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Clare Carlisle's biography of George Eliot, The Marriage Question, is one of my favourite modern biographies, so I was really pleased to interview Clare. We talked about George Eliot as a feminist, the imperfections of her “marriage” to George Henry Lewes, what she learned from Spinoza, having sympathy for Casaubon, contradictions in Eliot's narrative method, her use of negatives, psychoanalysis, Middlemarch, and more. We also talked about biographies of philosophers, Kierkegaard, and Somerset Maugham. I was especially pleased by Clare's answer about the reported decline in student attention spans. Overall I thought this was a great discussion. Many thanks to Clare! Full transcript below. Here is an extract from our discussion about Eliot's narrative ideas.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to Clare Carlisle, a philosopher at King's College London and a biographer. I am a big fan of George Eliot's Double Life: The Marriage Question. I've said the title backwards, but I'm sure you'll find the book either way. Clare, welcome.Clare Carlisle: Hi, Henry. Nice to be here.Henry: Is George Eliot a disappointing feminist?Clare: Obviously disappointment is relative to expectations, isn't it? It depends on what we expect of feminism, and in particular, a 19th-century woman. I personally don't find her a disappointing feminist. Other readers have done, and I can understand why that's the case for all sorts of reasons. She took on a male identity in order to be an artist, be a philosopher in a way that she thought was to her advantage, and she's sometimes been criticized for creating heroines who have quite a conventional sort of fulfillment. Not all of them, but Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example, at the end of the novel, we look back on her life as a wife and a mother with some sort of poignancy.Yes, she's been criticized for, in a way, giving her heroines and therefore offering other women a more conventional feminine ideal than the life she managed to create and carve out for herself as obviously a very remarkable thinker and artist. I also think you can read in the novels a really bracing critique of patriarchy, actually, and a very nuanced exploration of power dynamics between men and women, which isn't simplistic. Eliot is aware that women can oppress men, just as men can oppress women. Particularly in Middlemarch, actually, there's an exploration of marital violence that overcomes the more gendered portrayal of it, perhaps in Eliot's own earlier works where, in a couple of her earlier stories, she portrayed abused wives who were victims of their husband's betrayal, violence, and so on.Whereas in Middlemarch, it's interestingly, the women are as controlling, not necessarily in a nasty way, but just that that's the way human beings navigate their relations with each other. It seems to be part of what she's exploring in Middlemarch. No, I don't find her a disappointing feminist. We should be careful about the kind of expectations we, in the 21st century project onto Eliot.Henry: Was George Henry Lewes too controlling?Clare: I think one of the claims of this book is that there was more darkness in that relationship than has been acknowledged by other biographers, let's put it that way. When I set out to write the book, I'd read two or three other biographies of Eliot by this point. One thing that's really striking is this very wonderfully supportive husbands that, in the form of Lewes, George Eliot has, and a very cheerful account of that relationship and how marvelous he was. A real celebration of this relationship where the husband is, in many ways, putting his wife's career before his own, supporting her.Lewes acted as her agent, as her editor informally. He opened her mail for her. He really put himself at the service of her work in ways that are undoubtedly admirable. Actually, when I embarked on writing this book, I just accepted that narrative myself and was interested in this very positive portrayal of the relationship, found it attractive, as other writers have obviously done. Then, as I wrote the book, I was obviously reading more of the primary sources, the letters Eliot was writing and diary entries. I started to just have a bit of a feeling about this relationship, that it was light and dark, it wasn't just light.The ambiguity there was what really interested me, of, how do you draw the line between a husband or a wife who's protective, even sheltering the spouse from things that might upset them and supportive of their career and helpful in practical ways. How do you draw the line between that and someone who's being controlling? I think there were points where Lewes crossed that line. In a way, what's more interesting is, how do you draw that line. How do partners draw that line together? Not only how would we draw the line as spectators on that relationship, obviously only seeing glimpses of the inner life between the two people, but how do the partners themselves both draw those lines and then navigate them?Yes, I do suggest in the book that Lewes could be controlling and in ways that I think Eliot herself felt ambivalent about. I think she partly enjoyed that feeling of being protected. Actually, there was something about the conventional gendered roles of that, that made her feel more feminine and wifely and submissive, In a way, to some extent, I think she bought into that ideal, but also she felt its difficulties and its tensions. I also think for Lewes, this is a man who is himself conditioned by patriarchal norms with the expectation that the husband should be the successful one, the husband should be the provider, the one who's earning the money.He had to navigate a situation. That was the situation when they first got together. When they first got together, he was more successful writer. He was the man of the world who was supporting Eliot, who was more at the beginning of her career to some extent and helping her make connections. He had that role at the beginning. Then, within a few years, it had shifted and suddenly he had this celebrated best-selling novelist on his hands, which was, even though he supported her success, partly for his own financial interests, it wasn't necessarily what he'd bargained for when he got into the relationship.I think we can also see Lewes navigating the difficulties of that role, of being, to some extent, maybe even disempowered in that relationship and possibly reacting to that vulnerability with some controlling behavior. It's maybe something we also see in the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship where they get together. Not that I think that at all Casaubon was modeled on Lewes, not at all, but something of the dynamic there where they get together and the young woman is in awe of this learned man and she's quite subservient to him and looking up to him and wanting him to help her make her way in the world and teach her things.Then it turns out that his insecurity about his own work starts to come through. He reacts, and the marriage brings out his own insecurity about his work. Then he becomes quite controlling of Dorothea, perhaps again as a reaction to his own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. The point of my interpretation is not to portray Lewes as some villain, but rather to see these dynamics and as I say, ambivalences, ambiguities that play themselves out in couples, between couples.Henry: I came away from the book feeling like it was a great study of talent management in a way, and that the both of them were very lucky to find someone who was so well-matched to their particular sorts of talents. There are very few literary marriages where that is the case, or where that is successfully the case. The other one, the closest parallel I came up with was the Woolfs. Leonard is often said he's too controlling, which I find a very unsympathetic reading of a man who looked after a woman who nearly died. I think he was doing what he felt she required. In a way, I agree, Lewes clearly steps over the line several times. In a way, he was doing what she required to become George Eliot, as it were.Clare: Yes, absolutely.Henry: Which is quite remarkable in a way.Clare: Yes. I don't think Mary Ann Evans would have become George Eliot without that partnership with Lewes. I think that's quite clear. That's not because he did the work, but just that there was something about that, the partnership between them, that enabled that creativity…Henry: He knew all the people and he knew the literary society and all the editors, and therefore he knew how to take her into that world without it overwhelming her, giving her crippling headaches, sending her into a depression.Clare: Yes.Henry: In a way, I came away more impressed with them from the traditional, isn't it angelic and blah, blah, blah.Clare: Oh, that's good.Henry: What did George Eliot learn from Spinoza?Clare: I think she learned an awful lot from Spinoza. She translated Spinoza in the 1850s. She translated Spinoza's Ethics, which is Spinoza's philosophical masterpiece. That's really the last major project that Eliot did before she started to write fiction. It has, I think, quite an important place in her career. It's there at that pivotal point, just before she becomes an artist, as she puts it, as a fiction writer. Because she didn't just read The Ethics, but she translated it, she read it very, very closely, and I think was really quite deeply formed by a particular Spinozist ethical vision.Spinoza thinks that human beings are not self-sufficient. He puts that in very metaphysical terms. A more traditional philosophical view is to say that individual things are substances. I'm a substance, you're a substance. What it means to be a substance is to be self-sufficient, independent. For example, I would be a substance, but my feeling of happiness on this sunny morning would be a more accidental feature of my being.Henry: Sure.Clare: Something that depends on my substance, and then these other features come and go. They're passing, they're just modes of substance, like a passing mood or whatever, or some kind of characteristic I might have. That's the more traditional view, whereas Spinoza said that there's only one substance, and that's God or nature, which is just this infinite totality. We're all modes of that one substance. That means that we don't have ontological independence, self-sufficiency. We're more like a wave on the ocean that's passing through. One ethical consequence of that way of thinking is that we are interconnected.We're all interconnected. We're not substances that then become connected and related to other substances, rather we emerge as beings through this, our place in this wider whole. That interconnectedness of all things and the idea that individuals are really constituted by their relations is, I think, a Spinoza's insight that George Eliot drew on very deeply and dramatized in her fiction. I think it's there all through her fiction, but it becomes quite explicit in Middlemarch where she talks about, she has this master metaphor of the web.Henry: The web. Right.Clare: In Middlemarch, where everything is part of a web. You put pressure on a bit of it and something changes in another part of the web. That interconnectedness can be understood on multiple levels. Biologically, the idea that tissues are formed in this organic holistic way, rather than we're not composed of parts, like machines, but we're these organic holes. There's a biological idea of the web, which she explores. Also, the economic system of exchange that holds a community together. Then I suppose, perhaps most interestingly, the more emotional and moral features of the web, the way one person's life is bound up with and shaped by their encounters with all the other lives that it comes into contact with.In a way, it's a way of thinking that really, it questions any idea of self-sufficiency, but it also questions traditional ideas of what it is to be an individual. You could see a counterpart to this way of thinking in a prominent 19th-century view of history, which sees history as made by heroic men, basically. There's this book by Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, called The Heroic in History, or something like that.Henry: Sure. On heroes and the heroic, yes.Clare: Yes. That's a really great example of this way of thinking about history as made by heroes. Emerson wrote this book called Representative Men. These books were published, I think, in the early 1850s. Representative Men. Again, he identifies these certain men, these heroic figures, which represent history in a way. Then a final example of this is Auguste Comte's Positivist Calendar, which, he's a humanist, secularist thinker who wants to basically recreate culture and replace our calendar with this lunar calendar, which, anyway, it's a different calendar, has 13 months.Each month is named after a great man. There's Shakespeare, and there's Dante, and there's-- I don't know, I can't remember. Anyway, there's this parade of heroic men. Napoleon. Anyway, that's the view of history that Eliot grew up with. She was reading, she was really influenced by Carlisle and Emerson and Comte. In that landscape, she is creating this alternative Spinozist vision of what an exemplar can be like and who gets to be an exemplar. Dorothea was a really interesting exemplar because she's unhistoric. At the very end of Middlemarch, she describes Dorothea's unhistoric life that comes to rest in an unvisited tomb.She's obscure. She's not visible on the world stage. She's forgotten once she dies. She's obscure. She's ordinary. She's a provincial woman, upper middle-class provincial woman, who makes some bad choices. She has high ideals but ends up living a life that from the outside is not really an extraordinary life at all. Also, she is constituted by her relations with others in both directions. Her own life is really shaped by her milieu, by her relationships with the people. Also, at the end of the novel, Eliot leaves us with a vision of the way Dorothea's life has touched other lives and in ways that can't be calculated, can't really be recognized. Yet, she has these effects that are diffused.She uses this word, diffusion or diffuseness. The diffuseness of the effects of Dorothea's life, which seep into the world. Of course, she's a woman. She's not a great hero in this Carlyle or Emerson sense. In all these ways, I think this is a very different way of thinking about individuality, but also history and the way the world is made, that history and the world is made by, in this more Spinozist kind of way, rather than by these heroic representative men who stand on the world stage. That's not Spinoza's, that's Eliot's original thinking. She's taking a Spinozist ontology, a Spinozist metaphysics, but really she's creating her own vision with that, that's, of course, located in that 19th-century context.Henry: How sympathetic should we be to Mr. Casaubon?Clare: I feel very sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon because he is so vulnerable. He's a really very vulnerable person. Of course, in the novel, we are encouraged to look at it from Dorothea's point of view, and so when we look at it from Dorothea's point of view, Casaubon is a bad thing. The best way to think about it is the view of Dorothea's sister Celia, her younger sister, who is a very clear-eyed observer, who knows that Dorothea is making a terrible mistake in marrying this man. She's quite disdainful of Casaubon's, well, his unattractive looks.He's only about 40, but he's portrayed as this dried-up, pale-faced scholar, academic, who is incapable of genuine emotional connection with another person, which is quite tragic, really. The hints are that he's not able to have a sexual relationship. He's so buttoned up and repressed, in a way. When we look at it from Dorothea's perspective, we say, "No, he's terrible, he's bad for you, he's not going to be good for you," which of course is right. I think Eliot herself had a lot of sympathy for Casaubon. There's an anecdote which said that when someone asked who Casaubon was based on, she pointed to herself.I think she saw something of herself in him. On an emotional level, I think he's just a fascinating character, isn't he, in a way, from an aesthetic point of view? The point is not do we like Casaubon or do we not like him? I think we are encouraged to feel sympathy with him, even as, on the one, it's so clever because we're taken along, we're encouraged to feel as Celia feels, where we dislike him, we don't sympathize with him. Then Eliot is also showing us how that view is quite limited, I think, because we do occasionally see the world from Casaubon's point of view and see how fearful Casaubon is.Henry: She's also explicit and didactic about the need to sympathize with him, right? It's often in asides, but at one point, she gives over most of a chapter to saying, "Poor Mr. Casaubon. He didn't think he'd end up like this." Things have actually gone very badly for him as well.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.Henry: There's a good book by Debra Gettelman about the way that novelists like Eliot knew what readers expected because they were all reading so many cheap romance novels and circulating library novels. There are a lot of negations and arguments with the reader to say, "I know what you want this story to do and I know how you want this character to turn out, but I'm not going to do that. You must go with me with what I'm doing.Clare: Yes. You mean this new book that's come out called Imagining Otherwise?Henry: That's right, yes.Clare: I've actually not read it yet, I've ordered it, but funnily enough, as you said at the beginning, I'm a philosopher so I'm not trained at all as a reader of literary texts or as a literary scholar by any means, and so I perhaps foolishly embarked on this book on George Eliot thinking, "Oh, next I'm going to write a book about George Eliot." Anyway, I ended up going to a couple of conferences on George Eliot, which was interestingly like stepping into a different world. The academic world of literary studies is really different from the world of academic philosophy, interestingly.It's run by women for a start. You go to a conference and it's very female-dominated. There's all these very eminent senior women or at least at this conference I went to there was these distinguished women who were running the show. Then there were a few men in that mix, which is the inverse of often what it can be like in a philosophy conference, which is still quite a male-dominated discipline. The etiquette is different. Philosophers like to criticize each other's arguments. That's the way we show love is to criticize and take down another philosopher's argument.Whereas the academics at this George Eliot conference were much more into acknowledging what they'd learned from other people's work and referencing. Anyway, it's really interestingly different. Debra Gettelman was at this conference.Henry: Oh, great.Clare: She had a book on Middlemarch. I think it was 2019 because it was the bicentenary of Eliot's birth, that's why there was this big conference. Debra, who I'd never met before or heard of, as I just didn't really know this world, gave this amazing talk on Middlemarch and on these negations in Middlemarch. It really influenced me, it really inspired me. The way she did these close readings of the sentences, this is what literary scholars are trained to do, but I haven't had that training and the close reading of the sentences, which didn't just yield interesting insights into the way George Eliot uses language but yielded this really interesting philosophical work where Eliot is using forms of the sentence to explore ontological questions about negation and possibility and modality.This was just so fascinating and really, it was a small paper in one of those parallel sessions. It wasn't one of the big presentations at the conference, but it was that talk that most inspired me at the conference. It's a lot of the insights that I got from Debra Gettelman I ended up drawing on in my own chapter on Middlemarch. I situated it a bit more in the history of philosophy and thinking about negation as a theme.Henry: This is where you link it to Hegel.Clare: Yes, to Hegel, exactly. I was so pleased to see that the book is out because I think I must have gone up to her after the talk and said, "Oh, it's really amazing." Was like, "Oh, thank you." I was like, "Is it published? Can I cite it?" She said, "No. I'm working on this project." It seemed like she felt like it was going to be a long time in the making. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a review of the book in the TLS. I thought, "Oh, amazing, the book is out. It just sounds brilliant." I can't wait to read that book. Yes, she talks about Eliot alongside, I think, Dickens and another.Henry: And Jane Austen.Clare: Jane Austen, amazing. Yes. I think it's to do with, as you say, writing in response to readerly expectation and forming readerly expectations. Partly thanks to Debra Gettelman, I can see how Eliot does that. It'd be really interesting to learn how she sees Jane Austen and Dickens also doing that.Henry: It's a brilliant book. You're in for a treat.Clare: Yes, I'm sure it is. That doesn't surprise me at all.Henry: Now, you say more than once in your book, that Eliot anticipates some of the insights of psychotherapy.Clare: Psychoanalysis.Henry: Yes. What do you think she would have made of Freud or of our general therapy culture? I think you're right, but she has very different aims and understandings of these things. What would she make of it now?Clare: It seems that Freud was probably influenced by Eliot. That's a historical question. He certainly read and admired Eliot. I suspect, yes, was influenced by some of her insights, which in turn, she's drawing on other stuff. What do you have in mind? Your question suggests that you think she might have disapproved of therapy culture.Henry: I think novelists in general are quite ambivalent about psychoanalysis and therapy. Yes.Clare: For what reason?Henry: If you read someone like Iris Murdoch, who's quite Eliotic in many ways, she would say, "Do these therapists ever actually help anyone?"Clare: Ah.Henry: A lot of her characters are sent on these slightly dizzying journeys. They're often given advice from therapists or priests or philosophers, and obviously, Murdoch Is a philosopher. The advice from the therapists and the philosophers always ends these characters up in appalling situations. It's art and literature. As you were saying before, a more diffusive understanding and a way of integrating yourself with other things rather than looking back into your head and dwelling on it.Clare: Of course. Yes.Henry: I see more continuity between Eliot and that kind of thinking. I wonder if you felt that the talking cure that you identified at the end of Middlemarch is quite sound common sense and no-nonsense. It's not lie on the couch and tell me how you feel, is it?Clare: I don't know. That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way to look at it would be to see Eliot and Freud is located in this broadly Socratic tradition of one, the idea that if you understand yourself better, then that is a route to a certain qualified kind of happiness or fulfillment or liberation. The best kind of human life there could be is one where we gain insight into our own natures. We bring to light what is hidden from us, whether those are desires that are hidden away in the shadows and they're actually motivating our behavior, but we don't realize it, and so we are therefore enslaved to them.That's a very old idea that you find in ancient philosophy. Then the question is, by what methods do we bring these things to light? Is it through Socratic questioning? Is it through art? Eliot's art is an art that I think encourages us to see ourselves in the characters. As we come to understand the characters, and in particular to go back to what I said before about Spinozism, to see their embeddedness and their interconnectedness in these wider webs, but also in a sense of that embeddedness in psychic forces that they're not fully aware of. Part of what you could argue is being exposed there, and this would be a Spinozist insight, is the delusion of free will.The idea that we act freely with these autonomous agents who have access to and control over our desires, and we pick the thing that's in our interest and we act on that. That's a view that I think Spinoza is very critical. He famously denies free will. He says we're determined, we just don't understand how we're determined. When we understand better how we're determined, then perhaps paradoxically we actually do become relatively empowered through our understanding. I think there's something of that in Eliot too, and arguably there's something of that in Freud as well. I know you weren't actually so much asking about Freud's theory and practice, and more about a therapy culture.Henry: All of it.Clare: You're also asking about that. As I say, the difference would be the method for accomplishing this process of a kind of enlightenment. Of course, Freud's techniques medicalizes that project basically. It's the patient and the doctor in dialogue, and depends a lot on the skills of the doctor, doesn't it? How successful, and who is also a human being, who is also another human being, who isn't of course outside of the web, but is themselves in it, and ideally has themselves already undergone this process of making themselves more transparent to their own understanding, but of course, is going to be liable to their own blind spots, and so on.Henry: Which of her novels do you love the most? Just on a personal level, it doesn't have to be which one you think is the most impressive or whatever.Clare: I'm trying to think how to answer that question. I was thinking if I had to reread one of them next week, which one would I choose? If I was going on holiday and I wanted a beach read for pure enjoyment, which of the novels would I pick up? Probably Middlemarch. I think it's probably the most enjoyable, the most fun to read of her novels, basically.Henry: Sure.Clare: There'd be other reasons for picking other books. I really think Daniel Deronda is amazing because of what she's trying to do in that book. Its ambition, it doesn't always succeed in giving us the reading experience that is the most enjoyable. In terms of just the staggering philosophical and artistic achievement, what she's attempting to do, and what she does to a large extent achieve in that book, I think is just incredible. As a friend of Eliot, I have a real love for Daniel Deronda because I just think that what an amazing thing she did in writing that book. Then I've got a soft spot for Silas Marner, which is short and sweet.Henry: I think I'd take The Mill on the Floss. That's my favorite.Clare: Oh, would you?Henry: I love that book.Clare: That also did pop into my mind as another contender. Yes, because it's so personal in a way, The Mill on the Floss. It's personal to her, it's also personal to me in that, it's the first book by Eliot I read because I studied it for A-Level. I remember thinking when we were at the beginning of that two-year period when I'd chosen my English literature A-Level and we got the list of texts we were going to read, I remember seeing The Mill on the Floss and thinking, "Oh God, that sounds so boring." The title, something about the title, it just sounded awful. I remember being a bit disappointed that it wasn't a Jane Austen or something more fun.I thought, "Oh, The Mill on the Floss." Then I don't have a very strong memory of the book, but I remember thinking, actually, it was better than I expected. I did think, actually, it wasn't as awful and boring as I thought it would be. It's a personal book to Eliot. I think that exploring the life of a mind of a young woman who has no access to proper education, very limited access to art and culture, she's stuck in this little village near a provincial town full of narrow-minded conservative people. That's Eliot's experience herself. It was a bit my experience, too, as, again, not that I even would have seen it this way at the time, but a girl with intellectual appetites and not finding those appetites very easily satisfied in, again, a provincial, ordinary family and the world and so on.Henry: What sort of reader were you at school?Clare: What sort of reader?Henry: Were you reading lots of Plato, lots of novels?Clare: No. I'm always really surprised when I meet people who say things like they were reading Kierkegaard and Plato when they were 15 or 16. No, not at all. No, I loved reading, so I just read lots and lots of novels. I loved Jane Eyre. That was probably one of the first proper novels, as with many people, that I remember reading that when I was about 12 and partly feeling quite proud of myself for having read this grown-up book, but also really loving the book. I reread that probably several times before I was 25. Jane Austen and just reading.Then also I used to go to the library, just completely gripped by some boredom and restlessness and finding something to read. I read a lot and scanning the shelves and picking things out. That way I read more contemporary fiction. Just things like, I don't know, Julian Barnes or, Armistead Maupin, or just finding stuff on the shelves of the library that looked interesting, or Anita Brookner or Somerset Maugham. I really love Somerset Maugham.Henry: Which ones do you like?Clare: I remember reading, I think I read The Razor's Edge first.Henry: That's a great book.Clare: Yes, and just knowing nothing about it, just picking it off the shelf and thinking, "Oh, this looks interesting." I've always liked a nice short, small paperback. That would always appeal. Then once I found a book I liked, I'd then obviously read other stuff by that writer. I then read, so The Razor's Edge and-- Oh, I can't remember.Henry: The Moon and Sixpence, maybe?Clare: Yes, The Moon and Sixpence, and-Henry: Painted Veils?Clare: -Human Bondage.Henry: Of Human Bondage, right.Clare: Human Bondage, which is, actually, he took the title from Spinoza's Ethics. That's the title. Cluelessly, as a teenager, I was like, "Ooh, this book is interesting." Actually, when I look back, I can see that those writers, like Maugham, for example, he was really interested in philosophy. He was really interested in art and philosophy, and travel, and culture, and religion, all the things I am actually interested in. I wouldn't have known that that was why I loved the book. I just liked the book and found it gripping. It spoke to me, and I wanted to just read more other stuff like that.I was the first person in my family to go to university, so we didn't have a lot of books in the house. We had one bookcase. There were a few decent things in there along with the Jeffrey Archers in there. I read everything on that bookshelf. I read the Jeffrey Archers, I read the True Crime, I read the In Cold Blood, just this somewhat random-- I think there was probably a couple of George Eliots on there. A few classics, I would, again, grip by boredom on a Sunday afternoon, just stare at this shelf and think, "Oh, is there anything?" Maybe I'll end up with a Thomas Hardy or something. It was quite limited. I didn't really know anything about philosophy. I didn't think of doing philosophy at university, for example. I actually decided to do history.I went to Cambridge to do history. Then, after a couple of weeks, just happened to meet someone who was doing philosophy. I was like, "Oh, that's what I want to do." I only recognized it when I saw it. I hadn't really seen it because I went to the local state school, it wasn't full of teachers who knew about philosophy and stuff like that.Henry: You graduated in theology and philosophy, is that right?Clare: Yes. Cambridge, the degrees are in two parts. I did Part 1, theology, and then I did Part 2, philosophy. I graduated in philosophy, but I studied theology in my first year at Cambridge.Henry: What are your favorite Victorian biographies?Clare: You mean biographies of Victorians?Henry: Of Victorians, by Victorians, whatever.Clare: I don't really read many biographies.Henry: Oh, really?Clare: [laughs] The first biography I wrote was a biography of Kierkegaard. I remember thinking, when I started to write the book, "I'd better read some biographies." I always tend to read fiction. I'm not a big reader of history, which is so ironic. I don't know what possessed me to go and study history at university. These are not books I read for pleasure. I suppose I am quite hedonistic in my choice of reading, I like to read for pleasure.Henry: Sure. Of course.Clare: I don't tend to read nonfiction. Obviously, I do sometimes read nonfiction for pleasure, but it's not the thing I'm most drawn to. Anyway. I remember asking my editor, I probably didn't mention that I didn't know very much about biography, but I did ask him to recommend some. I'd already got the book contract. I said, "What do you think is a really good biography that I should read?" He recommended, I think, who is it who wrote The Life of Gibbon? Really famous biography of Gibbon.Henry: I don't know.Clare: That one. I read it. It is really good. My mind is going blank. I read many biographies of George Eliot before I wrote mine.Henry: They're not all wonderful, are they?Clare: I really liked Catherine Hughes's book because it brought her down from her pedestal.Henry: Exactly. Yes.Clare: Talking about hedonism, I would read anything that Catherine Hughes writes just for enjoyment because she's such a good writer. She's a very intellectual woman, but she's also very entertaining. She writes to entertain, which I like and appreciate as a reader. There's a couple of big archival biographies of George Eliot by Gordon Haight and by Rosemary Ashton, for example, which are both just invaluable. One of the great things about that kind of book is that it frees you to write a different kind of biography that can be more interpretive and more selective. Once those kinds of books have been published, there's no point doing another one. You can do something more creative, potentially, or more partial.I really like Catherine Hughes's. She was good at seeing through Eliot sometimes, and making fun of her, even though it's still a very respectful book. There's also this brilliant book about Eliot by Rosemary Bodenheimer called The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. It's a biographical book, but it's written through the letters. She sees Eliot's life through her letters. Again, it's really good at seeing through Eliot. What Eliot says is not always what she means. She can be quite defensive and boastful. These are things that really come out in her letters. Anyway, that's a brilliant book, which again, really helped me to read Eliot critically. Not unsympathetically, but critically, because I tend to fall in love with thinkers that I'm reading. I'm not instinctively critical. I want to just show how amazing they are, but of course, you also need to be critical. Those books were--Henry: Or realistic.Clare: Yes, realistic and just like, "This is a human being," and having a sense of humor about it as well. That's what's great about Catherine Hughes's book, is that she's got a really good sense of humor. That makes for a fun reading experience.Henry: Why do you think more philosophers don't write biographies? It's an unphilosophical activity, isn't it?Clare: That's a very interesting question. Just a week or so ago, I was talking to Clare Mac Cumhaill I'm not quite sure how you pronounce her name, but anyway, so there's--Henry: Oh, who did the four women in Oxford?Clare: Yes. Exactly.Henry: That was a great book.Clare: Yes. Clare MacCumhaill co-wrote this book with Rachael Wiseman. They're both philosophers. They wrote this group biography of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. I happened to be having dinner with a group of philosophers and sitting opposite her. Had never met her before. It was just a delight to talk to another philosopher who'd written biography. We both felt that there was a real philosophical potential in biography, that thinking about a shape of a human life, what it is to know another person, the connection between a person's life and their philosophy. Even to put it that way implies that philosophy is something that isn't part of life, that you've got philosophy over here and you've got life over there. Then you think about the connection between them.That, when you think about it, is quite a questionable way of looking at philosophy as if it's somehow separate from life or detachment life. We had a really interesting conversation about this. There's Ray Monk's brilliant biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. He's another philosopher who's written biography, and then went on to reflect, interestingly, on the relationship between philosophy and biography.I think on the one hand, I'd want to question the idea that biography and philosophy are two different things or that a person's life and their thought are two separate questions. On the other hand, we've got these two different literary forms. One of them is a narrative form of writing, and one of them- I don't know what the technical term for it would be- but a more systematic writing where with systematic writing, it's not pinned to a location or a time, and the structure of the text is conceptual rather than narrative. It's not ordered according to events and chronology, and things happening, you've just got a more analytic style of writing.Those two styles of writing are very, very different ways of writing. They're two different literary forms. Contemporary academic philosophers tend to write, almost always-- probably are pretty much forced to write in the systematic analytic style because as soon as you would write a narrative, the critique will be, "Well, that's not philosophy. That's history," or "That's biography," or, "That's anecdote." You might get little bits of narrative in some thought experiment, but by definition, the thought experiment is never pinned to a particular time, place, or context. "Let's imagine a man standing on a bridge. There's a fat man tied to the railway line [crosstalk]." Those are like little narratives, but they're not pinned. There is a sequencing, so I suppose they are narratives. Anyway, as you can tell, they're quite abstracted little narratives.That interests me. Why is it that narrative is seen as unphilosophical? Particularly when you think about the history of philosophy, and we think about Plato's dialogues, which tend to have a narrative form, and the philosophical conversation is often situated within a narrative. The Phaedo, for example, at the beginning of the book, Socrates is sitting in prison, and he's about to drink his poisoned hemlock. He's awaiting execution. His friends, students, and disciples are gathered around him. They're talking about death and how Socrates feels about dying. Then, at the end of the book, he dies, and his friends are upset about it.Think about, I know, Descartes' Meditations, where we begin in the philosopher's study, and he's describing--Henry: With the fire.Clare: He's by the fire, but he's also saying, "I've reached a point in my life where I thought, actually, it's time to question some assumptions." He's sitting by the fire, but he's also locating the scene in his own life trajectory. He's reached a certain point in life. Of course, that may be a rhetorical device. Some readers might want to say, "Well, that's mere ornamentation. We extract the arguments from that. That's where the philosophy is." I think it's interesting to think about why philosophers might choose narrative as a form.Spinoza, certainly not in the Ethics, which is about as un-narrative as you can get, but in some of his other, he experimented with an earlier version of the Ethics, which is actually like Descartes' meditation. He begins by saying, "After experience had taught me to question all the values I'd been taught to pursue, I started to wonder whether there was some other genuine good that was eternal," and so on. He then goes on to narrate his experiments with a different kind of life, giving up certain things and pursuing other things.Then you come to George Eliot. I think these are philosophical books.Henry: Yes.Clare: The challenge lies in saying, "Well, how are they philosophical?" Are they philosophical because there are certain ideas in the books that you could pick out and say, "Oh, here, she's critiquing utilitarianism. These are her claims." You can do that with Eliot's books. There are arguments embedded in the books. I wouldn't want to say that that's where their philosophical interest is exhausted by the fact that you can extract non-narrative arguments from them, but rather there's also something philosophical in her exploration of what a human life is like and how choices get made and how those choices, whether they're free or unfree, shape a life, shape other lives. What human happiness can we realistically hope for? What does a good life look like? What does a bad life look like? Why is the virtue of humility important?These are also, I think, philosophical themes that can perhaps only be treated in a long-form, i.e., in a narrative that doesn't just set a particular scene from a person's life, but that follows the trajectory of a life. That was a very long answer to your question.Henry: No, it was a good answer. I like it.Clare: Just to come back to what you said about biography. When I wrote my first biography on Kierkegaard, I really enjoyed working in this medium of narrative for the first time. I like writing. I'd enjoyed writing my earlier books which were in that more analytic conceptual style where the structure was determined by themes and by concepts rather than by any chronology. I happily worked in that way. I had to learn how to do it. I had to learn how to write. How do you write a narrative?To come back to the Metaphysical Animals, the group biography, writing a narrative about one person's life is complicated enough, but writing a narrative of four lives, it's a real-- from a technical point of view-- Even if you only have one life, lives are not linear. If you think about a particular period in your subject's life, people have lots of different things going on at once that have different timeframes. You're going through a certain period in your relationship, you're working on a book, someone close to you dies, you're reading Hegel. All that stuff is going on. The narrative is not going to be, "Well, on Tuesday this happened, and then on Wednesday--" You can't use pure chronology to structure a narrative. It's not just one thing following another.It's not like, "Well, first I'll talk about the relationship," which is an issue that was maybe stretching over a three-month period. Then in this one week, she was reading Hegel and making these notes that were really important. Then, in the background to this is Carlisle's view of history. You've got these different temporal periods that are all bearing on a single narrative. The challenge to create a narrative from all that, that's difficult, as any biographer knows. To do that with four subjects at once is-- Anyway, they did an amazing job in that book.Henry: It never gets boring, that book.Clare: No. I guess the problem with a biography is often you're stuck with this one person through the whole--Henry: I think the problem with a biography of philosophers is that it can get very boring. They kept the interest for four thinkers. I thought that was very impressive, really.Clare: Yes, absolutely. Yes. There's a really nice balance between the philosophy and the-- I like to hear about Philippa Foot's taste in cushions. Maybe some readers would say, "Oh, no, that's frivolous." It's not the view I would take. For me, it's those apparently frivolous details that really help you to connect with a person. They will deliver a sense of the person that nothing else will. There's no substitute for that.In my book about Kierkegaard, it was reviewed by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. It was generally quite a positive review. He was a bit sneering about the fact that it had what he calls "domestic flourishes" in the book. I'd mentioned that Kierkegaard's favorite flower was the lily of the valley. He's like, "Huh." He saw these as frivolities, whereas for me, the fact that Kierkegaard had a favorite flower tells us something about the kind of man he was.Henry: Absolutely.Clare: Actually, his favorite flower had all sorts of symbolism attached to it, Kierkegaard, it had 10 different layers of meaning. It's never straightforward. There's interesting value judgments that get made. There's partly the view that anything biographical is not philosophical. It is in some way frivolous or incidental. That would be perhaps a very austere, purest philosophical on a certain conception of philosophy view.Then you might also have views about what is and isn't interesting, what is and isn't significant. Actually, that's a really interesting question. What is significant about a person's life, and what isn't? Actually, to come back to Eliot, that's a question she is, I think, absolutely preoccupied with, most of all in Middlemarch and in Daniel Deronda. This question about what is trivial and what is significant. Dorothea is frustrated because she feels that her life is trivial. She thinks that Casaubon is preoccupied with really significant questions, the key to all mythologies, and so on.Henry: [chuckles]Clare: There's really a deep irony there because that view of what's significant is really challenged in the novel. Casaubon's project comes to seem really futile, petty, and insignificant. In Daniel Deronda, you've got this amazing question where she shows her heroine, Gwendolyn, who's this selfish 20-year-old girl who's pursuing her own self-interest in a pretty narrow way, about flirting and thinking about her own romantic prospects.Henry: Her income.Clare: She's got this inner world, which is the average preoccupation of a silly 20-year-old girl.Henry: Yes. [laughs]Clare: Then Eliot's narrator asks, "Is there a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl who's preoccupied with how to make her own life pleasant?" The question she's asking is-- Well, I think she wants to tell us that slender thread of the girl's consciousness is part of the universe, basically. It's integral. It belongs to a great drama of the struggle between good and evil, which is this mythical, cosmic, religious, archetypal drama that gets played out on the scale of the universe, but also, in this silly girl's consciousness.I think she's got to a point where she was very explicitly thematizing that distinction between the significant and the insignificant and playing with that distinction. It comes back to Dorothea's unhistoric life. It's unhistoric, it's insignificant. Yet, by the end of Middlemarch, by the time we get to that description of Dorothea's unhistoric life, this life has become important to us. We care about Dorothea and how her life turned out. It has this grandeur to it that I think Eliot exposes. It's not the grandeur of historic importance, it's some other human grandeur that I think she wants to find in the silly girls as much as in the great men.Henry: I always find remarks like that quite extraordinary. One of the things I want a biography to tell me is, "How did they come to believe these things?" and, "How did they get the work done?" The flowers that he likes, that's part of that, right? It's like Bertrand Russell going off on his bicycle all the time. That's part of how it all happened. I remember Elizabeth Anscombe in the book about the four philosophers, this question of, "How does she do it all when she's got these six children?" There's this wonderful image of her standing in the doorway to her house smoking. The six children are tumbling around everywhere. The whole place is filthy. I think they don't own a Hoover or she doesn't use it. You just get this wonderful sense of, "This is how she gets it done."Clare: That's how you do it.Henry: Yes. The idea that this is some minor domestic trivial; no, this is very important to understanding Elizabeth Anscombe, right?Clare: Yes, of course.Henry: I want all of this.Clare: Yes. One of the things I really like about her is that she unashamedly brings that domesticity into her philosophical work. She'll use examples like, "I go to buy some potatoes from the grocer's." She'll use that example, whereas that's not the thing that-- Oxford dons don't need to buy any potatoes because they have these quasi-monastic lives where they get cooked for and cleaned for. I like the way she chooses those. Of course, she's not a housewife, but she chooses these housewifely examples to illustrate her philosophy.I don't know enough about Anscombe, but I can imagine that that's a deliberate choice. That's a choice she's making. There's so many different examples she could have thought of. She's choosing that example, which is an example, it shows a woman doing philosophy, basically. Of course, men can buy potatoes too, but in that culture, the buying of the potatoes would be the woman's work.Henry: Yes. She wasn't going to run into AJ Ayre at the grocer's.Clare: Probably not, no.Henry: No. Are you religious in any sense?Clare: I think I am in some sense. Yes, "religious," I think it's a really problematic concept. I've written a bit about this concept of religion and what it might mean. I wrote a book on Spinoza called Spinoza's Religion. Part of what I learned through writing the book was that in order to decide whether or not Spinoza was religious, we have to rethink the very concept of religion, or we have to see that that's what Spinoza was doing.I don't know. Some people are straightforwardly religious and I guess could answer that question, say, "Oh yes, I've always been a Christian," or whatever. My answer is a yes and no answer, where I didn't have a religious upbringing, and I don't have a strong religious affiliation. Sorry, I'm being very evasive.Henry: What do you think of the idea that we're about to live through or we are living through a religious revival? More people going to church, more young people interested in it. Do you see that, or do you think that's a blip?Clare: That's probably a question for the social scientists, isn't it? It just totally depends where you are and what community you're--Henry: Your students, you are not seeing students who are suddenly more religious?Clare: Well, no, but my students are students who've chosen to do philosophy. Some of them are religious and some of them are not. It will be too small a sample to be able to diagnose. I can say that my students are much more likely to be questioning. Many of them are questioning their gender, thinking about how to inhabit gender roles differently.That's something I perceive as a change from 20 years ago, just in the way that my students will dress and present themselves. That's a discernible difference. I can remark on that, but I can't remark on whether they're more religious.Just actually just been teaching a course on philosophy of religion at King's. Some students in the course of having discussions would mention that they were Muslim, Christian, or really into contemplative practices and meditation. Some of the students shared those interests. Others would say, "Oh, well, I'm an atheist, so this is--" There's just a range-Henry: A full range.Clare: -of different religious backgrounds and different interests. There's always been that range. I don't know whether there's an increased interest in religion among those students in particular, but I guess, yes, maybe on a national or global level, statistically-- I don't know. You tell me.Henry: What do you think about all these reports that undergraduates today-- "They have no attention span, they can't read a book, everything is TikTok," do you see this or are you just seeing like, "No, my students are fine actually. This is obviously happening somewhere else"?Clare: Again, it's difficult to say because I see them when they're in their classes, I see them in their seminars, I see them in the lectures. I don't know what their attention spans are like in their--Henry: Some of the other people I've interviewed will say things like, "I'll set reading, and they won't do it, even though it's just not very much reading,"-Clare: Oh, I see. Oh, yes.Henry: -or, "They're on the phone in the--" You know what I mean?Clare: Yes.Henry: The whole experience from 10, 20 years ago, these are just different.Clare: I'm also more distracted by my phone than I was 20 years ago. I didn't have a phone 20 years ago.Henry: Sure.Clare: Having a phone and being on the internet is constantly disrupting my reading and my writing. That's something that I think many of us battle with a bit. I'm sure most of us are addicted to our phones. I wouldn't draw a distinction between myself and my students in that respect. I've been really impressed by my students, pleasantly surprised by the fact they've done their reading because it can be difficult to do reading, I think.Henry: You're not one of these people who says, "Oh students today, it's really very different than it was 20 years ago. You can't get them to do anything. The whole thing is--" Some people are apocalyptic about-- Actually, you're saying no, your students are good?Clare: I like my students. Whether they do the reading or not, I'm not going to sit here and complain about them.Henry: No, sure, sure. I think that's good. What are you working on next?Clare: I've just written a book. It came out of a series of lectures I gave on life writing and philosophy, actually. Connected to what we were talking about earlier. Having written the biographies, I started to reflect a bit more on biography and how it may or may not be a philosophical enterprise, and questions about the shape of a life and what one life can transmit to another life. Something about the devotional labor of the biographer when you're living with this person and you're-- It's devotional, but it's also potentially exploitative because often you're using your subjects, of course, without their consent because they're dead. You're presenting their life to public view and you're selling books, so it's devotional and exploitative. I think that's an interesting pairing.Anyway, so I gave these lectures last year in St Andrews and they're going to be published in September.Henry: Great.Clare: I've finished those really.Henry: That's what's coming.Clare: That's what's coming. Then I've just been writing again about Kierkegaard, actually. I haven't really worked on Kierkegaard for quite a few years. As often happens with these things, I got invited to speak on Kierkegaard and death at a conference in New York in November. My initial thought was like, "Oh, I wish it was Spinoza, I don't want to--" I think I got to the point where I'd worked a lot on Kierkegaard and wanted to do other things. I was a bit like, "Oh, if only I was doing Spinoza, that would be more up my street." I wanted to go to the conference, so I said yes to this invitation. I was really glad I did because I went back and read what Kierkegaard has written about death, which is very interesting because Kierkegaard's this quintessentially death-fixated philosopher, that's his reputation. It's his reputation, he's really about death. His name means churchyard. He's doomy and gloomy. There's the caricature.Then, to actually look at what he says about death and how he approaches the subject, which I'd forgotten or hadn't even read closely in the first place, those particular texts. That turned out to be really interesting, so I'm writing-- It's not a book or anything, it's just an article.Henry: You're not going to do a George Eliot and produce a novel?Clare: No. I'm not a novelist or a writer of fiction. I don't think I have enough imagination to create characters. What I love about biography is that you get given the characters and you get given the plots. Then, of course, it is a creative task to then turn that into a narrative, as I said before. The kinds of biography I like to write are quite creative, they're not just purely about facts. I think facts can be quite boring. Well, they become interesting in the context of questions about meaning interpretations by themselves. Again, probably why I was right to give up on the history degree. For me, facts are not where my heart is.That amount of creativity I think suits me well, but to create a world as you do when you're a novelist and create characters and plots, and so, that doesn't come naturally to me. I guess I like thinking about philosophical questions through real-life stories. It's one way for philosophy to be connected to real life. Philosophy can also be connected to life through fiction, of course, but it's not my own thing. I like to read other people's fiction. I'm not so bothered about reading other biographies.Henry: No. No, no.[laughter]Clare: I'll write the biographies, and I'll read the fiction.Henry: That's probably the best way. Clare Carlisle, author of The Marriage Question, thank you very much.Clare: Oh, thanks, Henry. It's been very fun to talk to you.Henry: Yes. It was a real pleasure. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe
In which the Musical Man - having absolutely no money to burn - is relieved to learn from a proper gentleman that the party's on the house. Donate today via Patreon: patreon.com/musicalmanpod / Podbean: musicalmanpod.podbean.com / Email: musicalmanpod@gmail.com
Tonight's reading comes from The Moon and Sixpence. Written by William Somerset Maugham and published in 1919, this story follows one man's journey to follow his dream and become an artist. My name is Teddy and I aim to help people everywhere get a good night's rest. Sleep is so important and my mission is to help you get the rest you need. The podcast is designed to play in the background while you slowly fall asleep.For those new to the podcast, it started from my own struggles with sleep. I wanted to create a resource for others facing similar challenges, and I'm so grateful for the amazing community we've built together.
Chris Taylor is a lifer. His first bands, (Windows and Love Coma,) were covered by True Tunes when we were just getting started back in the early 90s. While his bandmate Matt Slocum went on to form the alternative pop group Sixpence None The Richer, Taylor continued to release projects as Love Coma and as a solo artist. He also became an accomplished painter along the way. Now, almost 35 years later, Taylor continues to break new artistic ground. His most recent Love Coma project (which included contributions by Slocum) was a stunner, and his brand new solo project - "I Carry The Flame" may be his best work yet. You may have heard Taylor when he appeared on our Bruce Cockburn episode, but this time it's all about him, his longevity, and how he keeps the flame burning after all these years. PLUS we spin the new EP "Rosemary Hill" by Sixpence None The Richer on the Jukebox! For more info visit the full show notes page at TrueTunes.com/TaylorFlame. If you want to support the show, please join our Patreon community or drop us a one-time tip and check out our MERCH!
Phyllis McGinley (March 21, 1905 – February 22, 1978) was an American author of children's books and poetry. Her poetry was in the style of light verse, specializing in humor, satiric tone and the positive aspects of suburban life. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961.McGinley enjoyed a wide readership in her lifetime, publishing her work in newspapers and women's magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal, as well as in literary periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Saturday Review and The Atlantic. She also held nearly a dozen honorary degrees – "including one from the stronghold of strictly masculine pride, Dartmouth College" (from the dust jacket of Sixpence in Her Shoe (copy 1964)). Time Magazine featured McGinley on its cover on June 18, 1965.-bio via Wikipedia This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Lilli har besøk av Frida, som både vil nøste opp i to opplevelser med en liten spøkelsesgutt, og hva ringen etter den avdøde farmoren hennes forteller henne. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
OUR FAMILY MUSIC ACADEMY: Affordable and effective online weekly music lessons designed for families.https://www.voetbergmusicacademy.comUse coupon code: PODCASTVMA for 10% off each month-Get it All Done Club: Stop drowning in motherhood and start thriving! https://www.nowthatwereafamily.com/get-it-all-done-clubIs your life just too complicated to ever feel peaceful? Learn how to create a peacefully productive home in one week. Check out Katie's Free Home Management Masterclass: https://www.nowthatwereafamily.com/peacefully-productive-home-masterclass-Mentioned during podcast:- "Sixpence in her Shoe” by Phyllis McGinley - https://amzn.to/3ATYbjs
We have a chat before our last night at Radio Bar. Talking about what we look for in a venue and the amazing support we've gotten. Thank you Radio Bar for having us! ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us, consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion Or you can buy our poetry book through our website right here! Hosted by Rhath & UserNameUnknown https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
Ft. Cari Scharl https://www.instagram.com/cari.scharl_/ Interviewed by Kelsey Jean: https://www.instagram.com/kelseyjean_is/ What's the best way to connect with others in the scene and start to build up your network? Kelsey & Cari chat about our latest 'Tones' gig, and finding other musicians in the Melbourne scene. ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us, consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion Or you can buy our poetry book through our website right here! Hosted by Rhath & UserNameUnknown https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
Ft. Trycolour https://www.instagram.com/trycolour_studios/ What does it take to capture live music on film? We have a chat with Trycolour about creating our video series 'Tones' as well as video trends that come and go. ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us (Purely optional mind you), consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion Or you can buy our poetry book through our website right here! Hosted by Rhath & UserNameUnknown https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
Ft. Man Vs Synth https://www.instagram.com/manvssynth/ We're thrilled to have a chat with Mat of Man Vs Synth, who featured recently on the latest Tones line up! We talk about promoting your work as a musician, Australian tall poppy syndrome and much more. Get around it. ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us (Purely optional mind you), consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion Or you can buy our poetry book through our website right here! Hosted by Rhath & UserNameUnknown https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
We're excited to welcome back, Shy and Hawraa! Hosts and poets of our fundraiser night, 'Poets for Palestine'. A powerful conversation around the ongoing genocide in Gaza and rising anti-colonial sentiment in Australia. https://www.instagram.com/shyreesays/ https://www.instagram.com/hawraakash/ ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us (Purely optional mind you), consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
Ft. Freddie Arthur https://www.instagram.com/freddiearthur/ Get your tickets to Crackpot Comedy: https://events.humanitix.com/crackpot-comedy Are work friends real friends? What is real friendship, and where do you find it? Being a performing artist is not your usual job, so perhaps the circumstances are different. ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us (Purely optional mind you), consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion Or you can buy our poetry book through our website right here! Hosted by Rhath & UserNameUnknown https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
Brent is back in the $80's this week after a huge rebound and initial sell-off post-OPEC meeting. Crude flat prices are back to where we were pre-OPEC meeting, as the August contract fell to lows of $77/bbl before climbing all the way back up to $82/bbl this morning.The M1 refinery margins in Europe continue to weaken this week by nearly $0.35/bbl; however, the same in Asia climbed by $0.55/bbl this week. Asian margins appear to be picking up compared to how low they were at the end of May. The market still looks less confident about gasoline, though.The summer demand looks like it's manifesting in jet fuel in Asia, due to strong aviation demand - which is soaring as travel returns back to pre-Covid levels.Looking to the macro market, James and Greg discuss why unemployment has ticked up 4.4%. As demand is falling, people aren't spending as much, and lower-income households are hurting. Full-time work is declining, and people with multiple part time jobs are on the rise. This isn't a great sign for the economy. The trade idea for this week is long US propane. If you would like to connect with any of our hosts on LinkedIn, please click on the hyperlinks below: Greg Newman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oilderivatives/James Brodie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbrodiecmt/Vincent Wu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincent-wu-099816125/Mita Chaturvedi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mita-chaturvedi/Chapters for this episode are: 0:00 Welcome 1:25 Brent Futures6:44 Refinery margins 14:39 Macro market news 23:42 "Googling oil:" world oil news 31:52 Trade idea of the week 37:58 Poll results and outro
Competing in poetry poses a strange set of questions and emotional responses. To share something so personal in competition. But it can also be a fantastic place to get amazing feedback and validation for your work. We've got three competition winners here today, so plenty to discuss. Oh and Ry. He's not won anything, besides our hearts. ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us (Purely optional mind you), consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion Or you can buy our poetry book through our website right here! Hosted by Rhath & UserNameUnknown https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
We're in a weird state of mind. Frustrated by the act focusing on making 'content' to promote gigs, podcasts, videos etc, while also understanding the importance of it. We have a bit of a discussion on how our mental state is while doing it. Also we talk A.I music. ... If you enjoy what we do, if you want to support us (Purely optional mind you), consider supporting us on Patreon. A few dollars goes a long way in keeping the lights on, paying for our website and helping us do more cool stuff. https://www.patreon.com/VibeUnion Or you can buy our poetry book through our website right here! Hosted by Rhath & UserNameUnknown https://www.instagram.com/vibe.union Edited & graphics by Rhath Intro music by Sixpence https://www.instagram.com/sixpence_aus
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was an English crime novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those featuring her famous characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, with her works having sold over two billion copies worldwide. Her innovative plots, clever misdirection, and surprising twists have earned her the title of the Queen of Crime. "Sing a Song of Sixpence" is a short story by Agatha Christie, first published in the December 1929 issue of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in the U.K. The story was later collected in the anthology "The Listerdale Mystery" (1934) and published in the U.S. in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in February 1947 and the collection "The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories" (1948). Within Christie's extensive body of work, "Sing a Song of Sixpence" stands as an early example of her mastery of the short story format. Published in 1929, the story falls within the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in Britain, a period characterized by puzzle-like mysteries, amateur sleuths, and complex plots. While the story deviates from some of Christie's more famous works by featuring a one-off protagonist instead of her iconic detectives, it still showcases her ability to craft intricate and engaging mysteries. If you enjoyed this story, please consider Buying Me A Coffee! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
(1:00) Tipping (10:00) FSBT Update (25:00) Casey reads angry comments to Matthew (31:00) Shoot the Shoot (easter, play by play announcers, children of assassination, Sixpence)
So as a little taster to the massive 1940s episodes which go live here on April 1st we are dropping this single film focused episode here today in celebration of a fantastic new record. You see, Albert Lewin directed Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in 1951 and The Moon and Sixpence in 1941 but The Picture of Dorian Gray is easily his best known work, sadly, he is not known for a lot else. So When I asked musician Charles Moothart from Fuzz to pick a movie to cover for this show, imagine my delight when he came back with Dorian Gray as his choice. This is a discussion about his new solo record and the Angela Lansbury starring 40s horror movie The Picture of Dorian Gray. Seriously. What a belter!Charles Moothart / Fuzz
Panelet snakker om Brann-boten, Jakobs oldboys-karriere med Markus og Martinus og Tete provoseres av uttrykket "right on the sixpence". I panelet: Sven Bisgaard Sundet, Tete Lidbom og Jakob Naustdal. Hør episoden i appen NRK Radio
Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1098, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Heavy Metal Heroes 1: He bedeviled us as the lead singer of Black Sabbath before his reality TV fame. (Ozzy) Osbourne. 2: With his work on songs like "Hot For Teacher", some rank him as the greatest heavy metal guitarist. Eddie Van Halen. 3: 1980s heavy metal included this band that featured Izzy, Duff and Axl. Guns N' Roses. 4: "We're not gonna take it" if you can't name this band fronted by Dee Snider. Twisted Sister. 5: This "Fistful of Metal" band named itself for a disease. Anthrax. Round 2. Category: 5-Letter WS. With W in quotation marks 1: The name of this dance is from German for "revolve". the waltz. 2: To twist a wet towel to extract all the moisture. wring. 3: An edible grass in the genus Triticum. wheat. 4: I can see it in your eyes when you do this, to flinch in pain. wince. 5: Roger, I heard your radio message and I'll use this combination of 2 words to indicate I'll do what you asked. wilco. Round 3. Category: More Nasal Passages 1: The poem "Sing a Song of Sixpence" says, "Along came" one of these birds, "and snipped off her nose". blackbird. 2: "Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne, entuned in hir nose ful semely" in the prologue to this masterpiece. The Canterbury Tales. 3: The heathens "have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they smell not" in no. 115 of this Biblical book. Psalms. 4: "My nose itched," wrote Jonathan Swift, "and I knew I should drink wine or" do this to "a fool". kiss. 5: "The nose of a mob is its imagination, by this...it can be quietly led", said this poet known for his "To Helen". Edgar Allan Poe. Round 4. Category: Elizabethan Plays And Playwrights 1: In "Gorboduc", one of England's earliest plays in this genre, Porrex kills his brother; then their mother kills him. a tragedy. 2: Thomas Kyd helped establish the unrhyming form called this verse on the English stage. blank verse. 3: In John Lyly's 1595 play "The Woman in the Moon", shepherds ask Nature to create this first woman of Greek myth. Pandora. 4: This author of "Every Man in His Humour" was apparently out of humor when he stabbed a man to death in 1598. Ben Jonson. 5: Ian McKellen calls this author's "Edward II" "perhaps the first drama ever written with a homosexual hero". Christopher Marlowe. Round 5. Category: The 1780s 1: He was given command of the Bounty in 1787. Bligh. 2: In 1788 French-Canadian trader Julien Dubuque became the first white settler in what is now this state. Iowa. 3: This first Constitution went into effect March 1, 1781 after Maryland became the last state to ratify it. the Articles of Confederation. 4: In 1784 Benjamin Franklin literally created a spectacle with his invention of these. the bifocals. 5: His "Blue-Backed Speller", published in 1783, helped standardize American spelling and pronunciation. (Noah) Webster. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used
Don't have time for terrible ❤️ books? Kim and Aimee help you out with a super-speedy review of Australian romance queen Anne Gracie's novella ‘The Laird's Bride'. Quickest episode ever?! (With reference to Episode 10: ‘A Sixpence in Her Shoe'.)We LOVE it when our listeners ask us to read books! Please hit us with your suggestions via Twitter @or_treasure or email trashortreasurepodcast@outlook.com
fWotD Episode 2456: W. Somerset Maugham Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.The featured article for Thursday, 25 January 2024 is W. Somerset Maugham.William Somerset Maugham ( MAWM; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.Maugham's novels after Liza of Lambeth include Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor's Edge (1944). His short stories were published in collections such as The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Mixture as Before (1940); many of them have been adapted for radio, cinema and television. His great popularity and prodigious sales provoked adverse reactions from highbrow critics, many of whom sought to belittle him as merely competent. More recent assessments generally rank Of Human Bondage – a book with a large autobiographical element – as a masterpiece, and his short stories are widely held in high critical regard. Maugham's plain prose style became known for its lucidity, but his reliance on clichés attracted adverse critical comment.During the First World War Maugham worked for the British Secret Service, later drawing on his experiences for stories published in the 1920s. Although primarily homosexual, he attempted to conform to some extent with the norms of his day. After a three-year affair with Syrie Wellcome which produced their daughter, Liza, they married in 1917. The marriage lasted for twelve years, but before, during and after it, Maugham's principal partner was a younger man, Gerald Haxton. Together they made extended visits to Asia, the South Seas and other destinations; Maugham gathered material for his fiction wherever they went. They lived together in the French Riviera, where Maugham entertained lavishly. After Haxton's death in 1944, Alan Searle became Maugham's secretary-companion for the rest of the author's life. Maugham gave up writing novels shortly after the Second World War, and his last years were marred by senility. He died at the age of 91.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:35 UTC on Thursday, 25 January 2024.For the full current version of the article, see W. Somerset Maugham on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Emma Standard.
Summary No guest today in what is my first episode of the new year. I promise no New Year's resolutions except one: to read and digest as many books as I can during the year. Given my interest in books, I was curious to know what some of my colleagues, friends, and family members will read in 2024. So, I contacted more than 40 of them, asking them for a brief bio, their book of choice, and why that title might find its way to their nightstand. I thought that maybe I'd hear from a few, but that many might be too busy to respond, given the fast-approaching holiday. Their responses poured in: Jesse Kohler is the President and Chair of The Change Campaign and also serves as Executive Director of the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice. Going to read Preventing and Healing Climate Traumas: A Guide to Building Resilience and Hope in Communities by Bob Doppelt. Because the climate crisis is widely traumatizing. Promoting support across our society to work through it together is one of the most critical callings of our time. Paul McNicholls is a lay historian and author. Going to read Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918–40 by Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman. Because what happened to the British Army between the First and Second World Wars explains why they were summarily defeated by the Germans and had to be evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk in 1940. Frank Zaccari is a best-selling author and CEO of Life Altering Events, LLC. Going to read The Passion Test by Janet and Chris Attwood. Because over my long time on the planet, my passion – or what I thought was my passion – has changed many times. Now, in my semi-retirement, this book will help me focus on finding my next passion where I can make a difference. Neil C. Hughes is a freelance technology journalist, podcast host and engineer, and the producer of "Tech Talks Daily" and "Tech Fusion" by Citrix Ready. Going to read Freedom to Think: Protecting a Fundamental Human Right in the Digital Age by Susie Alegr. Because this title will deepen my understanding of the intersection between technology, privacy, and human rights in the digital age. Melissa Hughes, Ph.D. is a neuroscience researcher, speaker, and author of Happy Hour with Einstein and Happier Hour with Einstein: Another Round. Going to read Misbelief by Dan Ariely. Because the human brain is so incredible and so incredibly flawed (and because I read everything that Dan Ariely writes!) And Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant. Because we all have hidden potential begging to be discovered. Valerie Gordon is a former Emmy-winning television producer who brings the Art of Storytelling for Impact and Influence to audiences and corporate leaders. Going to read Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant. Because I found his previous works to be insightful and helpful in my business as well as in meeting my own goals. I recommend it to anyone interested in the human mind and its impact on realizing our potential. Rich Gassen is a print production manager at UW-Madison and also leads a community of practice for supervisors where we explore topics on leadership and staff development. Going to read Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant. Because I have always sought to improve myself and those around me to achieve more through better processes, incorporating efficiencies, and harnessing strengths. I feel that this book will bring me to another level in being able to do that. Sarah Elkins is a StrengthFinder coach and story consultant, keynote speaker, podcast host, and the author of Your Stories Don't Define You, How You Tell Them Will. Going to read Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson. Because I've become especially sensitive to representation over the past few years, and I talk about wanting to support all people. Reading a book by a person of color and understanding her back story is one way to help me do that. Diane Wyzga is a global podcaster, a story expert who helps clients clarify ideas and amplify messaging, and a hiker – who walks the talk. Going to read The Perfection Trap - Embracing the Power of Good Enough by Thomas Curran. Because as I've become aware of our culture's dangerous obsession with perfection, I want to learn to step away from my own focus on it. Bill Whiteside is a retired software salesman who is now writing a book about Winston Churchill and a little-known event from World War II. Going to read Larry McMurtry: A Life by Tracy Daugherty. Because after spending the past five years researching my book with my nose in books about Britain and France in 1940, it's going to be refreshing to read just for fun once again. McMurtry's personality and career as a bookstore owner and a highly regarded author – “Lonesome Dove," “The Last Picture Show” and “Terms of Endearment” – fascinate me. Mark Reid is a maker of traditional handmade Japanese paper and host of the Zen Sammich podcast. Going to read The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham. Because the main character's internal moral challenges and the battle with societal expectations are compelling for me to read about and contemplate. Mark O'Brien is the founder and principal of O'Brien Communications Group, a B2B brand-management and marketing-communications firm, and host of The Anxious Voyage, a syndicated radio show about life's trials and triumphs. Going to read Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus. Because as a longtime fan of Camus' existential work, I look forward to stretching my thick Irish noggin to let in a tad more light – as I always try to do. Hope Blecher is an educational consultant and the founder of Hope's Compass, www.HopesCompass.org, a non-profit that helps members of the community and visitors to interact with survivors of the Holocaust and children of survivors through arts, music, poetry, prose, and more. Going to (re)read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exuperty. Because I experience something new each time I read it. And Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell. Because I'm curious about what these authors will say that will help me continue on my own pathway of exploring art. Christine Mason is the Cultivating Resilience podcast co-host, educational psychologist researcher, entrepreneur, and yoga instructor/mindfulness coach. Going to read From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman. Because Friedman knows the region exceptionally well, this book will provide me with a greater understanding of the underlying regional and religious tensions and conflicts and also prepare me to lead others in a deeper discussion toward a potential resolution and peace. Tammy Hader is a retired accountant, a lifetime Kansan, a storyteller, a caregiver, and an author. (See above.) Going to read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. Because our relationships – our social capital – continue to be degraded in the current environment, so I want to study it, defend against it, and learn how to shift myself and my community into improved connections. Cindy House is the author of Mother Noise, a memoir about her recovery from addiction. She is a regular opener for David Sedaris on his book lecture circuit. She is also my memoir instructor. Going to read Art Monster: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin. Because the book looks at women artists and their work as a reaction against the patriarchy. In these days of watching the GOP war against women, it seems especially important as a woman in the arts to consider how my work can be a protest against extreme political positions. Susan Rooks – the Grammar Goddess – is an editor/proofreader who helps nonfiction/business content authors of books/blogs/websites and podcasters and their episode transcriptions look and sound as smart as they are. Going to read Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia, MD. Because as I age, I'm interested in doing everything I can to stay alive in a healthy manner. Steve Ehrlich is a lifelong educator and has an equally long-standing calling in fly fishing. He combines those two loves in classes on the lessons of fly fishing and its treasured literature for personal and professional growth, renewal and healing, and social change. Going to read An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. Because I've always been intrigued by the interconnectedness of things, especially the things we can't fully understand. Such a mystery is at the heart of this book, which is about how animals are connected to one another in so many ways and in a manner that most of us have difficulty comprehending. Annette Taylor is a rogue researcher of evolutionary psychology. Going to finish We Are Electric by Sally Adee – but doing so scares me... Because it seems like the author is justifying our “merging” with AI or at least romanticizing our ever increasing entanglements with technology. And since I like to simplify life using a cave-dweller perspective, this idea freaks me out. Leon Ikler is a commercial photographer primarily shooting tabletop and small room scenes in the studio along with a mix of location work. Going to read Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson. Because in these contentious times with the nation so divided, I like how she frames today's issues against what has taken place in the past. I feel it is essential to know our history so we can try to avoid making the same mistakes again. Rita Grant is a former award-winning video producer. Going to reread The United States of Arugula by David Kamp. Because it's a great reminder of how our current American culinary landscape was created. I'm ending with Rita because she also sent in another suggestion. Not a book, but a song – "You Can't Take That Away From Me," sung by the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald. As Rita noted, "The lyrics will stand the test of time. They're a testament to what we hold in our hearts and imagination that can never be taken from us."
In their ninth Advent 2023 mini-episode, Eleanor and Martin are talking Four Colley Birds, and not 'Calling Birds' at all!From 'Sing a Song of Sixpence,' which dates back to the Renaissance, to Celtic myths like The Tale of Branwen and The Three Birds of Rhiannon, they discuss how the blackbird occupies a very strange position in folklore. Not least in two really strange tales, one of which sees the Patron Saint of Europe stripping naked and jumping into a bed of stinging nettles, and another which culminates in a magical fox begging to be executed!The Three Ravens is an English Myth and Folklore podcast hosted by award-winning writers Martin Vaux and Eleanor Conlon.Released on Mondays, each weekly episode focuses on one of England's 39 historic counties, exploring the history, folklore and traditions of the area, from ghosts and mermaids to mythical monsters, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends, and much, much more. Then, and most importantly, the pair take turns to tell a new version of an ancient story from that county - all before discussing what that tale might mean, where it might have come from, and the truths it reveals about England's hidden past...With Bonus Episodes released on Thursdays (Magic and Medicines about folk remedies and arcane spells, Three Ravens Bestiary about cryptids and mythical creatures, Dying Arts about endangered heritage crafts, and Something Wicked about folkloric true crime from across history) plus a range of exclusive content on Patreon, audio ghost tours, the Three Ravens Newsletter, and monthly Three Ravens Film Club episodes about folk horror films from across the decades, why not join us around the campfire and listen in?Learn more at www.threeravenspodcast.com, join our Patreon at www.patreon.com/threeravenspodcast, and find links to our social media channels here: https://linktr.ee/threeravenspodcast Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Garret gives a few practical ways to share music with people you know. Plus he introduces us to several crowdfunding campaigns and pre-sales active now.--- SPOTLIGHT CAMPAIGN ---Larry Norman - Live in the UK '77https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/charles-norman/larry-norman-live-in-the-uk-77--- OTHER CAMPAIGNS ---Michael Knott - Screaming Brittle Siren vinyl reissue - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sbs2/michael-knott-screaming-brittle-siren-vinyl-kickstarter/Too Bad Eugene - Battle Scars - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/toobadeugene/new-too-bad-eugene-album-battle-scarsPillar - One Love Revolution vinyl - https://pillarmusic.com/Citizens - self titled vinyl reissue - https://downrightmerch.com/collections/bec-recordings/products/citizens-citizens-s-t-vinyl-pre-order Sixpence vinyl reissue - https://www.walmart.com/ip/vinylalerts/5113283403Believer - 3 album reissues - https://boonesoverstock.com/collections/believer-cd-vinyl-cassette/products/ultimate-1st-three-believer-budget-bundle-6x-cd-6x-vinyl-1x-cassette-extraction-sanity-dimensions--- CREDITS ---Host/Producer - Garret GodfreyExecutive Producer - Dave TroutSPONSOR: Jason Lenyer Buchanan - https://is.gd/criversspUTR Buildathon Campaign - https://utrmedia.org/b2023UTR's Christmas Playlist - https://utrmedia.org/smcmasGood Patron Email Newsletter - https://utrmedia.us14.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=85113034823cd07c83d277cad&id=ca2fe47e5dX - https://twitter.com/goodpatronFacebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/crowdfundingchristianmusicAll songs used are with permission or under fair use provision(c) 2023 UTR Media. All Rights Reserved. A 501(c)(3) non-profit org - info at https://utrmedia.org
Joy and Sarah are stoked to be joined by the one and only Leigh Nash! You know her from her hit song “Kiss Me” by Sixpence none the Richer. She is currently on the road guesting for 10'000 Maniacs in attempts to survive being an empty-nester. Joy has to rearrange the nursery and Sarah is tired of being the bad cop.
Zeech's party continues with cockatrice combats, skull-bowling and an all-too-familiar appetiser!
Don completes this series on the parable of Lostness from Luke 15
Don continues our series looking into Luke 15.
Don continues the series exploring the parable of 'lost things' from Luke 15
Don commences a series looking at the parable of 'lost things' from Luke 15
We have another one hit wonders episode of the 90s only this time we're giving it to the ladies! Yep, this week we're discussing a few hit songs all by women, all one hit. Dyvinls, Sean Cullin, Fiona Apple, Macy Gray, Cardigans, Sixpence none the Richer and more all on this episode of The Mix Tape! Please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts! You can help the show by donating to our Buy Me a Coffee: The Mix Tape is Weekly Pop Culture Podcast (buymeacoffee.com) Please visit our sponsor- www.BustedTees.com At checkout use code JASON25945 To receive a fat discount Follow us Online! www.TheMixTapeShow.com Join us on YouTube with all the Twisted Kid and Rewind Toy goodness you could want! Please take a moment to Subscribe: https://youtube.com/channel/UC01Q55dWT8mYLdjbP-x6GTQ Twitter- Mix_Tape_Pod Facebook- Tapeworms! Fans of the Mix TapePodcast https://www.facebook.com/groups/1373722583092349 TikTok- Mixtapepod https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRSG8CVm/ Instagram- https://instagram.com/the_mix_tape_podcast?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= A little love to friends Not A Bomb Podcast- https://www.notabombpodcast.com/ Behind the Funny- https://behindthefunny.libsyn.com/ NOTLP- https://www.facebook.com/notlp/ Scream Queenz- https://www.screamqueenz.com/ Buy some Swag, show us some love- https://yourmixtapepodcast.wixsite.com/mixtapepodcast/general-4 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mixtapepod/message
‘De Star and Sixpence sprankelt van plezier, romantiek, mysterie en een knappe smid. Het is genieten! – Julie Cohen Uitgegeven door Heartbeat Spreker: Jennifer van Brenk
‘De Star and Sixpence sprankelt van plezier, romantiek, mysterie en een knappe smid. Het is genieten! – Julie Cohen Uitgegeven door Heartbeat Spreker: Jennifer van Brenk
Een heerlijke roman van bestsellerauteur Holly Hepburn. ‘Ik wil er een barkruk bij slepen, een gin-tonic bestellen en alle perikelen van de Star and Sixpence heerlijk in me opnemen.' – Cathy Bramley Uitgegeven door Heartbeat Spreker: Jennifer van Brenk
Simon Astrup, Mads Holm og Michael Schøt holder morgenmøde. DÆMONKRATI er kan nu streames og downloades for 40 kr. på www.michaelschoet.dk Har du lyst til at prøve Zetland, så kan du gøre det på www.zetland.dk/ministeriet
If you are a fan of Harry Potter, then this book might be for you. I hope you enjoy.
It's our third installment of shows about the origins of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. Spoiler alert: Many of the real stories are hard to pin down. Research: Cheadle, Roberta Eaton. “Dark Origins – Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” Writing To Be Read. https://writingtoberead.com/2021/06/30/dark-origins-here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush/ Historic UK. “More Nursery Rhymes.” 4/15/2015. https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/More-Nursery-Rhymes/ Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O. “Popular rhymes and nursery tales : a sequel to the Nursery rhymes of England .” London : John Russell Smith. 1849. Howard, Jennifer. “The Realities Behind the Rhymes.” Washington Post. 6/11/1997. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/1997/06/11/the-realities-behind-the-rhymes/9fbd7d36-4bb9-4fc0-af38-58fbe3fb7e43/ Ker, John Bellenden. “An essay on the archaiology [sic] of popular English phrases and nursery rhymes.” London. Whittaker. 1834. https://archive.org/details/b29309670/ Littlechild, Chris. “The Egg-Citing Truth Behind Humpty Dumpty.” Ripley's. 7/4/2019. https://www.ripleys.com/weird-news/humpty-dumpty/ Opie, Iona Archibald and Peter Opie. “The Singing Game.” Oxford University Press. 1998. Opie, Iona and Peter. “The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.” Oxford University Press. 1997. Overstreet, Mikkaka. “10 Disturbing Nursery Rhyme Origin Stories to Celebrate Nursery Rhyme Week.” Book Riot. 11/4/2021. https://bookriot.com/nursery-rhyme-origin-stories/ Seaver, Carl. “The Strange Historical Origins of the Humpty Dumpty Nursery Rhyme.” History Defined. 1/24/2023. https://www.historydefined.net/humpty-dumpty-history/ Tearle, Oliver. “A Short Analysis of the ‘Hickory Dickory Dock' Nursery Rhyme.” Interesting Literature. 9/2018. https://interestingliterature.com/2018/09/a-short-analysis-of-the-hickory-dickory-dock-nursery-rhyme-history-origins/ Tearle, Oliver. “A Short Analysis of the ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence' Nursery Rhyme.” Interesting Literature. https://interestingliterature.com/2018/10/a-short-analysis-of-the-sing-a-song-of-sixpence-nursery-rhyme-origins-history/ Thomas, Katherine Elwes. “The Real Personages Of Mother Goose.” Lothrop, Lee & Shepard. 1930. Wood, Jennifer M. “The Dark and Mysterious Origins of 10 Classic Nursery Rhymes.” Mental Floss. 10/28/2015. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55035/dark-origins-11-classic-nursery-rhymes See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Duequiz - Lokale nyheter - Hell i uhell Episoden kan inneholde målrettet reklame, basert på din IP-adresse, enhet og posisjon. Se smartpod.no/personvern for informasjon og dine valg om deling av data.
Continuing the Conversation: a Great Books podcast by St. John’s College
Does a contemplative life bring us closer to the divine, as Aristotle believed? Is it the highest form of human life or is it self-centered and lived at the expense of others? Can one lead a contemplative life while living in the real world? Philosophers, artists, mystics, and students have long pursued lives of solitude, contemplation, and creative exploration, only to encounter a recurring set of practical obstacles and vexing moral questions. In this episode of Continuing the Conversation, Annapolis host Louis Petrich and tutor Jonathan Badger explore a conversation that honors the pursuit of “the eternal present” in Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence (based on the life of the painter, Gauguin), while exploring its attendant questions with equal concern and gravity. This episode also includes conversation on works by Goethe, Rousseau, Thoreau, and Aristotle.
Books Mentioned Christmas by the Book by Anne Marie Ryan The Christmas Wish by Lindsey Kelk Tea Coconut Cocoa by Republic of Tea TV Shows Mentioned Abbott Elementary (Hulu)
In this week's episode we're taking you back to downtown Savannah to explore a couple of our haunted restaurants-Six Pence Pub and Tondee's Tavern. Join us as we discuss the storied histories of these establishments. From excellent food to lingering spirits and even a movie connection-these two restaurants are a fun stop if you are in town. On What We're Watching, we review episodes 7 and 8 of the 2022 Horror show “Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities.” And on Layla and Coffee talk, we talk about the return of OSCAR. Further reading on slavery in Savannah https://www.savannahnow.com/story/news/2021/05/06/the-weeping-time-savannah-ga-largest-sale-enslaved-people-new-york-tribune-article/4948258001/ Find us on the web: www.scarysavannahandbeyond.com We now have exclusive content on our Patreon page! This includes audio and video episodes! Please go check it out at: www.patreon.com/scarysavannah Please leave us a 5 star review, and we'll read it on air! You can find a link to do this on our webpage, just click on the links tab. If you do, send us a message through the contact form on our webpage, let us know, and we'll send you some free Scary Savannah stickers! Give us a call and leave a voicemail about a story idea, a message for the podcast, or if you in fact are affiliated with Big Haunting, (we'll play it on the show!) ph. 912-406-2899 Get some goods at our awesome merch store! https://scarysavannah.square.site Visit us on social media: Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/scarysavannah Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarysavannah Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scarysavannah YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/scarysavannah Tik-Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@scarysavannah LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scarysavannahandbeyond You can follow the show creators on Twitter as well! Brett: https://www.twitter.com/brettlay Crystal: https://www.twitter.com/aquablonde27
Here's a Kickstarter we definitely want to see happen! Fear of the Unknown - Zero Prep Horror Mystery Roleplaying, I mean as a Game master you had me at Zero prep! I got to sit down and chat with Thomas at Sixpence games for their upcoming Kickstarter and RPG: Fear of the Unknown a zero prep horror RPG! This really is a fun and very fluid RPG to pick up and play with friends with honestly no Prep! Please join me in backing this Kickstarter. The Kickstarter is HERE! The free Quick-Start is HERE on DriveThruRPG! Here are the Sixpence social media link to Facebook , Twitter and the Discord channel is HERE! Definitely check out the Discord and see if you can get into a game! Please support our shows at www.patreon.com/cppn and even join us in some games! Also keep an eye at the new things on our now affiliated Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/creativeplayandpodcast Also follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CreativePlayandPodcastNetwork Would you be interested if we hosted D&D and Edge of Empire games on Roll20 for you to join? Email us at Creativeplaypodcastnet@Gmail.com
Jesus challenged his disciples to do something very difficult, but not for a reward. In fact, he didn't really want them to do it. Pastor Luke teaches from Luke 17:1-10 in "Sixpence to the Good," part 6 of his 10-part series, "Stories for the Journey."
Oakland, CA author Minyoung Lee shares her thoughts about the ways in which the immigrant time capsule effect contributed to her way of seeing the world, which was a constantly shifting landscape for her as her family moved from place to place across the globe. That wandering way of life was carried over into patterns that would continue for her as an adult. We read her story "Sing a Song of Sixpence," which explores the challenges of assimilation. Support the show
Sixpence Witch hunting isn't a bad trade if you know how to do it right. Rick Danforth resides in Yorkshire, England, where he works as a Systems Architect to fund his writing habit. When not working valiantly at the typeface or the plot mines, he can normally be found doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a type of involuntary yoga with uncomfortable pyjamas. ---- Story Submission ---- Got a short story you'd like to submit? Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.TallTaleTV.com ---- About Tall Tale TV ---- My name is Chris Herron, and I narrate audiobooks. In 2015, poor control of my diabetes left me legally blind for the better part of a year. The doctors predicted an 80% chance I would never see again, but I changed the way I was living and through sheer willpower beat the odds. During this time I couldn't read or write. Two things that I had been turning to for comfort since I was a small child. With the sheer amount of stress I was under, this was devastating. My wife took me by the arm, lead me into the local library, and read out titles of audiobooks to me. I chose the audiobook versions of books I had loved such as the Disc World series, Name of the Wind, Harry Potter, and more. They brought my favorite stories to life in ways I never thought possible and helped me through the darkest time of my life. Once my vision recovered, I maintained a love for audiobooks. I decided I would turn my focus from being a writer to becoming a narrator. I devised Tall Tale TV as a way to help out all the amazing authors in the writing communities I had come to love before my ordeal. I created Tall Tale TV to help aspiring authors by providing them with a promotional audiobook video. A way to showcase their skills with the written word. They say the strongest form of advertisement is word of mouth, so I provide a video to a platform of readers to help get people talking. Help them spread the word. Click the share button and let the world know about this author. ---- legal ---- All images used in this video are either original or Royalty and Attribution free. Most stock images used are provided by http://www.pixabay.com or https://www.canstockphoto.com/. Image attribution will be declared only when required by the copyright owner. All stories on Tall Tale TV have been submitted in accordance with the terms of service provided on http://www.talltaletv.com or obtained with permission by the author. Common Affiliates are: Amazon, Smashwords
"Kiss Me" is one of the biggest hits of the '90s, and the self-titled Sixpence None the Richer album is an enduring classic full of rich songs and complex emotions, a real standout in the CCM genre, and a major pop crossover that *should* have won the band a couple of Grammys--but we'll get into that. Lead singer Leigh Nash joins us to talk about her Sixpence days, her latest project "The Tide," and more. Plus: - A really wack year for “Song of the Year” Grammys - Listening to a guitar part for context - A first for the show Join us on PATREON for early access, extended interviews, weekly reaction mini-sodes, full bonus shows, and more ways to be part of the show! patreon.com/greatsongpod Visit greatsongpodcast.com for archives, merch, and more! Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @greatsongpod, and join the Facebook group at Facebook.com/groups/greatsongpod. The Great Song Podcast is a Tiger Leap Production. Check out the other fine Tiger Leap podcasts like Curio with Dan Buck, Project SSA, and The Punnery. Patreon Producers: Andrea Konarzewski, Ari Marucci, Michael Conley, Peter Mark Campbell, David Steinberg, Randy Hodge, Chaz Bacus, Juan Lopez, Jason Arrowood, Howard Passey, Matt Demecs, Kevin Foley, and Micah Murphy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/greatsongpod/message