rla on August 28th, 2014

Walt Whitman

"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.

rla on October 22nd, 2012

"My boy was by my side, so slim /And graceful in his rustic dress!"

We invite you attend to children, in their innocence, their playfulness, their horror too. We have as our guests this time Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Anne Sylvestre, Mokey Fraggle, Randy Newman, Kinky Friedman, and Dylan and the Kinks, with readings from Wordsworth and RLS, plus the myth of Niobe.

"Beaver, I believe her, is gone."


We celebrate the two energies of Springtime: Anger and Kindness, with the help of Dante and Shakespeare, and our usual panel of Dylan, the Kinks and RLS. Anger leading to self-knowledge and even to kindness – there’s an idea you don’t hear every day. Aha, but it’s a new way of looking at things, just what you expect from Evening under Lamplight!

Including RLA’s Spring meditation from Journey through the Seasons: Meditations on the Five Chinese Healing Energies.

Dante: Inferno (Penguin Classics)

The Tempest (Penguin Popular Classics)

Highway 61 Revisited (Bob Dylan “Like a Rolling Stone”)

Phobia (Kinks, “Hatred”)

In Concert – the Complete 1967 Anaheim Show (Donovan, “Lullaby for Spring)

rla on February 7th, 2011

Tashi & friend

RLA & Tashi


This our third show on Animals, a topic always good for interesting music and poetry. Several dogs here this evening, including the original “Hound Dog” – not sounding like you thought it sounded – and cats and a rooster (cockerel) and a bumble bee with a stinger as long as my arm, a spider, a tiger, some birds, and, yes, even a dragon. Our usuals – Dylan, Kinks, RLS – plus, well, listen along and you’ll see who else.

The Village Green Preservation Society (Kinks, “Animal Farm”)

Anthology 3 (Beatles, “Octopus’s Garden”)

New Morning (Bob Dylan, “If Dogs Run Free”)

Ulysses (Modern Classics) (James Joyce’s Ulysses, read by Jim Norton)

Songs from a Room (Leonard Cohen, “Bird on a Wire”)