Rolling in, top up,

                              divided as the dew,

                              shells and animalcules

                              to Paterson.

Suzanne has been enjoying Paterson, Paterson, Paterson! Paterson is a book-length poem by William Carlos Williams (you know, the guy who wrote the one about the red wheelbarrow and the one about the plums in the icebox). Paterson is a classic photo essay by George A. Tice. Paterson is also a film inspired by the poem, directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Adam Driver. And, of course, Paterson is a city in New Jersey. It’s near where Suzanne grew up, so she talks about how her own experiences open up these different reflections of Paterson.

Chris, meanwhile, has stepped far from home by reading Magda Szabó’s novel The Door, a classic of twentieth-century Hungarian literature. (Chris has never been to Hungary. Or Paterson, for that matter, despite also growing up near there.)

We talk about reading literature that emerges from a familiar place, and literature that emerges from unfamiliar places. And we talk about book covers that have mesmerized us — or not.

Thank you to Michael Collins for helping to edit this episode!

William Carlos Williams: Paterson.

George A. Tice: Paterson.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016).

Magda Szabó: The Door, trans. Len Rix.

Also by William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems, vol. 1 includes Spring And All. Collected Poems, vol. 2. Also check out The Doctor Stories.

Also by Magda Szabó: Abigail.

We mention our episodes on Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Walt Whitman and Dante.

The cover of Joyce’s Ulysses that Chris describes.

The cover of The Door on the edition by New York Review Books.

Eva Hesse.

The covers of Paterson on Suzanne’s copy, Chris’s copy, and the first editions.

Charles Demuth: I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. (Which includes the text of the poem.)

Ezra Pound: The Cantos.

Ron Padgett. He's got a Very Collected Poems coming out this fall (over 1100 pages!).

Charles Olson: The Maximus Poems.

The Kossuth Prize.

Shushan Avagyan: A Book, Untitled, trans. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, but Chris has the edition from Tilted Axis.

Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan.

Margareta von Oswald: Working through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Kent Monkman at the Royal Ontario Museum.

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I begun to get it through my head that he WAS most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, ME. I couldn't get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn't rest; I couldn't stay still in one place. It hadn't ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn't to blame, because I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every time, "But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody." That was so—I couldn't get around that noway. That was where it pinched.

Chris has been rereading Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain never intended that book (or the book it’s a sequel to, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) as books for children, but that is often how they are categorized today. Suzanne, meanwhile, has been rereading The Nine Tailors, a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is as much about campanology (the art of bell ringing in all its mathematical and combinatorical glory) as it is about the crime scene.

We talk about keeping up with the latest books (and movies), iconic scenes in novels, reworking classic literature, evoking a sense of time and place, and the literature that emerges after a pandemic.

Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also available on Project Gutenberg.

Dorothy L. Sayers: The Nine Tailors.

Also by Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Also by Dorothy L. Sayers: The Divine Comedy. Gaudy Night. The Man Born to Be King. Murder Must Advertise. Whose Body?

Premee Mohamed: One Message Remains is the new book; The Annual Migration of Clouds is the one Chris read.

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023).

Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024).

Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini: The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums.

Margareta von Oswald: Working through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Our episodes on children's books include Harriet the Spy and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List over on LitHub.

Percival Everett: James and I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

Margaret Atwood: The Penelopiad.

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea.

Madeline Miller: Circe.

A resource for learning more about campanology, if you’re so inclined.

Isaac Asimov wrote about The Nine Tailors in his essay Exclamation Point!, which can be found in his collections From Earth to Heaven or Asimov on Science.

Our episode on Boethius.

Jared Pechaček (of By-The-Bywater): The West Passage.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997).

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I love the bones that are stones...

Stone is our oldest grandfather. We refer to the stones that keep our songs and stories as grandfathers. Our grandfathers give us the rock on which we stand, but our grandmothers move us from that stone in the direction of relation with others. They are the keepers of the stories that teach us about relations; they are the flesh of our bones that are stones. I carry them, willingly.

Suzanne has been rereading Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves: Oratories, a collection of essay-like pieces that we first discussed back in 2020. Chris has finally read a proper Sherlock Holmes story: A Study in Scarlet, the novel where Arthur Conan Doyle introduced the character.

We talk about reading books your friends have written, not reading books your friends have written, lingering on passages that you don’t yet understand, how we share understanding and knowledge, and how to deal with a know-it-all character.

Lee Maracle: Memory Serves: Oratories.

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet. Also available on Project Gutenberg.

Our previous episodes on Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves and I Am Woman, as well as the bonus episode where she joined us to discuss Great Expectations (and more)!

Anthony Oliveira: Dayspring.

Jared Pechaćek: The West Passage.

Matthew Gabriele & David Perry: Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe.

Karla Mallette: Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean.

Jen Coleman: We Denizens.

Walter C. Lightning: Compassionate Mind: Implications of a Text Written by Elder Louis Sunchild.

Our episode on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back.

The episode of Chris’s other podcast where Sherlock Holmes came up recently.

Arthur Conan Doyle: The White Company, Sir Nigel, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Dorothy Sayers: The Nine Tailors.

Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land.

Our episode on The Return of the King.

Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep.

Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Our episode on The Name of the Rose.

William Carlos Williams: Paterson and Spring and All (which includes The Red Wheelbarrow).

George A. Tice: Paterson.

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A young man killed in battle by sharp bronze

Happy New Year! And happy birthday to The Spouter-Inn. We’ve decided to tweak our format a bit. After six years of talking about books, we’re finding ourselves interested these days in reading. What are we reading? How are we reading it? What strikes us as we read? How does this connect with everything else in our lives, and everything else we’ve been thinking about? And how does the act of reading fit in with the ecology and economy of reading?

Each episode, Chris and Suzanne will bring a book we’ve been reading for discussion. For the first episode in the new format, Chris is returning to The Iliad, the book we looked at in their very first episode, but this time in a new translation. Suzanne returns to an old favourite, Umberto Eco’s medieval mystery novel The Name of the Rose.

We talk about books as gifts, the goals of translation, the limits of language, repositories of fascinations, and the organization of bookshelves. We hope you enjoy the new format and enjoy the time you spend at The Spouter-Inn.

Homer: The Iliad (trans. Emily Wilson).

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose (trans. William Weaver).

A shout-out to Dear Reader, another bookish Megaphonic podcast (sadly on hiatus), whose format we’ve adapted.

Our episode on Bear.

Michael Glover: Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art.

Amanda Peters: The Berry Pickers.

Aaron Robertson: The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America.

Rebecca Nagle: By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land.

Our episode on The Iliad.

Chris’s other podcast (about the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000) recently did an episode about Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster.

Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969).

Euripedes: Medea.

Sophocles: Philoctetes.

David Melnick: Men in Aïda, which is also in his recent collected works, Nice.

Aepy (or Aipy).

Turns out the idea that Eco based the library in The Name of the Rose on Robarts Library doesn’t come from Eco himself.

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet.

Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions includes his story The Garden of Forking Paths.

Our episode on The Rings of Saturn.

Baudri of Bourgeuil: To Countess Adela. (Should be free to download with a free JSTOR account.)

Our episode on Isidore’s Etymologies, which has a section on numbers. Isidore also did a separate book about numbers, which has not been translated into English.

Roberta Mazza: Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram & Nick Montfort, eds.: Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023.

Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith, eds.: Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

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It’s interesting to consider the last twenty years of [Tolkien’s] life, post–Lord of the Rings, when he was looking at what he created. He was doing some very heavy rethinks about what he had done—the structure of the worlds that he had created and the implications of a lot of it.

Ned Raggett is a library professional and freelance music writer, whose recent essays have appeared in outlets like the Quietus, the Wire, Shfl, Qobuz, and on his lovely (and free-to-follow) Patreon. And he’s also one of the hosts of the Megaphonic podcast By-The-Bywater, which looks at all things J.R.R. Tolkien—his work, his inspirations and impact, creative interpretations in other media, languages, lore, ripoffs, parodies, and anything he and his co-hosts think is interesting!.

Ned joins Chris and Suzanne for a wide-ranging discussion about the various people who read and get something out of The Lord of the Rings, as well as Tolkien’s changing relationship with his work over time.

Ned and his music writing can be followed via Bluesky or his prolific and free-to-follow Patreon.

And, of course, he's one of hosts of By-The-Bywater.

We mention By-The-Bywater episodes about Silicon Valley, the Scouring of the Shire, nostalgia, orcs, and Tolkien’s story The Mariner’s Wife.

It was not Ari Fleischman, it was Rick Santorum.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Marquette’s Tolkien archive.

Jared Pechaček: The West Passage.

Lord Dunsany: The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

N.K. Jemisin: The Broken Earth trilogy.

R.F. Kuang: Babel.

Marlon James: Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

Ursula K. LeGuin: Earthsea.

Lloyd Alexander: Chronicles of Prydain.

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And then at last over the miles between there came a rumble, rising to a deafening crash and roar; the earth shook, the plain heaved and cracked, and Orodruin reeled. Fire belched from its riven summit. The skies burst into thunder seared with lightning. Down like lashing whips fell a torrent of black rain. And into the heart of the storm, with a cry that pierced all other sounds, tearing the clouds asunder, the Nazgûl came, shooting like flaming bolts, as caught in the fiery ruin of hill and sky they crackled, withered, and went out.

‘Well, this is the end, Sam Gamgee,’ said a voice by his side. And there was Frodo, pale and worn, and yet himself again; and in his eyes there was peace now, neither strain of will, nor madness, nor any fear. His burden was taken away.

The Return of the King is third and final part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord of the Rings. It describes the final battles against Sauron, as well as Sam and Frodo’s journey through Mordor to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom. But then it spends a good amount of time untangling all its plot threads and wrapping up its many character’s stories.

Chris and Suzanne explore these various endings as they look at a kind of ending of their own, as The Spouter-Inn prepares to change its format in the new year to something related, but a little different, from what they’ve been doing for the past six years. They hope you’ll still come around to join them as they talk about what they’ve been reading.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Return of the King.

Our episodes on the first two parts of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.

Our episodes on Troilus and Criseyde, Harriet the Spy, Monkey Beach, the Aeneid, Memory Serves, and our conversation with Lee Maracle about Great Expectations and more.

Roberta Mazza: Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts.

George Eliot: Daniel Deronda. (See also our episode on Middlemarch.)

By-The-Bywater is another podcast on our network, about all things Tolkien.

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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.