The Spouter-Inn

By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris PiumaArts Books

The Spouter-Inn episodes

October 01, 2022 60. The Two Towers.
‘Hm, but you are hasty folk, I see,’ said Treebeard. ‘I am honoured by your
confidence; but you should not be too free all at once.... I’ll call you
Merry and Pippin if you please – nice names. For I am not going to tell you
my name, not yet at any rate.... For one thing it would take a long
while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long
time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the
things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It
is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it,
because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time
to say, and to listen to.’
The Two Towers is the middle section of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Lord
of the Rings. It separates the people who formed the first book’s fellowship
into two groups: Most head west and encounter the tree-ish ents and the horse-riding Rohirrim, while Sam and Frodo try to enter Mordor, with Gollum as their
guide. It begins a cluster on Other Languages, as Chris and Suzanne tease out
how Tolkien distinguishes and connects peoples through carefully constructed
language families.
Show Notes.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Two Towers.
[Bookshop.]
Our episode on The Fellowship of the
Ring.
By-The-Bywater, an all-Tolkien
podcast here on Megaphonic, recently had an episode on Tolkien’s constructed
languages.
Tolkien’s major essay on language construction, A Secret
Vice, has been republished in a lavish critical
edition.
Next: Suzette Haden Elgin: Native Tongue.
[Bookshop.]
54 min
September 25, 2022 59. Harriet the Spy.
“I want to know everything, everything,” screeched Harriet suddenly, lying
back and bouncing up and down on the bed. “Everything in the world,
everything, everything. I will be a spy and know everything.”
Ole Golly said, “It won’t do you a bit of good to know everything if
you don’t do anything with it. Now get up, Miss Harriet the Spy, you’re going
to sleep now.”
Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy is a novel about a young girl who wants
to be a writer — or maybe a spy. She constantly writes her candid observations
about other people in her private notebook, and she is given love and
attention by her nurse, Ole Golly. But what would happen if Ole Golly were to
leave? Or if her notebook got into the hands of her classmates, and they read
her unfiltered thoughts about them? Suzanne and Chris reconnect with a book
that meant a great deal to them as children, appreciating its careful and
striking construction, and teasing out the queerness in the book.
Show Notes.
Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy.
[Bookshop.]
Other books by Louise Fitzhugh: The Long Secret.
Nobody’s Familiy Is Going to Change.
Sport.
Sandra Scoppettone: Suzuki Beane.
Leslie Brody: Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise
Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy. (An
excerpt.)
Our episodes on other children’s books: Little
Women. Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory. Charlotte’s
Web.
Our episode on Invisible Man.
Next episode: J.R.R. Tolkien: The Two Towers.
[Bookshop.]
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58 min
September 04, 2022 58. Invisible Man.
In the South everyone knew you, but coming North was a jump into the unknown.
How many days could you walk the streets of the big city without encountering
anyone who knew you, and how many nights? You could actually make yourself
anew. The notion was frightening, for now the world seemed to flow before my
eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity,
it was the recognition of possibility.
Ralph Ellison’s monumental novel Invisible Man is a picaresque coming-of-age story. Our unnamed narrator grows up in the American South between the
World Wars. After a series of incidents gets him a scholarship to—and then
expelled from—college, he travels to New York City. There, in the bustling,
anonymous city, he realizes he has been invisible all along—which is to say,
that no one seems to be able to see him for him. Suzanne and Chris explore
this powerfully written book, and how sight, sound, and taste can connect its
narrator, even as the city isolates him.
Show Notes.
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man.
[Bookshop.]
Also by Ralph Ellison: Juneteenth;
Essays (Includes “Living with Music”).
Our episodes on: Gertrude Stein,
Dante’s Inferno, Moby-Dick, Ernest
Hemingway, the
Decameron, The Book of the City of
Ladies, and The
Jungle.
Voltaire: Candide.
Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American
Cities.
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project.
China Miéville: The City and the City.
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities.
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities.
Next: Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon. Thanks!
53 min
June 16, 2022 57. Ulysses.
—Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing
period.
—Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his name
is, say of it?
—Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that
which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s child. My
dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid. Will any man love the
daughter if he has not loved the mother?
—The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L’art d’être grand...
—Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,
another image?
Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men._
James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is sometimes considered the greatest novel of
all time, and sometimes considered an impenetrable brick of a book. In
celebration of its centenary and on the anniversary of the day the book is set
(Bloomsday!) Chris and Suzanne trace the paths of its characters through the
streets of Dublin, revel in its sensuous writing, and consider what approaches
to reading the book encourages.
Show Notes.
James Joyce: Ulysses.
[Bookshop. Project
Gutenberg.]
Also by Joyce: Chamber Music.
Dubliners. A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man. Finnegans
Wake.
We refer to several books we’ve discussed in previous episodes: The
Odyssey; Mrs.
Dalloway; The Divine
Comedy;
Middlemarch; A Moveable
Feast;
W; I Am
Woman.
Don Gifford: Ulysses Annotated.
Harry Blamires: The New Bloomsday Book.
Patrick Hastings: Ulyssesguide.com and The Guide
to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The Joyce Project offers a heavily annotated
copy of the text.
An overview of the censoring of Ulysses in the
US.
An image of the edition with giant
letters.
A lecture by Johnna Purchase on graphic design and
Ulysses.
Écriture
feminine.
James Heffernen on Woolf’s reading of
Joyce.
The pharmacy mentioned in Ulysses.
Tracing Stephen Dedalus's gay desires.
Kate Bush is having a moment right now, so let’s add her adaptation of Molly’s
speech, The Sensual World.
Next: Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
1 hr
May 25, 2022 56. Mrs. Dalloway.
Clarissa had a theory in those days—they had heaps of theories, always
theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of
dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know
each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was
unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting
on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not
“here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She
waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know
her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the
places.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a novel that traces the lives of several
characters over the course of a single day in June 1923. The novel jumps
between characters, tracing their inner monologues and their memories as they
go about London, reminisce about their younger days, and worry about where
their lives have brought them. Suzanne and Chris explore this web of
connections and parallel lives, and dwell on particular moments of intensity:
an overheard conversation at a party, an unexpected kiss, or even riding a
bus.
Content warning: the novel and the episode contains discussion of mental
illness and suicide.
Show Notes.
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway.
[Bookshop.]
Some annotated editions of Mrs. Dalloway have come out
recently.
Our episodes on To the Lighthouse and
Orlando.
The Hogarth Press.
We didn’t talk about the effect of the pandemic on the book, but here’s an
article about reading Mrs. Dalloway in the shadow of our own
pandemic.
Ned Blackhawk: Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early
American West.
Charles Wilkinson: Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian
Nations.
Bram Stoker: Dracula.
Chris talks about Dracula on another
podcast.
Dracula Daily.
Our episode on John Donne.
Next: James Joyce: Ulysses.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
(Thanks!)
54 min
May 16, 2022 55b. Bonus: Sandow Birk on the Divine Comedy.
I’ve always struggled, since I went to art school, with the question of: What
is the career of making paintings in the twenty-first century? Of sitting
alone in a room and painting in a way people did 500 years ago, in the world
of technology and movies and stuff. So I always wanted to make works that are
about now, but then show that they’re coming out of the history of art and are
tied to art history.... And to say, look, see how the history of art keeps moving
forward, and it’s still connected… It’s sort of a way to try to prove that
painting matters.
Sandow Birk is an artist whose works have dealt with contemporary life in
its entirety, exploring themes such as inner city violence, graffiti,
political issues, travel, war, and prisons, as well as surfing and
skateboarding. Some of his work specifically engages with the kinds of “great
books” that we explore here at the Spouter-Inn, including an illustrated
version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, reworked with Marcus Sanders, from 2005, as
well as the American Qur’an, published in 2016.
Sandow joins us to discuss these two projects and the impulse of reading a
centuries-old text and saying: What if this were here and now? What would that
look like?
Show Notes.
Sandow Birk’s website includes illustrations from
the Divine Comedy, the American
Qur’an, and other works we discuss.
The Divine Comedy.
[Bookshop.]
American Qur’an.
[Bookshop.]
A talk Sandow gave about the American
Qur’an (introduced by Karla
Mallette, who spoke with us about
Purgatorio!)
Gustave Doré’s illustrations for the Divine
Comedy.
Matthew Collins, ed.: Reading Dante with Images.
Dante’s Inferno, the animated film.
Kent Monkman.
The Chester Beatty.
Arion Press and their editions of The Fairy
Tales of Oscar Wilde and Moby-Dick.
Machado de Assis: The Posthumous Memories of Brás
Cubas.
Roberto Bolaño: 2666.
Support The Spouter-Inn and our network, Megaphonic, on
Patreon! Thanks.
39 min
April 30, 2022 55. Paradiso.
At this point I admit my defeat;
no poet, comic or tragic, ever was
more outdone by his theme than I am now
for, as sunlight does to the weakest eyes,
so did the mere thought of her lovely smile
strike every recognition from my mind.
From the first day that I beheld her face
in this life till the vision of her now,
I could trust in my poems to sing her praise,
but now I must stop trying to pursue
her beauty in my verse, for I have done
as much as any artist at his best.
Dante’s Divine Comedy comes to an end with Paradiso , as Beatrice guides
him through the nine spheres of Heaven to his ultimate encounter with God. But
how does Dante approach describing a place filled with people who are
satisfied basking in God’s indescribable glory? And how does he reconcile his
obsession with measuring out time while also trying to contend with
timelessness? Suzanne and Chris think through endings and puddings.
Show Notes.
Dante: Paradiso.
[Bookshop.]
That’s the Mark Musa translation; see also the
Singleton and the
Sanders/Birk versions.
Our episodes on Inferno and
Purgatorio.
Also by Dante: De Vulgari Eloquentia; La Vita
Nuova; Convivio; De
Monarchia.
Sandow Birk’s Dante illustrations,
including the Rose.
Our episodes on Paradise Lost and the
Confessions.
Rare audio of Erich Auerbach giving a lecture on “The Three Traits of Dante’s
Poetry” in March
1948.
Robert Heinlein: The Door into Summer.
The relevent episode on Chris’s other podcast
will be out in a few days.
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths.
William Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale.
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time
War.
The Seven Sleepers.
Walter Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Next: Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and our network,
Megaphonic. Thanks!
53 min
April 07, 2022 54. The Rings of Saturn.
Months after this experience, which I still cannot explain, I was on Dunwich
Heath once more in a dream, walking the endlessly winding paths again, and
again I could not find my way out of the maze which I was convinced had been
created solely for me. Dead tired and ready to lie down anywhere, as dusk
fell I gained a raised area where a little Chinese pavilion had been built,
as in the middle of the yew maze at Somerleyton. And when I looked down from
this vantage point I saw the labyrinth, the light sandy ground, the sharply
delineated contours of hedge taller than a man and almost pitch-black now –
a pattern simple in comparison with the tortuous trail I had behind me, but
one which I knew in my dream, with absolute certainty, represented a
cross-section of my brain.
W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn is hard to pin down — is it a
memoir? an essay? a novel? a prose poem? Whatever it is, it’s a remarkable
reflection of how connected the world is, and how moments and memories and
fragments of history and biography can all echo and resound across time. Chris
and Suzanne trace out some of these paths of connections that Sebald walks,
and think about how the book pulls together story, photography, and time.
Show Notes.
W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn.
[Bookshop.]
Also by Sebald: Austerlitz.
Daniel Mendelsohn on The Rings of
Saturn.
Maps of Sebald’s route (in German).
A video retracing Sebald’s
steps.
Our episode on Moby-Dick.
Thomas Browne: Religio Medici.
Roger Casement.
Our episode on Times Square Red, Times Square
Blue.
Proust: In Search of Lost Time.
Octavia Butler: Kindred.
Herodotus: Histories.
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project.
H.G. Wells: The Time Machine.
Support The Spouter-Inn and our network, Megaphonic, on
Patreon.
57 min
March 08, 2022 53. Confessions.
I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is. Yet I confess
too that I do know that I am saying this in time, that I have been talking
about time for a long time, and that this long time would not be a long time
if it were not for the fact that time has been passing all the while. How
can I know this, when I do not know what time is? Is it that I do know what
time is, but do not know how to put what I know into words? I am in a sorry
state, for I do not even know what I do not know.
Our cluster on Time begins with Augustine’s Confessions , one of the most
widely read books of of the most widely read books of late antiquity, written
in the last years of the Roman Empire. On the one hand, the book is
autobiographical, describing (sometimes in very personal detail) Augustine’s
childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, culminating in his conversion and
commitment to Christianity in his early thirties. On the other hand,
especially in its less often read final chapters, the book is a philosophical
and theological exploration of what allows a person to change over time — and,
in particular, a meditation on the nature of time itself. Suzanne and Chris
explore Augustine’s fraught relationships to his friends and family, and they
begin to unpack the ways time structures and informs the book.
Show Notes.
Augustine: Confessions.
[Bookshop.] [We’re using the
classic translation by R.S. Pine-Coffin, but many translations are available.]
Other books by Augustine: City of God; Literal
Commentary on Genesis; De
Magistro [The Teacher].
Manichaeism.
Our episodes on the Inferno and
Paradise Lost.
Brian Stock: Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics
of Interpretation.
Catherine Conybeare picks Five Books about
Augustine.
The Cloisters.
Birgit Brander Rasmussen: Queequeg's Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early
American Literature.
Samuel R. Delany: Tales of Nevèrÿon.
Ayelet Tsabari, Eufemia Fantetti, and Leonarda Carranza: Tongues: On Longing
and Belonging through Language.
Next: W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
50 min
February 22, 2022 52. Black Skin, White Masks.
I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul
desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other
objects.
Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his
liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would
give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of
the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I
stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the
same way you fix a preparation with a dye. I lose my temper, demand an
explanation.... Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together
by another me.
We like to begin each year with a book that will challenge us with some
theoretical perspectives and insights, which we can have rattling around our
minds as we carry on the year’s reading. This year we are beginning with
Frantz Fanon’s 1952 classic Black Skin, White Masks. A collection of
essays exploring the construction of the author’s psyche (as a Black man from
Martinique), Fanon looks at the personal impacts of colonialism, the ways that
psychoanalysis might be adapted to understand the colonized psyche, and what
possible futures might lie ahead. Chris and Suzanne explore the book’s
argument and its literary qualities, as well as reflecting on how Fanon’s
essays continue to resonate today.
Show Notes.
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks.
[Bookshop.]
Also by Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth.
An overview of Fanon’s thinking.
Stuart Hall: Why
Fanon?
[requires institutional access, alas]
Manichaeism.
Interpellation.
Aimé Césaire.
Léopold Senghor.
Glen Sean Coulthard: Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics
of Reconciliation.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui: “A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and
Enduring Indigeneity.
Next: Augustine: Confessions.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and our network, Megaphonic FM, on
Patreon.
48 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).