A Meal of Thorns 50- SISYPHEAN with Gareth Watkins

A rain of corpses is falling from the sky, insectoid femme fatales are setting their compound eyes on our tender thoraxes, and our cattle drive across an expanse of nanotech goo is starting to go off the rails. So we ask ourselves: do we still have to go to work tomorrow? Critic, author, & podcaster Gareth Watkins joins to discuss Dempow Torishima’s delightfully strange Sisyphean.

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• Guest: Gareth Watkins
• Title: Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima, translated by Daniel Huddleston
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Death // Sentence
• Muskism by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff 
• Peter Thiel
• One Piece by Eiichiro Oda
• Slavoj Žižek
• René Girard
• Carl Schmitt
• Thiel/Douthat NYT interview
• Jeff VanderMeer
• Haikosoru
• Viz Comics
• Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• The Doloriad by Missouri Williams
• M. John Harrison’s essay on worldbuilding
• Marmite/Vegemite
• Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
• "Professor Jiang"
• Isaac Asimov's Foundation
• New Chronology
• Tartarianism
• Franz Kafka & Philip K. Dick
• A Scanner Darkly
• H.R. Giger
• Phil Tippet’s Mad God
• Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion
• Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus
• Manuela Draeger's Kree
• Mike Judge’s Office Space
• David Cronenberg
• Raymond Chandler
• Antonio Gramsci
• Nick Land
• Friedrich Nietzsche's eternal recurrence
• Yoss's Planet for Rent
• Deleuze & Guitarri
• The Sex Pistols & Avril Lavigne
• H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu"
• Ayn Rand
• Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts
• Torishima's Kanadete no Nufuretsun
• Gareth's bluesky
• Just Plain Evil: Cruelty, Extinction, and the Authoritarian Mind 
• Gareth's appearances on Blood Work