First and Foremost
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Welcome to the "Maynne Xperience", where we discuss Music, Finances, relationships, t.v shows , movies, etc etc... I'm open to opinions and I like to hear other ppls point of view. Thanks for taking the time out to listen, and just because Im Pro-Black don't mean I hate all white ppl #MaynneXperience
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Be Inspired Get Free Fitness Information Transform Your Body and Life with Thomas Smith and Terence Golden.
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Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books. Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series. How To Subscribe In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast feed to unlock the full episodes. Or for other podcast apps, sign up here: lrb.me/closereadings Close ...
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The Not There Yet podcast is a ongoing series of short essays covering a wide range of subjects from the perspective of the third decade of the 21st century. They are intended to be thought provoking, challenging, skeptical and hopefully funny once in a while. They are sometimes conventional in nature and others are a little more experimental. They cover science, history, sports, technology, philosophy or just about whatever subject comes to mind. Sometimes they look forward, other times the ...
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Political Poems: 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones
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‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was wo…
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In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Ag…
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The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawai…
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After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope. Hope against …
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What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to dep…
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Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and r…
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In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting …
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The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbia…
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Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the l…
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'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and …
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Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other grea…
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The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Empire in the second century CE, Lucian wrote in the classical Greek of fifth-century Athens. His razor-sharp satire was a model for Erasmus, Voltaire a…
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In their quest for the medieval sense of humour Mary and Irina come to The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, a 15th-century reimagining of the nativity as domestic comedy that’s less about the birth of Jesus and more about sheep rustling, taxes, the weather and the frustrations of daily life. The pageant was part of a mystery cycle, a collection of plays …
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Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of masculinity and adulthood served as tools of conquest. Using figures as disparate as Gandhi, Oscar Wilde and Aurobindo Ghosh, Nandy suggests ways in which alternative models of age and gender c…
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Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mo…
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Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embod…
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Plato’s Symposium, his philosophical dialogue on love, or eros, was probably written around 380 BCE, but it’s set in 416, during the uneasy truce between Athens and Sparta in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. A symposium was a drinking party, though Socrates and his friends, having had a heavy evening the night before, decide to go easy on the w…
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As Mary and Irina discussed in the previous episode of Medieval LOLs, fabliaux had an enormous influence on Chaucer, but outside of his work, only one survives in Middle English. Dame Syrith, a story of lust, deception and a mustard-eating dog, is medieval humour at its silliest and most troubling. Mary and Irina explore the surprising representati…
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In A House for Mr Biswas, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naip…
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In The Beggar’s Opera we enter a society turned upside down, where private vices are seen as public virtues, and the best way to survive is to assume the worst of everyone. The only force that can subvert this state of affairs is romantic love – an affection, we discover, that satire finds hard to cope with. John Gay’s 1727 smash hit ‘opera’, which…
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s deeply disturbing 1847 poem about a woman escaping slavery and killing her child was written to shock its intended white female readership to the abolitionist cause. Browning was the direct descendant of slave owners in Jamaica and a fervent anti-slavery campaigner, and her dramatic monologue presents a searing attack o…
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In the fifth episode of Among the Ancients II we turn to Greek lyric, focusing on Pindar’s victory odes, considered a benchmark for the sublime since antiquity, and the vivid, narrative-driven dithyrambs of Bacchylides. Through close reading, Emily and Tom tease out allusions, lexical flourishes and formal experimentation, and explain the highly co…
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Fabliaux were short, witty tales originating in northern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, often featuring crafty characters in rustic settings and overwhelmingly concerned with money and sex. In this episode Irina and Mary look at two of these comic verses, both containing surprisingly explicit sexual language, and consider the ways in w…
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In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, the last of the series with Judith Butler, we fittingly turn to The Human Condition (1956). Hannah Arendt defines action as the highest form of human activity: distinct from work and labour, action includes collaborative expression, collective decision-making and, crucially, initiating change. Focusing on …
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According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic use of obscenities, though their precise meanings can sometimes be obsc…
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Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and int…
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Some of the most compelling stories of the Classical world come from Herodotus‘ Histories, an account of the Persian Wars and a thousand things besides. Emily and Tom chart a course through Herodotus‘ history-as-epic, discussing how best to understand his approach to history, ethnography and myth. Exploring a work full of surprising, dramatic and f…
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Riddles are an ancient and universal form, but few people seem to have enjoyed them more than English Benedictine monks. The Exeter Book, a tenth century monastic collection of Old English verse, builds on the riddle tradition in two striking ways: first, the riddles don’t come with answers; second, they are sexually suggestive. Were they intended …
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Begun as a psychiatric dissertation, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) became a genre-shattering study of antiblack racism and its effect on the psyche. At turns expressionistic, confessional, clinical, sharply satirical and politically charged, the book is dazzlingly multivocal, sometimes self-contradictory but always compelling. Judit…
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What did English satirists do after the archbishop of Canterbury banned the printing of satires in June 1599? They turned to the stage. Within months of the crackdown, the same satirical tricks Elizabethans had read in verse could be enjoyed in theatres. At the heart of the scene was Ben Jonson, who for many centuries has maintained a reputation as…
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In their second episode, Mark and Seamus look at W.H. Auden's ‘Spain’. Auden travelled to Spain in January 1937 to support the Republican efforts in the civil war, and composed the poem shortly after his return a few months later to raise money for Medical Aid for Spain. It became a rallying cry in the fight against fascism, but was also heavily cr…
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Supposedly an enslaved man from sixth-century Samos, Aesop might not have ever really existed, but the fables attributed to him remain some of the most widely read examples of classical literature. A fascinating window into the ‘low’ culture of ancient Greece, the Fables and the figure of Aesop appear in the work of authors as diverse as Aristophan…
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All teachers know that the best way for students to learn a language is through swear words, and nobody knew this better than Aelfric Bata, a monk from Winchester whose Colloquies, compiled in around the year 1000, instructed pupils to swear in Latin with elaborate and vivid fluency. Mary and Irina work through some of Aelfric’s fruitier dialogues,…
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Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woman? Focusing on three key chapters, Adam and Judith navigate this dense…
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In their second episode, Colin and Clare look at the dense, digressive and often dangerous satires of John Donne and other poets of the 1590s. It’s likely that Donne was the first Elizabethan author to attempt formal verse satires in the vein of the Roman satirists, and they mark not only the chronological start of his poetic career, but a foundati…
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In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by Frank Kermode as ‘braced against folly by the power and intelligence that make it possible to think it the greatest political poem in the language’. Mar…
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Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones kick off their second season of Among the Ancients with a return to the eighth century BCE, exploring the poems of Homer’s near contemporary, Hesiod, the first western writer to craft a poetic persona. In Works and Days, brilliantly translated by A.E. Stallings, Hesiod weaves his personality into a narrative that encom…
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Were the Middle Ages funny? In this bonus Close Readings series running throughout this year, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their quest for the medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Miller’s Tale', a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago. But who is the real butt of the joke? Mary a…
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Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in French as Réflexions Sur La Question Juive. Sartre’s ‘portraits’ of the ‘anti-Semite’ and the ‘Jew’, as he saw them, caused controversy at the time for directly confronting anti-Jewish bigotry…
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Clare and Colin begin their twelve-part series on satire with the big question: what is satire? Where did it come from? Is it a genre, or more of a style, or an attitude? They then plunge into their first text, The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, a prose satire from 1511 that lampoons pretty much the whole of sixteenth century life in the vo…
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For the final introduction to next year’s full Close Readings programme, Emily Wilson, celebrated classicist and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, returns for a second season of Among the Ancients, to take on another twelve vital works of Greek and Roman literature with the LRB’s Thomas Jones, loosely themed around ‘truth and lies’ – from Ae…
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In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’ll be talking separately to three guests – Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards – about some of the most revolutionary thought of the 20th century. Judith, Pankaj and Brent will each discu…
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In the first of three introductions to our full 2024 Close Readings programme, starting in January, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their series, On Satire. Over twelve episodes, Colin and Clare will attempt to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in English literatur…
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In the final episode of The Long and Short, we turn to Elizabeth Bowen, widely considered one of the finest writers of the short story. Mark and Seamus unpack ‘the Bowen effect’ and her singularly haunting style: subtle social commentary cut through with humour, and occasionally outright romanticism. A culmination of the short fiction explored in t…
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For the final episode in Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom look at Seneca, whose life is relatively well known to us. A child of the established Roman Empire, born around the same time as Jesus, Seneca had turbulent relationships with the emperors of his time: exiled by Caligula, he returned to tutor the young Nero, but was eventually forced to com…
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For the final episode of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina look at by far the most popular text (in its time) of all that have featured in the series: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions of different places, peoples and animals across the Holy Land and Asia are almost certainly drawn mainly from …
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The eleventh episode of the Long and Short brings us to the present day and the distant past, as we turn to two multivocal, monumental poems by Alice Oswald. The dazzlingly polyphonic Dart (2002) celebrates the voices of the river Dart, and the people, animals and supernatural forces entwined with it. Memorial (2011) translates and transfigures the…
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Ovid was perhaps the most prolific poet of Ancient Rome, certainly in the amount of his poetry which has survived (around 30,000 lines). This episode focuses on his 15-book epic, the Metamorphoses, a patchwork of hundreds of stories of transformation, including numerous retellings of famous myths from Apollo and Daphne to the Trojan War. In this ep…
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For sheer scale and spectacle, surely few plays of any period can match The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene. Boasting at least fifty speaking parts, with multiple locations, scaffolds and pyrotechnics, including an ascent into heaven, this wildly ambitious piece of late Medieval theatre mixes traditional hagiographic drama with magical adventure, roma…
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The Long and Short: Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and Langston Hughes's 'Montage of a Dream Deferred'
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In the tenth episode of the series, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ is taut, tense and tartly stylish take on the Jamesian short story, redolent with ironies and ambiguities, and feels just as relevant today. Widely considered his masterwork, Langston Hughes’s ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’ dra…
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