Recall This Book

By Elizabeth Ferry and John PlotzSociety & Culture Arts Books History

Recall This Book episodes

September 21, 2023113* David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)
Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening Here, 2004) studied the contrast between the FBI’s work in the 1960’s to wipe out left-wing and Black protests and its efforts to control and tame right-wing and white supremacist movements. That gives him a valuable perspective on the run-up to January 6th–and what may happen next.
Mentioned in the Episode
David Cunningham collaborated on this article about the “common pattern of underestimating the threat from right-wing extremists.”
Ulster Defence Association
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
Ulster Defence Association
Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing: FBI perspective and reported book
Two of the “after-action” reports on Charlottesville that David discusses are:
“Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia” (Hunton and Williams 2017)
“Virginia’s Response to the Unite the Right Rally: After-Action Review” (International Association of Chiefs of Police, December 2017)
Lessons Charlottesville (should have) taught us: “Prohibiting Private Armies at Public Rallies” (Georgetown Law School, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and protection, September 2020).

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30 min
September 07, 2023112 Earthsea, and Other Realms: Ursula Le Guin as Social Inactivist (EF, JP, [UKL])
To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin's "speculative anthropology," gender politics, and goats.
And we share a delight we've been holding back for just this occasion, a series of clips from John's interview with Le Guin in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, in 2015 (a longer print-only version appeared in Public Books). Since Ursula is no longer with us, having died in 2018, it's especially poignant to listen to their conversation. Though its tone actually isn't sad at all, but friendly, generous, and ruminative.
Mentioned in the Episode
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Books of Earthsea
Friedrich Schiller, "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry"
Ursula K. Le Guin, "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Lloyd Alexander, Taran Wanderer (and the Chronicles of Prydain)
Judith Butler Gender Trouble
Angelica Gorodischer (esp. Le Guin's translation of Kalpa Imperial)
Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin
"The Bones of the Earth" in Tales from Earthsea
John Plotz, Time and the Tapestry
Listen to the episode here
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48 min
August 17, 2023111* Samuel R. Delany, Neveryon and Beyond (JP)
John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution.
Recall This Book loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America?
He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation.
On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books
Discussed in this episode:
The Neveryon Series, “Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton (also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. Delany
In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
“The Science Fiction of Roe vs. Wade,” Palmer Rampell
Library of America Volumes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Delany disses them!)
A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson
I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Heinlein
The Fifth Season Novels, N.K. Jemisin
More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
Read the episode here.

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28 min
August 03, 2023110* Joshua Cohen’s "The Netanyahus" (JP, Eugene Sheppard)
n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them?
Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel.
With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion…
Mentioned in this episode:
Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."
Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."
Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.
Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt.
"Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")
Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.
Leon Feuchtwanger
"There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.")
Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real"
Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss.
Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

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46 min
July 20, 2023109* Thomas Piketty on Capitalism and Inequality (Adaner Usmani, JP)
Is Thomas Piketty the world’s most famous economic historian ? A superstar enemy of plutocratic capitalism who wrote a pathbreaking bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century? Or simply a debonair and generous French intellectual happy to talk redistributive justice? Join this 2020 conversation with John and Adaner Usmani (star of RTB’s episode 44: Racism as idea, Racism as Power Relation) to find out.
Why did we invite him? John thinks nobody is better than Piketty at mapping and explaining the nature and origin of the glaring and growing inequality that everywhere defines wealth distribution in the 21st century—both between societies and within them. His recent magnum opus, Capital and Ideology. ask what sorts of stories societies (and individuals within those societies) tell themselves so as to tolerate such inequality—and the poverty and misery it produces. Or even to see that inequality as part of the natural order of things.
Why did he accept our invitation? A mystery, but who are we to look a gift economist in the mouth?
Mentioned in the Episode
Philip Larkin, “Why aren’t they screaming?” (from the poem “The Old Fools”)
Bonus: Here is John’s question about his favorite writer, the one Adaner teased him for not asking:
“Mr. Piketty, you are interested in hinge points where people cease being captivated by one ideology and begin seeing differently (might one also say, begin being captivated by another ideology?) In 2014, Ursula le Guin said:
‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.‘
Can I ask how that resonates with your argument about the rapid changeability of economic paradigms–and moral paradigms for justifying inequality–in Capital and Ideology? “
Read transcript here

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48 min
July 05, 2023108* Chris Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck)
Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything.
We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is also managing editor of JustMoney.org, a website that explores money as a critical site of governance. Desan’s research explores money as a legal and political project. Her approach opens economic orthodoxy to question by widening the focus on money as an instrument, to examine the institutions and agreements through which resources are mobilized and tracked, by means of money. In doing so, she shows that particular forms of money, and the markets within which they circulate, are neither natural or inevitable.
Christine Desan, “Making Money“
Ursula Le Guin The Earthsea Novels (money hard to come by, but kinda cute)
Samuel Delany, the Neveryon series (money part of the evils of naming, slavery, labor appropriation)
Jane Austen “Pride and Prejudice“
Richard Rhodes, “Energy“
John Plotz, “Is Realism Failing?” (on liberal guilt and patrimonial fiction)
William Cobbett, “Rural Rides” (1830; London as wen)
E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (notional “just price” of bread)
Peter Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD”
Chris Vanden Bossche, “Reform Acts“
“Sanditon” on PBS (and the original unfinished Austen novel)
Still from “Sanditon”
Margot Finn, “Character of Credit“
Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century“
L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900)
Leo Tolstoy “The Forged Coupon” (orig.1904)
Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp” (1891)
Frank Norris, “The Octopus” (1901)
D. W. Griffith, “A Corner in Wheat” (1909)

Read the episode here.

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45 min
June 15, 2023107* The Electro-Library with Jared Green (EF, JP)
Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created.
Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely to be yes).
The conversation then turns to the difference between artworks that slide in at the ear and those that come in by eye. What kind of world-building is going on on Recall This Book? Which podcasts are like a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and which are more Schubertian, semi-detached and conversational? Then, in Recallable Books, Jared recommends Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Elizabeth recommends the work of Sarah Lewis, and John recommends the Habitat podcast.
Discussed in this episode:
Lapham’s Quarterly
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
“The Photograph,” Umberto Eco
Various audiobooks, John Le Carré
Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, Robert Frost
The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse
“The Dead,” James Joyce
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes
Aperture 223, “Vision and Justice,” ed. Sarah Lewis
The Habitat

Read the episode here.

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46 min
June 01, 2023 106 Musical Collaboration: A Chat with Francisco del Pino (JP)
Francisco del Pino is a widely celebrated composer from Buenos Aires, and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. John fell in love with Francisco's music (during his own semester there) when he heard a piece based on the poetry of his longtime friend Victoria Cóccaro.
Recall This Book seized the chance to speak with del Pino (in John's weirdly resonant office) about composition and collaboration.
Listen to all of Decir on New Amsterdam Records.
You can hear more of the music on Spotify, Band Camp and even on his You Tube channel.
J. S. Bach: Reasons to be interested in late almost abstract or even inhuman pieces (e.g. 1747Musical Offering.) that may have been written without any particular instrument in mind.
John brings up whale songs, thinking of the memorable 1979 National Geographic record he listened to as a kid.
Read the episode here.

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42 min
May 18, 2023105* David Plotz: Books in Dark Times (JP)
Aside from being John’s (younger, suaver and beardier) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and “The Good Book“) and left Atlas Obscura to found City Cast.
So, when John called him up in April 2020 for the Books in Dark Times series, what was his Pandemic reading? The fully absorbing “other worlds” of Dickens and Mark Twain tempt David, but he goes another direction. He picks one book that shows humanity at its worst, heading towards world war. And another that shows how well we can behave towards one another (and even how happy we can be…) at “moments of super liquidity” when everything melts and can be rebuilt.
He also guiltily admits a yen for Austen, Rowling, and Pullman–and gratuitously disses LOTR. John and David bond about their love for lonnnnnnng-form cultural history in the mold of Common Ground. Finally the brothers enthuse over their favorite book about Gettysburg, and reveal an embarrassing reenactment of the charge down Little Round Top.
Mentioned in this episode:
Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield“
J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Hobbit“
Mark Twain, “Huckleberry Finn” (1884)
Barbara Tuchman, “The Guns of August” (1962, but about 1914)
Emily St. John Mandel, “Station Eleven” (2014)
Jon Moallem, “This is Chance” (March 2020; on the great Alaska earthquake)
Isabel Wilkerson,. “The Warmth of Other Suns” (2010) (David delightedly discovers it on his bookshelf..)
J Anthony Lukas, “Common Ground” (1986) (the mothership of the long-form cultural history that DP and JP both adore)
Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice” (1813)
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter series
Michael Shaara, “The Killer Angels” (1974)

Read the transcript here.

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21 min
May 04, 2023104 Journalistic Collaboration (JP)
Steve Fainaru and his brother Mark Fainaru-Wada wrote a bestselling and award-winning book (and accompanying PBS documentary series) about the NFL coverup of concussion trauma, League of Denial. This conversation inaugurates an occasional Recall this Book series on collaborative work: who does it well, what makes it succeed, why can't grumpy isolatos like English professors get with the program?
The brothers generously praise the colleagues and mentors who helped them on their way. They also dig into questions of trust between collaborators and constant choices reporting and writing entails. Some stories are dogs, some are "unmakeable" and some you can't see; how do you recognize the situation and cope?
Almost as afterthought, they lay bare the amount of persistent, patient long-term conversation and relationship-building that goes into finding out the truth behind events that powerful organizations. Steve explains the reporting behind his 2008 Pulitzer-winning stories about American private contractors during the invasion of Iraq. Basically, "institutions react institutionally." Then the tricky question of how to be a football fan in the concussion era arises.
Mentioned in the episode:
Phil Bennett a mentor for Steve.
Lance Williams journalist, partner, source-maintainer: inspiration for Mark.
The memorable newspaper advisors who shaped Mark and Steve in their high-school gig at the Redwood Bark: Sylvia Jones and Donal Brown.
Plus: Stand by for more of their work on the NBA in China....

Read and listen to the episode here.

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52 min