up I became more and more interested in the whole idea of literary canons. I realized that the teachers who taught me had themselves been in high school in the 1960s and 1970s, and the works they chose for their classes reflected Boomer tastes towards counterculture, science fiction, and social change. They were also mostly written by a bunch of white guys. So I started to go out of my way to enlarge the works the podcast covered, to include more women, minorities, non-Americans, and works that were not a part of my canon but a part of Millennial canon, or British canon, or others. I found that I was teaching myself by doing this, and that my listeners were getting exposed to a greater variety of works, and I’m glad for the evolution of the podcast. But in the back of my mind, I still occasionally wanted to do something silly.
Near where I live in Boston there are two streets a block apart called John Alden Road and Myles Standish Road. There is, however, no Priscilla Mullins Road. This amused me for a long time because I wondered how many people who lived on these streets had ever read “The Courtship of Miles Standish.2” I have a soft spot in my heart (and my head)3 for ponderous 19th century poetry—I find it fascinating that writers like Longfellow, Tennyson, or Greenleaf Whittier were the rock stars of their age, and that whole generations of schoolchildren were forced to recite their work for declamation. My father used to quote “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” to me all the time. I thought that I should eventually do an episode on “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” because the idea amused me, and because the poem was a card in the Whitman card game Authors that my family had when I was a kid.
Many years ago, in the early 2000’s, Dan had made fun of visiting me for Thanksgiving (or at least a fictionalized version of me) in an episode of his Channel 102 series 9 O’Clock Meeting. So when in 2016 he again came to Boston for the holiday, I decided it was fair game to put him on the spot.
The characters in “The Courtship of Miles Standish” were all Pilgrims, which sort of made the poem appropriate for a holiday episode, and because we had eaten too much and were slightly drunk I was feeling festive. And to be honest, I try to have Dan on my podcast as much as he’ll put up with, because he’s the internet celebrity of the family and I always hope he’ll bring some of that sweet Flop House listenership along. (I don’t really know what my podcast stats are like, but I suspect they are perishingly small compared to his, which is probably why he’s never asked me to guest on the Flop House4.)
I can’t speak on Dan’s behalf, but I enjoyed recording the episode a lot, and so the next year I wanted to do another. That time my older brother Rob was also visiting, so I invited him to partake. Poor Rob, in spite of being a lawyer and therefore used to arguing in public, was a bit mic shy, but I got him drunk as well. That time we discussed Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is bona fide Literature, but also goofy as hell. And when I posted the episode, Jason Snell, the head honcho of the Incomparable Network (my podcast home), made a very nice tweet comparing the three of us to the McElroys, in the sense of being three brothers, not in the sense of being anywhere as funny. And so the Thanksgiving episodes became Sophomore Lit tradition. At least a tradition for me; I guess it became tradition for my brothers to dread my annual pitch for increasingly silly topics. Here’s a full list of all the previous specials:
2024 Comfort Reads
2023 Poor Richard’s Almanack
2022 The Wreck of the Hesperus
2021 Burma-Shave
2020 Trees
2019 Casey at the Bat
2018 Over the River and Through the Woods
2017 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
2016 The Courtship of Miles Standish
As for this year’s subject of protest songs: the idea came to me from a combination of my memories of Dad playing Alice’s Restaurant on the piano and of my irritation with the smug coyness of the fictional “Mountain People” in One Tin Soldier, who really must take some responsibility for their own demise. And then I threw in Where Have All the Flowers Gone? because of the rule of threes.
I should stress that I have genuine affection for all the songs we discussed. I’m sure that much of that comes from hearing these when I was very young, but a lot of it also comes from admiring their earnestness. By the 1980s a veneer of sarcasm and cynicism covered most of American pop culture, and this was the formative decade for Generation X, so it was sort of inevitable that we would be seen as ironic and nihilistic. But our childhoods were steeped in sincerity, however mawkish, and I like to think that that’s the gooey core hidden under our hard candy shells. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving.
- You can also hear a lot of abrupt audio jumps from me fumbling about in Audacity, trying to correct all my verbal tics. ↩︎
- Standish, Alden, and Mullins were all real people who arrived on the Mayflower, but only remembered through Longfellow’s fictional poem. ↩︎
- This is not my original joke but I forget where I read it. ↩︎
- Hint, hint. ↩︎
