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Radio War Nerd EP #456 — Céline's War + Iran Elections, feat. Trita Parsi (Patreon)

Published:
2024-07-14 21:58:50
Edited:
2024-07-14 22:00:07
Imported:
2024-07
Tags:

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Content

Guest: Trita Parsi, Quincy Institute

Recorded: July 11, 2024

This episode we're going back to the 2-segment format: making sense of the Iran elections, with Trita Parsi; and we discuss War, the newly-translated antiwar novel by the 20th-c French author Céline.

First - We talk tornadoes & dust devils.

At 10:31 - Trita Parsi joins us to discuss Iran's presidential elections & Masoud Pezeshkian.

At 27:11 - Music interlude by Brendon Anderegg.

At 28:30 - We discuss the publication of Celine's lost antiwar novel Guerre (War).

Total time: 1:19:32

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Music interlude by Brendon Anderegg. Check out music from his group Mountains here. 

Files

Comments

Winston Reid

I was about to say that this is continuing in the great RWN tradition of recording an episode the day before a historic event. I am excited for the inevitable political assassination episode though.

.

“You’ve never seen it miss this house, and miss that house and come after you!” “Christ, Jo, is that what you think it did!?”

William

Yawn. Talk to me when you have something worse than inclement weather

William

Yall just described a summer weekend in the midwest

Adam m

Every time they talk Celine I become more convinced I never want to read him lol

Quinn

idk if thats inevitable they might be afraid to open up the JFK can of worms

NYCM&AHole

::cue Van Halen with too much chorus through an SLO100::

JoR

Apologies that this comment has nothing to do with the show or even recent shows but it does harp back to your conversations on the civil war and Mcclellan I came across a reddit post on Lee's comment calling Mcclellan "the best general he faced." I didn't comprehensively read every comment but I did my best to skim through them, and absolutely none of them discuss the very obvious point: Lee liked him because Mcclellan lost for the south. https://www.reddit.com/r/CIVILWAR/s/KgrNQ0IBnl Reddit is a big place so I guess you shouldn't completely generalize it, but overall I'd say it's the more liberal/leftish leaning social media space, basically a centrist verison of yahoo/YouTube comments. It just shows you how fucked up the civil war discourse is. My takeaway of their concensus is: The idea that Mcclellan was even a bad general is apparently controversial, if anything he "cares too much about his soldiers." the idea that he was purposely losing for the sake of the confederacy would probably get you blacklisted by this crowd. Granted, this is one post, on a site that may not really reflect any significant population. But still interesting to note

Beatz

Recently heard a great interview with people from the New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies, on Regrettable Century pod — very appealing approach to forming a left wing “organization,” I think, avoiding your typical pitfalls and pratfalls by being a bit more humble about your self-conception. Wish I had one near me (outside of NZ)!

T

Didn’t they lament the dearth of political assassinations sometime in the last month?

J P 3

Great episode. With respect to the Iranian presidency, it would have been good to get a sense about the power of the institution. e.g. relative to the United States in particular, or other countries. At least based on my rudimentary understanding, the Iranian president seems to have limited room for maneuver when it comes to foreign policy, effectively needing to clear things with the Supreme Leader and the political establishment. e.g. I'm speculating, but Raisi may have been something of a special case, given his close proximity to the security establishment. My recollection when Rouhani negotiated the nuclear deal with the U.S. and other powers is that the revolutionary guard started conducting a bunch of missile tests, with some speculation that hardliners were effectively using their levers to sabotage the agreement (the Iran nuclear deal not only potentially threatened the power of the IRGC in terms of nuclear development, but the sanctions relief threatened the IRGC's control of the economy). On the other hand Rouhani was able to move forward, because he had the Supreme Leader's blessing. What are the various checks on the Iranian president's power within the system, both in terms of international relations and domestic policy, formal and informal?

J P 3

I prefer the "virtue" given the nature of the 24 hour news cycle. There's so much speculation at this point and very little that anyone can definitively say about the impact. Maybe worth revisiting in 6 months to a year. The network channels and cable news were all kind of milking this whole thing for hours, when the actual news part of the story could have been reduced to a five minute news segment.

Ellen Harold

In my high school many years ago, senior year was devoted to twentieth century in History, French, & Literature classes (though we did read William Dean Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885). In practice, the reading list centered around WW1, including Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, where I think he recounts the story his recovery from the wound that also was alluded to in The Sun Also Rises (Spanish Civil War). A conscientious objector, he had been an ambulance driver. IIRC, Farewell to Arms was considered his best book and the Sun Also Rises, somewhat (well, quite) inferior. At least that is what my mother told me. She worked in publishing, at that time one of the main employers in NYC, as Hollywood still is to the movies, and the grownups talked about books all the time, the way people now talk about movies. Anyway, our teacher assigned Journey to the End of the Night to our class. (The previous year her class had read The Good Soldier Schweik). At first, I thought Journey to the End of the Night was the most horrible thing I had ever read. I had read Henry Miller at the age of 12 or so -- you know -- it was lying around the house, and we didn't have a TV, perish the thought, so I was somewhat inured to shocking things (besides I didn't understand it) . But this was a whole different level of unpleasantness. But then - my memory is a bit dim -- Celine's protagonist was a doctor who traveled the world. He went to Africa and was shocked by the miserable conditions of the black workers there, and then unexpectedly he came to NYC, entering the harbor by boat, and he worked as an abortionist who felt pity for the plight of those poor women (which Henry MIller never did). And I realized Celine was a humanist who cared deeply about human suffering -- the sorrows of the world outraged by war and exploitation. My whole outlook was turned around. I always assumed that Celine's irritability and angry excesses stemmed from the fact that he was trepanned. I never understood why his critics never mentioned this. Incidentally, I do think John Dolan is correct that Celine's style imaginatively recreates the vivid immediacy of oral literature, or at least of lived experience, without exactly being oral. It is absurd to think this is can be achieved through any mechanistic formula such as using short sentences, as the devotees of Hemingway used to think and which has become a sort of modern folklore.

Jess

There are severe limitations, and that came up in the presidential campaign itself. However, just as in some other countries the actual executive power is one person who's as old as the hills, and there's no real tradition of transfer of power. So whoever has even a limited amount of official power might be in a good position to shape the future of the country (or not, who knows).

NYCM&AHole

Actually the legendary amp that is the Peavey 5150 was released by then and I’m sure it was recorded on that.

Viro Mia

The weather in Ohio has been getting worse every year. The summer thunderstorms have been getting more violent year after year until this year when we started getting tornadoes. A month ago one touched down a minute away from my house and tore up a farm and a week ago there was another tornado warning. Apparently tornado alley has shifted eastward every year due to climate change.

Anthony Schiappa

A friend recommended Journey when I was in my early 30s. I haven't questioned his judgment since. Like Mark, it had me my the lapels by the third paragraph. It was exciting and a little scary. I'm lucky I didn't read it in my 20s, or I'd have gotten exactly the wrong things out of it, as often happens with Bukowski. The better book is Death on the Installment Plan (the better title for a US audience IMO) but there's little daylight between it an Journey, which has some of the best one-liners ever written. After Journey, fiction was ruined for me for like a year, nothing but non-fiction. A lot of great authors discussed on the show, but I think Celine's got it all over everybody. Reading him while finishing grad school, it was a exhilirating to find someone whose style brooks against subtext. I also agree that Bukoswski seems like a coward compared to Vonnegut, who genuinely went out on a limb writing those introductions. He also said the Mannheim's translations are so good he almost deserves co-author credit in the English-speaking world. I have War but haven't started it yet, I need to clear my calendar, but I'm wondering if anyone is noticing a difference. Based on the first paragraph, I'm not at all concerned about the quality, and based on the episode, I'm guessing its superb.

Loui

Is there a rwn approved Celine translator?

Mark Ames

Ralph Mannheim's translations are legendary. That said, the translation for War reads pretty durn good to me.

Doug Cartel

In a way, liking contemporary writers who are good at their job and are otherwise evil isnt much different from liking an author from a different century. Like you know from the start that this person is alien to you in a lot of ways but you still appreciate the work. Kind of like a boss and employee, I guess. "You're basically an animal to me but you're a great worker."