This episode is a collection of helpful thoughts and insights into what it means to be patient, and to have the courage to accept and love the world even when being clearly aware of all the pain and the evil in the world, and to have the hope that allows us to hold on to the larger meaningfulness of life even when (or especially when) things seem hopeless. “If you sing the blues, you don’t suffer the blues,” Cornel West tells us, and we let Edgar Allan Poe sing us the blues in one of his great stories. You are invited to attend.
(First broadcast on Cambridge 105 Radio.)
We pick up on Walt Whitman’s line, “With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds”, and attend to tongue twisters, lies, truths, poetic truths, mythic truths, and more. You are invited to attend.
(As heard on Cambridge 105 Radio.)
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“But I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get stoned”, sings Dylan, and we take up that thought and attend to the ways it can adjust our outlook, bringing us all together in the inevitable adversity that is part of our humanity, consoling ourselves and reaching out to console others, with music by Dylan, Frederick Knight, The Four Tops, Solomon Burke, Ernest Bloch, the Kinks, and some comforting words from Stephen Levine, ending with a miraculous Holocaust story. You are invited to attend.
(As heard first on Cambridge 105 Radio.)
Poor boy, rich girl / rich boy, poor girl: can they get together? Only Stevie Wonder seems to hold out any hope, but lots of others see the dramatic potential in this situation. We attend to some of these wee dramas, and you are invited to attend also.
(As heard first on Cambridge 105 Radio.)
We attend to the Janus myth in this his month of January, as we stand (as we always do) on the threshold between past and future, looking from this still point of the turning world at what has been and what might be. With lots of songs of various kinds interspersed. You are invited to attend.
(First broadcast on Cambridge 105 Radio)
We attend to the way they give gifts in the myths, and today: gifts as token of esteem, gifts as bribes, gifts as expressions of generosity, with a variety of musical accompaniment. You are invited to attend.
(As heard on Cambridge 105 Radio.)
More Lovers’ Dramas, including a set of Motown dramas, plus opening up Leonard Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving”, followed by Dylan, who opens with the amazing lines: “Some of us turn out the lights and we live / In the moonlight shooting by / Some of us scare ourselves to death in the dark / To be where the angels fly”. Come along; you are invited to attend.
(First broadcast on Cambridge 105 Radio, the commercially funded community broadcaster for the city and South Cambridgeshire.)
As heard on Cambridge 105 Radio, attending to a handful of songs about lovers’ dramas, mostly on or nearly on the telephone, including a mythic song by Dylan. You are invited to attend.
We attend to the famous/notorious Powder of Sympathy, as popularised by Sir Kenelm Digby [pictured] in the 1650s, and used to cure wounds even from a distance. Do we believe these stories? Do we dismiss them, like the missionary at the beginning of Stevenson’s fable, who insists there’s “nothing in it”, or like the missionary after his adventure when he admits that there might be “something in it” after all? You are invited to attend.
[As heard on Cambridge 105 Radio]
We attend to the famous episode in the Odyssey in which Odysseus meets the Cyclops: witty, gruesome, and strange in many ways. You are invited to attend too.
