Seamus Heaney, “Blackberry-Picking.” Today we consider a lyric poem from Death of a Naturalist, Seamus Heaney’s first collection (1966). In “Blackberry-Picking” Heaney recounts a memory from his childhood, or perhaps from the beginning of his childhood’s end. ---------- We started recording episodes about a year ago and are just now releasing them. We ha ... Show More
Jul 2021
EP04 - Lunchbreak At the Victory Mansions | Orwell, "1984"
George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One. The opening paragraphs of George Orwell’s novel seem innocuous, as a man named Winston Smith returns to his apartment building for lunch. However, from the first sentence onward Orwell estranges us from the world we take for granted and begins hi ... Show More
1h 3m
Jul 2021
EP05 - Alone in the Darkness | Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent”
John Milton, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.” In the early 1650s John Milton lost his eyesight. Blindness forced him out of politics, where he had been an important figure in Oliver Cromwell’s government, and into retirement where he wrote some of the greatest poetry in a ... Show More
54m 30s
Jul 2021
EP06 - Memories of Jane | Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye"
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 11. Jane Gallagher had been the sort of girl who kept her kings in the back row. Is she still? As sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield unravels over the course of a few days in Manhattan his thoughts often return to Jane, who haunts hi ... Show More
1h 13m
Dec 2021
Ep 507 - If on a winter's night a traveler, by Italo Calvino
Sometimes a book is so meta it sort of breaks your brain! How to talk about a book that is all beginnings and no ends? How to discuss a book that enlists You, the Reader, in its chicanery? We try to get on the wavelength with Calvino's text. You be the judge of if we get there. O ... Show More
1h 6m
Dec 2022
472 The Art of Not Knowing
In this special episode, Jacke pays tribute to a friend, including a consideration of endings and beginnings, mystery and grace, and two powerful works: John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket and James Joyce's masterpiece "The Dead."
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1h 6m
Nov 2023
568 The Tempest (with Laurie Frankel)
Jacke celebrates autumn with a look at Shakespeare's Sonnet #73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"), then welcomes novelist Laurie Frankel (Family Family, One Two Three) for a Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving discussion of one of Shakespeare's last works, The Tempest.
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1h 18m