A Christmas Carollusionist

December 19, 2024 The Allusionist

Over four livestreams, 19-22 December 2024 starting each day at 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET/20:30 UTC/check your timezone, I’m reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, with musical and visual accompaniment by Martin Austwick. Join us, all are welcome! It’ll be fun if you want, or lulling you to sleep if you don’t want. It’ll be festive if you want, or a tale of jerks learning a hard lesson if you don’t. The sidebar chat will be a great time; that, we can count on.

All the videos are at youtube.com/allusionistshow, specifically in the Allusionist Reads playlist. And if you can’t make the livestreams, they’ll be available not-live afterwards there too. Plus they are embedded downpost for your convenience.

Also, now's the optimal time to listen to the various Festivelusionists, about such things as Winterval and the many names for Santa, and real life Christmas elves, and the most frequently occurring words in Christmas songs (includes my evergreen ditty about meat sweats), but especially the one about why Christmas got so Dickensy. They are gathered in this playlist: theallusionist.org/festivelusionist.

Ho ho ho bah humbug,

The Allusionist reads A Christmas Carol, stave 1: Marley’s Ghost.

Scrooge is going about his daytime business of work, more work, and making other people's lives worse. Then that night he is visited by the ghost of his late business partner Jacob Marley, and guess what: business ghosts are not fun ghosts.

The Allusionist reads A Christmas Carol, stave 2: The Ghost of Christmas Past.

Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas Past and is taken on a whistlestop tour of festivities from his boyhood and earlier adulthood, so he gets to see himself becoming ever more of a prick.

The Allusionist reads A Christmas Carol, stave 3: The Ghost of Christmas Present.

Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas Present and is shown a whole lot of festive partayyyyyyyyyy, to which he himself is not, er, party. Also: the poor lil mite Tiny Tim. He'll be ok, right? Right??

The Allusionist reads A Christmas Carol, stave 4: The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, and stave 5: Christmas Day.

In Stave 4, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and gives him some pretty scary life spoilers! Unless... Scrooge becomes a changed man? Tune into Stave 5 to find out!!

Allusionist 203. Flyting

November 9, 2024 The Allusionist

In 15th and 16th century Scotland, in the highest courts of the land, you'd find esteemed poets hurling insults at each other. This was flyting, a sort of medieval equivalent of battle rap, and it was so popular at the time that the King himself wrote instructions for how to do it well. Writer and Scots language campaigner Ishbel McFarlane and historical linguist Joanna Kopaczyk explain the art of flyting, where an insult becomes slander, what's going on within the speech act of performative diss-trading, and what the legal consequences could be of being accused of witchcraft.

Allusionist 191. Hypochondria

March 23, 2024 The Allusionist

The word 'hypochondria' has travelled from meaning physical ailments in a particular region of your body, to ones that are only in your mind. It has been in fashion, and thoroughly out; it has been subject to a range of treatments; it has been lucrative for quacks; and it's a very understandable form of anxiety - which I have, and so does Caroline Crampton, author of the new book A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria.

Allusionist 173. Death

March 24, 2023 The Allusionist

"You can't redead the dead by you saying something shit," says Cariad Lloyd of Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone; nevertheless when you're bereaved, people still are usually so nervous to say the wrong thing that they often don't say anything at all. And especially not the word 'dead'. Maybe what we need, says council funeral officer Evie King, author of Ashes To Admin, is a "jazzy snazzy term for death, the 'bottomless brunch' of death..."

Allusionist 172. A Brief History of Brazilian Portuguese

March 9, 2023 The Allusionist

"The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language, but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of sorts?" says linguist and translator Caetano Galindo, author of Latim em Pó, a history of Brazilian Portuguese. "You look deeper into things and you find you have to wrap your mind around a very different reality.”

Allusionist 169. The Box

January 27, 2023 The Allusionist

Erwin Schrödinger is one of the "fathers of quantum mechanics". He also sexually abused children. Trinity College Dublin recently denamed a lecture theatre that had been named after him - but his name is still on an equation that won the Nobel Prize for physics. And a cat.

Writer and historian Subhadra Das recounts how and why you rename a university building, and retired physicist Martin Austwick considers that renaming an eponymous equation or theory might be more difficult than unscrewing a sign from a wall.

Allusionist 168. Debuts

January 13, 2023 The Allusionist

There’s been a recurring theme on the show over the years, of filling gaps in language, removing stigma and bias, finding better ways to express ourselves and talk about our feelings and our bodies. Today Kalle Rocklinger, sex educator with RFSU, the National Association for Sexuality Education in Sweden, talks about how and why over the years, the RFSU has come up with and publicised new terms for body parts and sexual acts, and what they would still like to change. This is the first part of the Telling Other Stories series, about renaming things.

Allusionist 167. Bonus 2022

December 16, 2022 The Allusionist

What do the hippocampus, homophones, Little Women, worrying and egg hacks have in common? They all star in the 2022 parade of Allusionist bonus bits! This year's guests provide some extra fascinating facts, thoughts and feelings: in order of reappearance, Jing Tsu, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Tim Clare, Stephanie Foo, Lewis Raven Wallace, Charlotte Lydia Riley, Hannah McGregor, Kristen Meinzer and Jolenta Greenberg.

Allusionist 166. Fiona part 2

December 5, 2022 The Allusionist

“I don't think that anyone should come away from this conversation not wanting to use the name Fiona. I think this is a beautiful and rich history. It might not be quite the history that you imagined, but I think it's a beautiful history," says writer and performer Harry Josie Giles. She and PhD researcher Moll Heaton-Callaway investigate this complicated name with fascinating history, in this second of a pair of episodes about the name Fiona.

Allusionist 165. Fiona part 1

November 22, 2022 The Allusionist

A lot of people assume that Fiona is a very old Scottish name, but the first known Scottish Fiona is from the 1890s: Fiona Macleod, the enormously popular novelist of Scotland's Celtic Revival movement. But when she suddenly stopped writing in 1905...and there turned out to be far more surprises about Fiona Macleod than the novelty of her name. Writer and performer Harry Josie Giles and PhD researcher Moll Callaway-Heaton consider the first Scottish Fiona.

This is part one of a pair of episodes about the name Fiona; part two will explore the etymology of the name and similar ones in various languages, and examine the first appearance of Fiona in literature, which comes with its own cocktail of complication.