Speechification

A very good 45-minute feature about the prosecution and incarceration of modernist legend (and ‘A’ Level English fixture) Ezra Pound. He made over 400 broadcasts on Italian radio during the Second World War and narrowly escaped a conviction for treason on his capture and return to the USA. He wasn’t sent to prison but to serve twelve years in a psychiatric hospital, after which he returned to his adopted Italy. Fascinating and bewildering. Grand and infuriating. (MP3). Here’s a 1958 interview with the poet from BBC4’s interview archive.

Here’s one for the flaneurs. It’s a programme by James Crowden about Thomas de Quincey’s walking stick. Yup, it’s a programme about a walking stick. It’s not an especially remarkable walking stick, you can see it here. But it’s made special because walking is so integral to de Quincey’s writing, and, presumably his stick was integral to his walking. (Obviously it’s not just about the stick, it’s about the whole, you know, de Quincy thing.) MP3 here.

Here’s some proper learning from the grown-ups over at Radio 3. Tom Paulin, a public intellectual on an almost Eighteenth Century model and a William Blake expert, has written a four-part essay about Blake’s language for the Beeb’s aforementioned Blake-a-thon.

I’m going to grab all four of these because Radio 3’s archiving policy is patchy at best. So as not to swamp the podcast with the old fruitcake (sorry), I’ll add parts two, three and four to this entry. So, remember to come back here if you’d like to hear them all (MP3s: part one, part two, part three, part four). From the  British Library’s collection, here’s a really lovely Shockwave facsimile of one of his notebooks and here’s a page about The Tyger.

I’m already enjoying the Beeb’s 250th anniversary Blake-a-thon (is that how you spell ‘Blake-a-thon’?). There’s stuff on all the networks. The best so far has been this half hour on Radio 4 in which Jenny Uglow asserts Blake’s radicalism. She’s worried that these days everyone thinks he was either a sentimental English patriot (mostly because of ‘Jerusalem’) or a fruitcake (mostly because of the angels in the trees and the mad engravings).

Tom Paulin, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd are on hand to back her up, the historical context is fascinating and there’s obviously plenty of marvelous poetry from the old fruitcake (sorry). MP3.