Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: kathleen jamie, nature, nature writing, Radio 4, sightlines
If you get a chance to hear Book of the Week on Radio 4 this week it is Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie. Excellent. A book to buy too.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: everything flows, francis spufford, life and fate, novels, Radio 4, the guardian, vasily grossman
BBC Radio 4 are about to embark on a series of programmes about Vasily Grossman, the astonishing twentieth century Russian author who, for me, is on a par with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Look out for the dramatisation of Life and Fate- and even better read it. There’s a very good introductory article by Francis Spufford in The Guardian here:
With any luck, a public much larger than the one that encountered the novel in Robert Chandler’s excellent English translation will soon recognise Life and Fate as all the things critics say it is: one of the great narratives of battle, a moral monument, a witness-report in fiction from the heart of 20th-century darkness, an astonishing act of truth-telling.
I’m looking forward to this and settling down now with my copy of Everything Flows.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: david stewart, gardens, nature, nicholas rudd jones, pathways, Radio 4, richard mabey, something understood, the guardian
Mabey in the Wild is on Radio 4 on Sunday afternoons for the next few weeks. Listen to his history of wild daffodils here.
Something Understood yesterday was on the healing power of gardens. Listen here.
There’s a very interesting new book called Pathways by David Stewart and Nicholas Rudd Jones, looking at historical routes in Britain. The Guardian is publishing a walk a day from it here.
This book is on my Christmas list.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: a good read, Camino de Santiago, footsteps, joyce rupp, meister eckhart, pilgrimage, Radio 4, richard holmes
pilgrimage to the recesses of the heart
I heard this wonderful phrase a night or two ago on the radio programme A Good Read as the contributors discussed Richard Holmes’ book Footsteps. I have found it to be enigmatic and suggestive, and is certainly something that I want to live with for a while, something I want to chew over, to let rest within me, to meditate upon.
Immediately it is making connections with the quotation from Joyce Rupp that I posted a few days ago and the thoughtful responses from Robert and Anna-Marie, reflecting on their experiences of pilgrimage in Spain. The phrase is a wonderful reminder that pilgrimage is not just about the physical challenge of walking a long way (although this can be enough), but that it is an internal journey that is also set before us if we wish. The invitation to explore the recesses of the heart, to journey deeper into the heart and the soul. As with walking, this can be wonderful and it can also be hellishly hard. As Rupp reminds us, we can change for the bad as well as for the good. For myself, I pray for the grace of God and for the help of those around me that the change might be good, and that I might be ready continually to obey Christ’s command “Follow me”, or as Meister Eckhart so wonderfully puts it:
Put on your travelling shoes and jump into the arms of God.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: edgelands, michael symmons roberts, paul farley, Radio 4
Holy Week is over. A good sleep, a lie in, and then finding that Edgelands, which I am looking forward to reading, is the Book of the Week. An excellent start to a few days off – a space to catch up on some rest, on time with my family, on the garden, a little bit of walking (and some planning for a longer walk soon).
BBC Radio 4′s Book of the Week this week is Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. Details of how to listen here and of the book here:
Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts explore a wilderness that is much closer than you think: those debatable zones that are neither town nor countryside. These two lyric poets celebrate the strange beauty of these places that we all journey through, but generally fail to acknowledge.
Recorded entirely on location in the English edgelands, this Book of the Week journeys through the post-industrial landscapes of ruined warehouses, landfill sites, retail parks, sewage works and power stations.
Today, the car breaker’s yard and the graffitied bridge.
Read by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
Produced by Emma Harding
Edgelands is published by Jonathan Cape (27th February 2011). It won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction in 2009.
Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry – including ‘Ice Age’ – and has received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Michael Symmons Roberts has published five collections of poetry – including ‘Corpus’, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award – and two novels. He is a frequent collaborator with the composer James MacMillan and their opera, ‘The Sacrifice’ won the RPS Award.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: drama, julia blackburn, poetry, Radio 4, thomas blackburn
Really excellent play this afternoon ‘The Spellbound Horses’ by Julia Blackburn about her father Thomas Blackburn. From the website:
Julia’s father was the poet Thomas Blackburn. He was an alcoholic before he became a poet, but in spite of his drunken rages, his erratic behaviour and his crazy obsession with death, she always knew he loved her.
She learnt the transforming power of words from him, and she clung to them, a life raft in a stormy sea. ‘Find the metaphor, darling!’ he’d say, ‘and when you’ve got that, you’re on the way towards facing whatever it is that needs to be faced!’
Julia is older now than her father ever became, and here is her son Daniel, about to get married. She worries about the impression she has given Daniel of his grandfather. There are no aunts or uncles to give a different twist on Thomas’ life so it has all come from her: stories of bad behaviour and drunken excess, told to make Daniel laugh with disbelief but not to bring him closer to the man who was his grandfather.
And what has Daniel inherited as well as that lanky body and those bushy eyebrows? Could there be a locked box of trouble somewhere inside him, a smouldering present from the past?
A work of mesmerising delicacy from the winner of the Pen Ackerley prize for memoir 2009.
Listen again here.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: billy bragg, passion, poetry, Radio 4, socialism, vision
An excellent programme in this series, interviewing Billy Bragg about poetry. Click here to listen again.
Mr Gee presents the final programme in the four part series, Rhyme and Reason.
This week he is joined by musician and activist Billy Bragg to talk about how poetry has played a major role in his life. Billy Bragg tells of how he’s used music and poetry to express his feelings at pivotal points in his life. We hear readings of his favourite poetry and music from his back catalogue going back over 25 years.
I’ve just caught this excellent short programme on Radio 4:
Parishioners of St. Edburgs Church, Bicester, wanted a novel way to support their 900-year-old church and raise funds for a much-needed £1m refurbishment. With very little experience of adventuring far by bus, they set out to travel from Canterbury to York, staying with fellow christians along the way. It was a journey that would change their views on bus travel and on the great British countryside. As one pilgrim puts it; ” This week has been one of the most memorable, humbling and happy weeks of my life. God was certainly looking down on us.”.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bbc radio, Radio 4, something understood, walking
Radio 4′s Something Understood yesterday was a meditation on walking. Listen again here.
What many of us take for granted as a rather mundane activity is elevated for others into a creative, spiritual or philosophical meditation.
Drawing on the writings of a Buddhist monk, the artist Richard Long and the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, among others, Melissa Viney explores walking’s physical and psychological benefits. Also, with music from Herb Alpert, Mozart, Ella and Elvis.
And she talks to Mark Hennessy, who’s having to learn to walk all over again following a brain injury.
Readers: Emma Fielding and Jonathan Keeble
Producer: Alan Hall
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.
MUSIC
Jankowski – A Walk in the Black Forest
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
CD: Going Places
High Coin SABRECD2009 tr. 11
Block/Hecht – Walking After Midnight
Patsy Cline
CD: ‘Ultimate Legends – Patsy Cline
The Ventures – Walk, Don’t Run
CD: ‘Walk Don’t Run: The Very Best Of The Ventures.’
Trad. Arr G. Price/R. Black – Just a Closer Walk With Thee
Ella Fitzgerald
CD: Brighten the Corner
Capitol CDP 795 151 2 tr. 2
Mozart – Piano Sonata no. 15 – Andante
Maria Joao Pires (pianist)
Piano Sonata in C Major No. 15. K. 545 “Facile”: II. Andante
CD: The Works: Mozart Piano Sonatas
Deutsche Grammophon
Emily Maguire – Keep Walking
Emily Maguire
Shaktu Records SHK2 – 102
Joe South – Walk a Mile in My Shoes
Elvis Presley
CD: On Stage
RCA 0786 367 741 2 tr. 9
Pub. Lowery Music
READINGS
Rebecca Solnit – Wanderlust
Pub: Verso.
Henry Thoreau – Walking
Pub: Arc Manor
Richard Long: ‘Five, six, pick up sticks,
Seven, eight, lay them straight.’
Published on occasion of solo exhibition at Anthony D’Offay gallery, London, 1980. Reprinted in ‘Richard Long, Heaven and Earth. Tate Exhibition Catalogue.
Edited by Clarrie Wallis.
Thich Nhat Hanh – The Long Road Turns to Joy
(A Guide to Walking Meditation)
Pub: Parallax Press, Berkeley, California
Werner Herzog – Of Walking In Ice
Trans. Martje Herzog & Alan Greenberg
Pub. Tanam Press, NY 1980
Kierkegaard
Soren Aaby Kierkegaard, Letter to Henrietta Land, 1847 ‘Kierkegaard’s Writing: Letters and Documents’
Pub. Princetown University Press.
John Napier – The Antiquity of Walking
Human Ancestors
Pub. Scientific American
Mark Hennessy
POEM
Cecil Day Lewis – Walking Away (For Sean)
The Gate and Other Poems
Stanford University Press.
ACTUALITY
Mark Hennessy
BROADCASTS
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Sun 12 Dec 201006:05
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Sun 12 Dec 201023:30
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bbc radio, excess baggage, pilgrimage, Radio 4
Excess Baggage on BBC Radio Four is on pilgrimage this week:
Anita Anand explores pilgrim routes from Canterbury to Kerala and meets Tony Giles, the blind and severely deaf traveller, who has undertaken two solo trips around the world.
Listen again here.
