#skacasting

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In this installment of my quarantine lecture series: Skazka gets lightly toasted and discusses English Renaissance drama and its subgenres at length. Topics include: pants on fire; wax hands; a hot butch with a lute; extremely non-union stage employment. Commissioned by Mira @forthegothicheroine

Further reading:

- “The Case of Moll Frith”, Natasha Korda - Jacobean Public Theatre - Alexand Leggatt - Jacobean Private Theatre - Keith Burgess - Jacobean Drama - David Farley-Hills - Labors Lost: Women’s Work And the Early Modern Stage - Natasha Korda - Documents of Performance in Early Modern England - Tiffany Stern

Plays recommended:

- The Devil’s Charter - Barnabe Barnes - The Duchess Of Malfi - John Webster - The Roaring Girl - Thomas Dekker/Philip Massinger - The Virgin Martyr - Thomas Dekker/Thomas Middleton

Cocktails imbibed: 

The Roaring Girl 

2 oz. rum (I used Mount Gay Eclipse) 2 oz. apple cider 4 oz. ginger beer (I used Reed’s) a spritz of orange peel & clove bitters 

Commission a two-cocktail quarantine lecture on the history topic of your choice on my Ko-Fi today! I am very bored and I need money for books.

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More Information Than You Perhaps Require: Gossip In Late Republican Rome

Skazka has officially one canned cocktail too many and discusses salacious Roman gossip and its uses. At length. Commissioned by @noxelementalist.

Topics include: rhetorical uses of bullshit; bygone effeminate gestures; throwing rocks at your enemy’s clitoris; how one vomits into a toga. Special guest star: the velvet-voiced allons_donc as the voice of Cicero.

More reading: • The Garden Of Priapus: Sexuality & Aggression In Roman Humor, Amy Richlin • “Mark Antony’s Assault of Publius Clodius: Fact Or Ciceronian Fiction?”, Anthony Alexander • “Problematic Masculinity: Antony and the Political Sphere in Rome”, Rachael Kelly (Kelly’s scholarship on Antony as a figure of flawed masculinity, especially in HBO’s Rome, is really neat) • “Perusinae Glandes and the Changing Image of Augustus”, Judith Hallett

Music and image licenses at the link -- if you’d like to commission a drunk ramble of your own, hit up my Ko-Fi. 

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This week Ska chats about the rise and fall of 20th century gay pulp fiction. Highlights include: the strange and curious twilight world of postwar publishing; dubious butches; E.M. Forster; Ed Wood, Jr.;  gay detectives; gay housemasters; gay cowboys; gay whores; gay girls; gay psychos; gay brothers; gay awakenings; Fire Island. 

Reading recs:

1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage, ed. Drewey Wayne Gunn & Jaime Harker

Pulp Friction: Uncovering The Golden Age Of Gay Male Pulps, Michael Bronski

Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback, Susan Stryker 

Strange Sisters. The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949-1969, Jaye Zimet

For an extremely in-depth (and yet still not exhaustive) list of queer pulps and books determined to be of queer interests check out the annotated index of books in the University of Toronto’s queer pulp collection drafted to accompany Ian Young’s Out In Paperback.

Recs online:

“Gay Pulp” podcast 

Arkhamlibrarian @ Twitter for all kinds of great pulp collecting sleaze 

PulpCovers’ Gay collection (many more under a keyword search for “gay” or “lesbian”, though some of the covers featured under the former keyword are gay-as-in-festive) 

Cocktails Imbibed:

The Anita Bryant

1.5 oz. vodka (I used the cheapest I own)

Apple juice (I used Martinelli’s)

Measure vodka into highball glass; add apple juice to top and stir. 

Commission your own two-cocktail quarantine lecture and stipend my ridiculous interlibrary loans today at Ko-fi.com/skazka! This show is now on the Apple Podcasts store for those of you who can’t get enough of my vocal fry.  

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I have pioneered a new form of infotainment, which is that if you give me $20 on ko-fi (or like, regular paypal, I’m not a monster) I will make you a weird informational lecture on the subject of your choosing OR the subject of my choice, depending on your preference. I can do it after two cocktails. I can do it sober as a judge. I will do research. I will do a bibliography if you so desire. I can do it completely uninformed and completely flying blind. I’m a content creator now. 

You could commission your very own piece of premium content concerning:

...ancient roman sex baggage and why eating pussy gives you cavities

...early victorian night foods and the hypothesized origin of pea wet ‘

...why was weimar germany so horny-nervous about true crime

...why were there so many serial killers in the 1970s 

...why does incest make you an elizabethan werewolf

...summaries of the plotlines of various gay pulp novels from the 1960s i have read

And it’s all for the price of two shitty bourgeois cocktails to get me through the night. I believe in you. Believe in me. 

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Topics include: vintage free love; ghosts retaining artistic control; a great band name; sotadic zones; your host bending over backwards not to have to pronounce “Bysshe”; several compelling reasons not to quit your day job. Episode commissioned by @noxelementalist!

This episode contains some very brief mentions of sexual assault and shit sexual ethics in the Lord Byron section and some talk about terminal illness/suicide with Keats; heads-up if that’s not your preferred listening. 

Also when I refer to Byron’s gossipy letters as Ben Jonson-like I was thinking of BJ’s gossipy convos with William Drummond — I realize out of context that must be baffling. Thanks to Briony for her genuinely rich and detailed research suggestions for this episode, and thanks to Wikipedia and the murky mists of memory for the research I actually did. Music credits at the link.

More reading:

Follow @JuliaFtacek on Twitter for wonderful 18th century lit content (especially her lecture on Byron’s Manfred through a transfeminine literary lens)

The wonderful folks at Romancing The Gothic

Briony’s booklist over on Goodreads

Cocktails imbibed:

The Chilton (not a fun themed name this time, just a name)

1.5 oz vodka

Juice of 2 lemons

Soda water (I used carbonated mineral water, like Topo Chico or Gerolsteiner)

Rim glass with salt (or, heretically, with sugar); add ice, vodka, and lemon juice, then top off with soda water. Drink through a straw, or not.

Commission your own ep for $20 on my ko-fi! 

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[sprints into tumblr literally months late] so it’s the podcast ep for @adreadfulidea​, please forgive me for EVERYTHING that has transpired (including inexplicably uneven audio quality??? you are gonna hear some noise in this one, I’m so sorry) 

This episode Ska gets sober and gets cozy, talking about how old tyme Western European dudes kept themselves from showing their junk off in church. Highlights include: rich colors; thrifty diagrams;  mixing fibers; keeping warm in a colder climate; silly little hats; a depressing tangent about the disenfranchisement of marginalized persons in Renaissance Florence. I talk about codpieces at great length in this one so the language is somewhat NSFW.

Related reading: 

Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies’ The Tudor Tailor

Janet Arnold’s Patterns Of Fashion books

The Renaissance Tailor’s research into 16th and early 17th century tailors’ pattern-books Sexuality in Medieval Europe, Ruth Mazo Karras (for more on Bernardino of Siena, sodomy, and apparel)

SCA and reenacting resources: 

An Overview of Men’s Clothing in Northern Italy c. 1420 – 1480, ??? | Lorenzo Petrucci 

“Men’s Clothing in the Second Half of the 15th Century: From the Skin Out”, James Barker | James de Biblesworth 

“15th-century Men’s Doublets: An Overview”, Susan D. Reed | Teleri Talgellawg 

(With all their pitfalls, these are still really handy for visualizing historical construction and silhouette — SCA/reenacting names are given in italics)

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I’ve pivoted my podcast feed over to Podomatic before the third episode drops -- I’ve got some editing to do but I’m planning on dropping the next ep tomorrow, wherein I relate as much as I know about key Romantic poets and how willing I’d be to date any one of them. 

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I’m sorry to keep people waiting on the next podcast episode -- I ended up spending yesterday in the ER and I’m still recovering. If I’m doing well enough to drink in the next few days I can party down but otherwise I’ll try to record a lecture that is sober and merely pedantic as soon as time allows.

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Update: I’m gonna try to do one of these talks a week for the selfish purpose that it lets me get the gay pulp novels I want to introduce people to via interlibrary loan. This week: salacious Classical gossip!

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I had an incredibly fun time recording tonight and almost as much fun editing -- I really need to thank Mira again for making this possible and for having the juiciest possible topic to hand. If more than like, two people commission one of these I’ll buy an actual microphone and then it’s all over for everybody. 

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Oh my god, I can’t believe I actually edited the Fire Island talk out of that episode, I’m a monster. I did a plot breakdown of the novel Gay Whore before realizing you’d be better off listening to the host of Gay Pulp read the entire novel aloud. I’d hoped to do some reading from a few novels in the U of M collection but they’re not loaning them out during the pannacotta.

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Holy shit, my next lecture commissions are in and they are going to be *amazeballs* -- I am restraining myself from making this next one about Suetonius. 

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Hey Title! Quick question about the podcast: as someone who doesn't have podomatic, is there a way to subscribe to make sure we don't miss an update???

This is an excellent question and one I need to figure out! If you use the Apple Podcasts app you should be able to subscribe to the RSS feed directly via the main podcast page, down in the right-hand navigation panel under Subscribe On iTunes. If you have a preferred podcast aggregator that does RSS feeds or a RSS feed aggregator in general you can hook up there too: https://moreinformation.podomatic.com/rss2.xml 

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skacasting update

Do folks have any preference for my posting schedule on upcoming boozy lectures? Is a weekly posting schedule reasonable or should I aim for bi-weekly? cc @noxelementalist especially on this one -- if you have any thoughts please weigh in!