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Recall This Book

Recall This Book

De : Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
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 Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world.Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz Art Sciences sociales
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    • 165* Helen Garner Hacking Away at the Adverbs: A Novel Dialogue Crossover Conversation

      165* Helen Garner Hacking Away at the Adverbs: A Novel Dialogue Crossover Conversation
      Feb 19 2026
      In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.” Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.” Mentioned in the Episode Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (the fixed people and the wandering people), Gilead, Home, The West Wing (yes, the TV show! Helen watched it during lockdown when she couldn’t bear fiction…) Raymond Carver‘s minimalist fiction (his first collection) Tess Gallagher (as writer and as Carver’s editor) Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922; on how to un-furnish fiction, leaving it an empty room) Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast Sigmund Freud on “the day’s residue” (e.g. in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900) George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch Listen to Episode Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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      53 min
    • 164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)

      164 Maurice Samuels: Jewish Assimilation, Integration and the Dreyfus Affair (JP)
      Feb 5 2026
      When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past. Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions. The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day. From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures. Mentioned in the episode Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844) George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876) Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)? The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample. The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that. Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair. America's racial "one drop" rule. Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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      1 h
    • 163* The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)

      163* The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)
      Jan 29 2026
      As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John's 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about The Drama of Celebrity, her tour-de-force account of how stars are born, publicized, and in time devoutly scrapbooked by adoring fans. They tackle a question at least as old as Sarah Bernhardt: who or what makes a star? Rather than crediting star making to the culture industry, to fans, or to star themselves, Sharon makes the case that all three forces together constitute a celebrity creation machine. After discussing her archival work on theatrical scrapbooking in Indiana, Sharon pulls from the vaults a marvelous Hollywood memoir, Brooke Haywood’s Haywired. That triggers discussion of the studio system and how its models of celebrity are and are not with us today. Sharon’s two Recallable Books also capitalize on mid-century notions of celebrity: Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford and Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton. John’s choice, The Entertainer by Margaret Talbot, another biographical account written by a star’s daughter, gives a slightly rosier perspective on the family memoir. Discussed in this episode: Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity Daniel Boorstin, The Image (“a person who is known for his well-knownness”) Theodor Adorno and Theodore Horkheimer, “Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment Henry Jenkins, “Textual Poachers“ Dick Herbdige, “Subculture: The Meaning of Style“ Mark Twain, Patented Scrapbook Innovator Brooke Hayward, Haywire Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest Jean Stein, George Plimpton, Edie, American Girl Margaret Talbot, The Entertainer Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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      32 min
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