『Recall This Book』のカバーアート

Recall This Book

Recall This Book

著者： Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
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 Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz アート 世界 文学史・文学批評 社会科学
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  • 158 RTB Ben Fountain in Dark Times (JP)

    158 RTB Ben Fountain in Dark Times (JP)
    2025/10/16
    Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie. Back in 2020's lockdown, RTB asked Fountain what was consoling and engaging him. American novels, especially those about Americans abroad (Joan Didion. say) have always done something special for him. Marilynne Robinson’s and James Baldwin’s work make us confront the reality that’s happening around us all the time, “a freaking massacre.” He carried the the (fictional but genuine) facts of Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk in his head for forty years. Allen Tate, Fugitive poet (and author most famously of the tricky post-Eliotic 1928 “Ode to the Confederate Dead“) Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996; “a masterpiece of tone and mood and character and profound interiority”; the movie, not so much) Joan Didion, Democracy (1984; she goes “straight after the heart of that mystery, what is America?“) Marilynne Robinson. Listeners, do you prefer her incisive nonfiction (“Poetry of Puritanism“) or the deep, torqued interiority of her first novel, Housekeeping ? Zadie Smith on the amazing, terrifying Americanness of Kara Walker Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety” (also referenced in our Silvia Bottinelli episode on food art!) James Baldwin, A Letter to My Nephew (1962) James Baldwin, e.g. If Beale Street Could Talk (Ben loves those Library of America volumes…) Another Country (1962) Giovanni’s Room (1956) Sewanee Review, The Corona Correspondence Chronicles of Now George Saunders “A Letter to My Students…." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    25 分
  • 157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)

    157 Mangrum's Comical Computation (JP)
    2025/10/02
    When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford UP, 2025), which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedy has provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them "collective repertoires") for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.John's interest in Menippean satire within science fiction leads him to ask about about the sliding meanings of comedy and its pachinko machine capacity; he loves the way Ben uses the word and concept of doubling,; Ben explains how the computer may either queer (in an antisocial way) or get assimilated into romantic heteronormative pairings. John asks about Donna Haraway’s 1985 A Cyborg Manifesto and teh way it denaturalizes gender roles and the way new technological affordances (from the Acheulean axe that Malafouris discusses to the Apple watch) redefine human roles. Ben delves into the minstrelsy pre-history of the photo-robots going as far back as the late 19th century. They unpack the distinctively American Leo Marxian optimism of The Machine in the Garden (1964) that spreads back as far as the proto-robots like The Steam Man of the Prairies(1868) and good old Tik-Tok in the Wizard of Oz novels. John asks about double-edged nature of Ben’s claim that comic “genericity provides forms for making a computationally mediated social world seem more habitable, even as it also provides Is for criticizing and objecting to that world." First you get description says Ben--and then sometimes critique. John asks about the iterability of the new: how much of what seems new actually New New (in the sense of that great 1999 Michael Lewis book, The New New Thing)? Mentioned in the episode: The Desk Set a play William Marchand and a movie starring Katherine Hepburn. How might a computer be incorporated into the sociability of a couple? Her (Spike Jonze,, 2013) computer meets human makes the rom-com into a coupling machine. WarGames (1983( ends with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy (not Ione Skye—silly John!) paired. But also with Broderick and the formerly deadly computer settling down to “how about a nice game of chess”? Black Mirror as the 2020’s version of the same dark satire as the 1950’s Twilight Zone. John asks about Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad, and the comic coupling of Kirk and Spock and the death-as-computer comedy of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964). Dave Eggers: the joke structure as critique in The Circle and The Every. John Saybrook wrote in the New Yorker about an eye-opening conversation with Bill Gates in 1994. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's Seven Beauties of Science Fiction on the “fictionalization of everyday life" Recallable Books: Elif Batuman The Idiot (2017) Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark (2000) Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends (2017) Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    46 分
  • 156 Recall This B-Side #1: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”

    156 Recall This B-Side #1: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
    2025/09/18
    RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon). Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart will have you thinking again. Merve Emre, Ginzburg fan and B-Side author Merve started her piece, and we started this 2023 conversation, by asking that age-old question: “When should a woman kill her husband?” Mentioned in This Episode J. W. Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading” Natalia Ginzburg. The Little Virtues (personal essays that do not stage an excessive evacuation of the self, but instead triangulate between reader, writer and object of concern…) Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives Rachel Ingals Mrs. Caliban (1982) Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    16 分
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