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 123 episodes available.

The Spouter-Inn episodes:

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 123 episodes available.

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