Recall This Book

Since the original airing of this episode in June 2021, Roger Reeves' second book Best Barbarian was published by W. W. Norton, and the paperback edition of David Ferry's translation of The Aeneid was published by the University of Chicago Press.The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way.In conversation with Elizabeth for this episode of Recall this Book, originally broadcast back in 2021, poets Roger Reeves and David Ferry join the procession through the underworld, each one leading the other. They talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?”Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die.Mentioned in this episode David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric , Harvard University Press. Read transcript of the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration.He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old purple RtB studio. During the conversation, Rajiv read and in one case sang poems from his wonderful recent books, Cutlish and Antiman.Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this rebroadcast, John and Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (an occasional host and perennial friend of Recall this Book) speak with Madeline Miller, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Circe. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth and John talk about fantasy's power of world-making with Edinburgh professor Anna Vaninskaya, author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 ( 2010) and Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien ( 2020). Anna uncovers the melancholy sense of displacement and loss running through Tolkien, and links his notion of "subcreation" to an often concealed theological vision. Not allegory but "application" is praised as a way of reading fantasy.John asks about hopeful visions of the radical politics of fantasy (Le Guin, but also Graeber and Wengrow's recent work); Elizabeth stresses that fantasy's appeal is at once childish and childlike. E. Nesbit surfaces, as she tends to in RtB conversations. The question of film TV and other visual modes comes up: is textual fantasy on the way out?Mentioned in the Episode: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. In "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" Ursula Le Guin perhaps surprisingly praises the otherworldly prose style of Anna's beloved E. R. Eddison, best known for The Worm Ouroboros (1922) J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories" E. Nesbit The Phoenix and the Carpet Lord Dunsany, King of Elfland's Daughter Ursula Le Guin The Books of Earthsea Recallable Books: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin (and read this lovely Ivan Kreilkamp article on her earlier strange great Lolly Willowes) Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season Read transcript hereElizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth talk cultural renewal with Christina Thompson in this rebroadcast of a 2019 Recall this Book conversation. Her Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia both relates the history of Polynesia, and explores how histories of Polynesia are constructed.The discussion considers various moments of cultural contact between Polynesian and European thinkers and doers. Those range from the chart Tupaia drew for Captain Cook during the “first contact” era (above) to the moment ijn 1976 when the Hokule’a‘s traveled from Hawaii to Tahiti in a triumphant reconstruction of ancient Polynesian wayfinding. Thompson has fascinating thoughts on how the work of David Lewis, Brian Finney and the Bishop Planetarium served as invaluable background to the navigational achievements of Mau Pialug and Nainoa Thompson.The conversation then turns to Epeli Hau’ofa’s influential article, “Our Sea of Islands,” and the conditions that arise to separate islands–water, language, or national boundaries. Can these conditions also serve to draw islands together? The discussion turns to the much-celebrated voyage of the Hokule’a, revivals of Polynesian tattooing practice, hula dancing, and oh yes, Moana.Planetarium at the Bishop MusuemFinally, in Recallable Books, Christina recommends Nancy D. Munn’s The Fame of Gawa as a book that takes seriously the theories of value developed within Gawan community; Elizabeth recommends Sam Low’s documentary text Hawaiki Rising; and John, thinking archipelagically, recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels.Christina Thompson (not in our studio)Mentioned in this episode: Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia and Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, Christina Thompson “Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific,” Andrew Sharp We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, David Lewis “Our Sea of Islands,” Epeli Hau’ofa Moana, dir. Ron Clements and John Cusker The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society, Nancy D. Munn Hawaiki Rising, Sam Low The Books of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin Read transcript hereElizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and new Brandeis host Jerome Tharaud (author of Apocalyptic Geographies) learn exactly how the growth of America's public universities relied on shameful seizures of Native American land. Working with Tristan Athone --editor of Grist and a member of the Kiowa Tribe--historian Robert Lee wrote a stunning series of pieces that reveal how many public land-grant universities were fundamentally financed and sustained by a long-lasting settle-colonial "land grab." Their meticulous work paints an unusually detailed picture of how most highly praised institutions of higher education in America (Cornell, MIT, UC Berkeley and virtually all of the great Midwestern public universities) were initially launched and sometimes later sustained by a flood of cash deriving directly or indirectly from that stolen and seized land.Jerome and John discuss with Lee issues that are covered in the initial article in High Country News, a dedicated website with a better version of this fantastic map, a follow-up article tracing land that was never sold, and a scholarly forum that followed from their findings.The Morrill Act (1862, right in the middle of the Civil War, and that is no coincidence). Its author Justin Morrill, a Vermont Senator, argued the land-grants were a payback for the East's investment in opening the West. The West was "a plundered province" wrote Bernard de Voto (Harpers, August 1934). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This conversation, first aired in July 2021, features Brandeis poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014).Sean reads his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged and delicate documents, unfolds his ideas about birds, borders, houses and “who was here before me.”Mentioned in This Episode:C.S. Giscombe, Into and Out of DislocationC.S. Giscombe, Giscome RoadLorine Neidecker, Lake SuperiorItalo Calvino, Invisible CitiesAnne Carson, PlainwaterWilliam Vollmann, The Ice-ShirtListen and Read:Read transcript here: Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth had the marvelous fortune to talk with George Kalogeris about his new book Winthropos (LSU Press, 2021). The title comes from the "Greek-ified" name that George's father gave to their town, Winthrop, MA. George's poems are soaked in memories and tacit, deep affection, communicated through the language of the lines and especially through certain Janus-faced words that reflect the old country and the new at once.George reads and discusses three poems from his new book in the course of the conversation. If you want to read along as you listen to him, click here. You can read a transcript of the interview here.Upcoming episodes: As you know, we always have a new episode for your delectation on the first Thursday of the month, and on the second Thursday an essay by a young scholar connected to the episode. Following on the success of our November reissue of a 2019 conversation with Martin Puchner, we are dedicating the third week of the month to an "archival treasure." So on February 17th, we think you'll be pleased with an older poetical conversation, also starring Elizabeth.In March, a change of pace: we tackle the legacy of settler colonialism in "land grant" universities with a scholar who has been documenting the ways that stolen Native land funded the growth of America's higher education complex.Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crossover Month at Recall this Book ends with a glance sideways at the doings of our pals Saronik and Kim, hosts of the delightfully lapidary podcast High Theory. Refresh your sense of them with Recall this Book 52: they joined John to showcase their distinctive approach, taking as their topic "the pastoral." Or, just click Play without further ado to hear their thoughts on teletherapy, a concept that proves far more familiar, and omnipresent than we at RtB had realized. Take those omnipresent signs for the Suicide Hotline, for starters....In this 18-minute gem of an episode, Hannah Zeavin talks with HT about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. This mediated practice is the topic of her new book The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021). You can learn more about Hannah’s research and teaching on her website: zeavin.orgRead the transcript here.Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more.It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present.Mentioned in the Episode James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charley, The Fire Next Time Richard Wright, Native Son Johnny Pitts, Afropean Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark J. M. Coetzee, “What We like to Forget” (On Caryl Phillips) Graham Greene (e.g Brighton Rock and The Quiet American) wrote in “The Lost Childhood” (1951) that at age 14 ” I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf…From that moment I began to write.” Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom Read a transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices