It was her voice that made

Chris and Suzanne both recently celebrated a big round birthday, and so they each decided to revisit something that they loved when they were younger. Suzanne returns to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (with its interest in forms and philosophical riddles), and Chris revisits James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (with its cacophany of language and dream logic). They also talk about their own creative processes — because one of them has just put something out into the world...

Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Audiobook coming in May 2026.

James Joyce: Finnegans Wake. Audiobook. Online at the James Joyce Digital Archive.

The Minor Thirds (i.e., Chris and friends): The New Songs is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and more. Enjoy!

Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the Stratford Festival.

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass, illustrated by John Steuart Curry. (Our episode on Leaves of Grass.)

Alice B. Toklas: The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.

Yasmin Zaher: The Coin.

Sandra Boynton: The Going to Bed Book.

Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ed.: How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page (book designed by Chris Piuma).

Poems by Wallace Stevens mentioned in this episode:

Andrew Marvell: The Garden.

Walt Whitman: Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.

Our episodes on William Carlos Williams and Andrew Marvell.

We don’t normally include the quote from an episode’s second book, but it helps to be able to read along with this one, so here it is:

> Soe? La! Lamfadar's arm it has cocoincidences. You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep? You may so. It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover. Svapnasvap. Of all the stranger things that ever not even in the hundrund and badst pageans of unthowsent and wonst nice or in eddas and oddes bokes of tomb, dyke and hollow to be have happened! The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecoming. Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittletell tattle.

Our episode on Ulysses.

The sections Chris recommends for those starting to dip into the Wake:

A video tour of Chapelizod from 1988.

Giambattista Vico: The New Science.

Samuel Beckett et al.: Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress. (Work In Progress was the working title of Finnegans Wake.)

Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson: A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

William York Tindall: A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake.

John Bishop: Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake is an interesting reading of how the book interprets dreams.

The Joyce Foundation has a list of books on the Wake.

And there are lots of online guides and resources for Finnegans Wake, too! Chris found FinWake.com and The James Joyce Digital Archive particularly useful.

John Cage: Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were —

      Flopsy,

They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree.

‘Now my dears,’ said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, ‘you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.’

This month, Chris improbably decides to talk about Beatrix Potter’s classic children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Suzanne, on the other hand, remembers Edmund White’s recent passing and reads his first novel, the curious Forgetting Elena. They also discuss reading in second languages, reading authors before they pass, and museum gift shops.

(We mention a few things that we consider spoilers for Forgetting Elena, and we sound the spoiler alarm before we say them. But the spoilers do not ruin the book, just take away some of the surprise.)

Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Edmund White: Forgetting Elena.

Also by Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, and many more.

Also by Edmund White: A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and Nocturnes for the King of Naples.

Georges Simenon: Tout Maigret, a ten-volume collection of his novels featuring the detective Jules Maigret.

Pierre Boulle: La planète des singes.

On Beatrix Potter and observational drawing.

On Beatrix Potter and character merchandise.

Our recent episode on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

A translation of Peter Rabbit.

A.A. Milne: Winnie Ille Pu.

Michael T. Luongo remembers Edmund White at LitHub.

Laurie Colwin: Home Cooking.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

When they met again, two days later, it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was, somehow, betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold, and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever, and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

This month, Suzanne returns to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, which celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Meanwhile, Chris has been checking out the work of Stanisław Lem, beginning with his classic science fiction novel Solaris. They discuss the joys of short novels and the desire for the unobtainable. Oh, and they celebrate Pride. Happy Pride!

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby.

Stanisław Lem: Solaris (trans. Bill Johnston). See also: Summa Technologiae (trans. Joanna Zylinska); A Perfect Vacuum (trans. Michael Kandel).

R.I.P., Edmund White. His books include Forgetting Elena, A Boy’s Own Story, and The Beautiful Room Is Empty.

The Great Gatsby (Herbert Brenon, 1926) is a lost film, but the trailer is available on its Wikipedia page.

The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, 1974) and The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013).

Our episode on A Moveable Feast.

The Great Gatsby and World War II.

In addition to our episodes on The Blazing World and Frankenstein, we forgot that we have covered a proper science fiction book: Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue!

More Solaris and Lem talk can be found on Chris’s other podcast, which covered MST3K’s take on First Spaceship on Venus, a movie based on Lem’s first novel, The Astronauts (which is still not available in English).

Justine M. Pas: The Politics of Relay Translation and Language Hierarchies: The Case of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (from the collection Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts and Politics) is the essay Chris refers to.

Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972) and Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002).

Metropolitan (Whit Stillman, 1990).

Pierre Bayard: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Also: How to Talk About Places You Haven’t Been, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, etc.

The Karl May Museum.

Our episode on The Tempest also had a lot of birds in the background.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

“Is he stuffed?” asked the Lion in surprise, as he watched her pick up the Scarecrow and set him upon his feet, while she patted him into shape again.

“Of course he’s stuffed,” replied Dorothy, who was still angry.

“That’s why he went over so easily,” remarked the Lion. “It astonished me to see him whirl around so. Is the other one stuffed also?”

“No,” said Dorothy, “he’s made of tin.” And she helped the Woodman up again.

“That’s why he nearly blunted my claws,” said the Lion. “When they scratched against the tin it made a cold shiver run down my back. What is that little animal you are so tender of?”

“He is my dog, Toto,” answered Dorothy.

“Is he made of tin, or stuffed?” asked the Lion.

“Neither. He’s a—a—a meat dog.”

Two very different books this month (but maybe they have some unexpected similarities?). Chris has returned to L. Frank Baum’s beloved The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and finally takes a look at some of its sequels. Suzanne reads Margareta von Oswald’s study Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and considers its nuanced exploration of the work that goes into dealing wtih a problematic museum collection. Also, Suzanne has a new book (which she edited with former guest of the show Melissa Moreton), and Chris has a bunch of new books (thanks, Independent Bookstore Day!).

L. Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels, including The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and more...

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

A current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Chris talked about seeing a concert over on The Scene Of The Scene.

Norman Akers and his current residency.

Just in case: The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).

A video essay on the making of The Wizard of Oz from the delightful Be Kind, Rewind.

Ruth Plumly Thompson’s Oz books.

The Ruby Slippers at the National Museum of American History.

The Saw-Horse, illustrated by John R. Neill.

Matilda Joslyn Gage.

Return to Oz (Walter Murch, 1985).

Geoff Ryman: Was.

Gregory Maguire: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Wicked (Jon M. Chu, 2024).

The Ethnological Museum in Berlin and the Humboldt Forum.

Suzanne wrote an article about getting to know the museum.

An overview of the Berlin Palace.

An article from the Guardian on the rebuilding of the palace.

And an overview of the Palast der Republik.

On the Humboldt brothers.

Adolf Bastian, founder of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

A statement by the Humboldt Forum’s collaborators from communities of origins.

Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024).

Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads, which Suzanne helped curate at the Aga Khan Museum.

The objects from that exhibit.

Our episode with Melissa Moreton on that exhibit.

Suzanne Conklin Akbari & Melissa Moreton (eds.): Textiles in Manuscripts: A Local and Global History of the Book.

Canadian Independent Bookstore Day. (And the US version, on the same day.)

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

                               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.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

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).

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

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.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

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.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

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.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

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.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.