Recall This Book Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz

We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley.
And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of lives unled elsewhere while ostensibly documenting nothing more than the time to takes to down a couple of drinks, scuttle feverishly through some midtown streets, and take a lumbering commuter train out of the city.
Steve feels that in our own century, things have changed for the American short story and there's no going back to Cheever's mode. After Raymond Carver, it would be hard to embrace the proliferation (sometimes dizzying, sometimes delightful) of solid details that Cheever deploys. The two try out a final comparison to E M Forster who also quasi-fit into this society, but, Steve opines, could project himself into his female characters in a way that Cheever cannot or will not.
John Cheever works mentioned:

"The Swimmer" (also a Gregory Peck movie)

"The Jewels of the Cabots"

"Oh Youth and Beauty" and other stories that nest multiple lives within a single frame, like "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well"

Works by others:

Sloane Wilson's 1955 novel, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (and the 1956 film)

Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ("she would have been a good woman if there had been someone there to shoot her every day of her life.")

Anton Chekov, "Lady with the Lapdog"

Richard Yates and mid-century office nihilism (eg his 1961 Revolutionary Road)

Jean Stafford's novels (The Mountain Lion, Boston Adventure) do get reprinted and re-read, Steve points out.

Raymond Carver, only partially minimalist, but reduced still further by Gordon Lish in e.g. the story "Mr Copy and Mr fix-it"

Listen to and read the episode here.
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How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought.
Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What’s Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case” and most recently "Narrative and Meaning in Life". (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public). She has recently begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art.
John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting--and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro.
Discussed in this episode:

"A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf

"Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir," Sue William Silverman


The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk


My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard


How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti


An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Moth


The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo


Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser


The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell


Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch


Listen and Read Here
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In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the entanglement of politics, Taíno animism, and weather events in the form of a hurricane named Teddy. Steve describes the suffusion of sound he has experienced in Puerto Rico and the soundlessness at the heart of hurricanes, and tells us about his academic work on data centers, and a collaborative speculative film that imagines a world without clouds.
Steve and Elizabeth reflect on current shifts within anthropology that are opening the discipline to other modes of expression, including speculative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin (the subject of a recent episode and of John's recent book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea: My Reading) and of Arkady Martine, Byzantine historian and author of A Memory called Empire, and A Desolation Called Peace. As her Recallable Book, Elizabeth offers an anthropological space opera, The Expanse.
Mentioned in the episode:


"World without Clouds" by Jia Hui Lee, Luísa Reis Castro, Julianne Yip, Steven Gonzalez, and Gabrielle Robbins.


Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City by Vera S. Candiani.

Haraway, Donna. "Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1." In Women, science, and technology, pp. 455-472. Routledge, 2013.

Marcus, George E. "On the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now: Notes on a contemporary anxiety in the making of ethnography." Cross Cultural Poetics 12, no. 12 (2003): 7-20.

Read the episode here.
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In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023)
In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. 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.
The poets 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?”
"I feel the feathers softly gather upon
My shoulders and my arms, becoming wings.
Melodious bird I'll fly above the moaning
Bosphorus, more glorious than Icarus,
I'll coast along above the coast of Sidra
And over the fabled far north Hyperborean steppes."
-- from "To Maecenas", The Odes of Horace, II: 20.
Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us.
David Ferry, “Resemblance”
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.
Henry Justice Ford, ‘Grendel’s Mother Drags Beowulf to the Bottom Of The Lake’, 1899
So furious. So furious, I was,
When my son called to me, called me out
Of heaven to come to the crag and corner store
Where it was that he was dying, “Mama,
I can’t breathe;” even now I hear it—
Roger Reeves, “Grendel’s Mother”
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

Horace, The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux

Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press

Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian, W.W. Norton Press

Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard University Press


Read transcript of the episode here.
Listen to the episode here.
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NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford UP, 2023), begins as a mystery of sorts. When and why did the word “equality” get swapped out of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, to be replaced by “educability, plasticity”? She and John sit down to discuss how that switcheroo allowed for a putative anti-racism that nonetheless preserved a sotto voce concept of race.
They discuss the founding years of UNESCO and how it came to be that Jews were defined as the most plastic of races, and “Blackness” came to be seen as a stubbornly un-plastic category. The discussion ranges to include entwinement and interconnectedness, and Edward Said's notion of the "contrapuntal" analysis of the mutual implication of seemingly unrelated historical developments. Sonali's "Recallable Book" shines a spotlight on Aime Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism--revised in 1955 to reflect ongoing debates about race and plasticity.
Mentioned in the episode:

Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (1977)

Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Education" (1954) in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought ( "the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming" )

Franz Boas, "Commencement Address at Atlanta University," May 31, 1906 (this is where he says the bit about "the line of cleavage"

Franz Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Final Report, immigration COmmission (1911)

W.E.B. Du Bois, "Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace," (1945)

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History"

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination



IHRA definition of Antisemitism.


Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (1952)

Natasha Levinson, "The Paradox of Natality: Teaching in the Midst of Belatedness," in Hannah Arendt and Education: Renewing our Common World, ed. by Mordechai Gordon (2001)

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (on the contrapuntal)

Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law


UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 1950 Statement on Race


UNESCO, 1951 Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences


Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (on the methodological nationalism of postcolonial studies and new approaches that challenge it)


Recallable books:

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950, 1955 rev. ed.)

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)


Read and Listen to the episode here.
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In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.
Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.”
if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Cohen, Charles Yu, Caryl Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner and Orhan Pamuk.
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Sheila Heti:

Pure Colour

How Should a Person Be?

Alphabetical Diaries

Ticknor


We Need a Horse (children’s book)


The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)


Also mentioned:

Oulipo Group


Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard


Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael


George Eliot, Middlemarch



Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)

Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy


Willa Cather , The Professor’s House (overlap of reality and recollection): “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”)

William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.



Listen and Read:
Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
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