Recall This Book

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch--spoke with him back in October 2021 about his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the world, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Another equally descriptive title for that book, and for the discussion we share with you here (after Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a Bat?") might be What is it Like to be an Octopus?

As always, below you will find helpful links for the works referenced in the episode, and a transcript for those who prefer or require a print version of the conversation. Please visit us at Recallthisbook.org (or even subscribe there) if you are interested in helpful bonus items like related short original articles, reading lists, visual supplements and past episodes grouped into categories for easy browsing.

Mentioned in the Episode:

Listen and Read Here.

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Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle.” It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin.

Before diving into the story itself, Ivan and John marvel at STW's weird greatness--and great weirdness. Like Hilary Mantel, she is drawn to the deep strangeness of other people. Prompted by John to think about these fairy stories as posthuman, Ivan notes the "dehumanization ceremonies" fairies perform on stolen changelings. John builds on the idea by bringing up the rise (in the 1960's) of alien abduction narratives. Do they form an invisible subtext to the abduction that begins the story?

David Trotter's "Posthuman? Animal Corpses, Aeroplanes and Very High Frequencies in the Work of Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner" explores Warner’s taste for non-human perspectives in e.g. The Cat's Cradle Book. Warner's own line on her stories--"bother the human heart, I’m tired of the human heart"--signals to Ivan her knowledge that the animals we share the world with see things quite differently: his own cat, he suspects, might let him die without too much emotion. John respects Charles Foster's Being a Beast for his decision to live like a badger (worm-eating and all) rather than just imagining it.

Literature cited:

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Welcome to the final episode of What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. David Cunningham, chair of Sociology at Washington University in St Louis, is author of Klansville, USA (Oxford UP, 2014) and There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (U California Press, 2005). His ongoing research includes the recent wave of conflicts around Confederate monuments and other sites of contested memory.

David's vision of what has changed in 2024 relates to an extended analogy to the election of 1972, when the avowedly racist George ("Segregation....forever") Wallace almost rode right-wing fury to victory.

Notes of hope? Well, David has faith in extant political institutions and even bureaucracy (long live the deep state) to blunt the force of Trump's onslaught; movement politics of the left may also prove capable, as they were in the 1930's of rising up in response to a ferocious successful mobilization on the right.

You can also listen to earlier conversations with Vincent Brown and Mark Blyth.

Listen and Read here.

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Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. In this episode, Vincent Brown (History professor at Harvard) last spoke with us about his own work on Caribbean slave revolts; his many other well-known projects include the recent PBS series The Bigger Picture.

What exactly happened and will happen? Well, Vince has sympathy for Bernie Sanders Boston Globe op-ed about the Democrat's neglect of working-class and Gabriel Wynant's "Exit Right" abut the need to remake left-wing politics. He also takes seriously Thomas Piketty's theory of the rise of "Brahmin Left". That's a topic explored in the Recall This Book series on the Brahmin left ( Jan-Werner Muller, Matthew Karp and Thomas Piketty).

Any hopeful note to end on? Well, bad government breeds righteous opposition. From Ronald Reagan we got...Minor Threat and the Bad Brains.

Tune in tomorrow to hear John speak with David Cunningham; the previous conversation, already up on New Books Network, was with Mark Blyth.

Listen and Read here.

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Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025).

Mark sees 2008-9 as a true economic and political volta, one that the world has been busily ignoring to its peril in the years since. Early on, Mark mentions his 2016 article "Global Trumpism." Piketty's "Brahmins vs Merchants" explains the diploma divide. The top two employers in America are Amazon and Walmart, both warehouses for foreign goods coming for American consumers. Mark invokes the business cycle theory pioneered by Nikolai Kondratiev known as Kondratiev waves. He also invokes Piketty's "R over G"; that if return on investment among the rentier class exceeds growth, inequality will grow and grow.

In the short term, Mark sees immense financial gains mainly for the top but for the middle and bottom as well. The Republicans are in a pole position to capitalize on this. Higher ed is a legitimate site of concern: Blyth points to the Agenda 47 commitment to hamstringing private and public universities in various ways.

Is there hope? Well, sort of. US carbon emissions will make less of an impact on global warming than you might think--and yes it is still the most creative and technologically advanced country. Cheers!

Tune in tomorrow to hear another perspective from Vincent Brown, and finally from David Cunningham.

Listen and Read Here.

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In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as the lovely philosophical podcast Overthink) offers up something new in animal studies--"a philosophical interpretation of biological subjectivity." Although we share no linguistic schema with animals there is lots more evidence than just YouTube (octopuses, dogs, signing chimpanzees, brain scans of dreaming birds etc) to suggest oneiric behaviors and underlying mental states occur all over the animal kingdom. So, David discusses with John his interest in using dreaming as a window into consciousness. Here is what it means that we are not alone in our dreams...

David details the "flattening and impoverishing effect on the natural sciences" wrought by 20th century behaviorist paradigms. He also expresses skepticism about the likelihood of AI ever achieving more than a "zombie" state; it now and perhaps always will profoundly differ from animals' varied experiences of our shared world.

The biological commonality that most strikes David is the idea it is logically inconceivable that there might be a dreamer devoid of consciousness or sentience. Dreaming, he argues may be the key to acknowledging animal's "moral considerability"--the right to have their consciousness, sentience and in the deepest sense their standing taken into account. . Finally David admits to a feeling of tragedy in writing this book: he has had to engage with experimentation that crosses boundaries in animal treatment in order to make the case for those boundaries. He understands his decision as tragic because either way--to engage or to ignore the science--would be to lose something.

Mentioned in the episode:

• New Wave of "inner space" SF authors who focus on the alien nature of humanity itself: J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and John's hero Ursula Le Guin.

Recallable Books:

Listen and Read here.

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Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring.

Mentioned

Recallable books

Read Here:

38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today

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You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here.

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely.

This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction.

When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke.

Mentioned in the episode

Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion?

Head on over to Part 1 of episode 135.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely.

This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction.

When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke.

Mentioned in the episode

Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion?

Head on over to Part 2 of episode 135.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.”

Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.”

Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to Novel Dialogue's traditional "signature question": A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six.

Mentioned in this Episode:

By Anne Enright:

Also mentioned:

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking about This

Sally Rooney on the social life of the young on the internet, e.g. Conversations with Friends

Christopher Hitchens, “Booze and Fags:”

Transcript.

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