The Spouter-Inn

By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris PiumaArts Books

The Spouter-Inn episodes

April 18, 2019 7. Inferno.
I am the way into the doleful city,
I am the way into eternal grief,
I am the way to a forsaken race.
Justice it was that moved my great creator;
Divine omnipotence created me,
And highest wisdom joined with primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I shall last eternally.
Abandon every hope, all you who enter.
I saw these words spelled out in somber colors
Inscribed along the ledge above a gate;
‘Master,’ I said, ‘these words I see are cruel.’
Dante’s Inferno, the first section of the Divine Comedy, is a medieval
poem in which our author is given a guided tour of Hell. He encounters famous
historical figures as well as people he knew personally, while his tour guide
(the Roman poet Vergil) explains the logic of the Hell’s organization and the
divine justice of its terrible punishments. Suzanne and Chris retrace these
steps and talk about their favourite passages in all their upsetting cruelty
and beauty.
Show Notes.
The Inferno as translated by Mark Musa
[Bookshop], Charles
Singleton, or Ciaran
Carson. Also available free online in Allen
Mandelbaum’s translation (with useful notes by Teodolinda
Barolini) at Digital Dante.
The Holkham
manuscript, one of only four fully illustrated copies of
Dante’s Divine Comedy from the fourteenth century, is available online through
the Bodleian library. It’s worth exploring its
illustrations.
Gustave Doré’s famous nineteenth-century
illustrations are also
fabulous.
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s statue of Ugolino and His
Sons.
More artworks inspired by the
Inferno.
Caroline Bergvall reading
“Via”, hosted at her
PennSound page. The poem
is in her collection Fig.
Next time: John Milton’s Paradise Lost, also
available at Project Gutenberg.
1 hr
April 04, 2019 6. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time
a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it
was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them.
The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso
and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several
great people but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case
on sight within me something rang. In no one of the three cases have I been
mistaken. In this way my new full life began.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (written
by her partner, Gertrude Stein) recounts the couple’s lives in early
twentieth-century Paris among painters, writers, and composers—and, during the
First World War, soldiers. Chris and Suzanne explore what the book says about
how painting is like writing, about wives, and about America—and they talk
about other pieces by Stein that they love.
Show Notes.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. [Project
Gutenberg.
Bookshop.]
Other works by Stein: Three Lives. Tender
Buttons. The Making of
Americans. How to Write.
Gertrude Stein reads If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of
Picasso.
Alice B. Toklas in her own
words.
Picasso’s Trois
femmes
(1908), a portrait, “in a sort of red brown, of three women, square and
posturing, all of it rather frightening”.
Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude
Stein.
Sonia Delaunay’s magnificent book collaboration with poet Blaise Cendrars, La
prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de
France.
Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five
Stories, an exhibit that was at
the National Portrait Gallery several years ago with a webpage full of images
of Stein.
The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, a series of lectures
hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Next time: Dante’s Inferno (translated by Mark Musa
or Charles Singleton or Ciaran
Carson or whomever you’d like).
59 min
March 19, 2019 5. Little Women.
‘In spite of the curly crop, I don’t see the ‘son Jo’ whom I left a year
ago,’ said Mr. March. ‘I see a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces
her boots neatly, and neither talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to
do. Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety, but
I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower; she
doesn’t bounce, but moves quietly, and takes care of a certain little person
in a motherly way which delights me. I rather miss my wild girl, but if I get
a strong, helpful, tender-hearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite
satisfied. I don’t know whether the shearing sobered our black sheep, but I do
know that in all Washington I couldn’t find anything beautiful enough to be
bought with the five-and-twenty dollars which my good girl sent me.’
Little Women has Suzanne and Chris tackling
new territory: a novel, a children’s book, and something written within the
last two hundred years. They discuss this tale of four sisters (Meg, Jo, Beth,
and Amy), the possibilities it offers young women (but eventually takes from
them), its complex exploration of gender, and its fascination with death.
Show Notes.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. [Project
Gutenberg.
Bookshop.]
Avidly, on the Los Angeles Review of Books, had a great cluster of
articles about each
of the sisters.
“How Little Women Got Big” at the New Yorker, which draws upon a recent book about
Little Women, Anne Boyd Rioux’s Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women
and Why It Still Matters.
Next episode: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
by Gertrude Stein.
1 hr
March 06, 2019 4b. Bonus: Timothy Perry on The Book of Peace.
There’s the importance of the text and the writer, but also the importance of
the physical object and all the things you can do with the physical object
that you can’t do if you only have digital accuess or [no] access at all.
We met up with Timothy Perry , medieval manuscript and early book
librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library at the University of Toronto.
The Fisher is excited to announce the acquisition of a rare and lavish
medieval manuscript of The Book of Peace, written by Christine de Pizan (whose
classic The Book of the City of Ladies we
discussed in our last episode). Tim was kind enough to show the newly acquired
book to us and tell us about its many charms.
Show Notes.
A detailed description of the manuscript (with
images!) from the Fisher Rare Book Library.
An article about the acquisition in U of T News.
The Book of Peace, translated by Karen Green,
Constance Mews, and Janice Pinder. (Open access!)
An article about Pierre
Bergé, a previous owner of the
manuscript.
37 min
March 05, 2019 4. The Book of the City of Ladies.
When the evil Julian heard this voice, he reproached the torturers for not
having removed enough of Christine’s tongue, telling them to cut it so close
that she would be unable to converse with her lord Jesus. They cut off the
whole of her tongue, right down to the root, but she spat out these remains in
the tyrant’s face and blinded him in one eye. Speaking just as easily as ever,
she exclaimed, ‘Tyrant, what was the point of your removing my tongue so that
I couldn’t praise God when my spirit will praise Him for evermore whilst yours
is damned for all eternity? It’s only fitting that my tongue should have
blinded you, since you didn’t believe my words in the first place.’
The Book of the City of Ladies begins with its
author, Christine de Pizan, working in her study, and suddenly overwhelmed by
the misogyny of so many of the great books surrounding her. She is visited by
three women—personifications of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice—who instruct
her to build a city, and offer her biographies of all the illustrious women
who will live in (and therefore be ) the city. Suzanne and Chris explore
this classic medieval anthology: the ways in which women have made themselves
heard; the physical effort of creating both cities and manuscripts; and the
echoes Christine’s book has both with other great books and with our own
experiences today.
Show Notes.
The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de
Pizan, as translated by Rosalind Brown-Grant.
[Bookshop.]
More info (and images!) about the
manuscript of The Book of the City of Ladies that
Christine supervised herself.
“In the fifteenth century, men read Christine de
Pizan…”
A
banner,
unfurled at Columbia University during a protest in
1989,
included Christine as one of seven great female authors that should be part of
the canon.
Next episode: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
58 min
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.
56 min
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.)
56 min
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.
1 hr
January 07, 2019 0. Coming Soon.
Suzanne and Chris talk about great books—but what does "great" even mean?
2 min

About The Spouter-Inn

From the publisher's feed

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).