Episode 77
January 18, 2025
The IliadThe Name of the Rose
Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari
A young man killed in battle by sharp bronze
looks glorious in every way. His body
is fine and handsome even in his death.
But when the dogs despoil a gray old head
and gray old beard, and shame his private parts,
this is the most heartrending sight of all
for poor unhappy mortals.
Happy New Year! And happy birthday to The Spouter-Inn. We’ve decided to tweak our format a bit. After six years of talking about books, we’re finding ourselves interested these days in reading. What are we reading? How are we reading it? What strikes us as we read? How does this connect with everything else in our lives, and everything else we’ve been thinking about? And how does the act of reading fit in with the ecology and economy of reading?
Each episode, Chris and Suzanne will bring a book we’ve been reading for discussion. For the first episode in the new format, Chris is returning to The Iliad, the book we looked at in their very first episode, but this time in a new translation. Suzanne returns to an old favourite, Umberto Eco’s medieval mystery novel The Name of the Rose.
We talk about books as gifts, the goals of translation, the limits of language, repositories of fascinations, and the organization of bookshelves. We hope you enjoy the new format and enjoy the time you spend at The Spouter-Inn.
![[Episode artwork]](/images/podcast/spouter/episode/s/spouter-season-2.png)
Show Notes.
Homer: The Iliad (trans. Emily Wilson).
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose (trans. William Weaver).
A shout-out to Dear Reader, another bookish Megaphonic podcast (sadly on hiatus), whose format we’ve adapted.
Our episode on Bear.
Michael Glover: Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art.
Amanda Peters: The Berry Pickers.
Aaron Robertson: The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America.
Rebecca Nagle: By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land.
Our episode on The Iliad.
Chris’s other podcast (about the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000) recently did an episode about Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster.
Medea (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969).
Euripedes: Medea.
Sophocles: Philoctetes.
David Melnick: Men in Aïda, which is also in his recent collected works, Nice.
Aepy (or Aipy).
Turns out the idea that Eco based the library in The Name of the Rose on Robarts Library doesn’t come from Eco himself.
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet.
Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions includes his story The Garden of Forking Paths.
Our episode on The Rings of Saturn.
Baudri of Bourgeuil: To Countess Adela. (Should be free to download with a free JSTOR account.)
Our episode on Isidore’s Etymologies, which has a section on numbers. Isidore also did a separate book about numbers, which has not been translated into English.
Roberta Mazza: Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram & Nick Montfort, eds.: Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023.
Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith, eds.: Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.
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