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Lamplight 99
You are invited to attend to this episode about Work and Workers, including blacksmiths, chain gangs, drivers, bored office workers, oh, yes, and Fraggles and Doozers. Music from Joe Tex, Josh White, Sam Cooke, Dolly Parton, the Kinks, and Flatt and Scruggs, and two more sections of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.
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You are invited to our exploration of Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese approach to life and art especially suited to this time of the year. We have music from Japan, America (Otis Redding, Robert Johnson, and more), Britain (inc. a tribute to Jack Bruce), poetry from Ryokan, William Carlos Williams, Rumi, and Stevenson, RLA’s Autumn meditation from Journey through the Seasons, and finally a famous passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: a lonely woman’s fantasy about romping naked in the water with twenty-eight men, of whom “the homeliest of them is beautiful to her”.
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The Sick Rose
Abstract ideas, concrete details, head in the heavens, feet on the earth. You’re invited to explore this theme and attend Evening under Lamplight, with some comedy, some Broadway, Lennon, Dylan, Taizé, poetry both Scottish and American, and to finish, further scenes from Walt Whitman.
As heard, of course, on Cambridge 105.
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Lamplight 96 Resonating People
"The blab of the pave" - echoes of New York streets from the 1850s
You are invited to attend to all sorts of people, from class clowns to lover-boys to moochers; Don Quixote wandering lonely onto the Camino Real, dreaming of Desolation Row; Jean Shepherd reading Robert Service; and Whitman’s catalogue of echoing scenes and sounds of the streets.
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Robert Burns, A Man's a Man for A' That
Whitman asks, “Who need be afraid of the merge?” There are lots of ways we can take this, and we try out several of those ways this evening, under lamplight, with Robert Burns, celebrating the Scottish spirit of the “independent mind” (independent here not necessarily in the political sense), Whitman extending himself outside his hat and boots to merge with everyone he encounters, and Leonard Cohen, in honour of his big birthday this week.
Leonard taking a graceful and gracious bow as we wish him happy birthday.
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"Into the beautiful"
You’re invited to attend to the pivotal season of summer’s passing away “into the beautiful”, with Emily Dickinson, Journey through the Seasons, the Kinks, The Grapes of Wrath, Miriam Makeba, Dylan, and our usual visit to Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, followed by a meditation by Elizabeth Lesser. A mellow show, in its way, for what can be a mellow season.
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"You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me"
Lots of music this week: love songs, many from Motown, but also Frankie Lymon and the Mothers of Invention (great lovers, they) and Donovan and Otis and Dylan. And then one of those passages that got Walt Whitman banned. We today recognise the sexual ambiguity, but you are invited also to attend to the love-making between the Ego and the Soul.
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The Grapes of Wrath
We attend to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Wendell Berry on what goes wrong when the poor are dispossessed, and Walt Whitman’s description of what is and what is not our True Self, with music by Woody Guthrie and others.
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Lamplight 91: Jurgen, I and this mystery
Jurgen in search of Justice
We look at James Branch Cabell’s hero Jurgen, seeking Justice to reconcile human dreams with the bare facts of reality, and continue with Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, and the mystery of the “procreant urge” that keeps the world alive.
Jurgen compromsing with reality
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"Damn Braces. Praise Relaxes" (Blake)
This evening, under lamplight, we look at Community, and then at Devils in literature, including Milton’s Satan, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, RLS’s fable “The Devil and the Innkeeper”, Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, Dante’s Lucifer, the frozen mechanical monster at the centre of the Earth. But we turn more expansive as we continue with Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. You are invited to attend.
