Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
"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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
"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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
"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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Daedalus and Icarus taking to the air
Evening under Lamplight returns to Cambridge 105 with Series 3 of the show. “There is a time … for the evening under lamplight / (The evening with the photograph album)”, and we invite you to attend as we sit together looking through some photograph albums: Greek Myths, with pictures of Daedalus, who took to the air with new skills; Everything that Rises Must Converge, looking at Mindrollingpodcast and at the tales of Mulla Nasrudin, along with a companion story from the Yiddish folk treasury; and Song of Myself, as we begin looking together at Walt Whitman’s great poem from Leaves of Grass.
Walt Whitman
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
“Dust and ashes — we hold them up in our open palm and let the wind take them away.”
It’s time for letting go, or even letting yourself go, as you accept our invitation to attend to a show with some lively songs from many regular contributors, poems from Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, RLS, and thoughts on all of this and more from RLA, your friendly host for this occasion. See you there.
