This conversation, first aired in July 2021, features Brandeis poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014).

Sean reads his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged and delicate documents, unfolds his ideas about birds, borders, houses and “who was here before me.”

Mentioned in This Episode:

C.S. Giscombe, Into and Out of Dislocation

C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road

Lorine Neidecker, Lake Superior

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Anne Carson, Plainwater

William Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

Listen and Read:

Read transcript here: Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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John and Elizabeth had the marvelous fortune to talk with George Kalogeris about his new book Winthropos (LSU Press, 2021). The title comes from the "Greek-ified" name that George's father gave to their town, Winthrop, MA. George's poems are soaked in memories and tacit, deep affection, communicated through the language of the lines and especially through certain Janus-faced words that reflect the old country and the new at once.

George reads and discusses three poems from his new book in the course of the conversation. If you want to read along as you listen to him, click here. You can read a transcript of the interview here.

Upcoming episodes: As you know, we always have a new episode for your delectation on the first Thursday of the month, and on the second Thursday an essay by a young scholar connected to the episode. Following on the success of our November reissue of a 2019 conversation with Martin Puchner, we are dedicating the third week of the month to an "archival treasure." So on February 17th, we think you'll be pleased with an older poetical conversation, also starring Elizabeth.

In March, a change of pace: we tackle the legacy of settler colonialism in "land grant" universities with a scholar who has been documenting the ways that stolen Native land funded the growth of America's higher education complex.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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Crossover Month at Recall this Book ends with a glance sideways at the doings of our pals Saronik and Kim, hosts of the delightfully lapidary podcast High Theory. Refresh your sense of them with Recall this Book 52: they joined John to showcase their distinctive approach, taking as their topic "the pastoral." Or, just click Play without further ado to hear their thoughts on teletherapy, a concept that proves far more familiar, and omnipresent than we at RtB had realized. Take those omnipresent signs for the Suicide Hotline, for starters....

In this 18-minute gem of an episode, Hannah Zeavin talks with HT about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. This mediated practice is the topic of her new book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021). You can learn more about Hannah’s research and teaching on her website: zeavin.org

Read the transcript here.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more.

It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present.

Mentioned in the Episode

Read a transcript here

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we haveCaryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread.

Jennifer Egan © Pieter M. van Hattem

Their conversation ranges widely over Egan’s oeuvre–not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to modern phenomena like TikTok and gamers streaming (including gamers streaming chess, a very special instance of getting inside someone else’s thought process). The PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad gets special treatment, and tantalizing details from Egan’s forthcoming novel, The Candy House (April, 2022) make an appearance. Egan discusses her authorial impulse towards camouflage, her play with genre’s relationship to specialized lingos and argots–and the way a genre’s norms and structure can function like a “lifeline” and also a “portal.”

Mentioned in the Episode

Read the transcript here.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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John and Elizabeth continue their conversation with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019).

Dan’s work fits into a newish approach in anthropology of researching people with greater power and influence than the researchers themselves. That's sometimes called "studying up" and Dan and Elizabeth (who's writing a book about gold, after all!) have both thought a lot about it.

Read the transcript here.

Read Aneil Tripathy's RTB piece about actuarial time scales and how they shape the sort of anthropology that both he and Souleles practice.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty, Peter Brown and Christine Desan), John and Elizabeth talk with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan's work explores the world of private equity "guys" (who are indeed mostly guys) and the ways they are "suspended in webs of significance [they themselves have] spun" as Clifford Geertz puts it.

Further, he explores the ways we are all suspended in these webs through the immense buying and managing power of private equity firms. Private equity investors buy out publicly traded companies, often through enormous debt (which is why these deals used to be called "leveraged buyouts" or LBOs), manage the companies and then sell them. They argue they are creating value by cutting fat in management; typically workers bear the brunt of the debt while executives--and the private equity firm and lawyers and others servicing the deal--receive hefty payments.

Dan pulls off a tough feat in his book, helping us see the concerns and motivations of people he's working with as understandable and the people themselves as reasonable and even likeable, while also maintaining his own view of private equity as, generally speaking, a noxious force in society.

We end with a discussion of the Occupy movement and how it helped to change public conversations about inequality and the power of finance (another angle on the themes we tackled in our earlier "Brahmin Left" conversations).

Mentioned in this episode:

The transcript for this episode is here. 

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Book Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very origins of writing struck us as perfect companion to Mark McGurl's wonderful insights (in RtB 67, published earlier this month) about the publishing industry's in 2021, or as Mark tells it, the era of "adult diaper baby love."

Aside from being a fabulous conversation about Martin's wonderful history of book production through the ages (The Written World) this episode brings back happy memories of Elizabeth and John piling their guests into a cozy sound booth at Brandeis, the kind of place that's utterly taboo in Pandemic America.So travel with us back to 2019 for a close encounter with the epic of Gilgamesh. The three friends discuss the different stages of world writing--from the time of the scribes to the time of great teachers like Confucius, Socrates and Jesus Christ, who had a very complicated relationship to writing.

In Recallable Books, Martin recommends the fan fiction website Wattpad; Elizabeth recommends "No Reservations: Narnia," in which Anthony Bourdain goes through the wardrobe. John feints at recommending Dennis Tenen's book on the writing within coding before recommending the Brautigan Library.

Come for the discussion of writing, stay for the impressions of Gollum!

Discussed in this episode:

Episode transcript available here: Episode 6 Puchner 3.28.19

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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What do you make of Amazon: The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your tablet) just a click away? John and Elizabeth speak with Stanford English prof Mark McGurl, whose previous books include the pathbreaking The Program Era.

Mark faces that question squarely in his terrific new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: if you want to know even more about it, check out the NY Times review by RTB's own book-history maven, star of RTB 46, Leah Price. Mark ponders when service became an idiom for the relationship between writer and reader and how strong a claim he is willing to make about Amazon's impact on the modern novel (pretty strong!). Finally, he tackles the key question: is the genre of "Adult Diaper Baby Love" (a breakout hit in Kindle sales; google it at your peril!) the perfect metaphor for Amazon's effort to soothe, pacify and succor its infantilized consumer-base?

Mentioned in the episode:

Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption

Public libraries going trashy or classy: John wrote an article about this topic, praising a compelling database, "What Middletown Read"

Recallable Books:

Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1853)

Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855)

Transcript available here

RTB 67 Transcript

(or Visit the Recall this Book Transcript page)

Upcoming: Mark's discussion of the history of books and book publishing inspired next week's blog post: tune in next Thursday to find out more! It also sent us back to the archives for a golden RTB oldie starring Martin Puchner. That will appear, freshly rewrapped for the occasion, just before Thanksgiving.

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Octopus month has morphed seamlessly into Multispecies month here at RtB, bringing with it not only last week's piece on chimpanzees, but also this sparkling conversation about all sorts of multi-species communities. Recorded live in front of an audience of writing students and introduced by Brandeis physicist Matthew Headrick, it features Patricia Alvarez Astacio, an anthropologist and filmmaker. She has made a film about her work in the Peruvian highlands, where people live with, respect, shear and sometimes eat alpacas. Gina Turrigiano, RtB guest-host of long standing, wears her biological hat in this conversation, bringing to bear insights about avian intelligence and the other sorts of animal community that silently surround our species (think microbiome...). John tries to steer the conversation towards SF as usual.

Read Transcript Here (or Visit the Recallthisbook.org Transcript page)

Upcoming episodes: What do you make of Amazon? The new Sears Roebuck? A terrifying monopoly threat? Satisfaction (a paperback in your mailbox, a Kindle edition on your tablet) just a click away? We talk in early November with Stanford English prof Mark McGurl, who faces that question squarely in his terrific new book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].

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