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 116 episodes available.

The Spouter-Inn episodes:

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
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

FAQs about The Spouter-Inn:

How many episodes does The Spouter-Inn have?

The podcast currently has 116 episodes available.

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