François Rabelais
French writerWikipedia
84
MENTIONS
56
EPISODES
47
PODCASTS
Search complete. 84 mentions across 56 episodes found for "François Rabelais".
Nov 5, 2026
Helen CzerskiHOST
I'm Helen Cheresky, in France to shine a light on the global movement to help our filthy and forgotten urban rivers gush back into glorious life.
Helen CzerskiHOST
There's a river in Paris that's inspired artists, philosophers, songwriters, filmmakers and poets.
Helen CzerskiHOST
But it's not that one, not the obvious one, the Seine that flows past Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower.
Helen CzerskiHOST
It's a river that 75 years ago was wiped off the map of Paris.
Helen CzerskiHOST
Olivier Levillon is a filmmaker and Laurent Bopp is an ocean scientist.
Helen CzerskiHOST
Both live on the almost invisible banks of the Bievre, the lost river of Paris.
Olivier LevillonSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
A long time ago, it was a very nice valley here where the poets, the writers went to write, to paint, to see the nature with this little river, Victor Hugo and
Laurent BoppSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
many others.
Noel BadrianNARRATOR
I suppose that the entity of the poet may be represented by the number ten.
Noel BadrianNARRATOR
It is certain that a chemist, on analyzing and pharmacopolizing it, as Rabelais says, would find it composed of one part interest to nine parts of self-esteem.
Noel BadrianNARRATOR
Now, at the moment when the door had opened to admit the Cardinal, the nine parts of self-esteem in Gringoire, swollen and expanded by the breath of popular admiration, were in a state of prodigious
speaker_7NARRATOR
augmentation, beneath which disappeared, as though
Chad PostHOST
Doesn't matter.
Chad PostHOST
Which in my edition has a reference to a Rabelais story about whether or not that's a joke by Rabelais about a curate who's told he must pay the tax for keeping a woman, whether she's a mistress or not.
Chad PostHOST
So even if he So that's what he's riffing off of and doing it in this way where he's like, I chose to go a different way home.
Chad PostHOST
And they're like, we don't care.
18 MINS LATER
Chad PostHOST
Yeah.
Chad PostHOST
Like seeing those and then trying to figure out another move to make in terms of literature and in terms of writing and how to do it would be where I think that that's sort of coming from.
Chad PostHOST
And looking back to Rabelais, Quixote, Burton and emphasizing that level of things is what's really critical.
Chad PostHOST
Like I do like this like chain that you start to see that goes from him and looks backwards and then looks forwards to someone like Gaddis.
RosannaHOST
Surely, in my poor opinion, it says, the fashion of pockets in the doublet sleeve, or the hose, is much more honest and commendable.
RosannaHOST
In Rabelais' Pantagruel, a character called Panurge takes an orange out of his codpiece.
RosannaHOST
So, at one point in history, the pocket was an improvement in manners.
RosannaHOST
Women had pockets too, and earlier than the usual date.
Vanessa RichardsonHOST
Neither of them was a knight or a countess.
Vanessa RichardsonHOST
He quickly renamed the house after a fictional abbey in a 16th-century French novel by Rabelais, where the residents had no rules and did as they pleased.
Vanessa RichardsonHOST
In the book, it's called the Abbey of Tellem.
Vanessa RichardsonHOST
Alistair called his the Abbey of Thelema.
Peter BudrinGUEST
Then I suddenly, you know, see that, oh, actually Pushkin is directly referencing Stern and Eugene Leningin.
Peter BudrinGUEST
But beyond that, I kept reading and thinking about Stern as this really unusual, very funny writer, but also someone who is deeply philosophical and whose work is somewhere between times, right? We talked about how he was this modernist, but he was also close in spirit to his favorite writers, such as Cervantes or Rabelais.
Peter BudrinGUEST
So it's the kind of 16th century comic worlds as well.
Peter BudrinGUEST
So he is very anachronistic in a strange way.
William CooperHOST
And if there are any listening, it will delight you also.
William CooperHOST
They also embraced Rabelais then understood this kind of linguistic alchemy in terms of the correspondences and connections between objects or ideas on different levels or scales of being.
William CooperHOST
A classic example of this, being long term months, sudden juxtaposition on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.
William CooperHOST
And yet, even though Fulcinelli's basic idea and operational and linguistic alchemy used by sages or hermetic philosophers to transform reality become part of surrealism's intellectual currency, none of the surrealists mention Fulcinelli, our mystery of the cathedrals.
Marion WinikGUEST
Wright's wild sentences propel Meeks through murderous battles, more threesomes and orgies, and more.
Marion WinikGUEST
Wright may be 80, but he has the imaginative energy of a randy teenager channeling the vocabulary of Rabelais and Melville.
Marion WinikGUEST
Next up, Pirate Queen by historical fiction queen Ariel Lahan.
Marion WinikGUEST
The extraordinary life of a real historical figure named Grace O'Malley overlapped closely with that of Queen Elizabeth I, and one of the high points of Lahan's sixth novel depicts a meeting between the two, both sharply aware of their fraught position as female rulers in a man's world.
Steven RaichlenGUEST
And obviously that's a little bit different than, you know, writing about barbecue.
Steven RaichlenGUEST
And I'm reading books like Gargantua and Pantagruel by the French Renaissance writer Rabelais.
Steven RaichlenGUEST
I'm I'm reading Paul Bunyan, trying to find, you know, really diverse.
Steven RaichlenGUEST
So, and that's due on Thursday.
Harold RogersHOST
They rejected my story.
Harold RogersHOST
Rabelais, Cervantes, and Stern, writers considered bedrocks of the satirical tradition, all write prefaces in their books, anxious about how their humor will be interpreted, that nothing will be gleaned but jokes.
Harold RogersHOST
Rabelais compares his book to Socrates.
Harold RogersHOST
for to have eyed his outside and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance you would not have given the peel of an onion for him so deformed was he in body and ridiculous in gesture he was in his carriage simple boorish in his apparel and fortune poor unhappy in wives unfit for every office always laughing tippling and merrily carousing to every one with continual jibes and jeers the better by those means to conceal his divine knowledge But if you don't think Rabelais is funny, like with Stern and Cervantes, you'll never surmount the shell and eat the nut of divine knowledge.
Harold RogersHOST
Don Quixote's death at the end of his eponymous book is a transformation of everything you laughed at.
Harold RogersHOST
The reader, like Sancho, wants him to get back up and be ridiculous again, to be different than us, a difference we found risible.
46 more episodes mention François Rabelais.
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