Bonus: (sub)Text #1: Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: Poesis as Revenge Forsaken (Part One)

0:08 Mark: Partially Examined Life bonus episode covering William Shakespeare's comedy the Tempest from the year 1611. You, the partially examined Life listening public, are here witness to a first as Wes Alwan tries out a new kind of podcast, potentially a spin off podcast he has yet to name it, but I will right here call it Alwanalysis with Wes Alwan, a podcast about film and literature that probably will not actually be the name of it if it even becomes a podcast. Wes has, as of this moment, recorded three of these already. They will be made available in full to Partially Examined Life citizens and $5 Patreon members. Go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support to check it out. However, everyone gets to hear the first half. So here it is. Hope you enjoy it.

0:56 Wes: This is Wes Alwan and joining me today is a friend of the Partially Examined Life, Bill Youmans. You've been on a few of these now, right? Well, you've been on Crito.

1:06 Bill: Yep, I've been on Crito and also Lysistrata. Lysistrata. And you're a Broadway actor at the moment? I actually am a Broadway actor. I'm in the current production of Carousel. Yeah, I've been an actor for 45 years and actually one of the very first productions was ever involved with was a production of the Tempest at the CSC Repertory Theater in New York City back in 1974, I think. And I was the follow spot operator. So I heard the tempest at least 50 or 60 times, watched it and saw it 50 or 60 times that year. And I've been in a production of the Tempest at Actors Theatre of Louisville playing Trinculo. I've worked in the theater all these years and studied Shakespeare in college and at State University of New York at Purchase.

1:59 Wes: So yeah, I had asked you to do something. I wanted to do a bonus episode with you and we were thinking about fiction or a play. I forgot how this came about. Exactly. But you mentioned Shakespeare and I also have a huge love of Shakespeare. Ultimately, I think I mentioned the Tempest just because the Tempest is something I have thought a lot about and I taught it a little bit at a small liberal arts college where I was an adjunct for a semester and I've written about it. I happen to love this play and I know you immediately when I mentioned it, were enthusiastic.

2:32 Bill: Oh sure, it's one of his greatest plays. It's generally thought of as his last or one of his last. Now, partially to satisfy my curiosity, but also as a potential plug. Are your writings on the Tempest available online?

2:49 Wes: I actually, in preparation for this podcast I started looking at. It's kind of an academic paper that I had started writing, and I haven't completed it. And I thought, you know, reading it, I thought, wow, I should really complete this because it turned into sort of an idea for a book. One of the reasons why I'm so interested in this play is I became interested in the relationship between revenge, fantasy and creativity or being a poet. This is. Well, as you mentioned, it's one of his last plays, and at the very least, it's the last play he wrote alone.

Wrote it 1610-1611, and it was performed in 1611 and again, I think through 1613. And it is regarded as one of his romances, which are part of the meaning of that is it's not really classifiable as a tragedy or comedy. It's a tragicomedy. And what's interesting to me about it is it's kind of a tale of aborted revenge. So you see a lot of. In Shakespeare's tragedies, you see a lot of vengeance going on or at least a lot of violence. But say in Hamlet, that's a whole revenge theme. And that has roots in English theater and I think European theater more broadly, and the comedies, generally standalone comedies, obviously, they have the same revenge elements.

So in this particular tragicomedy, the Tempest, you see something that could turn out to be revenge, but it doesn't happen. It's aborted. And we'll give a summary in a second for listeners about how all that unfolds. So the play is also widely regarded as a commentary, as sort of Shakespeare's farewell to the stage and even as a comment on what it meant to be a poet, playwright. And so those two things standing together, it got me to thinking about, well, what's the relationship between that we have this aborted revenge fantasy, and then at least some reflection in this on what it means to be a poet.

And I wanted to see if I could make connections between the two.

4:42 Bill: I've never heard that connection in anything I've read about the Tempest. I think that definitely will be a very fruitful area to look at.

4:52 Wes: I heard Marjorie Garber, so she's an academic, written a great deal about Shakespeare, and she is the rare academic who's also a really good writer and is a delight to read. I don't know that anything I've read by her sort of makes this connection, but I do. I think I remember an NPR her being interviewed somewhere. It could have been NPR where she makes that connection. This was after I had Started my paper, but I was like, yeah, okay, someone else is thinking about that. And she may have already published on it by now because this was a while ago. So, yeah, so that's my interest in it. And in general, what has attracted you to the play in the past?

5:32 Bill: I think primarily I see it as Prospero moving from rage to forgiveness. So I think forgiveness is the thing that I'm interested in. How he gets from rage to forgiveness. And also the theme that runs throughout the play about appearance and reality, about reality versus dreams, about whether we can trust our senses regarding the nature of reality. You know, the whole we are such stuff as dreams are made on. Everyone in the play at some point or another is not sure whether, except for Prospero, is not sure whether they're dreaming or awake. A lot of them say this lot of times. So the line between dreaming and waking, these two states of consciousness, I think is something really interesting in the play.

6:25 Wes: All right, so let's give a brief summary. So the play is about Prospero, who was the one time Duke of Milan and was.

6:35 Bill: I think it's usually pronounced Prospero.

6:38 Wes: Okay, Prospero. That's interesting because I've sounded. I'm so used to saying that in my head, okay, so prosperous. I know Caliban calls him Prosper, so I'm going to give the back. So this is sort of backstory that doesn't come out until he's talking to Miranda. But before the story begins, he is the Duke of Milan and he becomes interested in liberal arts, interestingly enough, to the exclusion of running his kingdom, which basically awakes in his brother the desire to usurp him. And so his brother conspires with the King of Naples, Alonso, to basically get rid of Prospero and.

And his daughter Miranda. So they do that by, I guess, abandoning them at sea in a tub, right? Him and his three year old daughter Miranda. No sail, no tackle, but some books left to him by the advisor. So he'd been an advisor to Prospero, and so he's the person who shows mercy on him. And then. So they wash up on an island. Miranda and Prospero wash up on an island. And that's where they've been ever since. And Miranda, at this point, as the story begins, is about 15 or 16. And at this point, for some unexplained reason, Prospero now has magical powers.

He's now a magician and the very thing. And it's somehow related to his study of liberal arts. So this very bookish Nature, which is part of the thing that got him in trouble, is now a source of power on this remote island. And by providence, by luck, his enemies, the very people who betrayed him, are passing by. And he creates a storm and has them shipwrecked on the island. And then divides them up into little groups and puts them through various trials and tribulations. And ultimately will bring them all together and forgive them. And will marry Miranda to the son of Ferdinand of the King of Naples.

So one of his betrayers. And then will give up his powers and ready himself for a return to the real world, I guess, to his kingdom. Anything you want to add to that?

8:42 Bill: There's also a subplot involving the comic characters Trinculo and Stefano. And Caliban, who's not really a comic character, but is a comic character in a way, in which Caliban tries to get Stefano and Trinculo to murder Prospero and set Stefano up as king on the island. So Caliban wants to exchange one king for another, namely Prospero for Stefano. And how that comes about with a lot of drunkenness and slapstick humor is the substance of a subplot.

9:19 Wes: One of the interesting things about this play. So this play now is often written about in context of colonialism, post colonialism, which is. I doubt it's something we'll get into a lot today. But one of the sources for the play is something that happened, I think, in 1609. Yeah.

9:35 Bill: The wreck of one of nine ships that set forth from England to the Bermudas, which I think must be the Bahamas.

I don't know.

I don't know if it means the Bermuda.

9:47 Wes: It's not the Bahamas, it's the Caribbean, but it's not the Bahamas. So it's sort of out. And Bermuda is kind of more out in the middle of nowhere, out in the middle of the Atlantic.

9:57 Bill: I was looking at this. It's really hard to avoid the conclusion that the Tempest could not have come about without this.

10:05 Wes: Yeah. So there were some writings by survivors, right?

10:08 Bill: Yeah.

This man, William Strachey or something, was the. I guess the captain captain or something. Or was aboard the ship that was wrecked.

10:18 Wes: Yeah. The Sea Venture is the name of the ship.

10:22 Bill: Yeah. And the document is called A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas. Written by William Strachey. And right in the very first sentence, it says, a most dreadful tempest. Manifold deaths whereof are here to the life described. The wreck on Bermuda. And the description of Those islands. So, yeah, right away you get tempest. And then all throughout this document, and particularly in the description of the wreck, you can see that Shakespeare really lifted Ariel, particularly Ariel's description of how she managed the wreck, right from this document.

And also there's. In the document, there's a description of what we might call Saint Elmo's fire, which is this strange phenomenon that seems to happen during thunderstorms, particularly at sea, where you see, like, a ball of light dancing around on the. On the sails and about the ship and in the document, the repertory, he describes this thing and even says it looked like St. Elmo's fire, or what they call Castor and Pollux, which were the ancient gods that protected shipwrecked people wrecked at sea. And, you know, Ariel says, I boarded the king's ship.

Now on the beak, now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide and burn in many places on the topmast, the yards and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, then meet and join Jove's lightning. The precursors of the dreadful thunderclaps more momentary in sight outrunning were not the fire and cracks of sulphurous roaring. The most mighty Neptune seemed to besiege and make his bold waves tremble, Yea, his dread trident shake. So she's describing that she herself was this St. Elmo's fire, which is described very similarly in the original document.

For me, this was kind of like a big thing because I had not been aware of this document. And I beforehand, this is a marginal thing, but I beforehand, I had always been a de Vereist, meaning I was pretty convinced that the nobleman Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was the real writer of Shakespeare's plays. But he died in the early 1600s, and this document was not published until, like, 1610 or something. It becomes very hard to argue for. For de Vere as the author of the plays.

12:59 Wes: Yeah.

13:00 Bill: Or at least of the Tempest.

13:01 Wes: I mean, what's interesting about the account is the island in question was considered a dangerous place that people wanted to avoid. And it was either use that as a refuge or die at sea. And so they had to land there. But there had been stories that there were devils on the island and things of this sort. So they were very reluctant. And then they found. Well, actually, it's really, really nice. They basically ended up on a Caribbean vacation. And that's the story that they relate. This place that had been much, much feared was beautiful, and it was provident in the sense that they had everything they needed to eat and drink and so on and so forth.

That's the interesting thing about that account was the bounty of food and the climate and basically the fact that what seemed like a. Was going to be a tragedy turned out all for the. Well, in fact, the pamphlet, the writings that were the first hand accounts, they used the term tragicomedy for this. So it's an interesting idea for a play and it's, you know, and it creates a grade. And by the way, you were referring to Ariel's female. And I often think of Ariel as male, but Ariel was never given a gender and is played by both males and females.

Yeah, that is absolutely. I can't think of any scenes where Miranda and Ariel are in them together.

14:19 Bill: At the very end. I think they have. In the very final scene, he had a task to get everybody to switch their characters. But it was part of the nature of the production that they were able to do that. And he. He just waved her hand over her and she would sort of nod off and then come back as Ariel. It was very well done. It was very interesting. So. But that's why I always think of Ariel as a she. And if I. There's only one woman in the play. So it's an excuse to cast another woman in the play or girl. So if I were producing it, I would definitely cast Ariel as female.

14:55 Wes: So after we have this storm and we see Alonso, the King of Naples and his son Sebastian and Gonzalo the counselor, basically this is a storm and the boatswain is reprimanding them because they won't do what they're supposed to do and get below deck. Then we transition and so we, you know, scene two, we are introduced to Miranda, who, yeah, she has an unusually small role for a woman in a Shakespeare play. So she has the smallest role, I think, of any major female character in a Shakespeare play as far as I know. But she's really one of my favorite characters.

And we can talk a little bit more about the whole Ariel thing because that's really fascinating because Ariel is more of a. He's the spirit of the air and he's Prospero's servant. And he's much more self interested than Miranda, who is just this bundle of selflessness and empathy and someone who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt and wonder. And her name is etymologically related to wonder and that's also mirror in Latin.

16:07 Bill: Well, she's fascinating because you're talking about Miranda. She's fascinating because she's Completely without any of civilization's artifices that are associated with women in, let's say, European civilization. So yes, she's full of a certain kind of wonder and purity and lack of like self interested motives that you find in most other characters, either male or female, in all of Shakespeare. One of the great themes of Shakespeare, I think is appearance in reality. People seeming to be one thing, but being something else. Miranda is one of the few characters in Shakespeare who is exactly what she appears to be.

And what she says she is, she never dissimulates in any way. Most Shakespearean, I would almost say that the most salient theme in all of Shakespeare is people pretending to be something other than who they are. Who's there? The first line in Hamlet. Who really is there? Anyway, we could go through Shakespeare and I could come up with a lot of lines to support that.

17:13 Wes: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that she is what she is, which is unusual even for this island, which is sort of an enchanted realm. But so in the first, her first speech, she's reacting to the shipwreck which Prospero has arranged. And she says, oh, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer. A brave vessel who had no doubt some noble creature in her dashed all to pieces. Oh, the cry did knock against my very heart. Poor souls, they perished. Had I been any God of power, I would have sunk the sea within the earth where ere it should the good ship so have swallowed.

And the fraughting souls within her. So this word brave, by the way, comes up more than once and I want to discuss the meaning of that eventually. Later on she'll say towards the end of the play when she sees the cast of characters, the villains that Prospero's all brought together. So she's met Ferdinand already. And at every point, every man she sees, she's like a 16 year old girl and she's like, wow, mankind. She and Ferdinand have all already fallen in love at this point. But she says, oh, wonder how many goodly creatures are there here. How beauteous mankind is.

Oh, brave new world that has such people in it. Part of the irony of is that really these people are the intrusion of the mundane and the intrusion the villainess into her enchanted realm. It's her world that is brave and new and interesting, not theirs.

18:41 Bill: Yeah. Prospero even gives a little counterpoint. She says, brave new world. And he says, tis new to thee.

18:48 Wes: Yes, I love his. Throughout the play, the contrast to his sort of benevolent cynicism and her youthful naive enthusiasm. So in the face of it, brave just Means splendid. But I think we could talk a little bit more about that later about what's so interesting about that word.

19:04 Bill: Yeah, I would be very interested in that. That has not occurred to me that that is a word associated with her and with the play. Yeah, let's talk about it.

19:12 Wes: Yeah. But for now, it's just her empathy, which is so winning in the beginning, makes her such a compelling character and makes her someone who. Prospero from the beginning of the play, basically, his plan is to hook her up with Ferdinand, the son of his betrayer, because that's what's good for her. We can imagine if she weren't there, if he didn't have her with him, he might take a different path. Right. He'd be tempted simply to take revenge. Because the whole play involves him. And this is the sense in which he's a stand in for Shakespeare in the playwright as well. This whole cast of characters confined to this narrow realm, the island, who he has complete control over and manipulates, makes them do what he wants and.

19:55 Bill: Right. He's essentially a God on the island and a playwright. A lot of analogies have been made to Shakespeare, to this whole play is Prospero is kind of like a playwright, in a sense. He's arranging events to establish his idea of justice, which is the. Essentially the action of Shakespeare. Justice being a theme in many of Shakespeare's plays. The idea of marrying your daughter to the son of the perpetrator of a. Of a crime against you is. That's a pretty extreme act of forgiveness, I would say.

20:29 Wes: Yeah. That's really central to this play is the way in which Prospero forgives his enemies.

20:35 Bill: I think there's some debate about. I would debate about whether Prospero intends to forgive from the very beginning or whether he learns forgiveness or whether he decides later to forgive. You can make arguments for both, and in a way, both may be true. But there's that one sequence where he asks Ariel, do you have compassion for these people? I'm paraphrasing. And she says, yeah, my feelings would be empathetic toward them were I human. And he says, and mine shall hast thou that art but air. I don't know where it is a thought or sense or feeling of their afflictions. And shall not I.

21:17 Wes: So this is Act 5, Scene 1.

21:20 Bill: He also says at one point that we can have somebody read this speech, but the rarer action is in virtue, not in vengeance. That seems to me a revelation to him.

21:32 Wes: Yeah. It's the same speech.

21:33 Bill: Is it? Yeah. That would be as an actor, it seems to me the best way to play that is not as something you knew all along, but as something you kind of realized right there.

21:45 Wes: So I think at the very least, he seems to be tempted toward revenge at that point.

21:49 Bill: And he does, in a way, you can argue that he does take revenge. I mean, he puts these guys through a pretty hellish experience.

21:57 Wes: The other side of this is, I mean, I think as soon as we see him and Miranda happen upon Ferdinand, it's clear that he's planning to marry her to Ferdinand.

22:07 Bill: Yeah, no question. And he says, so my plans are growing just as I hoped they would or something.

22:14 Wes: He said, yeah, so maybe it's a question what will happen to everyone else? And at the very least, I think he's tempted there in the end, especially given the plot between Trinculo and Stephano and Caliban to kill him. Right. And take over the island. So I think that incites him at the very end.

22:33 Bill: Yeah, we've talked about Miranda. Maybe we should talk a little about the colonialism business.

22:40 Wes: Okay.

22:40 Bill: And slavery. So a lot of commenters have said that there's a theme of colonialism in the play. A European vessel lands on an uncivilized island, which we should say, by the

22:56 Wes: way, is in the Mediterranean. Even though it's based on Bermuda, it's actually in the Mediterranean between Tunis and Italy.

23:01 Bill: That's right. But it's an uncivilized island with palm trees, probably, and that's been untouched by European civilization. And on the island is Caliban. And Caliban, the people who see the play as a look at colonialism see Caliban as the native of a sort of a colonialized region. And actually, Caliban is often cast as a person of color to help point this up. So upon meeting the native Caliban, Prospero attempts to do what we find colonialists doing, which is to try to educate Caliban in the ways of European understanding and knowledge, teaches him language, teaches him, I guess, to read, and tries to instill in him a European set of so called civilized values.

But then Caliban tries to rape Miranda at some point before the play begins. And this causes Prospero to give up on the project of civilizing Caliban and instead just turn him into a slave. And this has to do with Shakespeare, seems to be talking about an article written by Michel de Montaigne on the natural man. It was called Of Cannibals. And it's an essay which is kind of paraphrased by Gonzalo in the first scene where the king and his train appear. And Gonzalo says, almost exactly, paraphrasing Montaigne from the Of Cannibals essay. And he says, had I.

I'm gonna skip around, but had I plantation of this isle, my lord in the Commonwealth, I would by contraries execute all things. For no kind of traffic would I admit no name of magistrate. Letters should not be known. Riches, poverty, and use of service none. Contract, succession, bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none. No use of metal, corn or wine or oil, no occupation, all men idle all, and women too, but innocent and pure. No sovereignty. And then Sebastian says, in a little parenthetical, yet he would be king on it. And then Gonzalo goes on, all things in common.

Nature should produce without sweat or endeavor. Treason, felony, sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine would I not have. But nature should bring forth of its own kind all foison, all abundance. So this is basically a paraphrase of Montaigne.

25:47 Wes: And a parody.

25:49 Bill: And a parody. Right. And Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that this is nonsense. But it's strange, because Shakespeare can't resist giving Caliban very likable and lovable characteristics. But he seems to be refuting Montaigne with Caliban's rape of Miranda. And Prospero's this idea that everything would be better without civilization. Shakespeare seems to be with Hobbes in this. That everything would not at all be better without civilization. But some people read the play as Prospero enslaving poor Caliban and Ariel, too. And so read it as a criticism of colonialism. The way Caliban and Ariel are written. And the way the word slave is used to them. Yeah, that's there.

26:36 Wes: Yeah. I just think it's not that well connected to the rest of the play. I do think it's kind of a stretch. So even Caliban, for instance, he's not really a native. He's the son of.

26:45 Bill: He's the son of Sycorax and the devil.

26:47 Wes: Right. And Sycorax was herself exiled to the island for misdeeds. And.

26:53 Bill: But we should say, though I do think a main theme in the play is the idea of dominance, of kinghood, kingship. There's a hierarchy. And Shakespeare seems to be wanting to have a look at this idea of hierarchy. Caliban, like I said earlier, Caliban wants to reject Prospero as a king. Only to substitute a worse king in the person of Stefano over himself.

27:18 Wes: You mean Antonio?

27:20 Bill: No, Caliban wants Stefano to Stephano to be his king. You will be my king and I will worship you. Even makes him into a God. Caliban also rejects learning, which in the play is the key to power. The books. And also, you know, the king thing is all over the place.

27:39 Wes: I think it's really important because a lot of this is about the. If it's about the psychology of vengeance, it's about the psychology of power.

27:48 Bill: Well, in the very first scene, it's very interesting reversal of power, where the boatswain is actually the guy in command. Right, Right. So here we have an actual situation where the natural power overrides the power created by artifice. Namely, the dukes and the king have to take orders from this lowly bosun boatswain, or whatever, however you want to call it.

28:17 Wes: Yeah.

28:18 Bill: Because he's the one who's going to be able to save them. So he has the power, even though they're kings and dukes. Yeah.

28:24 Wes: There's a point in the beginning where Alonzo says, where is the master? Boatswain says, I pray now. And then he says, play the men. Boatswain says, I pray now. Keep below. And then Antonio says, where is the master boatswain? Boatswain says, do you not hear him? You mar our labor. We hear from the master in the very first line where the master is ordering the boatswain to go do his bidding on the ship. After that, the master disappears, I think.

28:51 Bill: Yep. It's the guy who knows what to do.

28:53 Wes: Yeah. There's some irony to this. Alonso and Antonio saying, where is the master? And these are the guys who have. They got rid of Prospero. They got rid of the master of that domain. And in a sense, even though supposedly they've taken on mastery there, they actually don't know who the master is. And in this case in the storm, they obviously don't know that Prospero is the master of the storm. And so there are all sorts of things going on there.

29:19 Bill: And the play kind of runs the gamut of human rank, I guess you could say, from the subhuman to the superhuman even. It even exceeds the gamut of human rank. The subhuman being Caliban and the superhuman being Ariel. And there's just about every level of personal development, or maybe you might call spiritual development. In between, there's Trinculo and Stefano near the bottom with Caliban. And then there's. In the middle, there are the nobles, the best of whom being Gonzalo. And then there's Prospero. And then there's Ferdinand and Miranda, Prospero and then Ariel. Yeah, it's a hierarchy.

29:58 Wes: Yeah. And I think that's really important, ultimately to the psychology of revenge, which I think is really important to the play. You know, Prospero was the duke. He was the head guy, and he was deposed, which is basically. It's a form of humiliation, but it's sort of the most extreme example. And this is something you see a lot in Shakespeare's histories with kings, you know, who go from the highest possible position to the lowest possible position. And it's total humiliation and loss. But in Prospero's case, what this humiliation has led to, strangely enough, is not tragic loss in the sense that he has developed these new powers.

He becomes king of a new domain. He went from having servants in Milan to having absolute power over these underlings on this island. And he went from being basically not interested in his job, not interested in being a ruler in Milan, to being in total, total control on this island. And psychologically, you can see that as sort of a reaction to the most severe wound to pride. One could get the most severe humiliation going from being leader of everything to potentially being with just this guy and his daughter alone, washed up on an island. If you thought you could read the play, as some people have, as sort of Prospero's own fantasy, Prospero's delusional fantasy.

In fact. We never learn where these magic powers come from. We never learn how you can transmute a study of the liberal arts, which is so impractical that it's the thing that got him in trouble, into this absolute power. So I think the power thing is important because it's going to speak to the psychology of vengeance. Vengeance is the thing that we want when we have been humiliated. And I think part of the point of vengeance is to take control of the story, take control of the narrative. It's one thing to lose power. It's one thing to lose one's kingdom.

But it's another thing to lose the status associated with that. And the sort of the self concept and the self image associated with that. And to see oneself through the eyes of the deposers, through the eyes of an Antonio, through the eyes of an Alonzo. To see oneself as small and powerless through their eyes. And vengeance, I think, is the attempt to reestablish power. Typically, we do that by violently lashing out. And I think the point of that violence is to say, look, I'm not powerless, and I'm going to prove it to you. And I'm going to prove it by making you feel it.

You're going to feel the pain and you're going to realize that your story is wrong. Your view of me is this small, powerless, humiliated being. I can disprove that. I can tell my own story. And I can make you a character within my own sadistic, vengeful fantasy. You thought you put me in your story. Well, I'm going to put you in my story, which is the way things begin with with all these guys being washed up. In a way to depose him was to tell a certain kind of story. And then Prospero is going to reverse that story.

33:02 Mark: And that's all you get. There's still more than half of the discussion still to come. You can only get it from becoming a partially Examined Life Citizen or $5 Patreon Supporter. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support to check it out. If you have enjoyed this and want to hear more of Wes talking about film and literature, please by all means go make a comment to that effect@PartiallyExaminedLife.com on the blog post associated with this posting. Have a wonderful day.