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© Wesley Schantz
Description
Bookwarm Games plays on the connection between games, books, and life:
O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
- The Winter's Tale
You're back! Don't bother yourself with talking now, you look too tired.
Mothers understand these things. Eat some [favorite food] and scoot up to bed.
- EarthBound
Deep dives into video games and books, including a trove of audio for the Video Game Academy, co-hosted with Ben Kozlowski. Get involved at https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski
O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
- The Winter's Tale
You're back! Don't bother yourself with talking now, you look too tired.
Mothers understand these things. Eat some [favorite food] and scoot up to bed.
- EarthBound
Deep dives into video games and books, including a trove of audio for the Video Game Academy, co-hosted with Ben Kozlowski. Get involved at https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski
323 Episodes
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Complications arise in the form of sisters and Scrabble, and flowery long sentences and frank conversations conceal a key piece of the truth. Thanks for listening!
More on the uses of ellipses, magical barriers, spirals, and holographic images and text, plus an adorable Chocobo-Black Mage interaction and frog-based mini-games not involving Quina! From the quicksand to the Forgotten Continent and Oeilvert (pun on oeil-ouvert?) For more: https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/ Thanks for listening!
First impressions of the feted/infamous game of the year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and thoughts on the legacy/genre in which it has suddenly come to feature so prominently. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wRVNWkEmhY Thanks for listening!
Out of the Ground: Reading The Book of Dust by Philip PullmanCourse page: https://newschoolnotes.blogspot.com/2026/01/out-of-ground-reading-book-of-dust-by.html Episode 1: A Philosopher's Apprentice https://youtu.be/UBYHI-bNf14 Discussing La Belle Sauvage front matter and Chapter 1: The Terrace RoomSnow, by Louis MacNeice - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91395/snow-582b58513ffae "I have the feeling this all belongs to me," Pullman's autobiographical sketch for Something About the Author, vol. 65 (circa Apr 1993) - https://web.archive.org/web/20071030002130/http://www.philip-pullman.com:80/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=84 Schubert's Trout Quintet, Rudin et al. fresh from youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LhROkOrhF0 Gabriel Schenk's tour of Philip Pullman's Oxford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVuZ2TvsQaY Thanks for listening!
Pursuing the butterflies and other beasts in Nabokov's late work. Play and games, FF9's dual worlds--a crossover with the Video Game Academy seems imminent. Adding a chapter to the modernism book outline as we speak!Thanks for listening.
(Cards, voice, boat...) Garnet's lost her powers of speech, but we do our best to make up for it. For more: https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/ Thanks for listening!
Nabokov's Van and Ada, "dangerous cousins" long before Arrested Development and whatever French art films it was directly spoofing, prefigure also Woody Allen's and Wes Anderson's predilections. What are readers supposed to make of the nonagenarian narrator's loving descriptions of acts whose moral impact the precocious youths seem to overlook, whilst making anagrams of insect (scient - incest - nicest) and blushing across the breakfast table? Thanks for listening and pondering with us!
From the kerfuffle caused by Eiko's love letter to the Alexander summon sequence, passing over for now much of the Treno card tournament in merciful silence. For more: https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/ Thanks for listening!
Comparisons to Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust are entertained and mused upon at the narrator's invitation, and we readers and rereaders are entertained and bemused by this puzzling, playful later masterpiece from the author of Lolita, a book that has been back in the news lately due to certain famous people whose lives have been tawdry imitations of its controversial art. Text and annotations: https://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/ Lolita in the news: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/02/jeffrey-epstein-nabokov-lolita/685320/ Readership and vice: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/reading-crisis-solution-literature-personal-passion/685461/ Thanks for listening.
The princess and the summoner village brought full circle; we meet our final party member; Kuja vs Brahne; and on to Disc 3. More at https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/ Thanks for listening!
With guest appearances by Dostoevsky and Ippolit: https://anunexpectedjournal.com/beauty-in-tragedy-the-idiot-dostoevsky-and-eucatastrophe/ Thanks for listening!
Discussing Alex's forthcoming entry in the Bibliotheca Dantesca. https://penn.manifoldapp.org/journals/bibliotheca-dantesca Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbigmQGjQaA Thanks for listening!
Selections from Keats' Letters: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters Text of Endymion, with Preface and notes: https://johnkeats.uvic.ca/poem_endymion_book_i.html Thanks for listening
We end up talking quite a bit about Hamlet and other plays, less about the poem, but it's the point of departure for what I hope is an interesting conversation nonetheless. Babcock later turned up this article on the ways in which the fall of Troy appears across WS' work: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/1/38 For my part, I'm more interested in Shakespeare and Ovid. A book James and Caley of Chandler Prep suggest: https://archive.org/details/shakespeareovid0000bate Thanks for listening!
Here we are in the plague years of 1592-3, seeing what the "upstart crow" was up to while the theaters were closed. Thanks for listening!
What's the plural of hieros gamos? We celebrate the totally real and binding nuptials of hero and heroine, then living doll and aspiring gourmand, who are immediately blessed with a new child, the last of the Summoners who communes with the Moogles, before traversing the Iifa Tree, breaking the seal and dissipating the Mist. More at https://videogameacademia.org/courses/current-semester/final-fantasy-ix/ Thanks for listening!
Part IV and the Epilogue, Smerdyakov and Iago, Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. Thanks for listening!
Escaping death in Fossil Roo to reach the Outer Continent, where we compare Conde Petie and the Black Mage Village; the unobstructed light of the sky and the blue light of memory; the search for origins and the acceptance of mortality. And we don't forget about Quina! Thanks for listening!
Jace invited me to think through some of the ways in which memory and art are almost identicalThanks, Jace, and thank you for listening! You can find links to our past conversations on Xenogears, etc. here: https://newschoolnotes.blogspot.com/2019/05/bookwarm-games-xenogears.html
Contrasting the Queen and the Princess, their Summons, and the fall of Cleyra and Lindblum. Thanks for listening!
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