Recall This Book

Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
  • 4.7 (29)
  • Books
  • Updated Semimonthly

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.

  1. 4d ago

    RTB 181 In Praise of Agnes Heller (1929-2019)

    Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues and its vices. This experiment in reading Public Books articles aloud--akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side--follows on from JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles and 2026 article about the Pope and AI. You can consult the footnotes on Agnes Heller and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original 2019 form here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  2. Oct 1

    180 Aarthi Vadde has a Platform (JP)

    It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.” Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have responded since 2008. (That means compression" so please Google Aarthi to learn more about her Duke professorship, earlier Levin-prize winning Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 , role as President of the Society for Novel Studies; and forthcoming co-edited Columbia University Press collection of conversations from podcast she co-founded, Novel Dialogue.) Aarthi is brimming with unexpected insights about writers responding in varied and unpredictable ways to textual production under digital conditions: Patricia Lockwood, Lauren Oyler, Tao Lin and even Sheila Heti, who early on experimented with LLM conversations in the New Yorker. She sees a new range of writers (Vauhini Vara, Meghan O'Gieblyn) maintaining a commitment to experimental writing, while engaging the power dynamics befalling them with this new tool, what she calls a new case of the "writer's hand at a distance." Finally, when it comes to defining the "multi-front battle" university English departments will have to fight for their survival, Aarthi also wants to respond generously to students whose desire to write is as strong as their desire to read: why should we condemn that as a narcissistic impulse? Read the episode here. Mentioned in the episode Karen Hao, Empire of AISarah Wynne-Williams, Careless PeopleLaurence Lessig Free CultureXu Bing's Book from the GroundFred Bennison's Emoji Dick.“glitch art”Recallable Books  Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1970 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, as well as this AHR debate between Eisenstein and Adrian Johns.Ben Mangrum, The Comedy of Computation: also this excellent Recall this Book conversation about the feared obsolsence of the human knolwedge worker). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  3. Sep 17

    179* What does the Pope have to teach us about AI? (JP, from Public Books)

    When I heard that Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” was about “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” my first reaction was dread. Turns out I was wrong; always something new out of Chicago..... This is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side and to JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  4. Sep 3

    178 Done in a Day with the Vietnam War: Elisa Tamarkin (JP)

    Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon. It is an extended reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War, set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in the nation’s city newspapers, and framed through her own stepfather's experience covering the war. Tamarkin anatomizes curious forms of self-delusion that flourished in the American Me generation and traces the subtle trajectory that stretching from the journalistic autonomy of the mid-century to the "embedded reporters" of the US war in Iraq to today's implacable governmental hostility to truthful reportage. Back in the 1960's Hannah Arendt and others warned that bubbles of non-information and delusive self-deceit got propagated within the corridors of power and out in the larger public realm. Now cloudy misinformation is the property of a near-ubiquitous social media realm whose corrosive effect (the power to unthink) is far less circumscribed. Mentioned Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics" (subject of an earlier RTB episode) and "Home To Roost". Frank Kermode Sense of an Ending (1967). The philosopher John Pollock published a book called Knowledge and Justification in 1975. Jamie Cohen-Cole The Open Mind Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973). Ursula Le Guin The Lathe of Heaven 1971 (Elisa also mentions John's book on Le Guin). R. A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome (1971). Thomas Harris, I'm OK, You're OK (1967). Recallable Books: Adam Phillips, On Giving Up. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955). Read the transcript of the episode here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  5. Aug 20

    177 A Hosts' Special: Ferry and Plotz Choose Books in Dark Times (EF, JP)

    For our pandemic-era Books in Dark Times (our first ever Special Series!) Elizabeth and John discussed books that were keeping us afloat, barely afloat, way back in April 2020. Memory lane, here we come! A book you might not think would be so comforting starts it off, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London “during the last Great Visitation in 1665.” Classroom resource for Great Plague of 1665-1666 here Probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, the Journal comforts Elizabeth by its similarities to our current situation, providing a sense of continuity to our forebears. Even if that continuity is through our epidemiological vulnerabilities and our incapacity for coordinated action. Second, because some aspects of what happened in 1665 seem so familiar, from detailed discussions of the “weekly bills” of dead in each parish and how to interpret them, to arguments over social isolation, contact tracing, the ethics of leaving London for second homes in the country, and the devastating secondary effects of lost commercial activity: Thirdly: at least it’s not the bubonic plague. Elizabeth’s love for the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope (or 35 of them, anyways) kicks off a final foray into the deeply comforting books of our childhood–and a discussion of how fantasy nestles into the ordinary. Mentioned in this episode: Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) E. M. Forester, The Machine Stops (1909) Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855) Frank Capra, It Happened One Night (1934) Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley (1939) Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868) E. Nesbit, Five Children and It (1902), The Railway Children (1905) Read the transcript here; Episode 26 Ferry Plotz Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  6. Aug 6

    176 Laura Jockusch on Jewish Revenge after the Holocaust (JP)

    After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system? To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle, Brandeis University's Laura Jockusch (author, previously, of Collect and Record and Jewish Honor Courts) has written about Jewish revenge on genocide perpetrators in her searching, and shocking Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust. Drawing on her great erudition and painstaking archival research, she explores how views changed during and after the war--and in following decades when justice and vengeance came to seem potentially compatible, especially if revenge could be rendered an aesthetic or imaginative phenomenon. Mentioned in the episode Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds Seekers for vengeance and also justice: Eli Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal The killing of Ernst Vom Rath (pretext for the Night of Broken Glass) Aeschylus, The Oresteia (5th century B.C.) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, no episode of RTB would be complete without it...) Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980) Tony Judt Postwar (2005) Recallable Books: Zalman Gradovsky, The Last Consolation Vanished Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities Filip Müller Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers Kleist, Michael Kohlhass (1810) Read a transcript here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  7. Jul 16

    175 The Caste Pod: a Crossover episode with Ajantha Subramanian (JP)

    In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original as The Caste Pod, which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally. Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!) founder Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and producer (with Lori Allen) of the “Violent Majorities” series here at RTB. John and Ajantha delve into the founding of the podcast, and then enter into the business end of the series, which is to explore the complex interplay between caste, race and class as organizing features of economic inequality and its corresponding features of cultural discrimination and oppression. Ajantha's extended conversation with Prachi and Ram of Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans from The Caste Pod episode 10 lays bare its premise: to put scholars and activists into conversation and opens a space engineered for each to learn form the other. Before introducing the Savera excerpt, Ajantha frames the topic by way of Isabel Wilkerson's influential (if problematic) book Caste and its neglect of class and economic issues, and also the case against Cisco for caste discrimination in California that in significant ways internationalized the fight around caste's role in perpetuating economic and political inequity. Listen and Read Here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  8. Jul 2

    174 Anna Terwiel Offers A Moment of No to the Prison-Industrial Complex (JP)

    Punishment makes nobody safer, imprisonment only impoverishes us as a society. And yet, we lock up our own, more and more for worse and worse reasons. What might finally inspire us to run the equation another way, and come up with a different solution? Anna Terwiel joined John to discuss her remarkable new book, Prison Abolition for Realists, which charts a path away from paranoid (as documented by Eve Sedgwick) and purity politics in favor of an abolitionism that fuses "abstract normative theorizing" with attainable worldly goals. One name for this is agonistic abolitionism; it offers, as Anna sees it a positive vision alongside its criticism of the status quo. Anna is a professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, where she co-directs their Prison Education Project. She beings by tracing the impact of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) and his activism with the Prisons Information Group, and credits the influence, during her schooling, of the Prison and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project in Illinois at Statesville Prison. John (apropos of his earlier work) mentions the failed pursuit of purity among late 19th century Chartists, while Anna makes the case not for perfect solutions but for remainders, a form of politics of the possible. They explore possibilities of "non-reformist reform"; Anna stresses the enduring importance of Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete and her contribution to revolutionary black Marxist thought; and she praises local gender-based-violence organizations like CARA in Seattle. They discuss Sharon Dolovich's recent work on conditions for correctional officers, and Anna explores the notion of a new "right to comfort" that might take into account the current inhumanity of treatment inside prisons as regards profound but basic factors like ventilation and heat. As well as the right to a loved one's hugs. Listen to and read the episode here. Also mentioned in the episode Abolitionist work by Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore , e.g. Golden Gulag Recallable Books Nils Christie, "Conflicts as Property." Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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About

Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.

Information

  • Creator
    Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    189
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
  • Show Website
    Recall This Book

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