Avsnitt
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David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his co-authored Social Problems article, “Contesting Commemorative Landscapes” which first got him thinking about monument removal, he posits that “expungement, amplification, and repositioning” are three ways contemporary communities contest the monuments of the past.. The conversation from there ranges onward through various kinds of contested removal, ending with Cesar Chavez and his ongoing de-monumentalization.
David is author of There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence and the award-winning Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK,, a member of the City of St. Louis Reparations Commission and recently has been engaged in exploring political signalling in public art and monuments, including a forthcoming article on the political and cultural work of murals in Protestant and Catholic communities and in the interface areas that connect them in Belfast. His earlier Recall This Book episodes include on racialized policing in the US, on January 6th , and also on the 2024 presidential election–and a conversation with Glenn Patterson, author of Lapsed Protestant about the mural culture and politicized spaces of Belfast and Northern Ireland.
Read the episode here.
Mentioned in the episode
By David Cunmningham himself: “What Richmond got Right about taking down Confederate Monuments” and a 2023 article coauthored with Christina Simko, “Montgomery’s Monumental Truths”
On place vs space there is wonderful work by Pierre Nora and Henri Lefebvre.
Interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman.
The lucid John Guillory article (mentioned but not discussed) is “Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities.”
Confederate generals whose statues were erected essentially to glorify the KKK famously include Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. Private parks built up to collect Confederate monuments (with an underlying anti-government bias) include North Carolina’s Valor Memorial Park, and in Texas the SS American Memorial Foundation’s military retreat space now adorned with removed Confederate statues. In Bentonville, this park glorifies a Confederate statue that has now been (dubiously) linked to Governor James H. Berry.
The MOCA/Brick reimagined MONUMENTS Exhibition includes work by Kara Walker and Bethany Collins.
https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm
Sylva North Carolina Confederate plaque debate.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant and the Nietzschean problem of “creative forgetting.”
The idea of Productive creative cognitive dissonance is drawn from MLK’s idea of “creative tension.”
Hajar Yazdiha, Struggle for the People’s King
How long will the Chavez National Monument last? The statue at UC Fresno is already gone…” Is The Trail of Tears a historical site the same way Confederate statues are?
Denmark Vescey’s Garden by Ethan J. Kytle and, Blain RobertsZore Neale Hurston Their Eyes were Watching God
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For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer.
Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.
Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration?
Mentioned in the episode:
Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here)
Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris
Brian Teare, Doomstead Days
Derek Walcott, “Omeros“
W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs”
Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“
Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field Guides)
Trixie Belden
Shel Silverstein
Lois Lowry, “The Giver“
Liz equates poetry and Tetris
Leanne Simpson, “This Accident of Being Lost“
Elizabeth Bradfield, “We all want to see a mammal“
Listen and Read Here:
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Permafrost melts, desert cities boil, inland lakes dry up; but Waltham too in its own way has become one of the dark places of the earth. Adverse manmade climate change is seeping into basements everywhere, and a wonderful new research project, “Building Collective Resilience via Collective Memory” (that website launches very soon) counts some of the ways.
John is joined by two Brandeis colleagues who spearheaded the project and supplied some of the local interviews that bring climate change dynamics vividly to life. Danielle Jacques is at work on a dissertation exploring the social and spatial dynamics of the renewable energy transition. Rachel McKane is Assistant Professor of Sociology with interests in community-based approaches to environmental justice through networks of solidarity and mutual aid, and articles in such journals as Environmental Research Letters, Environmental Justice, Environmental Sociology, and Local Environment. We also hear from Mark and from Colleen (about peaches!) in this episode.
Mentioned in the episode
Follow the project's growth at Building Collective Resilience via Collective Memory. Or read about its origins in a local newspaper story here.
John Dittmer, Local People
Victorian neighborhood class proximity maps of London include the famous Booth "poverty maps."
Yuki Kato, Gardens of Hope.
Read the episode here.
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Our Recall This Buck series began by speaking with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School about how key ideas—and the actual currency, physical coins and bills— underlying the modern monetary system get “invisibilized” with that system’s success, so that seeing money clearly is both harder and more vital. Today, illustrious Princeton historian Peter Brown narrates the … Continue reading "42 Recall This Buck 2: Peter Brown on wealth, charity and managerial bishops in early Christianity (JP)"
Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected].
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John is joined by the brilliant and affable Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt (The Blood of Government) to discuss Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin, 2025) by Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. With Christine A. Desan (Recall This Book adores her) he is the co-director of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University. This builds on his marvelous previous work about the global cotton trade.
John wants to know about the importance of the state as money-maker and underpinner of markets. Paul asks about the key historical ruptures; the conversation goes back a millennium to traders in Aden and in China. Together Paul and Sven speculate on the role violence plays inside the “free” market that capitalist exchange established and now somewhat remarkably sustains. The singular turning-point of the late 19th century (which Sven decided to present in three interwoven chapters) comes in for sustained attention.
Mentioned in the Episode
Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (2014)
Ursula Le Guin “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” (National Book Foundation Medal speech 2014)
Ferdinand Braudel Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (1979)
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944)
Listen and Read here.
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In Recall This Book's second episode (January 2019) John and Elizabeth spoke with their brilliant Brandeis colleague, the MacArthur-winning neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano, about a number of different facets of addiction. The conversation seems as timely as ever.
What makes an addiction to a morning constitutional different from–or similar to–an addiction to Fentanyl? What are the biological and social factors to consider? Should the addict be thought of in binary terms, or addiction as a state that people move into and out of? They contemplate these questions through biological, anthropological, and literary lenses, drawing on Marc Lewis, Angela Garcia, and Thomas de Quincey. Late in the episode, there’s also a Sprockets joke.
Then, in Recallable Books, Gina recommends David Linden’s The Compass of Pleasure, Elizabeth recommends When I Wear My Alligator Boots by Shaylih Muehlmann, and John recommends Sam Quinones’s Dreamland.
Discussed in this episode:
Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease
Angela Garcia, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar
David Linden, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good
Shaylih Muehlmann, When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands
Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic
Read transcript here.
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The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose-built institutions? To others, we already have a template. Didn’t Michel Foucault long ago show us that prisons as they exist now–in all their horror, in all their commitment not just to jail people before trial but also to imprison them afterwards–come about only in the modern episteme, concomitant with capitalism and all sorts of attendant evils?
Actually, nope. Prisons are as old as the Romans and very likely much older than that. In Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (California, 2025). Mark Letteney (a U Washington historian who wrote The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity)directs excavations in a legionary amphitheater) and Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen, author of Gospels before the Book) document an ancient and durable prison system system with five key features: Centrality, surveillance, separation depth, and punitive variability.
Their RTB conversation explores key aspects of that system and its present-day legacy or parallels. Yet it ends on a note of cautious optimism from Letteney: just because we don’t find a prison-free world in ancient Rome is no reason to give up the struggle. Whatever better solution to societal safety and rehabilitation awaits us in the future, it must be something we ourselves set out to build anew.
Mentioned
Michel Foucault’s foundational Discipline and Punish (1975)
Adam Gopknik reviews Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration in The New Yorker
The Rules of Ulpian (3rd century jurist)
Wengrow and Graeber’s foundational and heavily debated The Dawn of Everything (2021)
Spencer Weinreich’s work on solitary confinement)
Erving Goffman Stigma (1963) and Asylums (1961)
Livy (eg in his History of Rome on prisons and prisoners
Who Would Believe a Prisoner? Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson
Libanius (on the abuse of Prisoners)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead
Samuel Delany Tales of Neveryon
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In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”
Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”
Mentioned in the Episode
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (the fixed people and the wandering people), Gilead, Home,
The West Wing (yes, the TV show! Helen watched it during lockdown when she couldn’t bear fiction…)
Raymond Carver‘s minimalist fiction (his first collection)
Tess Gallagher (as writer and as Carver’s editor)
Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922; on how to un-furnish fiction, leaving it an empty room)
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Sigmund Freud on “the day’s residue” (e.g. in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)
George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch
Listen to Episode
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When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past.
Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions.
The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day.
From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures.
Mentioned in the episode
Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844)
George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876)
Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)?
The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample.
The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that.
Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair.
America's racial "one drop" rule.
Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015)
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.
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As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John's 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about The Drama of Celebrity, her tour-de-force account of how stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly scrapbooked by adoring fans.
They tackle a question at least as old as Sarah Bernhardt: who or what makes a star? Rather than crediting star making to the culture industry, to fans, or to star themselves, Sharon makes the case that all three forces together constitute a celebrity creation machine.
After discussing her archival work on theatrical scrapbooking in Indiana, Sharon pulls from the vaults a marvelous Hollywood memoir, Brooke Haywood’s Haywired. That triggers discussion of the studio system and how its models of celebrity are and are not with us today.
Sharon’s two Recallable Books also capitalize on mid-century notions of celebrity: Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford and Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. John’s choice, The Entertainer by Margaret Talbot, another biographical account written by a star’s daughter, gives a slightly rosier perspective on the family memoir.
Discussed in this episode:
Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity
Daniel Boorstin, The Image (“a person who is known for his well-knownness”)
Theodor Adorno and Theodore Horkheimer, “Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment
Henry Jenkins, “Textual Poachers“
Dick Herbdige, “Subculture: The Meaning of Style“
Mark Twain, Patented Scrapbook Innovator
Brooke Hayward, Haywire
Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest
Jean Stein, George Plimpton, Edie, American Girl
Margaret Talbot, The Entertainer
Read the episode here.
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For our Pandemic-era Books in Dark Times series, RTB spoke in 2020 with Carlo Rotella of Boston College. Rotella is the author of such gems as Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt and most recently has come out with What Can I Get out of This? along with some sparkling related pieces about AI in the classroom.
Carlo is always worth listening to, in dark days... and darker ones, too. He starts by praising sagas, makes a case for stories of disagreeableness and plugs a remarkable book about preaching, deception, and the urge to belong.
Tacitus, Germania
Njal’s Saga
Egil’s Saga
Prose Edda
Poetic Edda
Haldor Laxness, Iceland’s Bell
Mitch Weiss, Broken Faith
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear (2013)
P. G. Wodehouse My Man Jeeves (indeed, 1919)
The Wizard of Id
Robert E. Howard, Conan (first appearance 1932)
Read transcript here.
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One Battle After Another, the spirited and controversial Oscar contender from Paul Thomas Anderson, premiered in September. That opening weekend featured a "Behind the Screen" premiere at the storied West Newton cinema.
Why "behind"? Because Marisa Pagano and J.B. Sloan of the West Newton Cinema Foundation) invited RTB to oversee a fascinating post-mortem between authors of recent books about Paul Thomas Anderson and about Thomas Pynchon, whose scintillating 1990 novel Vineland inspired the film. If inspired does not seem the right word, the exact relationship between the two was one of many things that Ethan Warren (The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, Columbia University Press, 2023)and Pete Coviello (Vineland Reread) pored over in some detail in this live-before-a-studio-audience Recall This Book conversation.
Pete situates the inspirational novel as a pivot-point ("funniest novel you've ever read") for Thomas Pynchon, who traces what happens to counter-insurgency from the post-1960's when it meets the complacency of the Reagan era. Ethan, who defends practically every PTA movie but Hard Eight (despite John's affection for it) points out the significance of centering non-white characters, and applauds his "alarming" decision to confront white supremacy in its clarity and also the cartoon supervillainy of the Christmas Adventurer's Club.
Pete, who wishes that the film could be as funny as the novel, emphasizes that earlier Pynchon novels were founded on conspiratorial pushback against Manichean structures. By 1990, though, he no longer rejects the solidarity that the left might bring to bear against the fascist power of the Right. God bless the unrepudiated armed insurgents, says Pete. Camaraderie and solidarity define the essence of both book and film. Ethan, more skeptical of the politics of the novel, reminds us that they all lose; at the end of the day, Ethan sees the film's overt message as less appealing than its visual energy.
Audience questions, topping off the event, delve into the past and the world of Pynchon's commitments, in often surprising ways. The conversation wraps by celebrating a more than cameo by Tisha Sloan, who happens to be West Newton organizer J.B.'s sister!
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John's “Arendt's Refugee Politics” came out in Public Books in early November. He made the case that his favorite political philosopher, Hannah Arendt is an opponent both of identity politics and also of a cosmpolitan universalism that is blind to all the differences (of race, gender, belief) that make us who though not what we are. Going back to one of the first pieces she published in English, a 1943 essay from Menorah called "We Refugees", he reflected on how amazingly Arendt was able to air her unease about militant Zionism at the same time she warned fellow arrivals in America from rushing to disguise their origins.
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. You can consult footnotes and a read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.
Reach out and let us know if you think it should be the first of many, or simply a one-off!
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In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016).
Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places--and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering "the one word that gets you killed"?
But Troubles that go cold also have a way of heating up again, if we forget, as Glenn puts it, that you can choose who you are. China Mieville's brilliant novel The City and the City is, says Glenn, an allegory for places like Belfast itself, where you have to learn to “unsee” residents of "the other city" even in shared areas. That kind of unseeing, in fiction and in real life, leads to distorted mental maps.
Glenn sees the so-called “softening” of the peace walls as among the most pernicious occurrences of the last 40 years, since softening coupled with notion that you simply belong to one of two "communities" is what makes real traffic, real conversation, harder to achieve. He and David agree that all over the world, in ways the echo Belfast although it is rarely spelled out, all sorts of invisible architectural extensions of the security and segregation apparatus hover unobtrusively. Glenn also riffs on the names people dream up for what might lie beyond a Belfast wall's other side, spinning off writer Colin Carberry's proposal: Narnia.
Mentioned in the Episode
“Love poetry: the RUC and Me” was Glenn's first nonfiction piece back inthe late 1980s.
Robert McLiam Wilson: Glenn's friend and fellow Troubles novelist, whose work includes Ripley Bogle (1989).
Eoin Macnamie's work includes Resurrection Man (1994).
“The C-word” (2014) Glenn's wonderful essay on the trouble that starts when the word "community" gets subdivided into "communities."
Padraic Fiacc, sometimes called ”the Poet oft he Troubles” finally has a blue historical marker. That makes Glenn ask why are there are so many "blue plaques" for combatants, so few for non-combatants?
The interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman,
Glenn compares Civil Rights in Northern Ireland in the 1960s with the US Civil Rights movement and with Paris 1968; the 70’s bombing campaigns lines up with the actions of the Red Army Faction in Germany.
Recallable Books
Glennn says his inspiration to write on partition comes from reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children. He also praises John Dos Passos USA trilogy.
David interested in the long tail of a conflict and aingles out Glenn Patterson’s own novel, The Northern Bank Job as well as Eoin McNamee The Bureau.
Inspired by Glenn's account of how resident learn to see and unsee portions of Belfast, John praises Kevin Lynch's 1960 The Image of the City.
Read the episode here.
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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…."
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When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, 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.” Comedyhas 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 the 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 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 is 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).
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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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)
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