IRIS ICHISHITA: There's so many different ways to try and understand this text. And there are so many different pieces of evidence that point us in these different directions. Is it fan fiction? Is it pirated fiction? Is it pastiche? Is it creative licence, creative liberty? Is it an alternate version? Could it have been Bram Stoker's original version, his director's cut? What are these texts in relationship to each other?
HZ: Well, they are first cousins, I'd say?
IRIS ICHISHITA: Yeah, yeah. If not shadowy twins.
HZ: Maybe it's more like identity theft.
Allusionist 123 Celebrity transcript
GREG JENNER: If we look back at classical sources, where do we get fame from? What does it mean? What's the origin point? The Greeks had a goddess called Pheme, and she is a winged, beautiful goddess, with a trumpet. She parps a trumpet. And that is your name being sung into the heavens through the trumpet. So it's a nice thing. It's good. You get fame and it means people going to hear about you. But when you get to the Romans, and we get one of the most famous Roman writers, Virgil, in his Aeneid, he talks about Fama, where we get our word 'fame' from. That derives from the verb 'fari', meaning to speak or gossip about someone. And Virgil's Fama is not a beautiful goddess with wings and a parping trumpet; she's basically Godzilla. She's a terrifying, massive monster who stalks the land and she's covered with eyes and ears and tongues, and she grows in scale the more people that are gossiping about you. So the more you're being chatted about or gossiped about, the larger this monster becomes until she's vanishing into the clouds and she never sleeps. And she hunts you down. And Virgil's version of fame is predatory. It's terrifying. It's this enormous force of nature that comes for you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Read moreAllusionist 84. Trammels - transcript
ROSS SUTHERLAND: We're taught from a young age to be good sports at losing games. Sportsmanship as a concept is all about being a good loser. And yet we're terrified of the concept of losing art. It's a horrible thing to try and to put yourself out there and for it to fail. So if you can reframe it as a game then all the better.
HZ: Because if you fail again you've just failed at the game and not at art entirely.
ROSS SUTHERLAND: Yeah, exactly. You fail at the game, but then you can play again. it's less of a referendum on your own self-worth if you just lose a game, because we play games all the time and so we're very comfortable with our odds. Whereas I feel when it when it comes to art the odds feel a little bit more important, and they shouldn't.
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