The Spouter-Inn

By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris PiumaArts Books

The Spouter-Inn episodes

January 16, 2022 51. I Am Woman.
Admit this, all of you. I laugh too loud, can’t hold my brownie properly in
polite company and am apt to call shit “shit.” I can’t be trusted to be loyal
to my class. In fact, the very clever among the elite know that I am opposed
to the very existence of an elite among us. For me, the struggle for self-determination will end with the dissolution of this elite and the levelling of
the CanAmerican class structure or it will continue—for a thousand years if
need be.
You have acquired your knowledge, friends, through the spoils of a colonial
system which intends to use you to oppress my poor country-cousins. I owe no
apology for refusing to go along with that.
At the end of each year, we like to read a book by an author who passed that
year, and in 2021, we lost someone very close to the show: Lee Maracle, whose
book Memory Serves we talked about in
a previous episode, and who joined us in a bonus episode about Great
Expectations. We chose to read her
book I Am Woman , a collection of essays (interwoven with memoir, story,
and poetry) subtitled “A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism”. And,
in addition to responding to the specific issues that the book brings to the
forefront, and appreciating Maracle’s craft in putting these issues on the
page, Suzanne and Chris think together about how it feels to read and talk
about a text that might not be addressed to you at all.
Show Notes.
Lee Maracle: I Am Woman.
[Bookshop.] [The book went out of
print shortly after her passing, but should be back in stock next month.]
Also by Lee Maracle: Memory Serves. Celia’s Song. My
Conversations with Canadians. Hope
Matters [with Columpa Bobb and Tania Carter].
Our episode on Memory Serves and our
bonus with Lee Maracle on Great
Expectations.
Our episode on Bear.
Lee Maracle delivers the 2020 Margaret Laurence
lecture, which addresses many of
the questions we had about literature, gender, and the power of story.
The New York Times’s (unfortunately headlined)
obituary.
An overview
of Lee Maracle’s life.
Gratitude for Lee Maracle from Hiromi Goto, Rita Wong, and Larissa Lai.
The Literary Legacy of Lee Maracle with Drew Hayden Taylor, Tanya Talaga, and Waubgeshig
Rice.
LitHub’s list of notable literary deaths in
2021.
bell hooks: Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking
Black.
Norton Juster: The Phantom Toolbooth.
Beverley Cleary: Dear Mr. Henshaw.
Next: Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks.
[Bookshop.]
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Patreon.
1 hr
December 25, 2021 50. The Hereford Mappa Mundi.
In this territory are the Dog-headed people.
Here live the Griste, an extremely wicked people, for among other vile
things they do, they make clothes for themselves and saddles for their horses
out of the skins of their enemies.
The east-to-west extent of Europe, from the outlet of the Sea of Azov to the
Strait of Gibraltar, in a straight line, is 3,427 miles....
Hungarians.
Slavs.
Ostrich: Head of a goose, body of a crane, feet of a calf. It eats iron.
The Hereford Mappa Mundi may or may not be a book. But this medieval map
of the world combines geography, theology, zoology, and history into a text
that’s fascinating to explore. Suzanne and Chris trace out a few itineraries
along the map, pointing out what they find along the way and some of the
narratives it traces, and they consider what it means to take this seriously
as a text—and a text that might teach us something about how other texts are
read.
Show Notes.
Virtual Mappa includes a detailed, if
sadly not annotated version of the map.
S.D. Westrem’s The Hereford
Map
is a transcription and annotation of the map.
Hereford Cathedral’s site devoted to the
map.
Wikipedia has a good overview of the types of medieval
maps.
A reproduction from the late 19th
century
which is very clear (but not annotated, and missing some colour information).
Orosius: History against the Pagans.
Bartholomeus Anglicus:
On the Properties of
Things.
Our episode on The Metamorphoses.
Martin Delany: Blake, or The Huts of America.
Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon.
John Crowley: The Solitudes, first book in the
Ægypt series.
Robertson Davies: Murther and Walking Spirits.
Jordy Rosenberg: Confessions of the Fox (about
“Honest Jack” Sheppard)
Graham Nelson: Jigsaw.
Brian Moriarty:
Trinity.
Walter M. Miller Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace.
Next episode: Lee Maracle: I Am Woman.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and Megaphonic on Patreon and help us make another 50
episodes! Thanks.
58 min
November 16, 2021 49. Watchmen.
When news of this being’s phenomenal genesis was first released to the world,
a certain phrase was used that has—at varying times—been attributed both to me
and to others. On the newsflashes coming over our tvs on that fateful night,
one sentence was repeated over and over again: ‘The superman exists and he’s
American.’
I never said that.... I presume the remark was edited or toned down so
as not to offend public sensibilities.... What I said was ‘God exists and
he’s American.’
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is an superhero comic about
time, history, power, and the threat of the Cold War. In other words, it’s
very 1980s. Chris and Suzanne reflect on their own experiences of the 1980s,
and they become particularly fascinated with Dr. Manhattan—a character who
experiences all of time at once, but also moves through time linearly. They
also consider the book’s reckoning of an apocalypse, its deeply intricate
formal construction, and what it means if these characters are kind of
unlikeable.
Show Notes.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: Watchmen.
[Bookshop.]
In memoriam Lee Maracle.
A recent interview with Lee Maracle.
Our episode on Memory Serves and our
bonus episode talking with Lee Maracle about Great
Expectations.
Our episodes on Middlemarch and
Persepolis.
Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan)
disintegrating.
The shadows left by the nuclear bombing of
Hiroshima.
The Doomsday Clock.
Our episode on Orlando.
An example of the opening pages of Chapter
XII
(from this interesting page).
Chris’s other podcast.
Our episodes on Frankenstein and
Paradise Lost.
Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
Richard McGuire:
Here. [Full book version.]
Christine Brooke-Rose: Subscript.
Next: The Hereford Mappa Mundi.
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Patreon.
57 min
October 19, 2021 48b. Bonus: Melissa Moreton on Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads.
The Silk Roads aren’t stuck in time. They’re so often depicted as just a
certain period of time and a certain geographic range, and I think we’re kinda
blowing that apart! [These objects span] a thousand-year history, but also
[range] from Japan all the way to Mexico. We’re breaking outside the box and
really thinking about: Wait a second. What do we all have around us today that
was influenced by this intercultural trade and exchange of ideas? And it’s
everywhere.
Melissa Moreton is a codicologist
and cultural historian who studies the material aspects of old books and
manuscripts and the people who made and used them. Her research started in
Italy, but has broadened to include the study of global manuscript culture,
the spread of book technologies, and book use across Africa, South Asia,
Europe, and the Middle East. She combines interdisciplinary methodologies
drawn from material book studies, history, art history, and the quantitative
sciences, and has been known to make parchment, paper, and to bind books. She
is currently a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton and helped organize the current exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum in
Toronto, entitled “Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk
Roads.”
Melissa joins us to talk about that “Hidden Stories”, which our own Suzanne
was one of the curators of! (Hence why we’ve been a little quiet recently.)
Chris, Suzanne, and Melissa discuss how the objects in the exhibition tell
stories both as texts and as objects, what it’s like to put together such a
show during a pandemic, and some of the marvellous pieces they were able to
put on display.
Show Notes.
Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk
Roads is at the Aga
Khan Museum in Toronto until February
27, 2022.
The digital companion site to the
exhibition, where images of many of the objects we discuss can be
found.
The textile Qur’an.
Two unexpectedly preserved
pieces.
The baptismal
register.
The antiphoner (and its
music).
The list of all the objects in the exhibit (still under
construction).
The
Women’s Studio Workshop.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon! Thanks
if you do.
47 min
August 01, 2021 48. Orlando.
The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore
could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which
amounts to much the same thing; (3) that she was an English Duke who had
married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which
sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his
property descended to them.... Thus it was in a highly ambiguous
condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or
nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending the
legal judgment, she had the Law’s permission to reside in a state of
incognito or incognita as the case might turn out to be.
Virginia Woolf’s genre-bending Orlando: A Biography is not quite a novel,
and not quite a biography of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. But it is a
playful text, thick with possibilities. The book covers the long life of
Orlando, a young man born in the sixteenth century, who somehow continues
living up to the present day (that is, the 1920s)—and who unexpectedly
transforms into a woman halfway through her life. Suzanne and Chris explore
how the book’s playfulness both interferes with and enables its depictions of
wreaking havoc on perceived gender binaries and its vital considerations of
the relationship between sex, gender, history, and identity.
Show Notes.
Virginia Woolf: Orlando.
[Bookshop.].
Sally Porter’s film adaptation of
Orlando [trailer].
Other books by Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse.
Mrs. Dalloway. The Common
Reader. The Second Common
Reader.
Our episode on To The Lighthouse.
Our episode on the Metaphysical poets.
Thomas Browne, author of
Religio Medici and other works.
Radclyffe Hall: The Well of Loneliness.
Mark Doty: What Is the Grass? Walt Whitman in My
Life.
Prick Up Your Ears [trailer].
Chris talks about Prick Up Your Ears for another
podcast.
Joe Orton: Complete Plays. The Orton
Diaries.
Next: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: Watchmen.
[Bookshop.]
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Patreon. Thanks!
55 min
July 14, 2021 47b. Bonus: Daniel Heath Justice on Animals.
Raccoons inhabit a world between. They have features that are very human:
their little paws, their behaviour. But their eyes are the eyes of an
animal, and they’re inscrutable. They sit up and look human with these
animal faces. Their behaviour — they don’t run away in the same ways that
other animals do from us. They’re drawn to novelty, rather than repelled by
it. So in all of these different ways, they sit between categories of
comfort for us. That’s what fascinates me, but I think that’s partly what
puts in some danger with a lot of humans.
Daniel Heath Justice is a
Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is Professor of Critical Indigenous
Studies and English at the University of British Columbia. His published work
is largely in the areas of Indigenous literary studies, Indigenous Studies,
and animal cultural history, including the recent Why Indigenous Literatures
Matter and Raccoon, and,
with co-editor Jean M. O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe), the forthcoming
Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler
Siege.
To round off their Animal
cluster, Suzanne and Chris
talk with Daniel about raccoons, badgers, and other animals, both in the real
world and in literature.
Show Notes.
Some of Daniel’s books: Raccoon;
Badger; Why Indigenous Literatures
Matter.
Reaktion Books’ Animal series.
Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows.
L. Frank Baum: The Wizard of Oz books.
Our episodes on Charlotte’s Web and
The Fellowship of the Ring.
Megaphonic’s Lord of the Rings podcast, By-The-Bywater, will be talking about eagles
in their next episode.
Bartholomeus Anglicus:
De proprietatibus
rerum.
(The section on the
badger.)
Rachel Poliquin: Beaver.
An article from The Star about Toronto’s raccoons and green
bins.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
50 min
July 06, 2021 47. Charlotte’s Web.
    “What are you doing up there, Charlotte?”
    “Oh, making something,” she said. “Making something, as usual.”
    “Is it something for me?” asked Wilbur.
    “No,” said Charlotte. “It’s something for me, for a change.”
    “Please tell me what it is,” begged Wilbur.
    “I’ll tell you in the morning,” she said. “When the first light comes into
the sky and the sparrows stir and the cows rattle their chains, when the
rooster crows and the stars fade, when early cars whisper along the highway,
you look up here and I’ll show you something. I will show you my
masterpiece.”
Charlotte’s Web is E.B. White’s beloved children’s book about a young and
humble pig named Wilbur, whose life is changed through the efforts of some
unlikely friends/mother figures—including Fern (a young girl), Templeton (a
selfish rat), and Charlotte (a wise and generous spider). Suzanne and Chris
read this book and think about the distinctions we make between people and
animals, and wonder whether there’s something about animal stories that make
them ideal for telling such poignant stories about death and time.
Content warning: Unsurprisingly, there is some discussion of animals dying in this
episode.
Show Notes.
E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web.
[Bookshop.]
Other books by E.B. White: Is Sex Necessary?: Or Why You Feel the Way You
Do (with James Thurber). Stuart
Little. The Trumpet of the
Swan. Elements of Style
(with William Strunk). Essays.
Letters.
Some essays by E.B. White.
Richard Adams: Watership Down.
Helen Macdonald: H is for Hawk.
T.H. White: The Once and Future King.
Graeme Base: The Eleventh Hour.
André Alexis: Fifteen Dogs.
Michael Field: Whym Chow: Flame of
Love.
Next: Virginia Woolf: Orlando.
[Bookshop.]
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you.
56 min
June 22, 2021 46b. Bonus: Anna Wilson on Bear.
I see Bear as a story about a woman who gets the chance to do to someone
else what has always been done to her.... She breaks out of her
experience of heterosexual relationships by having this exploitative
relationship with the bear.
Anna Wilson completed her PhD in
medieval studies in 2015 at the University of Toronto. She is now an assistant
professor of English at Harvard University . She works on medieval reading
communities, fanfiction, critical theory, historiography, and the history of
reading. Next year she’s heading to the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, NJ, for a year to finish her first book, which is about fans,
reading, immaturity, and medieval literature.
Anna joins Suzanne and Chris to talk about
Bear and its relationship to other
texts—in particular, feminist young adult fantasy novels.
Show Notes.
Anna’s article “Full Body
Reading”, on the connections between fanfiction and medieval mystic
Margery Kempe, is well worth reading.
Anna is also one of the contributors (along with Chris and Suzanne) to the
open-access collection How We Read.
Robin McKinley:
Deerskin. Pegasus.
Mercedes Lackey.
Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Tamora Pierce.
Suzy McKee Charnas:
Motherlines.
Kathryn Bond Stockton: The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in Twentieth
Century.
Audre Lorde: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.
Grizzly Man.
Ursula K. LeGuin: The Left Hand of Darkness.
On shifter romances.
52 min
June 16, 2021 46. Bear.
Bear, take me to the bottom of the ocean with you, bear, swim with me, bear,
put your arms around me, enclose me, swim, down, down, down with me.
Bear, make me comfortable in the world at last. Give me your skin.
Bear, I want nothing but this from you. Oh, thank you, bear. I will keep you
safe from strangers and peering eyes forever.
Bear, give up your humility. You are not a humble beast. You think your own
thoughts. Tell them to me.
Bear, I cannot command you to love me, but I think you love me. What I want
is for you to continue to be, and to be something to me. No more. Bear.
Marian Engel’s novel Bear has a reputation—or perhaps two. Some people
speak about it in giggling tones as “that Canadian book where a woman has sex
with a bear”; but people who actually read the novel often find a complex and
nuanced story, full of unexpected resonance. Suzanne and Chris think about how
the novel’s relationship with 70s feminism plays out 45 years later, and look
at the binaries the novel sets up (man/woman, human/animal, civilized/natural,
subject/object) and what happens as they break down.
Show Notes.
Next: Marian Engel: Bear.
[Bookshop.]
CBC Radio on Bear.
Hugh MacLennan: Two Solitudes.
Marius Barbeau, problematic
ethnologist.
On Lord Byron.
Edward John Trelawny: Records of Shelley, Byron and the
Author.
Our episodes on Braiding Sweetgrass
and Monkey Beach.
E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat
Murr.
Our episode on Little Women.
Marie de France: Lais, esp. Chevrefoil and Lanval.
Next: E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web.
[Bookshop.]
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53 min
June 04, 2021 45. The Conference of the Birds.
There are so many roads, and each is fit
For that one pilgrim who must follow it.
How could a spider or a tiny ant
Tread the same path as some huge elephant?
Each pilgrim’s progress is commensurate
With his specific qualities and state
(No matter how it strives, what gnat could fly
As swiftly as the winds that scour the sky?)
Our pathways differ—no bird ever knows
The secret route by which another goes.
Our insight comes to us by different signs;
One prays in mosques and one in idols’ shrines—
But when Truth’s sunlight clears the upper air,
Each pilgrim sees that he is welcomed there.
The Conference of the Birds, by the medieval Persian poet Farid ud-Din
Attar, tells the story of a group of birds seeking a king—or perhaps seeking
spiritual enlightenment. They elect a wise hoopoe to guide them to the
fabulous Simorgh. The hoopoe’s description of the difficult journey ahead
weaves in many parables, tales about Sufi mystics, figures from the Quran, and
historical people like Aristotle and Socrates. Suzanne and Chris discuss how
this book has been read—as spiritual guide, or as a collection of well told
stories—and about the possibilities opened up by the poem.
Show Notes.
Attar: The Conference of the Birds [Dick Davis and
Afkham Darbandi translation].
[Bookshop.] [Another
translation by Sholeh Wolpé.]
The Tomb of Attar.
Attar: Memories of the Saints [here translated as
Memories of Gods’ Friends].
Apophatic theology.
Hallaj.
The Simorgh.
Murmurations.
The masnawi poetic form.
Layla and Majnun.
Shebli.
Our episode on Persepolis.
Rozina Ali: “The Erasure of Islam from the poetry of
Rumi”.
Daniel Heath Justice: Raccoon (and
Badger).
Bernie Krause: The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in
the World's Wild Places.
Next: Marian Engel: Bear.
[Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and chat books with
us on a members-only Slack.
57 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).