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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FAQs about The Spouter-Inn:

How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 114 episodes available.

The Spouter-Inn episodes:

February 19, 20193. The Metamorphoses.
“O gods, if any there be who will listen to my prayer, I do not refuse the
dire punishment I have deserved; but lest, surviving, I offend the living,
and, dying, I offend the dead, drive me from both realms; change me and refuse
me both life and death!” [...] Even as she spoke the earth closed over her
legs; roots burst forth from her toes [...] her blood changed to sap, her arms
to long branches, her fingers to twigs, her skin to hard bark. And now the
growing tree had closely bound her heavy womb, had buried her breast and was
just covering her neck; but she could not endure the delay and, meeting the
rising wood, she sank down and plunged her face in the bark.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a long and curious poem, telling stories of people
getting transformed into animals, plants, or stones; stones turning into
people, and language getting perverted every which way. Suzanne and Chris talk
about the issues in translation, the way language can be lost, creation and
the natural world, Ovid’s ideas of gender and sexuality, and medieval (and
later) interpretations of these stories. They also wrap up this first
cluster—on so-called “foundational” texts that turned out to have an
unexpected common theme—and announce the next cluster.
Show Notes.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses in three translations: Frank Justus
Miller, Brookes
More,
and Arthur
Golding.
The passages we discuss:
Narcissus and Echo,
3.339–510
Myrrha,
10.298–518
Io,
1.567–649
Acteon,
3.138–250
Philomela,
6.424–674
Deucalion and Pyrrha,
1.313–347
Niobe,
6.146–312
Tiresias,
3.314–336
Hermaphroditus,
4.274–388
Orpheus,
10.1–105
and
11.1–66
Some later works inspired by the Metamorphoses:
Bernini, Apollo and
Daphne
Caravaggio,
Narcissus
Rubens, Deucalion and
Pyrrha
Benjamin Britten, 6 Metamorphoses for solo oboe after
Ovid
Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid
The Ovide moralisé is currently being translated into modern English.
Meanwhile here’s a translation into Middle English done by William
Caxton.
[Correction: Ovid was exiled in modern-day
Romania.]
The next book we’ll discuss.
...more
56min
February 04, 2019 2. The Symposium.
“Imagine that Hephaestus came with his tools and stood over them as they were
lying together, and asked, ‘What is it you humans want from each other?’ And
when they were unable to reply, suppose he asked them instead, ‘Do you want to
be so thoroughly together that you’re never at any time apart? If that’s what
you want, I’d be glad to weld you together, to fuse you into a single person,
instead of being two separate people, so that during your lifetime as a single
person the two of you share a single life; and then, when you die, you die as
a single person, not as two separate people, and you share a single death
there in Hades. Think about it: is this your heart’s desire?’”
Plato’s Symposium is a curious text: a
philosophical treatise on love, a play about a dinner party in classical
Athens where the guests are all flirty and catty, and a story-within-a-story
that goes at least five layers deep. Suzanne and Chris consider what it means
to get intellectually pregnant, to philosophically crash a party, and to find
your missing half.
Show Notes.
The Symposium by Plato, Robin Waterfield’s
translation. [Bookshop.]
Our friends at Dear Reader discussed some
adaptations of ancient Greek material: Check it
out!
Aristophanes’ myth of the origin of love inspired a striking song in Hedwig
and the Angry Inch.
When Alcibiades stumbles into the party, drunk and beautiful with flowers in
his hair, he probably looks a little like Dionysius, the god of
wine.
No Silenus states with effigies inside have survived, but Susan Woodford has
argued that medieval “Vierges
ouvrantes” statues were similar.
We do have
depictions
of Silenus as the (significantly older) tutor of Dionysus, however.
Next episode: The
Metamorphoses
by Ovid. (Use whatever translation you can find.)
...more
56min
January 18, 2019 1. The Iliad.
For a young man all is decorous
when he is cut down in battle and torn with the sharp bronze, and lies there
dead, and though dead still all that shows about him is beautiful;
but when an old man is dead and down, and the dogs mutilate
the grey head and the grey beard and the parts that are secret,
this, for all sad mortality, is the sight most pitiful.
Suzanne and Chris begin their conversations about great books with a very big and very old one: Homer’s Iliad. This Ancient Greek poem about the Trojan War is, of course, widely known, but if you haven’t
read it (or if you haven’t read it in a while), you might not remember how
complex (and downright strange) it gets with its reflections on war and the fallout
of war. They also talk about the joys of dipping in and out of books, rather than
reading them from cover to cover.
Show Notes.
The Iliad by Homer, in the Richmond Lattimore
translation. [Bookshop.]
A review
of English translations of the Iliad.
Another
review of English translations.
A
quick taste of what Ancient Greek might have sounded like.
“‘Homer
can help you’: War veterans use ancient epics to cope.”
“‘The
Iliad’ as illustration of epic struggle with post-Vietnam stress.”
“Here,
Bullet”
by Iraq war veteran Brian Turner, along with a short bio
and two
podcasts on war
poetry.
Teaching classics to convicts.
A lecture on “The Disordered Soul: Thémis and PTSD”.
Writers & Company interviews Pat Barker,
author of a recent novel that retells the Iliad from Briseis’s perspective.
Christopher Logue’s War Music is a classic recent radical translation/retelling of the Iliad.
Next episode: The Symposium by Plato.
...more
1h
January 07, 2019 0. Coming Soon.
Suzanne and Chris talk about great books—but what does "great" even mean?
...more
2min

FAQs about The Spouter-Inn:

How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 114 episodes available.