Recall This Book

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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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…." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices