Fred (host, reader)

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362 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Fred (host, reader)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Undertow: Familiar Haunts · The Green Book, Part 1 · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

So if you're an Author American purist, you may get mad at me for this, but you know, it's my podcast.

And uh so my explanation here is that the prologue and epilogue of the original story, that bracket, the green book, uh, the green book you'll hear itself is presented as a journal, a literal green book that's a first-person account of a young.

Woman who goes on some extraordinary experiences.

She passes through the veil, visits other worlds, and tries to reconcile these experiences with the limits that are imposed by her gender and societal norms of her time, threaded with uh little uh recollections of a really quite lovely relationship with her girlhood nurse, um, yeah, who has taken on a maternal role after her mother has died, and is in a big contrast to the stern and overbearing father.

So it

In the original text, the prologue and epilogue introduce two male characters in uh Victorian England.

There's a visitor, the curious Cotgrave, and there's a host, the intellectual Ambrose.

Uh, Ambrose leads a rather, uh, in my view, didactic conversation about the nature of good and evil.

Evil in this context being defined as things that kind of go against God's order in the universe.

Uh, not you know, murder or theft or social misdeeds, but instead sin is defined as.

Sort of breaking the order of the universe in the search for forbidden knowledge.

Examples of evil being if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, or if the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning, uh things that we might call cosmic horror today.

Uh the point uh in this passage being that basically human beings should be of this realm.

It is a realm with rule.

That were defined by God, even though uh obviously from the time it's a more scientific understanding of the universe that's still kind of reconciling uh with the godness of it all.

Uh, and that you know certainly the message here is that exploring other realms and seeking to gain and manipulate their power in this realm is the act of a sinner, and it's evil in a way that's more profound than any sort of social evil that you get in trouble with at the courthouse.

So the Green Book, uh

Presented in the st in the world, the story, as a real account of a young woman who went on such journeys, whom Ambrose purports to have known, is provided as evidence that evil exists.

And so for me, as a reader in 2026, I find that the account, uh the content of the green book itself is absolutely riveting.

And I question that there's a need to make this young woman's account be safer by confining it within the superstructure of these two older men who are frankly

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