Author Topic: PC735: The Artists’ Colony  (Read 498 times)

Ocicat

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on: May 18, 2022, 10:21:16 PM
PodCastle 735: The Artists’ Colony

Author: Patrick Freyne
Narrator: Eleanor R. Wood
Host: Matt Dovey
Audio Producer: Peter Adrian Behravesh

Previously published by Winter Papers Volume 5

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Content Warning:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)



Show Notes
Rated PG-13



 

Dear ­­­­­­­______,

I think you would love it here. It’s so peaceful and you were always saying, back in the city, that we needed to get away.

So let me describe what I can see from my writing desk. Outside my window I can see a silver lake which is very still. Behind the lake there is a hill that is partly covered with coniferous trees. Above the hill there is a mottled grey sky. The trees on the hill look like they’ve been painted against that sky with vertical dashes of paint and their reflections in the lake look like inverted impressionist renderings of the same scene.

There is no sound. No engines. No construction. No destruction. No children. No birds.




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Raccoonteur

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Reply #1 on: May 26, 2022, 02:20:59 PM
I feel vaguely... patronized?
OK, my attempt at a joke ends there.
Firstly, I very much enjoy Eleanor R. Wood's narration. I can't understate how much of a difference good narration makes.
On to the story; it stays with me like a dream. Was this a dream? It has a dreamlike sense of portent that looms all the larger for the elusiveness of its meaning.
I get a SENSE of what the story is about, but also that it's about more than one thing. A synthesis of artistic isolation and the vulnerability of one's livelihood (or sense of validation) relying on the reception of one's expression-- an external locus of control, in psych terms. Of the guilt and necessity of pragmatic compartmentalization. Of the nature of human connection-- desired, projected-- and the power dynamic involved in choosing whether or not to accept that projected connection. Is it ersatz? Depends on the quality of your regard.
I'm not a solipsist. I find there is meaning in being shared with... that I too, as the perceiver of art, am validated by its finding me.

What makes Aimee portable when others were not--  that she had been writing up until everything fell apart around her? That she was unaffected? Why take her to the battlefield, and what was the battle?