The Spouter-Inn; or, A Conversation with Great Books: Recent Episodes
Suzanne and Chris @ Megaphonic.fm
Her voice was sweet and liquid, like a stream
That lulls all other streams to sleep and dream;
Her eyes like doe’s eyes, whose dark gaze would make
A lion lie down dazed, and half awake.
She seemed an alphabet of loveliness,
Curved letters were the curling of each tress,
Straight letters were her stature, and her lips
Were like a letter formed as an ellipse,
And all the letters made her like that bowl
That shows the world as an enchanted whole.
The story of Layli and Manjun — sometimes written as Layla and Majnun — was most famously recorded in a book-length poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Chris and Suzanne consider what the poem has to say about love, mental illness, and fan culture.
SHOW NOTES.
Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun, trans. Dick Davis. [Bookshop.]
Our episode on Conference of the Birds.
Maria Rosa Menocal: Shards of Love: Exile and the Origin of the Lyric.
Our episode on Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus.
Manuscript images of Layli and Majnun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
And images of Majnun at the Ka’aba with a door knocker: 1, 2.
Our episode on Blind Owl.
The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit.
Next: Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. (Bookshop. Also a helpful online modernized and annotated version.)
You can support us through our network, Megaphonic, on Patreon.
Language is so personal and internal. It exists in your head. You can close your eyes and plug your ears and not engage with the outside world at all, and yet you still have language going on. So I think one of the things that attracts people to [etymology] is, it’s discussing something that they feel they have a part in.
Mark Sundaram is a medievalist and linguist who specializes in the history of the English language. He’s the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot and the main force behind the Alliterative YouTube channel. Mark has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at Laurentian University.
Aven McMasteris a Classicist who studies Latin poetry and Roman social history. She is the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot Podcast and does production work on the Alliterative channel videos. Aven has a PhD in Classics from the University of Toronto and taught at Thorneloe University at Laurentian.
They join Chris and Suzanne to talk all about etymologies, dictionaries, and etymological dictionaries. What pleasures are found in reading the dictionary? Why are some people so compelled by etymologies? How do etymologies and puns inform classical poetry?
SHOW NOTES.
The Endless Knot on Twitter.
John Ayto: Dictionary of Word Origins.
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.
Paul Anthony Jones (Haggard Hawks on Twitter): Why Is This A Question?
On Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.
Ernest Weekley: The Romance of Words.
Alliterative’s video on nation.
The etymology of feisty.
Ernest Klein: A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.
Anatoly Liberman: Word Origins and How We Know Them.
The Oxford Etymologist.
Calvert Watkins: The American Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
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The word “amicus” — meaning “friend” — comes from a derivation, as if it were “animi custos”, or “guardian of the soul”. And this is well put! The term for someone tormented by carnal desire is “amator turpitudinis”, a lover of wickedness. But “friend”, “amicus”, is from the word “hamus”, a hook — in other words, the chain of charity, since hooks hold on.
The Etymologies, by the seventh-century polymath and theologian Isidore of Seville, is a massive medieval encyclopedia, with sections devoted to topics from grammar to farming, mathematics to war. And throughout the book, Isidore attempts to understand the world through etymology—that is, by poking and prodding at words until they reveal their histories and the other words that they’re made of. Chris and Suzanne revel in Isidore’s ear for the materiality of language, as well as his encyclopedic impulse to gather and organize everything.
SHOW NOTES.
Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.] [The text in Latin.]
The only other book by Isidore available in English translation seems to be On the Nature of Things.
Our episodes on the Hereford Mappa Mundi, The Aeneid, Beyond a Boundary, Gertrude Stein, and Georges Perec.
Petrus Riga’s Aurora does not seem to be available in English translation.
The Latin text of the opening quote:
Amicus, per derivationem, quasi animi custos. Dictus autem proprie: amator turpitudinis, quia amore torquetur libidinis: amicus ab hamo, id est, a catena caritatis; unde et hami quod teneant.
Suzanne wrote about encyclopedism (and Moby-Dick, naturally) for LitHub.
The Glossa Ordinaria.
The First Grammatical Treatise.
Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.
Next: Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun. [Bookshop.]
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“Now I know,” she said, “that other, more serious cause of your sickness: you have forgotten what you are. So I really understand why you are ill and how to cure you. For because you are wandering, forgetful of your true self, you grieve that you are an exile and stripped of your goods; since indeed you do not know the goal and end of all things, you think that evil and wicked men are fortunate and powerful; since indeed you have forgotten what sort of governance the world is guided by, you think these fluctuations of fortune uncontrolled. All these are quite enough to cause not merely sickness but even death. But I thank the author of all health that you have not yet wholly lost your true nature.”
The Consolation of Philosophy by the sixth-century Roman author Boethius has a little of everything: poetry and prose, autobiography and philosophy; bright and lively writing and… maybe some boring bits, especially in the last two sections. But it was written by a man who found himself thrown in jail and condemned to death; who can blame him for trying to use philosophy—or, a dialogue with the personification of Philosophy herself—to make sense of his life? Chris and Suzanne discuss how this complex poem intersects with a lot of other literary works, and argue about the uneasy marriage of philosophy and poetry.
SHOW NOTES.
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy. [Bookshop.]
Our episodes on The Symposium, Augustine’s Confessions, The Book of the City of Ladies, Paradiso, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
The Wikipedia page for The Consolation of Philosophy has a nice medieval depiction of Fortune’s wheel.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo. (The original German text. See also Mark Doty talking about this poem.)
Next: Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and our network on Patreon — it helps us make the show, and it gives you access to our friendly Discord!
I come to my garden, my sister, my bride;
I gather my myrrh with my spice,
I eat my honeycomb with my honey,
I drink my wine with my milk.
Eat, friends, drink,
And be drunk with love.
The Song of Songs is a work of lyric poetry which is notably and undeniably erotic in focus. And yet it has also been a key religious text within both Judaism and Christianity, and has been read and commented upon for thousands of years within those contexts. Chris and Suzanne read this poetry both within and without these traditions of interpretations — and also luxuriate in its intensity (and spiciness).
SHOW NOTES.
The Song of Songs is part of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible, and is available in many translations. Chris was primarily looking at the Jewish Publication Society translation; Suzanne at the Revised Standard Version.
Our episodes on Walt Whitman, the allegorical Conference of the Birds, and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
Bernard of Clairvaux: Commentary on the Song of Songs.
Alain of Lille’s commentary, Elucidatio in Cantica Canticorum, doesn’t seem to be easily available in English, but here’s the Latin.
Rupert of Deutz’s Commentaria in Cantica Canticorum also doesn’t seem to have been translated into English.
Next: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.
are you mockers of me
you grabbing old men
are you laughers at me
though I’m not yet gone
O springs of the rivers of Thebes
O reaches of the plains of Thebes
bear me witness
no one sheds a tear for me
as I go to my strange new grave
no one knows what kind of laws they are that sentence me
nor what kind of tomb it is I go to
I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I
not at home with the dead nor with the living
Sophocles’s play Antigone asks many questions about our relationship to the law, to the state, to our families, and to the dead. The new king in town, Creon, wants his nephew Polynices’s body to go unburied, as he died an enemy of the state. Polynices’s sister Antigone says she will bury the body herself, because that is the right and necessary thing to do. Things escalate.
Chris and Suzanne revisit this work and its world—how it depicts the gods and the dead, and how we might read the struggles of a king trying to rule and a young woman trying to do right by her brother. They also explore two different translations by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.
SHOW NOTES.
Next: Sophocles: Antigone. [Bookshop.]
Anne Carson: Antigonick and its less fancy edition.
Also by Anne Carson: Autobiography of Red; Nox; Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides; and many more.
Elizabeth Wyckloff’s translation of Antigone.
Euripides: Hippolytus, translated by Sean Gurd, recreates the Greek (lack of) punctuation.
Our episode on the Iliad.
And our episode on To the Lighthouse.
Walter Benjamin: The Task of the Translator.
Will Aitken: Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove, and the Art of Resistance.
Next: Song of Songs.
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‘My friend, whom I loved so dear,
who with me went through every danger,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved so dear,
who with me went through every danger:
‘the doom of mortals overtook him.
Six days I wept for him and seven nights.
I did not surrender his body for burial,
until a maggot dropped from his nostril.
‘Then I was afraid that I too would die,
I grew fearful of death, and so wander the wild.
‘What became of my friend was too much to bear,
so on a far road I wander the wild;
what became of my friend Enkidu was too much to bear,]
so on a far path I wander the wild.
‘How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
my friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay.
Shall I not be like him and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?’
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a very old poem. The Standard Babylonian version of it was redacted over three thousand years ago by an editor and poet named Sîn-lēqi-unninni, but much of the material he compiled was even older than that. The poem describes Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, two-thirds divine and one-third human, who is so superior to everyone else that the gods must create a companion for him. That companion is Enkidu, a bestial man who must be carefully brought into civilization. Their relationship — and the questions that arise after the gods condemn Enkidu to an early death — are still compelling several thousand years later. Chris and Suzanne explore this fragmentary monument of ancient literature, and think about what choices a translator (and a reader!) have to make when engaging with it.
SHOW NOTES.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, as translated by Andrew George, N.K. Sandars, Sophus Helle, and David Ferry. [Many others are available!]
Our episode on The Iliad.
On cuneiform writing.
In a very different context, Chris has talked about Gilgamesh on a podcast before.
Michael Schmidt: Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem, an accessible book-length overview of the poem.
Next: Sophocles: Antigone. [Bookshop.]
And our 2023 reading list, if you want to read ahead! (Some books may change. We are fickle.)
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In classical narrative poetry, there’s these formulaic repetitions that come up, right? And then we have these very weird formulaic repetitions that come up in Blind Owl. And I think the function is completely the opposite in the classical works and in this modern work. [In classical poetic narratives, repetitions] keep the reader kind of grounded. It’s that same familiar signpost that keeps you on the right track. When we get to Blind Owl, when we get these very odd repetitions … it unhinges the reader, right? It makes you feel like you’re in some weird dream and you can’t get up.
Sassan Tabatabai is a poet, translator, and scholar of Medieval Persian literature. He is Master Lecturer in World Languages and Literatures and the Core Curriculum, and Coordinator of the Persian Language Program at Boston University. His translations of Persian poetry have appeared in numerous journals, and he is the author of Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry, Sufi Haiku, and Uzunburun: Poems. He is also the translator of the novel Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, published by Penguin Classics. His forthcoming books, both scheduled for release in spring 2023 are Ferry to Malta: Poems and Translations, and a Persian translation of the poetry of David Ferry.
He joins Suzanne and Chris to talk about the challenges in translating prose and poetry, and to further explore the influences and the intricacies of Sadeq Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl.
SHOW NOTES.
Sassan Tabatabai on Twitter.
Sassan Tabatabai’s books and translations: Blind Owl. Father of Persian Verse: Rudaki and His Poetry. Sufi Haiku. Uzunburun: Poems. Also some translations of Rumi.
Our episodes on Blind Owl, The Conference of the Birds, and Frankenstein.
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I had thought about death and the decomposition of all the particles in my body many times—to the extent that it didn’t frighten me—in fact, my true wish was to be completely annihilated. The only thing that frightened me was that the atoms in my body would mix with the atoms in the bodies of the vulgar. This was an insufferable thought. Sometimes I wished that after death I would have long arms and extended fingers with which I could gather all my own atoms and hold them with both hands so that the atoms that belong to me would not enter the bodies of the vulgar.
Sadeq Hedayat’s novel Blind Owl is brief, curious, and often disquieting. It tells the tale of a man who paints pen-case covers, who paints the same image again and again—and old man sitting beneath a cypress tree, an alluring young woman offering him a water lily, a stream running between them. And he is haunted by this image, and especially by the woman in this image—who may also be his wife, his cousin, his mother? The setting of the novel keeps shifting, the props in the novel keep reappearing, and the characters all seem like hazy echoes of the two figures in the painting. Chris and Suzanne try to stay grounded as they discuss this marvellous gem of Iranian modernism.
Content warning: The book contains some potentially disturbing imagery, and so does our discussion.
Thank you to Michael Collins for helping us edit this episode.
SHOW NOTES.
Next: Sadeq Hedayat: Blind Owl. [Bookshop.] (We read the translation by Sassan Tabatabai.)
Not enough of Hedayat’s other work is available in English, but see also Three Drops of Blood (a collection of short stories) and The Fable of Creation (a play).
Previous episodes that we mention: Invisible Man. Persepolis. Symposium. Paradiso. Frankenstein.
An example of a nineteenth-century painted pen case from Iran.
Lingam puja.
Edgar Allan Poe: Berenice.
Junji Ito: Frankenstein and The Enigma of Amigara Fault.
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I know the rest of the night will be as devoted to work as love as I’m now resting in this expensive sentence and in the end I’ll spend it fast writing to you anyway, addressing you and a solution or night beginning like a letter, just a few words more freely seeing everything more clearly than the rest of life and love tends to be like windows facing mostly south but surrounding us, I’m thinking of you.
Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day is a book-length poem entirely written on December 22, 1978. It documents her day—early morning dreams, midday chores with her toddlers, late night all-night writing sessions with her partner—in a panoply of poetic modes. Chris and Suzanne read the poem alongside some of the other books they’ve read this year, and consider Mayer’s works and days.
SHOW NOTES.
Bernadette Mayer: Midwinter Day. [Bookshop.]
Other books by Bernadette Mayer: Memory. Studying Hunger Journals. Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. Sonnets. A Bernadette Mayer Reader. The Helens of Troy, NY. Milkweed Smithereens. 0 to 9: The Complete Magazine, 1967–1969.
Bernadette Mayer’s pages at the Poetry Foundation and PennSound.
Some of her early works can be found at Eclipse.
Obituaries in the New York Times and Artforum.
Our episodes on Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, the Metaphysical Poets, the Iliad, and The Waste Land.
Catullus.
Geoffrey Chaucer: The House of Fame.
Ted and Alice are Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley.
John Donne: A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.
Sonnet [You jerk you didn’t call me up].
Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments.
Next: Sadeq Hedayat: Blind Owl. [Bookshop.]
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Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is a monument of modernist poetry built out of fragments. But the poem also turned 100 in 2022, and so Chris and Suzanne wonder: What does it mean to read this poem today? What still delights us, and what frustrates us? And what are the various languages, dialects, and registers all doing in this poem, rubbing up against each other like that?
SHOW NOTES.
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land. (And Eliot’s endnotes, usually published alongside the poem.)
Also a new edition of a facsimile of the original drafts of The Waste Land, with Ezra Pound’s notes, was published for the centenary.
And you can listen to Eliot reading the poem.
Other works by Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Hollow Men. Four Quartets. Murder in the Cathedral. The Cocktail Party.
Support us on Patreon and hear Chris and other Megaphonic hosts talking about the 1965 epic The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Jessie Weston.
The Beatles: Revolution 9.
Our episode on Ulysses.
Rothenberg & Joris, eds.: Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1.
Some books that have been published for the centenary:
Matthew Hollis: The Waste Land: A Biography of the Poem.
Jed Rasula: What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern.
Robert Crawford: Eliot After The Waste Land.
Next: Bernadette Mayer: Midwinter Day. [Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly little Discord.
Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother’s knees, when their mothers had time to tell them…. How women, in the long ago time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships—a fantasy world for these girlchildren, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and dragons—how women, even then, had begun the first slow gropings toward a language of their own.
The tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail; and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings. A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before. … [Encodings were] precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse. … “A woman who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women are in her debt forevermore.”
Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue is a feminist science-fiction novel first published in 1984. The future it describes features an America in which women are considered biologically (and thus legally) inferior to men. But it’s also taking place in a time when humans are in contact with aliens, and only a handful of families have the ability to communicate in their alien languages. And the women of these linguist families are constructing a language that should make it easier for women to express their thoughts—which in turn will have powerful political implications. Suzanne and Chris explore the tremendous world-building of this novel.
Thank you to Michael Collins for helping to edit this episode.
SHOW NOTES.
Suzette Haden Elgin: Native Tongue. [Bookshop.]
Other words by Elgin: Judas Rose. Earthsong. The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defence. A Third Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan.
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association.
The homepage for Láadan.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
An article on Láadan and emotional labour.
Another article on Elgin’s influence.
Diane Wilson: The Seed Keeper.
Next: T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land.
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The Two Towers’ landscape passages… a lot of the book is from Sam’s POV, and he’s the gardener, and Ithilien is packed with flower names in a way that not even the Shire is when he’s not the viewpoint character. So there’s so much lore that he clearly is collecting as he goes. Which I think is so beautiful.
Jared Pechaček is a writer and artist whose recent work includes illustrating the acclaimed horror novel Red X by David Demchuk. He’s also one of the hosts of By-The-Bywater, a podcast here on the Megaphonic network that’s about all things Tolkien. He lives in Seattle, where he can generally be found either tweeting about fashion or drifting over the beach at low tide.
Jared joins Chris and Suzanne for a wide-ranging discussion on The Two Towers, including a look at the characters of Sam and Frodo, a reading of the landscape of Ithilien, and a sampling of rabbit stew.
SHOW NOTES.
Follow Jared on Twitter or Patreon, or listen to him on By-The-Bywater.
By-The-Bywater episodes on food, the Ents, and Orcs.
Jared made rabbit stew for a Kitchen Party livestream (which happens occasionally on the Megaphonic twitch channel).
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon.
“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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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.]
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—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.]
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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.]
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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.
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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.]
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W.G. Sebald's curious book The Rings of Saturn.
Our cluster on Time begins with Augustine's Confessions.
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.]
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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.]
Support The Spouter-Inn and Megaphonic FM on Patreon.
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.]
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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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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.
Virginia Woolf’s genre-bending novel Orlando.
Daniel Heath Justice, author of the books "Badger" and "Raccoon", on animals in literature and in real life.
E.B. White’s children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web.
Medievalist and fanfiction scholar Anna Wilson puts Marian Engel's Bear in new contexts.
Marian Engel’s controversial but classic novel Bear.
Farid ud-Din Attar’s medieval poem The Conference of the Birds.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s collection of essays about botany and Indigenous knowledge.
Medievalist Nahir I. Otaño Gracia joins us to talk about Laxdæla Saga and other Icelandic sagas.
The medieval Icelandic Laxdæla Saga, also known as The Saga of the People of Laxárdalr.
Eli Clare’s memoir and call to activism, Exile and Pride.
Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 play about gay lives.
Luther Obrock, scholar of Sanskrit poetry, joins us to talk about the Mahabharata and read from the Bhagavad Gita.
The Mahabharata is an enormous Sanskrit epic of ancient India, which includes the Bhagavad Gita.
Samuel R. Delany's memoir/theoretical tract about sex and the city.
Shamma Boyarin, assistant professor at the University of Victoria, joins us to discuss Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina Clericalis.
Petrus Alphonsi’s twelfth-century collection of aphorisms and (often salacious) short stories.
Eden Robinson’s debut novel is a coming-of-age story that has elements of horror and magic realism, but is deeply rooted in the writer’s own Indigenous Haisla and Heiltsuk culture.
Karla Mallette, scholar of medieval Mediterranean literature, on Dante’s Purgatorio.
The second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Purgatorio.
George Perec's curious novel braids together a story of a sport-obsessed island with an autobiographical attempt to remember a childhood haunted by loss.
We’re joined by David Hadbawnik, poet, translator, and scholar, to talk about his exciting translation of the Aeneid.
The Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem about the founding of Rome, includes a long section where Aeneas and his men engage in sports at the beach. What’s that all about?
C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary is considered one of the great books of sports writing — but while it talks about cricket, it's also an autobiography, an analysis of colonialism, and an inquiry into aesthetics.
We check in with Carissa Harris, Alison Kinney, Simone de Rochefort, and Shamma Boyarin to ask how the months of social isolation and the recent activism against police violence are affecting them and their reading habits.
“I am alone in the world,” said the friendless girl. “I have nothing to look for but what my own labour can bring me; and while that little pink-faced chit Amelia, with not half my sense, has ten thousand pounds and an establishment secure, poor Rebecca (and my figure is far better than hers) has only herself and her own wits to trust to. Well, let us see if my wits cannot provide me with an honourable maintenance, and if some day or the other I cannot show Miss Amelia my real superiority over her. Not that I dislike poor Amelia: who can dislike such a harmless, good-natured creature?—only it will be a fine day when I can take my place above her in the world, as why, indeed, should I not?”
William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a massive novel that follows the lives of two women: Amelia Sedley, who is naive and sweet and devoted, and Becky Sharp, who is cunning and manipulative and beautiful. But novel’s subtitle is “A Novel without a Hero”, and Thackeray doesn’t paint either woman as entirely good or entirely evil. And as their fortunes rise and fall, they offer a glimpse into the mercurial, ambitious, and often cruel world of Vanity Fair, in which everyone scrambles for money, power, and status, and for what? It’s a world that the narrator lampoons mercilessly while also participating in fully, and Chris and Suzanne start to unpack it—and talk about whether they’re #TeamBecky or #TeamAmelia. (Oh, come on, you know the answer to that one.)
Show Notes.William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair. [Gutenberg. Librivox. Bookshop.]
Our episode on C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins.
John Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress.
Our episode on Little Women.
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.
Also by Thackeray: The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon [and its film adaptation] and The History of Henry Esmond.
Becky Sharp (1935).
Speaking of that spicy meal that Becky can’t handle…
How a recent ITV adaptation of Vanity Fair dealt with the book’s racism.
On Mira Nair’s recent adaptation of the book into a movie.
Next episode: C.L.R. James: Beyond a Boundary. [Bookshop.]
Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon, if you can.
Lee Maracle, author of Memory Serves, joins us to discuss Great Expectations (and much more).
Charles Dickens's Great Expectations is the tale of Philip Pirrip, better known as Pip, a young blacksmith’s apprentice who unexpectedly finds he has been given the means to become a gentleman of leisure.
Jess Henderson, contract faculty at University of Toronto, Missisauga, recently led a virtual reading group on Emma, so we asked her to join us to share some hot takes.
Jane Austen’s novel Emma is about a young woman of high social standing determined to use her powers of matchmaking to do a little good in the world.
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.
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of 100 short stories told during a plague.
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Professor of History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, on Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and modern Iran.
Marjane Satrapi's comics memoir Persepolis, about growing up in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.
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.
We talk with Lesley S. Curtis about Stella, Émeric Bergeaud’s allegory of the Haitian Revolution and the first Haitian novel.
Our cluster on Revolution(s) begins with C.L.R. James’s history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.
Memory Serves is a challenging and compelling collection of oratories by author, activist, and Elder of the Stó:lo Nation Lee Maracle.
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.
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.
Irina Dumitrescu is a professor of medieval literature at the University of Bonn, but she also has a secret life as a food essayist.
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.
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 a passionate amateur Hemingway enthusiast.
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.
Liza Blake, Margaret Cavendish scholar, joins us to give a bit more context to The Blazing World and its glittering glories.
The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, more commonly known simply as The Blazing World, is a philosophical flight of fancy by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.
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).
Writer, podcaster, and personal trainer Michael Collins joins us to talk about his favourite book, George Eliot's Middlemarch.
We begin our cluster on Philosophical novels with Middlemarch, George Eliot’s massive and masterful “study of provincial life”.
Emily Wilson, professor and translator of the Odyssey, joins us to discuss the art of translation.
We finish our water/ocean cluster with Homer's epic poem The Odyssey.
Professor Steve Mentz emerges from the Atlantic to discuss The Tempest, blue humanities, and what happens when you consider the ocean's perspective.
The Tempest is one of William Shakespeare’s last plays—and one of his most curious.
Our Water/Ocean cluster begins with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Medievalist and Moby-Dick fan Damian Fleming joins us to keep the conversation going about this great book.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a massive book. It’s a story about obsession, an encyclopedia of whale facts, and an unexpected love story. It’s also the source of the name of our podcast!
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley) emerges from a specific time and place and yet, despite feeling very much of that moment, still resonates with issues that American culture is dealing with today—and is still a powerfully written book.
Peter Coviello, author of Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, joins us to talk about Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass.
It’s Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday today! Suzanne and Chris are celebrating by rereading Leaves of Grass, the book of poetry that Whitman kept writing, revising, and expanding throughout his life. With its ecstatic rhythms, its vigorous celebration of the body and of freedom, and its dreams of collectivity through diversity, Whitman’s poetry can be compelling, even overwhelming. And even when the book doesn’t quite live up to our hopes and dreams, it offers a path beyond itself.
Sarah Chamberlain, host of the Canadian horror movie podcast A Part Of Our Scare-itage, joins us to talk about the many movie adaptations of Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a story that seems familiar to everyone—even people who haven’t read the novel (or seen any of the movie adaptations). But the novel fleshes out the story that everyone is familiar with (a scientist creates a creature out of dead parts, releasing a force of havoc and destruction upon the world) in a number of intriguing ways. Suzanne and Chris discuss how the novel tackles creation, parenting, corporeality, nature, and death—as well as how thoroughly it is connected to Paradise Lost, and why it has inspired so many adaptations.
Anthony Oliveira, host of The Devil’s Party, a podcast that has been slowly and lovingly working its way through Paradise Lost, joins us to talk about Milton's epic poem.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost offers fantastic poetry, and a deeply realized retelling of the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve’s fall from the Garden of Eden. But Chris and Suzanne still struggle with Milton’s personality and theology.
Dante’s Inferno, the first section of his Divine Comedy, is a medieval poem in which our author is given a guided tour of Hell.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (written by her partner Gertrude Stein) recounts the couple’s lives in early twentieth-century Paris among painters, writers, and composers—and, during the First World War, soldiers.
Suzanne and Chris look at Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women.
Timothy Perry, medieval manuscript and early book librarian at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, shows us a newly acquired medieval manuscript of Christine de Pizan's Book of Peace.
The Book of the City of Ladies, by Christine de Pizan, is a medieval feminist classic.
Suzanne and Chris discuss Ovid's Metamorphoses—and translation, lost language, the natural world, gender and sexuality, and medieval interpretations of these tales of transformations.
Suzanne and Chris begin their conversations about great books with a very big and very old one: Homer’s Iliad. This Ancient Greek poem about the Trojan War is, of course, widely known, but if you haven’t read it (or if you haven’t read it in a while), you might not remember how complex (and downright strange) it gets with its reflections on war and the fallout of war. They also talk about the joys of dipping in and out of books, rather than reading them from cover to cover.
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The Spouter-Inn
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Jan 18, 2019
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The Iliad.
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Feb 4, 2019
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The Symposium.
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Feb 19, 2019
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The Metamorphoses.
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Mar 5, 2019
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The Book of the City of Ladies.
- Mar 6, 2019
4b. Bonus: Timothy Perry on The Book of Peace. + Mar 19, 2019
- Little Women.
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Apr 4, 2019
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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
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Apr 18, 2019
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Inferno.
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May 3, 2019
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Paradise Lost.
- May 6, 2019
8b. Bonus: Anthony Oliveira on Paradise Lost. + May 23, 2019
- Frankenstein.
- May 27, 2019
9b. Bonus: Sarah Chamberlain on Frankenstein. + May 31, 2019
- Leaves of Grass.
- Jun 3, 2019
10b. Bonus: Peter Coviello on Leaves of Grass. + Jun 19, 2019
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
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Jul 4, 2019
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Moby-Dick.
- Jul 8, 2019
12b. Bonus: Damian Fleming on Moby-Dick. + Jul 18, 2019
- To the Lighthouse.
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Aug 9, 2019
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The Tempest.
- Aug 12, 2019
14b. Bonus: Steve Mentz on The Tempest. + Aug 23, 2019
- The Odyssey.
- Aug 26, 2019
15b. Bonus: Emily Wilson on the Odyssey. + Sep 13, 2019
- Middlemarch.
- Sep 16, 2019
16b. Bonus: Michael Collins on Middlemarch. + Oct 1, 2019
- Hayy ibn Yaqzan.
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Oct 18, 2019
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The Blazing World.
- Oct 21, 2019
18b. Bonus: Liza Blake on Margaret Cavendish. + Nov 1, 2019
- A Moveable Feast.
- Nov 4, 2019
19b. Bonus: Simone de Rochefort on Ernest Hemingway. + Nov 15, 2019
- How to Cook a Wolf.
- Nov 18, 2019
20b. Bonus: Irina Dumitrescu on Food Writing. + Nov 27, 2019
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
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Dec 19, 2019
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Beloved.
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Jan 22, 2020
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Memory Serves.
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Feb 14, 2020
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The Black Jacobins.
- Feb 21, 2020
24b. Bonus: Lesley S. Curtis on Stella. + Mar 2, 2020
- The Jungle.
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Mar 19, 2020
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Persepolis.
- Mar 27, 2020
26b. Bonus: Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi on Persepolis. + Apr 1, 2020
- The Decameron.
- Apr 3, 2020
27b. Bonus: Reading During Crisis. + Apr 25, 2020
- Emma.
- Apr 29, 2020
28b. Bonus: Jess Henderson on Emma. + May 11, 2020
- Great Expectations.
- May 18, 2020
29b. Bonus: Lee Maracle on Great Expectations. + Jun 1, 2020
- Vanity Fair.
- Jun 12, 2020
30b. Bonus: Reading During Crisis, Part Two. + Jun 23, 2020
- Beyond a Boundary.
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Jul 13, 2020
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The Aeneid.
- Jul 20, 2020
32b. Bonus: David Hadbawnik on the Aeneid. + Aug 4, 2020
- W, or the Memory of Childhood.
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Aug 31, 2020
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Purgatorio.
- Sep 8, 2020
34b. Bonus: Karla Mallette on Purgatorio. + Sep 21, 2020
- Monkey Beach.
- Sep 24, 2020
35b. Bonus: Loretta Todd on Monkey Beach. + Oct 20, 2020
- Disciplina Clericalis.
- Oct 27, 2020
36b. Bonus: Shamma Boyarin on the Disciplina Clericalis. + Nov 14, 2020
- Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.
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Dec 21, 2020
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Mahabharata.
- Dec 22, 2020
38b. Bonus: Luther Obrock on the Mahabharata. + Jan 2, 2021
- The Metaphysical Poets.
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Jan 14, 2021
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The Boys in the Band.
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Feb 7, 2021
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Exile and Pride.
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Mar 15, 2021
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Laxdæla Saga.
- Mar 24, 2021
42b. Bonus: Nahir Otaño Gracia on Laxdaela Saga. + Apr 5, 2021
- Braiding Sweetgrass.
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Apr 20, 2021
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The Fellowship of the Ring.
- Apr 30, 2021
44b. Bonus: Oriana Schwindt on The Fellowship of the Ring. + Jun 4, 2021
- The Conference of the Birds.
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Jun 16, 2021
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Bear.
- Jun 22, 2021
46b. Bonus: Anna Wilson on Bear. + Jul 6, 2021
- Charlotte’s Web.
- Jul 14, 2021
47b. Bonus: Daniel Heath Justice on Animals. + Aug 1, 2021
- Orlando.
- Oct 19, 2021
48b. Bonus: Melissa Moreton on Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads. + Nov 16, 2021
- Watchmen.
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Dec 24, 2021
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The Hereford Mappa Mundi.
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Jan 15, 2022
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I Am Woman.
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Feb 21, 2022
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Black Skin, White Masks.
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Mar 7, 2022
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Confessions.
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Apr 7, 2022
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The Rings of Saturn.
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Apr 30, 2022
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Paradiso.
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