Recall This Book Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz

Dana Stevens joins Elizabeth and John to discuss Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. Her fantastic new book serves as occasion to revel in the work and working world of Buster Keaton, that "solemn, beautiful, perpetually airborne man."
Although packed with fascinating tidbits from Keaton's life, Camera Man is much more than just a biography. It performs its own airborne magic, lightly traversing topics like the crackdown on the use of children in vaudeville, the fluidity of roles before and behind the camera in early Hollywood and the doors that were briefly (ever so briefly) opened for female directors. Among other treats, Dana unpacks one of Keaton's early great "two-reelers" One Week ( a spoof of brisk upbeat industrial films) and his parodic "burlesques" e.g. of Lillian Gish.
People, Films, Books and Ideas in the conversation include:
Roscoe ("Fatty") Arbuckle: got Keaton his start in early films like Butcher Boy, reportedly filmed the day Keaton first stepped onto a set. He said "Buster lived inside the camera."
"Cinema of Attractions." a phrase coined by film historian Tom Gunning to describe the way the early years of cinema (1895 to 1913, more or less) achieved success by way of gags, stunts, special effects and other dazzling technological innovations--rather than plot or character development,.
John and Dana rave about Keaton's last great film (age 33!), The Cameraman (1928) and deprecate the later silents (with a silent caveat for the pancake scene Grand Slam Opera).
Mabel Normand: Arbuckle's longtime collaborator and briefly a rising director--Charlie Chaplin kneecapped her at a crucial moment in her career. Dana singles out for special praise Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916) starring Luke, the first canine movie star.
Singing in the Rain as a MGM-friendly myth-making explanation for Clara Bow's eclipse (and the famous vocal failure moment: "I can't stand 'im")
Steamboat Bill Jr. ( 1928, Buster Keaton feature) "Keaton's most mature movie" says Dana.
Read 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.
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Our first August rebroadcast was John and Pu's 2019 interview with SF superstar Cixin Liu (you may want to re-listen to that episode before this one!). Here, they reflect on the most significant things that Liu had said, and to ponder the political situation for contemporary Chinese writers who come to the West to discuss their work.
They consider whether our world is like a cabinet in a basement, and what kind of optimism or pessimism might be available to science fiction writers. They compare the interview to a recent profile of Liu in The New Yorker, and ponder the advantages and disadvantages of pressing writers to weigh in on the hot-button topics of the day.
Discussed in this episode:

Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End


Jiayang Fan, “Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds” (New Yorker interview/profile)

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution


Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity


George Melies (dir.), A Voyage to the Moon


Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis


Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth


Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov



Transcript available 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.
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John and Pu Wang, a Brandeis professor of Chinese literature, spoke with science-fiction genius Cixin Liu back in 2019. His most celebrated works include The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End.
When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record this interview. Liu spoke in Chinese and Pu translated his remarks in this English version of the interview (the original Chinese conversation is at 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Episode 14c).
Mr. Liu, flanked by John and Pu (photo: Claire Ogden)
They discuss the evolution of Mr. Liu’s science fiction fandom, and the powerful influence of Leo Tolstoy on Mr. Liu’s work, which leads to a consideration of realism and its relationship to science fiction. Science fiction is also compared and contrasted with myth, mathematics, and technology.
Lastly, they consider translation, and the special capacity that science fiction has to emerge through the translation process relatively unscathed. This is a testament to science fiction’s taking as its subject the affairs of the whole human community–compared to the valuable but distinctly Chinese concerns of Mo Yan, or the distinctly Russian concerns of Tolstoy.
Discussed in This Episode:

Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End


Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace


Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey


E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops“

Mo Yan, Red Sorghum


Read 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.
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John and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith, so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding. Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous.
Discussed in this episode:

Tony Judt, Postwar


Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy


Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test


Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge


Doris Lessing The Fifth Child


Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means


Stephen McCauley (with JP on RTB) Barbara Pym and the Comic Novel


Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (and others…)

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland


J. P. Toussaint, The Bathroom


Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Moments of Being”


Philip Roth, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost



You can read the transcript here:
RTB 15x Ferry and Plotz on ZS
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In this 2019 episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. The conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, the inhumanity!) and what it means to be a London–no, a Northwest London–writer before arriving at her case against identity politics. That case is bolstered by a discussion of Hannah Arendt on the difference between who and what a person is.
Zadie and John also touch on the purpose of criticism and why it gets harder to hate as you (middle) age. She reveals an affection for “talkies” (as a “90’s kid,” she can’t help her fondness for Quentin Tarantino); asks whether young novelists in England need to write a book about Henry VIII just to break into bookstores; hears Hegel talking to Kierkegaard, and Jane Austen failing to talk to Jean Genet. Lastly, in Recallable Books, Zadie recommends Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom.
Transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:

Zadie Smith, White Teeth, NW, Swing Time, “Two Paths for the Novel” “Embassy of Cambodia,” Joni Mitchell: Some Notes on Attunement” “Zadie Smith on J G Ballard’s Crash“

Willa Cather, Song of the Lark (1915, revised 1932)

Elif Batuman, The Idiot


Charlotte Bronte, The Professor and Villette


George Eliot, Middlemarch


Pauline Kael, various film reviews


Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood


Ursula Le Guin, “The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview”


Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child


Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall


Dexter Filkins, “The Moral Logic of Humanitarian Intervention” (on Samantha Power)

Patti Smith, Just Kids


Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again


Gary Winick (dir.), Thirteen Going on Thirty (starring Jennifer Garner, not Anne Hathaway)

Sally Rooney, Normal People


Toyin Ojih Odutola

Matthew Lopez, The Inheritance


Jean-Philippe Toussaint, The Bathroom



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.
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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.
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