783 Southern Imagining (with Elleke Boehmer) | My Last Book with John McMurtrie

The History of Literature podcast is a member of the PodGlomerate Network and Lithub Radio. step into the most beloved world in fantasy literature and become a part of a vibrant active community of listeners, then look for the Prancing Pony podcast wherever you listen. Hello, we start today with an anecdote. After I graduated from high school, I made a move

from a small town in Wisconsin to study in Chicago, a city of millions of people, the biggest city that I had ever been in. My attitude was, I can't believe you guys live here. This is insane. There's so much to do. You're so lucky to be in this enormous city. And yet, Chicago called itself the second city, knowing it was forever the runner-up to New York.

It wasn't the second city to me. It wasn't small or second best or the little brother or anything like that. It took me a while to absorb this feeling of being in the second city, but I eventually did, especially after I'd been to New York. It's strange to define yourself by where you live, but it's even stranger to define yourself or to feel that you're being defined

by somewhere you don't live. And literature is always about definitions and self-definitions. It's often the plot of the book. Who is this person and what does he or she become? Some characters develop that verb suggests that they start somewhere and end up somewhere else. Those places are identity, but even deeper.

It's like going into computers and seeing the level beneath the software where the computer knows how to interpret the software. What is this called? Machine language?

Maybe I'm not sure. At that, anyway, at that hardware level of literature, there's identity every time an author sits at a laptop or picks up a pen or fiddles with a stylus or clears his or her throat to wrapped listeners sitting around the campfire.

Who am I to tell this story? A wise elder, a slick out of towner, a scholar, a mother, a priest. History means everything in literature, and literature in turn creates identity. So what happens when a whole region of people is placed in that position of Chicago?

You live in a big city, but you feel like it's somehow small because it's not New York. Well in this case, we're looking at the Southern Hemisphere. What happens when the rest of the world takes for granted that the North is culturally predominant?

The South is where things are far away, or remote, or strange. Do the people of the South read those books and think, Yes, I am strange? But everything they know, once they close the book, is not strange, it's familiar. It might be all they know.

Do they embrace the idea that they've been othered? Do they struggle against it? Is it a source of pride or defiance? Our guest today has looked at these Southern imaginings she'll explain to us what she

found. And Chekov answers one of his critics, Leo Tolstoy. And we'll hear my last book with an expert in literary journeys. all coming up today on the history of literature.

Okay, here we go. The year was 1902 and Chekhov is talking with a rich acquaintance who later wrote up his memories of the visit. The two of them went fishing, which Chekhov described as a sort of quiet madness. You are happy with life. You are happy with yourself. And you are not a danger to anyone. That was his view of fishing. Oh boy, happy with life and happy

with yourself. Guess what people? That's not always the case when it comes to your old friend Jack Wilson. Oh, no. Let me tell you what it's like to be me. So I haven't been to the local library for a while, but I stopped in there the other day. I wandered into the isle, the literary isles, as I like to do. And I noticed a book by Marion Turner was turned

out. We've had Marion Turner on the show a couple of times to talk of, wants to talk about the very booked, the very, oh boy, wants to talk about that very book, in fact, that I was looking at on the shelf now her biography of the wife of Bath. And when I say turned out, you know what I mean, right? The shelves are, there's a row of books where you only see the spines and then there's

one that's turned out like at a bookstore. So you see the full front cover. And there it was, a book we had featured on this podcast. And then I looked down the shelf below and there was Emma Smith, another one of our guests who has also appeared on the podcast to discuss that very book. And then Jedrez Sula was there. We were three for three. The books that the library,

the librarians at the library had chosen to turn out to face the public, the most enticing books out of that group. They had chosen as the top books from each of those three shelves, books that had been featured on the humble little podcast. I took a wider look. Eight shelves, five of the books turned out were books and authors that we had discussed.

I kind of couldn't believe it. We've covered a lot of ground here and we've talked to a lot of wonderful people. But that was a pretty high percentage. I felt this surge of accomplishment, even pride. I thought, Jack, you've done a good thing here with the podcast. And I even thought to myself, I literally had this thought. I thought, I'm going to feel good about myself today.

I was looking forward, it was only the afternoon. I was looking forward to the rest of the day, the evening where I would feel good about myself for once. Happy with life and happy with yourself

and not a danger to anyone. Thank you, Chekhov. And so I texted my wife, Emma, who is the show's producer, to congratulate her as well.

Look at how well we're doing. Here's a picture of the shelves. Look at these five for eight we are. And one of the shelves that we didn't hit on

one of the three that wasn't a book that we had on our show was of ancient classics. And so she texted back, oh, I'm surprised they don't have Daniel Mendelssohn's translation of the Odyssey on there.

We'd have gone six for eight. And I was on such a roll. This wasn't going to bother me. Right.

The idea that we should have done better than five for eight.