John Henry Menton

• Ep. 109 – The Tower of Silence

  Break out the Tantalus glasses – we’re finally getting out of the Underworld! Topics in our final episode covering “Hades” include paying the ferryman, turning a suit, rats, Robert Emmet, the speech from the dock, toxic nostalgia, cremation, the Catholic Church’s position on cremation, quicklime, Zoroastrianism, the Parsi Tower of Silence, the unexpected consequences of…

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• Ep. 104 – Broken Hearts

  Corpses rarely wear hats. Topics include the correspondent organ of Hades (the heart), the O’Connell Circle, Daniel O’Connell’s heart, Tom Kernan, hats, losing your identity in the underworld, freemasonery, whether or not Leopold Bloom is a mason, Mount Jerome and the Irish church, Bloom’s denial of an afterlife, humor in the face of death, ghosts…

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• Incubism

  “The coffin is a house in which the dead shelter for a time…. The cortège brings the dead back into the pathways of the living. When the body is no longer capable of locomotion, it is carried along by members of the community in an act of solidarity, which turns out to be an act…

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• Ulysses & The Odyssey: Hades

  Part of an occasional series on the Homeric parallels in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Odyssey, Book XI: Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets the prophet Tiresias, who reveals the ultimate fate of Odysseus and his crew. Odysseus has a chance to speak to other souls in the underworld, including his mother, a parade of…

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