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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How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 114 episodes available.

The Spouter-Inn episodes:

April 29, 2020 28b. Bonus: Jess Henderson on Emma.
I think it’s interesting in Austen’s novels that they’re all so positive, and
we think of them as sort of happy comforting kinds of things, because from all
sides are pressing in these realities of disease and death… There are so many
characters in this novel that just aren’t there or don’t have family members
because they’ve passed away.
Jess Henderson is a contract faculty
member of the English and Drama Department at the University of Toronto,
Mississauga. She teaches a wide array of texts—from Middle English through to
the digital age—as well as a variety of skills—from how to read literature
critically to how to write effectively. She loves reading and is delighted
when she gets to talk with others about books. In fact, she recently hosted a
virtual reading group on Emma which Suzanne attended, so she and Chris asked
her on to discuss that experience and to share her thoughts on which
characters are underrated, what other possibilities lie within the novel, how
letters work in this world, and to debate what the novel would be called if it
were titled like Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility.
Show Notes.
Jess Henderson on Twitter.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and join
us in a members-only Slack to talk about books (and/or Animal Crossing).
...more
44min
April 25, 2020 28. Emma.
Mr. Knightley and Harriet Smith!—It was a union to distance every wonder of
the kind….—Such an elevation on her side! Such a debasement on his! It was
horrible to Emma to think how it must sink him in the general opinion, to
foresee the smiles, the sneers, the merriment it would prompt at his expense;
the mortification and disdain of his brother, the thousand inconveniences to
himself.—Could it be?—No; it was impossible. And yet it was far, very far,
from impossible.
We finally cover a Jane Austen novel! Emma , a young woman of high social
standing, is a curious mix of observant and clueless, intelligent and
clueless, capable and clueless… and, having secured a good marriage for her
former governess, she’s determined to use her powers of matchmaking for good
once again—this time on the innocent (and clueless) Harriet Smith. Will her
meddling be successful? Or will she make something of a fool of herself for
our amusement, and learn a lesson or two along the way, and maybe, just maybe,
accidentally find herself married by the end? I think you can guess the answer
to that, but there’s still a lot to enjoy in seeing it all unfold. Chris and
Suzanne launch a cluster on the nineteenth-century English novel—and therefore
a cluster on class—with this classic.
Show Notes.
Emma.
[Gutenberg.
LibriVox.
Bookshop.]
Some adaptations: Emma. and
Clueless.
Ian Balfour: Free Indirect Filmmaking: Jane Austen and the Renditions (On
Emma among Its Others) (PDF
provided with permission of the author and publisher).
Janeites.
Austenolatry.
Virginia Woolf on Jane
Austen.
Recognizing the Enduring Whiteness of Jane
Austen.
Next episode: Charles Dickens: Great Expectations.
[Gutenberg.
Librivox.
Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and join us on a
friendly, chatty Slack!
...more
54min
April 03, 2020 27b. Bonus: Reading During Crisis.
In late March 2020, in the first few weeks of the social distancing brought
about by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chris and Suzanne checked in with a few
friends about how they’re handling this new stress and isolation, and what (if
anything) they’re reading right now.
We hope you’re all doing well. We would love to
know what you’re reading.
Our Guests.
Irina Dumitrescu is a professor of medieval
literature at the University of Bonn, but she also has a secret life as a
writer of creative non-fiction, especially essays—including one published last
year in a volume called How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing,
Sound,
co-edited by Suzanne along with Kaitlin Heller. Most recently, she had an
article in the Times Literary Supplement titled “How to Write Well: Rules,
Style and the ‘Well-made Sentence’”.
Cord J. Whitaker is a Philadelphia native
whose lifelong relationship with the African Methodist Episcopal Church led
him to fall in love with Chaucer and medieval literature. Today an associate
professor at Wellesley and an internationally known
speaker, Whitaker regularly writes and lectures on
blackness and the Middle Ages, on white supremacist deployments of the Middle
Ages, and on African American political medievalism. His most recent book is
Black Metaphors: How Modern Race Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking.
Oriana Schwindt is a freelance
writer based in New York, with bylines in New
York Magazine, Vice, and Vox, and she co-hosts By-The-Bywater, a Tolkien podcast right here on
Megaphonic FM. She is thinking about restarting her own podcast about grift in
America (it’s called American
Grift). In
2017, she experienced this grift firsthand on a crowdfunded reporting trip to
the geographic center of every state in
America. Yep, she did all 50. No, your
state isn’t her favorite.
Karla Mallette is a professor of Italian
and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work
focuses on the relationship between literary traditions in the medieval
Mediterranean, especially Arabic, Latin, and Romance vernaculars. Her earlier
books include The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100–1250, and
European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean, and
she is just finishing a new one called Lives of the Great Languages:
Cosmopolitan Languages in the Medieval Mediterranean.
Show Notes.
Irina Dumitrescu, ed.: Rumba Under
Fire. [Free PDF!]
Our friend Nadia is the host of The Opposite Of
Lonely.
L. Frank Baum: The Wizard of Oz.
Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore: Watchmen.
Walter Mosely: Futureland.
The Wizard of Oz and the gold
standard.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Braiding Sweetgrass.
Octavia Butler: Seed to Harvest.
Polygon’s video on Animal Crossing (and translating its fake
language).
Dante: Inferno, trans. Allan Mandelbaum.
Dante: Purgatorio and
Paradiso, trans. Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M.
Durling.
Kengo Hanazawa: I Am a Hero.
Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting: Velvet.
Isabel Greenberg: Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the
Brontës.
Mary Szybist: Incarnadine.
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron 6.10: Friar
Cipolla shows off relics.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
...more
1h
April 01, 202027. The Decameron.
“Let us therefore do as I suggest… We can move from place to place, spending
one day here and another there, pursuing whatever pleasures and entertainment
the present times will afford. In this way of life we shall continue until
such time as we discover (provided we are spared from early death) the end
decreed by heaven for these terrible events.”
It’s 1348, and plague has broken out in Florence. Ten affluent people decide
to escape the city for a bit, and over the course of two weeks they travel
from one villa to another, trying to have a nice time of it. Amongst the
singing, dancing, and feasting, every day includes a round of story-telling.
Ten storytellers, ten days of storytelling: The
Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio is a collection of
one hundred stories told by people trying to get their minds off the
disruption of disease.
Chris and Suzanne look at the frame tale and five of their favourite stories,
picking out some of the more interesting features of the book, enjoying how
funny or sexy or strange the stories can be, and considering the work stories
might do in a pandemic.
Show Notes.
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron.
[Bookshop.
Gutenberg.]
We’re using the G.H. McWilliam translation, and we’re looking at these
stories:
2.7 Alatiel marries the King of Algarve, eventually
3.1 Masetto tends to the gardens of a nunnery
3.10 Alibech sends the Devil back to Hell
10.9 Messer Torello shows hospitality to Saladin
10.10 Griselda suffers her husband, the Marquis of Saluzzo
Kalila wa-Dimna.
Decameron Web
has lots of useful information, including some details about the Decameron
manuscripts.
The autograph manuscript of the Decameron (i.e., in Boccaccio’s
own handwriting).
A fully digitized Decameron manuscript from around
1400.
Some projects turning to the Decameron right now:
The Decameron Project.
The Modern Decameron Project.
100 Days of Decameron.
Next: Jane Austen, Emma.
[Gutenberg.
LibriVox.
Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon if you
can, and tell us what you’re reading!
...more
53min
March 27, 2020 26b. Bonus: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi on Persepolis.
The Iranians of the post-Revolutionary generation are the probably the most
secular of not only Iranians—I would dare to say, the most secular of their
contemporaries worldwide.
Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
is Professor of History and Near and
Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. He is the Editor of
the academic journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East, and he has written two books: Refashioning Iran: Orientalism,
Occidentalism and Nationalist Historiography (Palgrave, 2001) and Tajaddud-i
Bumi [Vernacular Modernity] (in Persian, Nashr-i Tarikh, 2003). He is
currently working on Pathologizing Iran, which explores the medicalization of
historical narratives and political discourses.
Mohamad joins Chris and Suzanne to help put Persepolis into further context.
How idiosyncratic is its portrayal of the 1979 revolution and where does
Satrapi’s graphic novel fit into traditions Iranian diasporic writing? They
also reflect on the celebration of Nowruz (Persian New Year) in a time of
crisis.
Show Notes.
Mohamad’s website, which offers a free pdf of his
book Refashioning Iran.
Leila Abu Lughod: Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle
East.
Women Writing Novels Emerge as Stars in
Iran.
Mystical poets Rumi, Hafez, and
Saadi.
Nowruz and haft
sin.
The 2500 year celebration at the tomb of Cyrus the Great at
Persepolis.
The 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad
Mosaddegh.
Some images from the children’s newsmagazine Keyhan
Bacheha.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
(Thanks!)
...more
40min
March 19, 2020 26. Persepolis.
That night I stayed a very long time in the bath. I wanted to know what it felt like to be in a cell filled with water. GOD (sitting next to the narrator, a young girl, as she takes a bath): What are you doing? My hands were wrinkled when I came out, like Grandpa’s.
Marjane Satrapi was ten years old at the start of the Iranian Revolution, and
her comics memoir Persepolis explores what it
was like to grow up in that environment. It’s a story of the Iranian
Revolution, which began in 1979, but it’s also the story of one individual
life in a time of great crisis, moving into the Iranian diaspora. Chris and
Suzanne discuss this personal story of revolution, how a child’s understanding
of events can be useful for introducing topics to readers, and the
difficulties of talking about comics on podcasts.
Show Notes.
Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis.
[Bookshop.]
Happy Nowruz!
Haft sin, the seven items
beginning with S.
Art Spiegelman: Maus.
Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics.
The 2500 year celebration of the Persian
Empire.
Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Other works mentioned by Marjane Satrapi:
Embroideries, Chicken with
Plums.
Marjane Satrapi on her new film Radioactive, about Marie
Curie.
A conversation with Marjane Satrapi and Art
Spiegelman.
Emma Watson interviews Marjane Satrapi.
Next: Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron.
[Gutenberg.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and help
us make the show. Thanks!
...more
57min
March 03, 2020 25. The Jungle.
The peculiar bitterness of all this was that Jurgis saw so plainly the
meaning of it. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had
gotten a job the first day; but now he was second-hand, a damaged article, so
to speak, and they did not want him. They had got the best of him—they had
worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had
thrown him away! And Jurgis would make the acquaintance of others of these
unemployed men and find that they had all had the same experience. There were
some, of course, who had wandered in from other places, who had been ground up
in other mills; there were others who were out from their own fault—some, for
instance, who had not been able to stand the awful grind without drink. The
vast majority, however, were simply the worn-out parts of the great merciless
packing machine; they had toiled there, and kept up with the pace, some of
them for ten or twenty years, until finally the time had come when they could
not keep up with it any more.
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906)
describes the lives of the working class in America by following Jurgis
Rudkus, who moves with his family from Lithuania to the US at the turn of the
century and then spends several years toiling in the slaughterhouses of
Chicago. The novel ends with Jurgis’s conversion to socialism, and Sinclair
hoped to inspire the reader to the socialist cause as well. And although the
socialist revolution in America didn’t play out as Sinclair imagined, his
novel did lead to major reforms in food safety legislation. It offers a lot
for Suzanne and Chris to chew on.
Show Notes.
Upton Sinclair: The Jungle.
[Gutenberg.
Librivox.
Bookshop.]
Also by Upton Sinclair: Manassas. The Brass
Check. Oil!
There Will Be Blood [trailer].
An article on the Helicon Home Colony.
The story of Sinclair’s run for Governor of
California.
The original serialized version of The Jungle.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
...more
58min
February 21, 2020 24b. Bonus: Lesley S. Curtis on Stella.
Nineteenth-century Haitian writing [is] absolutely fantastic. It still rings
radical. If you’re reading about it today, it still seems radical to us. There
[are] these really fantastic anti-colonial thinkers whose words just did not
make the impact that we are still striving for today.
We continue to think about the Haitian Revolution with our guest, Lesley S.
Curtis. Dr. Curtis is the founder and
president of Sagely, a Philadelphia-based
company offering strategy and communication services to small businesses,
schools, and universities. She holds a PhD in literature from Duke University,
where she studied gender and abolitionism in the French Caribbean. In 2015,
she and Christen Mucher (Smith College) co-translated Haiti’s first novel,
Stella, an allegorical retelling of the Haitian
Revolution. The novel was originally written in French by Haitian politician
Émeric Bergeaud and first published in 1859.
We talk about Stella, the relationship between history writing and literature,
the ongoing resonances of the Haitian Revolution, and the generous act of
translation.
Show Notes.
Émeric Bergeaud: Stella.
[Bookshop. A scan of the second
edition, in French.]
Curtis and Mucher: Haiti’s First Novel: Expanding the Study of the Age of
Revolutions, a brief overview of
Stella.
Beaubrun Ardouin.
Eugène Delacroix: Liberty Leading the
People.
Richard Burton, trans.: The Arabian
Nights.
Baron de Vastey.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
...more
44min
February 14, 2020 24. The Black Jacobins.
The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jacquerie or the
Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way,
the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if
they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. […] From their
masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest
provocation, death. They returned in kind. […] They, whose women had undergone
countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often
on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers.
‘Vengeance! Vengeance!’ was their war-cry, and one of them carried a white
child on a pike as a standard.
And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more
humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them.
The Revolution cluster begins! C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution is a
remarkable book about the history of the Haitian Revolution (1794–1803) and
the astonishing man who led the revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture. First
published in 1938, it remains read today, both for its historical insight and
for the vividness of its writing. (It has even recently been optioned to be
adapted into a tv series!) Suzanne and Chris grapple with the genre of history
writing, the way revolution acts as a protagonist in this book, and the
exceptional life and work of its author.
Show Notes.
C.L.R. James: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution.
[Bookshop.]
Other C.L.R. James books mentioned: Beyond a
Boundary; Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The
Story of Herman Melville and the World We LIve in;
Minty Alley; The Life of Captain
Cipriani; and the play that preceded The Black
Jacobins.
An interesting review of the new edition of that
play.
Abolqasem Ferdowsi: Shahnameh: The Persian Book of
Kings.
Thomas Carlyle: The French Revolution.
Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire.
Herodotus: The Histories.
Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian War.
The Black Jacobins radio play from
1971.
The Black Jacobins has been optioned for
television.
A 1970 interview with C.L.R. James about The Black
Jacobins.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
...more
50min
January 22, 2020 23. Memory Serves.
Even in the worst catastrophe, there is something unknown and cherished to be
discovered. We are certain that all life and death contain something
cherished that can be observed; if we listen, if we look for its internal
dynamic, watch its behaviour, and commit to its being, we may discover it.
Once we discover it, we can establish a relationship with it. Despite the
distance maintained between the barracuda and ourselves, we still have a
relationship with it. That relationship is one of cherishing the distance
between predator and prey; in this way, the barracuda becomes a teacher, and
the relationship is one of student and teacher. The space is deep green
water.
The Spouter-Inn begins its second year (happy birthday to us!) by reading a
book that challenges and provokes us in a number of ways (only a few of which
we talk about): Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves.
Lee Maracle is a writer, activist, and Elder of the Stó:lo Nation, and this
book is a collection of oratories—which is a term and a methodology that
struck Chris and Suzanne as fascinating, and one which poses a lot of
questions about the approaches they might take (and the limits they encounter)
as they make this podcast.
Show Notes.
Lee Maracle: Memory Serves: Oratories.
[Bookshop. NeWest
Press.]
Some other works by Lee Maracle: Ravensong.
Celia’s Song. I Am
Woman. My Conversations with
Canadians.
Some of her poetry.
An interview with Lee Maracle.
Two additional resources for starting to learn about Indigenous literatures:
Daniel Heath Justice: Why Indigenous Literatures
Matter.
Gregory Younging: Elements of Indigenous Style
(aimed at publishers but useful beyond that).
Michel de Montaigne: Essays.
We’ve been nominated for a Canadian Podcasting Award in the Outstanding Arts
Category! If you are a Canadian
podcaster, you’re eligible to vote for us (so please do).
Next episode: C.L.R. James: The Black Jacobins.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon, help us
make the show possible, and chat about books with us in a members-only Slack!
...more
50min

FAQs about The Spouter-Inn:

How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 114 episodes available.