The Spouter-Inn

By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris PiumaArts Books

The Spouter-Inn episodes

June 08, 2023 68. The Consolation of Philosophy.
“Now I know,” she said, “that other, more serious cause of your sickness: you
have forgotten what you are. So I really understand why you are ill and how to
cure you. For because you are wandering, forgetful of your true self, you
grieve that you are an exile and stripped of your goods; since indeed you do
not know the goal and end of all things, you think that evil and wicked men
are fortunate and powerful; since indeed you have forgotten what sort of
governance the world is guided by, you think these fluctuations of fortune
uncontrolled. All these are quite enough to cause not merely sickness but even
death. But I thank the author of all health that you have not yet wholly lost
your true nature.”
The Consolation of Philosophy by the sixth-century Roman author Boethius
has a little of everything: poetry and prose, autobiography and philosophy;
bright and lively writing and… maybe some boring bits, especially in the last
two sections. But it was written by a man who found himself thrown in jail and
condemned to death; who can blame him for trying to use philosophy—or, a
dialogue with the personification of Philosophy herself—to make sense of his
life? Chris and Suzanne discuss how this complex poem intersects with a lot of
other literary works, and argue about the uneasy marriage of philosophy and
poetry.
Show Notes.
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.
[Bookshop.]
Our episodes on The Symposium,
Augustine’s Confessions, The Book of
the City of Ladies,
Paradiso, and The Autobiography of
Malcolm X.
The Wikipedia page for The Consolation of
Philosophy
has a nice medieval depiction of Fortune’s
wheel.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo. (The original German
text. See also
Mark Doty talking about this poem.)
Next: Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and our network on
Patreon — it helps us make the show, and it
gives you access to our friendly Discord!
59 min
May 11, 2023 67. The Song of Songs.
I come to my garden, my sister, my bride;
I gather my myrrh with my spice,
I eat my honeycomb with my honey,
I drink my wine with my milk.
Eat, friends, drink,
And be drunk with love.
The Song of Songs is a work of lyric poetry which is notably and
undeniably erotic in focus. And yet it has also been a key religious text
within both Judaism and Christianity, and has been read and commented upon for
thousands of years within those contexts. Chris and Suzanne read this poetry
both within and without these traditions of interpretations — and also
luxuriate in its intensity (and spiciness).
Show Notes.
The Song of Songs is part of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible, and is
available in many
translations.
Chris was primarily looking at the Jewish Publication
Society translation;
Suzanne at the Revised Standard
Version.
Our episodes on Walt Whitman, the
allegorical Conference of the Birds,
and Times Square Red, Times Square
Blue.
Bernard of Clairvaux: Commentary on the Song of
Songs.
Alain of Lille’s commentary, Elucidatio in Cantica Canticorum, doesn’t seem to
be easily available in English, but here’s the
Latin.
Rupert of Deutz’s Commentaria in Cantica Canticorum
also doesn’t seem to have been translated into English.
Next: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.
50 min
April 02, 2023 66. Antigone.
are you mockers of me
you grabbing old men
are you laughers at me
though I’m not yet gone
O springs of the rivers of Thebes
O reaches of the plains of Thebes
bear me witness
no one sheds a tear for me
as I go to my strange new grave
no one knows what kind of laws they are that sentence me
nor what kind of tomb it is I go to
I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I
not at home with the dead nor with the living
Sophocles’s play Antigone asks many questions about our relationship to
the law, to the state, to our families, and to the dead. The new king in town,
Creon, wants his nephew Polynices’s body to go unburied, as he died an enemy
of the state. Polynices’s sister Antigone says she will bury the body herself,
because that is the right and necessary thing to do. Things escalate.
Chris and Suzanne revisit this work and its world—how it depicts the gods and
the dead, and how we might read the struggles of a king trying to rule and a
young woman trying to do right by her brother. They also explore two different
translations by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.
Show Notes.
Sophocles: Antigone.
[Bookshop.]
Anne Carson: Antigonick and its less fancy
edition.
Also by Anne Carson: Autobiography of Red;
Nox; Grief Lessons: Four Plays by
Euripides; and many more.
Elizabeth Wyckloff’s translation of Antigone.
Euripides: Hippolytus,
translated by Sean Gurd, recreates the Greek (lack of) punctuation.
Our episode on the Iliad.
And our episode on To the Lighthouse.
Walter Benjamin: The Task of the
Translator.
Will Aitken: Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove,
and the Art of Resistance.
Next: Song of Songs.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thanks!
55 min
February 26, 2023 65. The Epic of Gilgamesh.
‘My friend, whom I loved so dear,
   who with me went through every danger,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved so dear,
   who with me went through every danger:
‘the doom of mortals overtook him.
   Six days I wept for him and seven nights.
I did not surrender his body for burial,
   until a maggot dropped from his nostril.
‘Then I was afraid that I too would die,
   I grew fearful of death, and so wander the wild.
‘What became of my friend was too much to bear,
   so on a far road I wander the wild;
what became of my friend Enkidu was too much to bear,
   so on a far path I wander the wild.
‘How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet?
   My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay.
   Shall I not be like him and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?’
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very old poem. The Standard Babylonian version
of it was redacted over three thousand years ago by an editor and poet named
Sîn-lēqi-unninni, but much of the material he compiled was even older than
that. The poem describes Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, two-thirds divine and
one-third human, who is so superior to everyone else that the gods must create
a companion for him. That companion is Enkidu, a bestial man who must be
carefully brought into civilization. Their relationship — and the questions
that arise after the gods condemn Enkidu to an early death — are still
compelling several thousand years later. Chris and Suzanne explore this
fragmentary monument of ancient literature, and think about what choices a
translator (and a reader!) have to make when engaging with it.
Show Notes.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, as translated by Andrew
George, N.K. Sandars,
Sophus Helle, and David
Ferry. [Many others are available!]
Our episode on The Iliad.
On cuneiform writing.
In a very different context, Chris has talked about Gilgamesh on a podcast
before.
Michael Schmidt: Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, an
accessible book-length overview of the poem.
Next: Sophocles: Antigone.
[Bookshop.]
And our 2023 reading list, if you want to read ahead! (Some books may change. We
are fickle.)
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thanks!
54 min
February 12, 2023 64b. Bonus: Sassan Tabatabai on Blind Owl.
In classical narrative poetry, there’s these formulaic repetitions that come
up, right? And then we have these very weird formulaic repetitions that come
up in Blind Owl. And I think the function is completely the opposite in the
classical works and in this modern work. [In classical poetic narratives,
repetitions] keep the reader kind of grounded. It’s that same familiar
signpost that keeps you on the right track. When we get to Blind Owl, when we
get these very odd repetitions … it unhinges the reader, right? It makes you
feel like you’re in some weird dream and you can’t get up.
Sassan Tabatabai is a poet, translator, and scholar of Medieval Persian
literature. He is Master Lecturer in World Languages and Literatures and the
Core Curriculum, and Coordinator of the Persian Language Program at Boston
University. His translations of Persian poetry have appeared in numerous
journals, and he is the author of Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His
Poetry, Sufi Haiku, and
Uzunburun: Poems. He is also the translator of the
novel Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, published by
Penguin Classics. His forthcoming books, both scheduled for release in spring
2023 are Ferry to Malta: Poems and Translations, and a Persian translation of
the poetry of David Ferry.
He joins Suzanne and Chris to talk about the challenges in translating prose
and poetry, and to further explore the influences and the intricacies of Sadeq
Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl.
Show Notes.
Sassan Tabatabai on Twitter.
Sassan Tabatabai’s books and translations: Blind
Owl. Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His
Poetry. Sufi Haiku.
Uzunburun: Poems. Also some translations of
Rumi.
Our episodes on Blind Owl, The
Conference of the Birds, and
Frankenstein.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thank
you!
38 min
January 31, 2023 64. Blind Owl.
I had thought about death and the decomposition of all the particles in my
body many times—to the extent that it didn’t frighten me—in fact, my true wish
was to be completely annihilated. The only thing that frightened me was that
the atoms in my body would mix with the atoms in the bodies of the vulgar.
This was an insufferable thought. Sometimes I wished that after death I would
have long arms and extended fingers with which I could gather all my own atoms
and hold them with both hands so that the atoms that belong to me would not
enter the bodies of the vulgar.
Sadeq Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl is brief, curious, and often disquieting.
It tells the tale of a man who paints pen-case covers, who paints the same
image again and again—and old man sitting beneath a cypress tree, an alluring
young woman offering him a water lily, a stream running between them. And he
is haunted by this image, and especially by the woman in this image—who may
also be his wife, his cousin, his mother? The setting of the novel keeps
shifting, the props in the novel keep reappearing, and the characters all seem
like hazy echoes of the two figures in the painting. Chris and Suzanne try to
stay grounded as they discuss this marvellous gem of Iranian modernism.
Content warning: The book contains some potentially disturbing imagery, and
so does our discussion.
Thank you to Michael Collins for helping us edit this episode.
Show Notes.
Next: Sadeq Hedayat: Blind Owl.
[Bookshop.] (We read the
translation by Sassan Tabatabai.)
Not enough of Hedayat’s other work is available in English, but see also
Three Drops of Blood (a collection of short
stories) and The Fable of Creation (a play).
Previous episodes that we mention: Invisible
Man.
Persepolis.
Symposium.
Paradiso.
Frankenstein.
An example of a nineteenth-century painted pen case from
Iran.
Lingam
puja.
Edgar Allan Poe: Berenice.
Junji Ito: Frankenstein and The Enigma of Amigara
Fault.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thank
you.
55 min
January 20, 2023 63. Midwinter Day.
I know the rest of the night will be as devoted to work as love as I’m now
resting in this expensive sentence and in the end I’ll spend it fast writing
to you anyway, addressing you and a solution or night beginning like a letter,
just a few words more freely seeing everything more clearly than the rest of
life and love tends to be like windows facing mostly south but surrounding us,
I’m thinking of you.
Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day is a book-length poem entirely written on
December 22, 1978. It documents her day—early morning dreams, midday chores
with her toddlers, late night all-night writing sessions with her partner—in a
panoply of poetic modes. Chris and Suzanne read the poem alongside some of the
other books they’ve read this year, and consider Mayer’s works and days.
Show Notes.
Bernadette Mayer: Midwinter Day.
[Bookshop.]
Other books by Bernadette Mayer: Memory. Studying
Hunger Journals. Eating the Colors of a Lineup of
Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer.
Sonnets. A Bernadette Mayer
Reader. The Helens of Troy,
NY. Milkweed Smithereens.
0 to 9: The Complete Magazine, 1967–1969.
Bernadette Mayer’s pages at the Poetry
Foundation and
PennSound.
Some of her early works can be found at
Eclipse.
Obituaries in the New York
Times
and Artforum.
Our episodes on Times Square Red, Times Square
Blue,
Ulysses, Mrs.
Dalloway, the Metaphysical
Poets, the
Iliad, and The Waste
Land.
Catullus.
Geoffrey Chaucer: The House of Fame.
Ted and Alice are Ted Berrigan and Alice
Notley.
John Donne: A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s
Day.
Sonnet [You jerk you didn’t call me
up].
Bernadette Mayer’s Writing
Experiments.
Next: Sadeq Hedayat: Blind Owl.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang
out with us in a private Discord.
53 min
January 04, 2023 62. The Waste Land.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is a monument of modernist poetry built
out of fragments. But the poem also turned 100 in 2022, and so Chris and
Suzanne wonder: What does it mean to read this poem today? What still delights
us, and what frustrates us? And what are the various languages, dialects, and
registers all doing in this poem, rubbing up against each other like that?
Show Notes.
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land. (And Eliot’s
endnotes, usually published
alongside the poem.)
Also a new edition of a facsimile of the original drafts of The Waste
Land, with Ezra Pound’s notes, was published for the
centenary.
And you can listen to Eliot reading the
poem.
Other works by Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock. The Hollow
Men. Four Quartets. Murder in the
Cathedral. The Cocktail
Party.
Support us on Patreon and hear Chris and
other Megaphonic hosts talking about the 1965 epic The Greatest Story Ever
Told.
Jessie Weston.
The Beatles: Revolution 9.
Our episode on Ulysses.
Rothenberg & Joris, eds.: Poems for the Millennium, Vol.
1.
Some books that have been published for the centenary:
Matthew Hollis: The Waste Land: A Biography of the
Poem.
Jed Rasula: What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry
Modern.
Robert Crawford: Eliot After The Waste Land.
Next: Bernadette Mayer: Midwinter Day.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang
out with us in a friendly little Discord.
49 min
December 20, 2022 61. Native Tongue.
Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother’s
knees, when their mothers had time to tell them…. How women, in the long ago
time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships—a fantasy world
for these girlchildren, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and
dragons—how women, even then, had begun the first slow gropings toward a
language of their own.
The tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail;
and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings. A word for a
perception that had never had a word of its own before.... [Encodings were]
precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse.... “A
woman who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women
are in her debt forevermore.”
Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue is a feminist science-fiction
novel first published in 1984. The future it describes features an America in
which women are considered biologically (and thus legally) inferior to men.
But it’s also taking place in a time when humans are in contact with aliens,
and only a handful of families have the ability to communicate in their alien
languages. And the women of these linguist families are constructing a
language that should make it easier for women to express their thoughts—which
in turn will have powerful political implications. Suzanne and Chris explore
the tremendous world-building of this novel.
Thank you to Michael Collins for helping to edit this episode.
Show Notes.
Suzette Haden Elgin: Native Tongue.
[Bookshop.]
Other words by Elgin: Judas Rose.
Earthsong. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defence. A Third Dictionary and Grammar of
Láadan.
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association.
The homepage for Láadan.
The Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis.
An article on Láadan and emotional labour.
Another article on Elgin’s influence.
Diane Wilson: The Seed Keeper.
Next: T.S. Eliot: The Waste
Land.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thank
you!
58 min
November 05, 2022 60b. Bonus: Jared Pechaček on The Two Towers.
The Two Towers’ landscape passages... a lot of the book is from Sam’s POV, and
he’s the gardener, and Ithilien is packed with flower names in a way that not
even the Shire is when he’s not the viewpoint character. So there’s so much
lore that he clearly is collecting as he goes. Which I think is so beautiful.
Jared Pechaček is a writer and
artist whose recent work includes illustrating the acclaimed horror novel Red
X by David
Demchuk. He’s also one of the hosts of
By-The-Bywater, a podcast here on the
Megaphonic network that’s about all things Tolkien. He lives in Seattle, where
he can generally be found either tweeting about fashion or drifting over the
beach at low tide.
Jared joins Chris and Suzanne for a wide-ranging discussion on The Two Towers,
including a look at the characters of Sam and Frodo, a reading of the
landscape of Ithilien, and a sampling of rabbit stew.
Show Notes.
Follow Jared on Twitter or
Patreon, or listen to him on By-The-Bywater.
By-The-Bywater episodes on food,
the Ents, and
Orcs.
Jared made rabbit stew for a Kitchen
Party livestream (which happens
occasionally on the Megaphonic twitch channel).
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
37 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).