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:

December 19, 2019 22. Beloved.
I can forget that what I did changed Baby Suggs’ life. No Clearing, no
company. Just laundry and shoes. I can forget it all now because as soon as I
got the gravestone in place you made your presence known in the house and
worried us all to distraction. I didn’t understand it then. I thought you were
mad with me. And now I know that if you was, you ain’t now because you came
back here to me and I was right all along: there is no world outside my door.
I only need to know one thing. How bad is the scar?
As 2019 draws to a close, Chris and Suzanne remember Toni Morrison, who passed
away this year, by reading Beloved. It’s a
difficult book—and a difficult book to talk about—but also a beautifully and
sensuously written book, and entirely worth reading. Your hosts explore what
genre(s) the book is, how time gets wobbly, and the unexpected roles of food,
as well as closely reading a few typically stunning passages.
Content warning: graphic violence, including the murder of a child.
Show Notes.
Toni Morrison: Beloved.
[Bookshop.]
An obituary for Toni Morrison.
That interview with Toni
Morrison.
Toni Morrison: The Source of Self-Regard.
The essay from that book about
Beloved.
An interview with Toni
Morrison.
Next episode: Lee Maracle: Memory Serves.
Support The Spouter-Inn via Pateon if you
can; it helps a lot. Or tell your friends about the show. Or both! Thanks.
...more
58min
November 27, 2019 21. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Mr Willy Wonka can make marshmallows that taste of violets, and rich caramels
that change color every ten seconds as you suck them, and little feathery
sweets that melt away deliciously the moment you put them between your lips.
He can make chewing gum that never loses its taste, and candy balloons that
you can blow up to enormous sizes before you pop them with a pin and gobble
them up. And, by a most secret method, he can make lovely little blue birds’
eggs with black spots on them, and when you put one of these in your mouth, it
gradually gets smaller and smaller until suddenly there is nothing left except
a tiny little pink sugary baby bird sitting at the tip of your tongue.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a classic work of children’s
literature by Roald Dahl. It tells the story of Charlie Bucket and his visit
to the fantabulous chocolate factory run by the reclusive Willy Wonka. Chris
and Suzanne explore how the book distinguishes between hunger and gluttony,
how it marks the bodies of children with their sins like some medieval
morality tale, and how parts of the story are tied up with colonialist
fantasies. All in time for (American) Thanksgiving!
Show Notes.
Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
[Bookshop.]
The Roald Dahl box set that Chris has been gorging
on. Includes, in particular, Matilda and
Boy.
His short story “Royal Jelly” is found in Cruelty
(among other collections).
Our episodes on Little Women, the
Metamorphoses, the
Inferno, and How to Cook a
Wolf and A Moveable
Feast.
An interview with Joseph Schindelman, who illustrated the first edition of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Roald Dahl was apparently not a great person.
Prudentius: Psychomachia. [More
info.]
Early (racist) versions of the Oompa-Loompas.
Next time: Toni Morrison: Beloved.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon if you
can, please. Thanks!
...more
58min
November 18, 2019 20b. Bonus: Irina Dumitrescu on Food Writing.
I’m actually not that interested in food writing that’s primarily about food.
I love food, but...
Irina Dumitrescu is a professor of
medieval literature at the University of Bonn, but she also has a secret life
as a food essayist. She is particularly interested in how food reflects
culture, how people use craft and creativity to survive hard times, and the
positive uses of imperfection. Her essays on food have been nominated for the
James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and been
reprinted in Best American Essays 2016, Best Food
Writing 2017, and Jay McInerney’s Wine Reads: A
Literary Anthology of Wine Writing (2018). She joins
us to talk about food writing and amateurs, the allure of survivalism, and
food writing that isn’t really about food.
Show Notes.
Irina Dumitrescu’s website, including links to
her essays My Father and the
Wine and
Currywurst.
The New Braunfels Wurstfest.
Najmieh Batmanglij: Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking
and Ceremonies.
Rose Levy Berenbaum: The Cake Bible. (Chris points
out that her Pie and Pastry Bible and Bread
Bible are both great.)
Mark Bittman: How to Cook Everything.
Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg: The Flavor Bible.
Chris first heard of Thermomix through The Katering
Show.
John Thorne: Serious Pig. (Based on articles from
his newsletter.)
Dawn Drzal: The Bread and the Knife. (Irina’s
review.)
Anthony Bourdain: Medium Raw and Kitchen
Confidential.
Emmymadeinjapan’s YouTube series on Hard
Times
cooking.
See also Great Depression
Cooking.
Lizzie Collingham: Curry.
Abe Opincar: Fried Butter.
Fuchsia Dunlop: Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.
Laurie Colwin: Home Cooking.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and join
us on a members-only Slack where we can share recipes.
...more
47min
November 15, 2019 20. How to Cook a Wolf.
There are times when helpful hints about turning off the gas when not in use
are foolish, because the gas has been turned off permanently, or until you can
pay the bill. And you don’t care about knowing the trick of keeping bread
fresh by putting a cut apple in the box because you don’t have any bread and
certainly not an apple, cut or uncut. And there is no point in planning to
save the juice from canned vegetables because they, and therefore their
juices, do not exist.
In other words, the wolf has one paw wedged firmly into what looks like a
widening crack in the door.
M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf is a book
about food written during World War 2. It’s full of meditations on hunger—the
wolf clawing at the door—and recipes for dishes that you might eat to survive
if supplies, fuel, and morale are limited. Chris and Suzanne talk about the
food she describes (both sumptuous and horrifying), her curious personality,
and the insight she provides on war and survival.
Show Notes.
M.F.K. Fisher: How to Cook a Wolf, also available
in the omnibus The Art of Eating.
[Bookshop.]
Laurie Colwin: Home Cooking.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: The Physiology of
Taste, translated by Fisher.
A review of Fisher’s translation from the New York
Times.
M.F.K. Fisher: A Cordiall Water.
Luke Barr: Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the
Reinvention of American Taste.
YouTuber Emmymadeinjapan recreated the preserved
eggs.
Bill Moyers interviews M.F.K. Fisher.
Next book: Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon if you
can. Thanks.
...more
55min
November 04, 2019 19b. Bonus: Simone de Rochefort on Ernest Hemingway.
For me, in coming to Hemingway in the 2010s as a queer woman, to start
reading the work of this man who can be incredibly polarizing and incredibly
cruel to women and queer people (although that’s very complicated…)—for me,
having the context of who he was and the dramatic backstory behind [The Sun
Also Rises] made me able to deal with the ugly parts of it a little more.
Simone de Rochefort is a Senior Video
Producer at Polygon, where she co-hosts the
podcast The Polygon Show. She’s also one of the hosts of the tech podcast
Rocket on Relay FM, which recently celebrated
its 250th episode. And, luckily for us, she is also a passionate amateur
Hemingway enthusiast. We were excited to bring her on the show to talk about
how and why she fell in love with Hemingway, how she navigates his more
problematic aspects, and how to reclaim Hemingway for women and queers.
Show Notes.
Simone de Rochefort on Twitter, her podcasts
The Polygon Show and Rocket, and her
work on Polygon’s YouTube channel.
Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast and the re-edited 2009 version.
Other Ernest Hemingway novels mentioned: The Sun Also
Rises, A Farewell to
Arms, and The Garden of
Eden.
A. Scott Berg: Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.
Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald Perkins
Correspondence.
Matthew J. Bruccoli: Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous
Friendship.
Lesley M. M. Blume: Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind
Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises.
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood.
Our episodes on the Iliad and The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Mikaella Clements: The Queerness of Ernest Hemingway.
Simone’s quote comes from Adam Gopnik: Hemingway, the
Sensualist.
Simone discusses her Dream
Daddy
avatar on The Polygon Show episode
7.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and
you’ll get to hear a short bonus bit where Simone offers an unflattering
anecdote about Hemingway.
...more
52min
November 01, 2019 19. A Moveable Feast.
You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the
bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at
tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had
given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy
[...] you could always go into the Luxembourg Museum and all the paintings
were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he
made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when
he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat.
It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have
been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a
different way.
A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway’s memoir
of being a young and often hungry writer surrounded by the writers, artists,
and waiters of 1920s Paris. He reminisces about Gertrude Stein, James Joyce,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald—but also about a really fine meal of pommes à l’huile
and a cold glass of beer. As his first wife (the book begins with them as
newlyweds and ends with them on the precipice of divorce), Hadley, observes:
“Memory is hunger.”
Show Notes.
A Moveable Feast. [Out of copyright in some
countries, where it’s available on
archive.org.
Bookshop.]
The re-edited 2009 version.
The person who reunited Hemingway with his diaries does not like the new
version.
Our episode on Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas.
Shakespeare and Company.
Paula McClain: The Paris Wife.
Playwright Tom Stoppard’s Reflections on Ernest
Hemingway.
Our next book is M.F.K. Fisher: How to Cook a Wolf.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and help
make this show possible. Thanks!
...more
58min
October 21, 2019 18b. Bonus: Liza Blake on Margaret Cavendish.
Even though the book starts out saying “Reason is one thing and Fancy is
another; Imagination is one thing and Philosophy is another,” she’s then
showing throughout the book how these are very similar kinds of actions.
Epicurus was making a world too. Was he living in it? Unclear. But by
imagining that he lived there, he led a different kind of life.
We were overwhelmed by Margaret Cavendish’s wild novel The Blazing
World, so we needed to bring in an expert.
Who did we turn to? Liza Blake,
assistant professor of English at the University of
Toronto.
She works on literature and science, literature and philosophy, and, most
recently, the books of Margaret Cavendish. Perfect! We talk about how to get
past those first impressions of Cavendish, what parts of The Blazing World are
satire, the importance of speculation to science and philosophy, and whether
animals can philosophize. (You might hear some animals philosophizing in the
background…)
Show Notes.
Liza Blake is on Twitter. You can find out
more about her academic work on her faculty
page.
Her critical edition of Margaret Cavendish’s first book, Poems and
Fancies.
Cavendish poems mentioned in this episode:
A World in an
Earring
Of Sense and Reason Exercised in Their Different
Shapes
It Is Hard to Believe that There are Other Worlds in This
World
Of the Knowledge of
Beasts; of
Fishes; of
Birds
Virginia Woolf on Margaret
Cavendish.
Lara Dodds wrote
thoughtfully about Cavendish’s “bad
writing”.
Prince Rupert’s drops
are pretty neat.
Robert Hooke: Micrographia (and
its
flea).
Margaret Cavendish: Sociable Letters and
Philosophical Letters.
Henry More.
John Wilkins: The Discovery of a World in the
Moone.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon to make
our world a little more blazing.
...more
48min
October 19, 2019 18. The Blazing World.
The Duchess’s Soul [...] left her Ærial Vehicle, and entered into her Lord.
The Empress’s Soul perceiving this, did the like: And then the Duke had three
Souls in one body; and had there been some such Souls more, the Duke would
have been like the Grand-Signior in his Seraglio, only it would have been a
Platonick Seraglio. But the Duke’s Soul [...] afforded such delight and
pleasure to the Empress’s Soul by his conversation, that these two souls
became enamoured of each other; which the Duchess’s soul perceiving, grew
jealous at first, but then considering that no Adultery could be committed
amongst Platonick Lovers [...] cast forth of her mind that Idea of Jealousie.
Then the Conversation of these three souls was so pleasant, that it cannot be
expressed.
The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World,
more commonly known as simply The Blazing
World, is a philosophical flight of fancy by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastle. This book was first published in 1666, and is often considered a
piece of proto–science-fiction. It tells the story of a woman who is
transported to another world, a marvellous world, which she is almost
immediately made empress of. Part philosophical treatise, part power fantasy,
and part exploration of the joys of “Platonick” love between women, The
Blazing World is an encomium to our powers of invention and creation. And it
is a very, very, very weird book.
Show Notes.
The Blazing World. [Project
Gutenberg. 1668 edition at
Archive.org.
Librivox.
Bookshop.]
Margaret Cavendish: Observations upon Experimental
Philosophy. [Or at
EEBO.]
Our episode on Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of
Ladies.
The Kabbalah.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
Mary Sue.
With “Muñoz” we’re referring to José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising
Utopia (and the conversations that followed it).
Our episode on Plato’s Symposium.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari: Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval
Allegory.
Virginia Woolf wrote (famously, but uncharitably) about Margaret
Cavendish.
Our next book: Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon, please,
if you can, and help us make the show!
...more
54min
October 02, 2019 17. Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
He kept up the fire with dry grass and a good supply of firewood, tending it
day and night because it seemed such a wonderful thing. He liked it best at
night when it took the place of the sun, giving warmth and light. It meant so
much to him he fell in love with it and was convinced that of all the things
he had, this was the best. Seeing how it always moved upwards, as though
trying to rise, he supposed it must be one of those jewel-substances he saw
shining in the sky.
Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan
(sometimes translated as “Alive, son of Awake”—though the title is the main
character’s name) is a curious philosophical thought experiment from twelfth-century al-Andalus (which is today southern Spain). Hayy grows up on a
paradisiacal island where he is the only human, and through his increasing
powers of observation and rational thinking he manages to reinvent both
philosophy and religion. Chris and Suzanne explore this tantalizing, almost
science-fictional work, talk about how it places Hayy in relation to animals,
stars, and the divine, and ask what it tells us about the relationship of
philosophy and literature.
Content warning: violence towards animals.
Show Notes.
Ibn Tufayl: Hayy ibn Yaqzan, translated by Lenn
Evan Goodman. [Bookshop.]
Emily Wilson, who spoke with us about her translation of the
Odyssey, just won a MacArthur “Genius”
Award!
Andrew Marvell: On a Drop of
Dew.
The qissa (or “qissa qasira”, sometimes transliterated as kissa) is a term
used by some classical Arabic literary scholars that can translate very
loosely as “short story”.
Our episode on Plato’s Symposium.
Our episode on Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.
Avicenna [Ibn Sina]: The Canon of
Medicine.
Bernardus Silvestris:
Cosmographia.
David Markson: Wittgenstein’s Mistress.
Christine Brooke-Rose: Subscript.
The History of Philosophy without Any Gaps on Ibn
Tufayl.
An overview of Hayy ibn Yaqzan by Marwa Elshakry and Murad
Idris.
Murad Idris: Producing Islamic philosophy: The life and afterlives of Ibn
Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan in global history, 1882–1947.
Murad Idris recently gave a talk about politics in Hayy ibn
Yaqzan, a transcription of which should soon
be made available.
Next episode: Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World
[Gutenberg,
Librivox].
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and join
us on a members-only Slack.
...more
1h
September 16, 2019 16b. Bonus: Michael Collins on Middlemarch.
Middlemarch is not necessarily interested in epistemology, but it absolutely
is interested in the difference between objectively knowing a thing to be true
and feeling the truth. And for most people the truth does not enter into their
being until they have felt it.
As a bonus to our episode on
Middlemarch, we invited writer,
podcaster, and personal trainer Michael Collins
to join us to talk about his favourite book. We discuss what keeps drawing him
back to the novel—and which parts can be difficult to reread. We also finally
get to talk about the opinionated narrator of the novel, as well as the
striking life of its author, George Eliot.
Show Notes.
Michael Collins is on Twitter, and hosts the
podcasts This Is Your Mixtape and Dear
Reader. Some of his writings can be found on
Medium.
The episodes of This Is Your Mixtape with
Chris and
Suzanne.
Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love.
George Eliot: Silly Novels by Lady
Novelists.
Virginia Woolf: George
Eliot.
For more information about the life of George Eliot, read Rebecca Mead’s My
Life in Middlemarch, or watch a
talk that Mead gave while
writing the book.
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and help
support our show. Thanks!
...more
47min

FAQs about The Spouter-Inn:

How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 114 episodes available.