The Spouter-Inn

By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris Piuma

Chris (a poet) and Suzanne (a professor) spent six years talking about “great books” (whatever that means), and are now talking about reading (and all the things that means).... more

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How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 118 episodes available.

The Spouter-Inn episodes:

October 21, 2019 18b. Bonus: Liza Blake on Margaret Cavendish.
Even though the book starts out saying “Reason is one thing and Fancy is
another; Imagination is one thing and Philosophy is another,” she’s then
showing throughout the book how these are very similar kinds of actions.
Epicurus was making a world too. Was he living in it? Unclear. But by
imagining that he lived there, he led a different kind of life.
We were overwhelmed by Margaret Cavendish’s wild novel The Blazing
World, so we needed to bring in an expert.
Who did we turn to? Liza Blake,
assistant professor of English at the University of
Toronto.
She works on literature and science, literature and philosophy, and, most
recently, the books of Margaret Cavendish. Perfect! We talk about how to get
past those first impressions of Cavendish, what parts of The Blazing World are
satire, the importance of speculation to science and philosophy, and whether
animals can philosophize. (You might hear some animals philosophizing in the
background…)
Show Notes.
Liza Blake is on Twitter. You can find out
more about her academic work on her faculty
page.
Her critical edition of Margaret Cavendish’s first book, Poems and
Fancies.
Cavendish poems mentioned in this episode:
A World in an
Earring
Of Sense and Reason Exercised in Their Different
Shapes
It Is Hard to Believe that There are Other Worlds in This
World
Of the Knowledge of
Beasts; of
Fishes; of
Birds
Virginia Woolf on Margaret
Cavendish.
Lara Dodds wrote
thoughtfully about Cavendish’s “bad
writing”.
Prince Rupert’s drops
are pretty neat.
Robert Hooke: Micrographia (and
its
flea).
Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters and
Philosophical Letters.
Henry More.
John Wilkins: The Discovery of a World in the
Moone.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon to make
our world a little more blazing.
...more
48min
October 19, 2019 18. The Blazing World.
The Duchess’s Soul [...] left her Ærial Vehicle, and entered into her Lord.
The Empress’s Soul perceiving this, did the like: And then the Duke had three
Souls in one body; and had there been some such Souls more, the Duke would
have been like the Grand-Signior in his Seraglio, only it would have been a
Platonick Seraglio. But the Duke’s Soul [...] afforded such delight and
pleasure to the Empress’s Soul by his conversation, that these two souls
became enamoured of each other; which the Duchess’s soul perceiving, grew
jealous at first, but then considering that no Adultery could be committed
amongst Platonick Lovers [...] cast forth of her mind that Idea of Jealousie.
Then the Conversation of these three souls was so pleasant, that it cannot be
expressed.
The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World,
more commonly known as simply The Blazing
World, is a philosophical flight of fancy by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle. This book was first published in 1666, and is often considered a
piece of proto–science-fiction. It tells the story of a woman who is
transported to another world, a marvellous world, which she is almost
immediately made empress of. Part philosophical treatise, part power fantasy,
and part exploration of the joys of “Platonick” love between women, The
Blazing World is an encomium to our powers of invention and creation. And it
is a very, very, very weird book.
Show Notes.
The Blazing World. [Project
Gutenberg. 1668 edition at
Archive.org.
Librivox.
Bookshop.]
Margaret Cavendish: Observations upon Experimental
Philosophy. [Or at
EEBO.]
Our episode on Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of
Ladies.
The Kabbalah.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
Mary Sue.
With “Muñoz” we’re referring to José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising
Utopia (and the conversations that followed it).
Our episode on Plato’s Symposium.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari: Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval
Allegory.
Virginia Woolf wrote (famously, but uncharitably) about Margaret
Cavendish.
Our next book: Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon, please,
if you can, and help us make the show!
...more
54min
October 02, 2019 17. Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
He kept up the fire with dry grass and a good supply of firewood, tending it
day and night because it seemed such a wonderful thing. He liked it best at
night when it took the place of the sun, giving warmth and light. It meant so
much to him he fell in love with it and was convinced that of all the things
he had, this was the best. Seeing how it always moved upwards, as though
trying to rise, he supposed it must be one of those jewel-substances he saw
shining in the sky.
Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan
(sometimes translated as “Alive, son of Awake”—though the title is the main
character’s name) is a curious philosophical thought experiment from twelfth-century al-Andalus (which is today southern Spain). Hayy grows up on a
paradisiacal island where he is the only human, and through his increasing
powers of observation and rational thinking he manages to reinvent both
philosophy and religion. Chris and Suzanne explore this tantalizing, almost
science-fictional work, talk about how it places Hayy in relation to animals,
stars, and the divine, and ask what it tells us about the relationship of
philosophy and literature.
Content warning: violence towards animals.
Show Notes.
Ibn Tufayl: Hayy ibn Yaqzan, translated by Lenn
Evan Goodman. [Bookshop.]
Emily Wilson, who spoke with us about her translation of the
Odyssey, just won a MacArthur “Genius”
Award!
Andrew Marvell: On a Drop of
Dew.
The qissa (or “qissa qasira”, sometimes transliterated as kissa) is a term
used by some classical Arabic literary scholars that can translate very
loosely as “short story”.
Our episode on Plato’s Symposium.
Our episode on Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.
Avicenna [Ibn Sina]: The Canon of
Medicine.
Bernardus Silvestris:
Cosmographia.
David Markson: Wittgenstein’s Mistress.
Christine Brooke-Rose: Subscript.
The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps on Ibn
Tufayl.
An overview of Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Marwa Elshakry and Murad
Idris.
Murad Idris: Producing Islamic philosophy: The life and afterlives of Ibn
Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan in global history, 1882–1947.
Murad Idris recently gave a talk about politics in Hayy ibn
Yaqzan, a transcription of which should soon
be made available.
Next episode: Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World
[Gutenberg,
Librivox].
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and join
us on a members-only Slack.
...more
1h
September 16, 2019 16b. Bonus: Michael Collins on Middlemarch.
Middlemarch is not necessarily interested in epistemology, but it absolutely
is interested in the difference between objectively knowing a thing to be true
and feeling the truth. And for most people the truth does not enter into their
being until they have felt it.
As a bonus to our episode on
Middlemarch, we invited writer,
podcaster, and personal trainer Michael Collins
to join us to talk about his favourite book. We discuss what keeps drawing him
back to the novel—and which parts can be difficult to reread. We also finally
get to talk about the opinionated narrator of the novel, as well as the
striking life of its author, George Eliot.
Show Notes.
Michael Collins is on Twitter, and hosts the
podcasts This Is Your Mixtape and Dear
Reader. Some of his writings can be found on
Medium.
The episodes of This Is Your Mixtape with
Chris and
Suzanne.
Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love.
George Eliot: Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists.
Virginia Woolf: George
Eliot.
For more information about the life of George Eliot, read Rebecca Mead’s My
Life in Middlemarch, or watch a
talk that Mead gave while
writing the book.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and help
support our show. Thanks!
...more
47min
September 13, 2019 16. Middlemarch.
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly
furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this
pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel
made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously
scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a
centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves
in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is
demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is
only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric
arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These
things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism
of any person now absent.
We begin our cluster on Philosophical novels with
Middlemarch, George Eliot’s massive and
masterful “study of provincial life”. A sometimes overwhelming number of
characters populate a small manufacturing town in the English Midlands around
1830—but the novel focuses on a few “later-born [Saint] Theresas”. People like
Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate aspire to do some good in the world, but
what does “doing good” look like? And can good be achieved in the world
without a nuanced ethical relationship to the others who make up that world?
Chris and Suzanne explore how these questions play out in Eliot’s characters,
and also look towards Baruch Spinoza, who is quietly behind Eliot’s
philosophy.
Show Notes.
Middlemarch. [Project
Gutenberg.
Librivox.
Bookshop.]
The portrait of John
Locke.
Chaucer: Man of Law’s
Tale.
Teresa of Ávila.
Bernini: Saint Teresa in
Ecstasy.
Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics will be republished next
year.
In the meantime, another translation of the Ethics.
In Our Time has a helpful episode about
Spinoza, and they mention Eliot at
the very end.
A.S. Byatt on
Middlemarch.
Ibn Tufayl: Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon—we rely
on our lovely patrons!
...more
56min
August 26, 2019 15b. Bonus: Emily Wilson on the Odyssey.
This is a text which was composed by people who were alive for other people
who were alive, which was alive in the mouths of those who were singing and
performing it, and so it needs to feel alive again now for the new
performances, the new experiences of it—and then also it has to have a sense
of a long history, which is going to be enacted through the tools I have,
which is the English language.
We are delighted to have Emily
Wilson, professor and translator of the
Odyssey (and other works), join us at The Spouter-Inn to talk about the task
of the translator. When tackling a large work like the Odyssey, where did she
begin? What decisions did she make about form, voice, and allusion? And is the
finished project a poem by Homer? By Emily Wilson? Or is the situation a bit
more complex than that?
Show Notes.
Emily Wilson on Twitter and on the
web.
In addition to the links we provided with our episode on the
Odyssey, you’ll find a list of other
interviews on her website. Check
them out!
We’ll highlight this interview on Women Translating the
Classics.
A sample tweet about her recent translation of Oedipus
Tyrannos (aka
Oedipus Rex or Oedipus the King).
A passage from the Odyssey:
> αὐτίκ᾽ ἔπειθ᾽ ὑπὸ ποσσὶν ἐδήσατο καλὰ πέδιλα,
ἀμβρόσια χρύσεια, τά μιν φέρον ἠμὲν ἐφ᾽ ὑγρὴν
ἠδ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν ἅμα πνοιῇς ἀνέμοιο.
εἵλετο δὲ ῥάβδον, τῇ τ᾽ ἀνδρῶν ὄμματα θέλγει,
ὧν ἐθέλει, τοὺς δ᾽ αὖτε καὶ ὑπνώοντας ἐγείρει.
τὴν μετὰ χερσὶν ἔχων πέτετο κρατὺς ἀργεϊφόντης.
Πιερίην δ᾽ ἐπιβὰς ἐξ αἰθέρος ἔμπεσε πόντῳ:
σεύατ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἐπὶ κῦμα λάρῳ ὄρνιθι ἐοικώς,
ὅς τε κατὰ δεινοὺς κόλπους ἁλὸς ἀτρυγέτοιο
ἰχθῦς ἀγρώσσων πυκινὰ πτερὰ δεύεται ἅλμῃ:
τῷ ἴκελος πολέεσσιν ὀχήσατο κύμασιν Ἑρμῆς.
ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ τὴν νῆσον ἀφίκετο τηλόθ᾽ ἐοῦσαν,
ἔνθ᾽ ἐκ πόντου βὰς ἰοειδέος ἤπειρόνδε
ἤιεν, ὄφρα μέγα σπέος ἵκετο, τῷ ἔνι νύμφη
ναῖεν ἐυπλόκαμος: τὴν δ᾽ ἔνδοθι τέτμεν ἐοῦσαν.
πῦρ μὲν ἐπ᾽ ἐσχαρόφιν μέγα καίετο, τηλόσε δ᾽ ὀδμὴ
κέδρου τ᾽ εὐκεάτοιο θύου τ᾽ ἀνὰ νῆσον ὀδώδει
δαιομένων: ἡ δ᾽ ἔνδον ἀοιδιάουσ᾽ ὀπὶ καλῇ
ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένη χρυσείῃ κερκίδ᾽ ὕφαινεν.
ὕλη δὲ σπέος ἀμφὶ πεφύκει τηλεθόωσα,
κλήθρη τ᾽ αἴγειρός τε καὶ εὐώδης κυπάρισσος.
ἔνθα δέ τ᾽ ὄρνιθες τανυσίπτεροι εὐνάζοντο,
σκῶπές τ᾽ ἴρηκές τε τανύγλωσσοί τε κορῶναι
εἰνάλιαι, τῇσίν τε θαλάσσια ἔργα μέμηλεν.
> At once he fastened on his feet the sandals
of everlasting gold with which he flies
on breath of air across the sea and land;
he seized the wand he uses to enchant
men’s eyes to sleep or wake as he desires,
and flew. The god flashed bright in all his power.
He touched Pieria, then from the sky
he plunged into the sea and swooped between
the waves, just like a seagull catching fish,
wetting its whirring wings in tireless brine.
So Hermes scudded through the surging swell.
Then finally, he reached the distant island,
stepped from the indigo water to the shore,
and reached the cavern where the goddess lived.
There sat Calypso with her braided curls.
Beside the hearth a mighty fire was burning.
The scent of citrus and of brittle pine
suffused the island. Inside, she was singing
and weaving with a shuttle made of gold.
Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave
a luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar,
and scented cypress. It was full of wings.
Birds nested there but hunted out at sea:
the owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks.
> (5.44–67)
Lydia Davis’s translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary.
“Resolution and
Independence” by William Wordsworth, about a leech-gatherer.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
...more
44min
August 23, 2019 15. The Odyssey.
“To outwit you
in all your tricks, a person or a god
would need to be an expert at deceit.
You clever rascal! So duplicitous,
so talented at lying! You love fiction
and tricks so deeply, you refuse to stop
even in your own land. Yes, both of us
are smart. No man can plan and talk like you,
and I am known among the gods for insight
and craftiness. You failed to recognize me:
I am Athena, child of Zeus. I always
stand near you and take care of you, in all
your hardships.”
Homer’s Odyssey tells us of a complicated man,
Odysseus, who spent ten years away from his family during the Trojan War (for
more details, read The Iliad) and spends
another ten years trying to get home to his wife Penelope and his son
Telemachus. But the Gods intervene, and Odysseus and his men get bounced from
one marvellous island to another. Meanwhile, a gaggle of suitors are insisting
that Odysseus has been gone so long he must be dead, and they’re going to keep
bothering Penelope until she picks one of them to marry. When Odysseus finally
gets home, he and Telemachus devise a brutal plan to solve the situation.
Suzanne and Chris have a conversation about how the poem depicts cleverness,
home, manliness, and
water—and what about it
has inspired so many adaptations.
Show Notes.
The Odyssey, in a recent translation by Emily
Wilson. [Bookshop.]
Wilson offers a pronunciation
guide to several of the
characters on her website.
Wilson has been interviewed by the Los Angeles Review of
Books and the New York Times
Magazine about her translation.
Suzanne was a guest on This Is Your
Mixtape.
We made some ridiculous
t-shirts based on The Tempest.
We talked a little about Tiresias in our episode on The
Metamorphoses.
James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Dear Reader on Madeline Miller’s Circe and Margaret Atwood’s
Penelopiad.
Derek Walcott’s Omeros.
Vergil’s Aeneid.
Percy Jackson’s The Lightning Thief.
Our episode on Dante’s Inferno.
Lucian of Samosata’s A True
Story.
Next episode: Middlemarch by George Eliot. [Free
ebook and
audiobook.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
...more
1h
August 12, 2019 14b. Bonus: Steve Mentz on The Tempest.
What I’m trying to think about is what the history of our planet looks like
from an oceanic rather than a terrestrial perspective. What does The
Tempest look like if we think about The
Tempest from the perspective of the water? How does that enable us to rethink
literary questions, aesthetic questions, environmental questions?
You don’t want to go too deep into thinking about the ocean without Steve
Mentz as your guide, especially when
you’re looking at Shakespeare’s oceans. Steve is a professor of English at St
John’s University in New York City and the author and editor of many books on
early modern literature, eco-poetics, and blue/oceanic humanities, including
At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, Shipwreck
Modernity, the essay collection Oceanic New
York, and most recently,
Break Up the Anthropocene. His biography of the
Ocean will be coming out next year as part of
Bloomsbury’s delightful Object
Lesson series. Suzanne
and Chris talk with him about The Tempest, about swimming in the Atlantic, and
about what happens when you consider the ocean’s perspective.
Show Notes.
Steve Mentz on Twitter and his
website.
The wreck of the Sea Venture.
Aimé Césaire: A Tempest. (Some
excerpts.)
Kamau Brathwaite:
Caliban.
Édouard Glissant: Collected Poems.
Chantal Zabus’s Tempests after Shakespeare has many
more examples of Tempest rewritings.
Medea’s
speech
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (about halfway down the page: “O trustie time of
night…”) is one of the scenes we didn’t discuss in episode
3.
Vija Celmins’s ocean drawings.
An Everywhere of Silver.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
...more
43min
August 09, 2019 14. The Tempest.
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
The Tempest is one of William Shakespeare’s
last plays—and one of his most curious. Prospero, former Duke of Milan, was
exiled with his daughter Miranda twelve years ago, but now an opportunity
arises for him to restore his place on the throne. Chris and Suzanne explore
this magical and musical island where time and place follow a dream-logic (or
theatre-logic?).
Show Notes.
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. [An online
edition; free
audiobook at Librivox. Bookshop.]
How We Read, an essay collection edited by Suzanne and Kaitlin Heller and designed
by Chris, is available for purchase (or free PDF download!) from punctum
books.
The Encyclopedic Genius of Melville’s Masterpiece: On Moby Dick as a Way of
Seeing the World, Suzanne’s essay for Melville’s 200th birthday, on LitHub.
Update: We’ve been reliably informed that The Comedy of Errors also happens,
so to speak, in real time.
Paul Mazursky’s Tempest (1982),
with John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.
A review of the performance of The Tempest with Patrick
Stewart that Chris
saw (a long time ago).
Julie Taymor’s The Tempest,
with Helen Mirren as Prospera.
Ian McKellen as Prospero in an audiobook version of The
Tempest.
Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare: What Shakespeare’s “Thing of Darkness”
Tells Us About Gatekeeping and Language, a beautiful essay by Marcos Gonsalez.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and chat
with us about books on our members-only Slack!
...more
55min
July 18, 2019 13. To the Lighthouse.
It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the
threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as
she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it
changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one
last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.
Our Water/Ocean cluster begins with Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse. This curious novel describes two days
(separated by ten dramatic years) in the life of the Ramsay family as they
stay at their holiday home in the Scottish Hebrides with their assorted
friends and hangers-on. But the novel does not concoct a wild plot; instead,
it examines how the characters observe each other’s internal and emotional
states. Chris and Suzanne explore the way Woolf and her characters try to
capture not only the endless flow of time, but also those moments when people
are configured just so and time seems to stand still.
Show Notes.
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse.
[Bookshop. In some countries,
the text and an audiobook are now public
domain.]
Margaret Atwood on reading To the Lighthouse as a teen, and again as an
adult.
Vanessa Bell’s art.
Vanessa Bell’s dust jacket design for the first edition of To the
Lighthouse.
The Hogarth Press.
The Bloomsbury Group.
Next episode: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
[An online edition;
free audiobook at Librivox.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and talk
book with us on a members-only Slack!
...more
54min

FAQs about The Spouter-Inn:

How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 118 episodes available.

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