The Spouter-Inn; or, A Conversation with Great Books

In the museum, attention shifted from painting to painting, the eye forced around, so that it was impossible to focus on any single work. The nightmare was of a giant bluebottle fly which buzzed, “I’m all there is.” Where cars don’t go are shortcuts. My grandfather was forced to recognize his age when another, younger, man offered his seat on the bus. When one travels, one might “hit” a storm. The shoe must be tied to the ankle. As for we who “love to be astonished,” McDonald’s is the world’s largest purchaser of beef eyeballs. They went out with bows and armbands to shoot at the hay. It’s as easy as waves, slopping water. Traverse, watch, and cease.

My Life is book of poetry by Lyn Hejinian. First published in 1980, the work originally consisted of 37 paragraphs, each with 37 lines, composed when the poet was 37 years old. A revised edition came out a few years later, which increased all those numbers to 45. This was continued in an addendum of sorts, My Life in the Nineties. But these poems are not simple autobiography. Instead, they weave together sentences, sounds, and images into a collage that often feels just at the edge of understandability.

Chris and Suzanne use this book to begin reflecting on this cluster of episodes on Essays, Essaying, Stories, Storying. How does this poetry approach form and openness (of what might get included, of how this writing might be understood), and how does Hejinian’s poeming reflect upon certain kinds of essaying and storying?

Lyn Hejinian: My Life (includes My Life in the Nineties).

An overview of Lyn Hejinain’s life and work, including a longer excerpt or two from My Life.

Douglas Messerli’s introduction to an anthology of “Language“ Poetries might explain things that these poets were trying to do.

William Carlos Williams: Paterson.

Brian Dillon: Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.

Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays. (The collected essays have been published over many volumes.)

George Orwell: A Collection of Essays. (His collected runs across four volumes.)

Kim TallBear‘s Critical Poly 100s appear in Shapes of Native Nonfiction.

Jackson Mac Low: Pieces o’ Six. (The book is very out of print, but the pdf is reasonably priced.)

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Next: J.R.R. Tolkien: The Return of the King. (Probably.)

We conceive of the essay as an exquisite vessel, one that evidences the delicate balance of beauty and pain. The ‘exquisite’ character of this vessel invokes simultaneously an exquisite work of art and the exquisite ache of an intense sensation. By bringing to the fore a focus on form, in both the structure and the concept of the collection, we use the term exquisite vessel not just to name the work done herein but to draw attention to form as a creative and literary practice of reverence for the exquisite in its most literal sense of something carefully sought out. To essay is to try, test, and practice. The form of the essay, then, is a fitting site for the experiential and sometimes painful work of seeking answers.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction is a collection of contemporary essays by Indigenous writers, edited by Elisha Washuta and Theresa Warburton, and published in 2019. But in addition to providing a sampler of Indigenous voices and perspectives, the collection also offers a provocation about essaying itself, by thinking deeply about the art of basket weaving. What goes into a well-crafted basket? How is that reflected in each of these essays, and in the gathering and arrangement of these essays? Chris and Suzanne look at a few key essays in the collection, and think about how books like this fit into our reckoning of “literature”.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, eds.)

The essays from this collection that we focus on:

Two essay collections that Suzanne edited and Chris designed:

Suzanne’s essay on LitHub about the essay and this collection.

Our episode on Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.

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Next: Lyn Hejinian: My Life.

Storytelling is an emergent practice, and meaning for each individual listener will necessarily be different. The relationships between the storyteller and the listeners become the nest that cradles the meaning. The storyteller creates both the context and the content and collectively a plurality of meanings are generated through the experiences of the audience. The “analysis” and the “critical examination” are done with the utmost care and respect. Nishnaabeg storytellers, when telling in English, will use phrases such as “maybe it happened this way,” “some people say that’s what happened, I don’t know, I wasn’t there” or “I heard it happened that way, but I don’t know.” Revealing that one can only speak about what they know to be true from direct experience.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s nonfiction book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (2011) considers what “resurgence” might mean for Indigenous people and communities. Her ways of thinking about resurgence are intimately connected to her thinking about story, especially the many forms of creation story. Suzanne and Chris reflect on and respond to Simpson's conceptions of what story is, how it relates to the essay, and what it makes possible.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence.

Leanne Simpson’s website.

Other books by Simpson include A Short History of the Blockade, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, and Rehearsals for Living (with Robyn Maynard).

Our episodes on Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Augustine’s Confessions

Next: Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, eds. Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers.

When lately I retired to my house resolved that, in so far as I could, I would cease to concern myself with anything except the passing in rest and retirement of the little time I still have to live, I could do my mind no better service than to leave it in complete idleness to commune with itself, to come to rest, and to grow settled; which I hoped it would thenceforth be able to do more easily, since it had become graver and more mature with time. But I find (variam semper dant otia mentem),

The Spouter-Inn returns with an experiment. We recorded four episodes over a busy weekend, and our cluster topic was "Essays, Essaying, Stories, Storying". We decided, this time, to put a “classic” text in conversation with some much more recent works. Let’s see where this path takes us?

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays are often described as the origin of the genre. But his writings are almost nothing like the kinds of essays we read in magazines or write for academic assignments. Montaigne’s pieces are meandering and personal, and often only tangentially related to the topics they are nominally “about”. Chris and Suzanne read a few of these essays and follow them wherever they might go.

Michel de Montaigne: Essays (trans. M.A. Screech). Also available on Project Gutenberg (trans. Charles Cotton) and on the HyperEssays website.

The essays we look at:

Our episodes on Leaves of Grass and the Symposium.

Étienne de La Boétie.

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Next: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence.

Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,

(Alas! Until the end of the world, no good word will be written or sung about

Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde tells a love story

Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (in the

Other works by Chaucer: The Canterbury

Our episode on the Iliad.

(The Spouter-Inn will in fact turn five years old in January.)

Boccaccio: Il Filostrato.

Our episodes on Paradiso, Consolation of

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There’s a feeling, I think, in English poetry that you have to be original.

Dick Davis is an award-winning poet and translator, famous for his

He joins Chris and Suzanne to talk about reading and translating Persian

Dick Davis’s translations include Layli and Majnun,

Our episodes on Layli and Majnun and

Fakhraddin Gorgani: Vis and Ramin (trans. Dick

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (trans.

Jahan Khatun.

Hafez.

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (trans. Dick Davis): originally

Mughal empire.

Our bonus episodes with Emily Wilson

Nezami: Khosrow and Shirin.

“Seek a Poet who your way do's bend, / And chuse an Author as you chuse a

Chapman’s Homer.

John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's

Nizami’s Khamsa.

On Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Ferdowsi: Shahnameh (trans. Dick Davis): magnificent hardcover in three

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Her voice was sweet and liquid, like a stream

The story of Layli and Majnun — sometimes written as Layla and Majnun —

Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun, trans. Dick

Our episode on Conference of the Birds.

Maria Rosa Menocal: Shards of Love: Exile and the Origin of the

Our episode on Enkidu from The Epic of

Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus.

Manuscript images of Layli and Majnun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

And images of Majnun at the Ka’aba with a door knocker:

Our episode on Blind Owl.

The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit.

Next: Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde.

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Language is so personal and internal. It exists in your head. You can close

Mark Sundaram is a medievalist

Aven McMaster is a Classicist

They join Chris and Suzanne to talk all about etymologies, dictionaries, and

The Endless Knot on Twitter.

John Ayto: Dictionary of Word Origins.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.

Paul Anthony Jones (Haggard Hawks on

On Webster’s Third New International

Ernest Weekley: The Romance of

Alliterative’s video on nation.

The etymology of feisty.

Ernest Klein: A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English

Anatoly Liberman: Word Origins and How We Know

The Oxford Etymologist.

Calvert Watkins: The American Dictionary of Indo-European

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The word “amicus” — meaning “friend” — comes from a derivation, as if it

The Etymologies , by the seventh-century polymath and theologian Isidore

Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies.

The only other book by Isidore available in English translation seems to be

Our episodes on the Hereford Mappa

Petrus Riga’s Aurora does not

The Latin text of the opening quote:

> Amicus, per derivationem, quasi animi custos. Dictus autem proprie: amator

Suzanne wrote about encyclopedism (and Moby-Dick, naturally) for LitHub.

The Glossa Ordinaria.

The First Grammatical

Virgilius Maro

Next: Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun.

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“Now I know,” she said, “that other, more serious cause of your sickness: you

The Consolation of Philosophy by the sixth-century Roman author Boethius

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.

Our episodes on The Symposium,

The Wikipedia page for The Consolation of

Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo. (The original German

Next: Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies.

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