Close Readings

At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress’ (2025).

For Scranton, the fate of the civilisation at Chaco Canyon is a microcosm for the crisis now confronting humanity. The challenges we face, from climate change to political instability, are so intractable in part because of their complexity. In this episode, Meehan and Peter discuss Scranton’s analysis of our predicament and his proposal for ‘ethical pessimism’, based on resistance to our bias for optimism, as a way of coping with an uncertain future.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture

Further reading:

Adam Tooze: Trouble Transitioning: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep8tooze⁠

Further listening:

Meehan Crist's series on 'Climate, Politics and Procreation' on the LRB Podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/meehanpod⁠

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also bears the intervening influence of modernism, not least in its opening section in which, for twenty pages, our hero simply stands on the street thinking about his life.

In this episode, James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor

Read more in the LRB:

Saul Bellow talks to Melvyn Bragg:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n08/melvyn-bragg/in-conversation-with-melvyn-bragg-saul-bellow-talks-about-his-new-novel-and-about-the-women-of-eastern-europe⁠

Andrew O’Hagan on Saul Bellow’s letters:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n01/andrew-o-hagan/they-don-t-say-that-about-idi-amin⁠

James Wolcott on Bellow’s later life:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward⁠
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign came a new, lavish court life, the emergence of the first newspapers amid the booming print industry around St Paul’s, and, with the guidance of Inigo Jones, the arrival of the renaissance in London’s architecture with the development of Covent Garden and the first of the city’s squares.

To continue her story of London, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to see why James’s Stuart settlement eventually failed under the personal rule of Charles I, leading to a civil war in which London became the financial and military headquarters for the victorious Parliamentarians and James’s grand new banqueting house at Whitehall was used as the backdrop for his son’s execution.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠

Read more in the LRB:

Perry Anderson on the Civil War:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n21/perry-anderson/maurice-thomson-s-war⁠

Blair Worden on the Civil War:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n16/blair-worden/conrad-russell-s-civil-war⁠

Maggie Kilgour on Milton and London:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/maggie-kilgour/pens-and-heads⁠

John Gallagher on Early Modern news:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n03/john-gallagher/quickly-quickly-quickly⁠
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the natural world. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the two poems as part of the literary revolution brought about by the Lyrical Ballads, in which everyday language is used to depict marginal lives without sentiment, guided by Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.’

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more in the LRB:

Marilyn Butler on The Lyrical Ballads: https://lrb.me/npep702

Jonathan Wordsworth: Wordsworth in Love: https://lrb.me/npep701

Seamus Perry on 'The Prelude': https://lrb.me/npep703

Colin Burrow on Wordsworth: https://lrb.me/npep704
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. Braiding Sweetgrass was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extractivist realpolitik.

In this episode, Meehan and Peter look at the most compelling features of Kimmerer’s technique – reminiscent of Darwin at his best – and where her book risks scientific overreach.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices