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”.
Tags: breakdown, Dolly Parton, Flatt and Scruggs, Fraggle Rock, Joe Text, Josh White, Kinks, Sam Cooke, Song of Myself, Taverner, Walt Whitman
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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”.
Tags: Coleman Barks, Cream, Eugene Friesen, Japanese art, Journey through the Seasons, Judo Notomi, Otis Redding, Robert Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rumi, Ryokan, shakuhachi, Song of Myself, wabi-sabi, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams
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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.
Tags: Blake, Dylan, Ellen Bass, James Robertson, John Lennon, Monty Python, My Fair Lady, Song of Myself, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Taizé, The Sick Rose, Walt Whitman, Woody Allen
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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.
Tags: Cab Calloway, Cadillacs, Camino Real, Charlie Brown, Coasters, Desolation Row, Dylan, Mildred Jones, Minnie the Moocher, Mr Thrill, Song of Myself, Speedo, Tennessee Williams, Walt Whitman
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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.
Tags: A Man's a Man for A' That, Because of, Confitemini Domino, Ewan MacColl, George Harrison, If It Be Your Will, Leonard Cohen, Robert Burns, Song of Myself, Taizé, Whitman
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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.
Tags: Death Is Not the End, Dylan, Elizabeth Lesser, Emily Dickinson, Fauré, John Steinbeck, Journey through the Seasons, Kinks, Miriam Makeba, Song of Myself, Walt Whitman
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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.
Tags: Donovan, Dylan, Frankie Lymon, Jackson 5, Miracles, Mothers of Invention, Otis Redding, Ruben and the Jets, Smokey Robinson, Song of Myself, Tammi Terrell, Temptations, Walt Whitman
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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.
Tags: Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, Song of Myself, Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, Woody Guthrie
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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
Tags: James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, Papé, Song of Myself, Whitman
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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.
Tags: A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Blake, Dante, Devil, fables, Flannery O'Connor, Inferno, Lucifer, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Milton, Mindrolling podcast, Proverbs of Hell, Satan, Song of Myself, Sounds True, Stevenson, Walt Whitman
