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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
  • 155 Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)

    155 Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)
    2025/09/04
    An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lyndsey sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lyndsey and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lyndsey, not attentively enough. Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion. Mentioned in the episode: Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 one of the last great historical events in Arendt’s lifetime. Lyndsey praises “reading while walking” and the unpacking of the totalitarian in Anna Burns’s marvelous Norther Ireland novel, Milkman. Hannah Pitkin’s wonderful 1998 The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, emphasizes Arendt’s idea that although we are free, we can forfeit that freedom by assuming we are rule-bound. Arendt on the challenge of identity: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” The Holocaust is a crime agains humanity a crime against the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people".” Various books by Hannah Arendt come up: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (1963). Judgement in Arendt is crucial from earliest days studying Kant and in her final works (among The Life of the Mind) she speaks of the moments when "the mind goes visiting.” Her earliest ideas about love and natality are in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, not published in English until 1996). Hannah Arendt is buried at Bard, near her husband Heinrich Blucher and opposite Philip Roth, who reportedly wanted to capture some of the spillover Arendt traffic. James Baldwin's essay “The Fire Next Time” (1963) caused Arendt to write Baldwin about the difference between pariah love and the love of those in power, who think that love can justify lashing out with power. Recallable Books Lyndsey praises Leah Ypi's (Free) forthcoming memoir about her Albanian family, Indignity. John recalls E. M Forster, Howard’s End a novel that thinks philosophically (in a novelistic vein) about how to continue being an individual in a new Imperial Britain. Read transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 分
  • 154 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson

    154 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson
    2025/08/07
    With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.KSR, Stan to his friends, brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.” Mentioned in this episode: Pact for the FutureCOP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference)COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….)Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.)Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of CrowdsParis AgreementDon’t Look UpTobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely VoiceMary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) Listen and Read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    46 分
  • 153: What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)

    153: What Hannah Arendt Has to Teach Us about Anticipatory Despair (JP)
    2025/07/03
    John recently published “Lying in Politics: Hannah Arendt’s Antidote to Anticipatory Despair" in Public Books. It makes the case against anticipatory despair in the face of the Trump administration's relentless campaign of lies, half-lies, bluster, and bullshit by turning for inspiration to his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Half a century ago, in "Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers" (1971) she showed how expedient occasional lies spread to become omnipresent--not just in how America's campaigns in Vietnam were reported, but throughout Nixon-era governance. Recall this Book 153 is simply John reading the article aloud. It is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side) in soliloquy. Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off. Mentioned in the episode: M. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy Harry Frankfurt, "On Bullshit" Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    27 分
  • 152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)

    152 Why I Paneled: A Backwards Glance by Kristin Mahoney and Nasser Mufti (JP)
    2025/06/07
    In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists' prior expectations. The three discuss what it means to have an emergent and residual shticks; differences between how you prepare to talk to undergraduates and your peers matter, and the three agree that going in without any expectations of your audience makes for a weaker presentation. Imaginary interlocution makes for better pre-gaming. Kristin Mahoney 's books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti 's first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don't need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    42 分
  • 151 Why I Panel, Part One: Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti (JP)

    151 Why I Panel, Part One: Kristin Mahoney, Nasser Mufti (JP)
    2025/06/05
    Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up--we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why? To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the Spring 2025 Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference. Their discussion began with the idea that agreeing to give papers is an act of “externalized self-promising” and ranged across the reasons that floating ideas before our peers is terrifying, exhilarating and ultimately necessary. Kristin Mahoney's books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti 's first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. RTB listeners don't need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession. Mentioned in the episode Theosophical Society in Chennai Annie Besant Jiddu Krishnamurthi in his early life was a not-quite-orphan child guru for Besant. Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies on grand theorizations of race by folks like Acton C L R James Adorno’s Minima Moralia provides Nasser with an importantreminder of the importance of “hating tradition properly.” H G Wells, The Time Machine and its modernist aftermath eg in the opening pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and in Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors and The Good Soldier, which is in its own peculiar way a time-travel novel. The three discuss Foucault’s notion of capillarity a form of productive constraint, which Nasser uses to characterize both early 20th century Orientalism, and the paradigms of postcolonialism that replaced it, Paul Saint Amour’s chapter on Ford Madox Ford is in Tense Future. John Guillory on the distinctions between criticism and scholarship in Professing Criticism; the rhizomatic appeal of B-Side Books. The “hedgehog and the fox” as a distinction comes from a poem by Archilochus—and sparked Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay of the same name. Pamela Fletcher the Victorian Painting of Modern Life . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    31 分