Today's Topics:
Re: Blake discography, was Re: Something different
Re: BLAKE AND SARTRE?
Blake & Buddhism & Sartre, Oh my!
BLAKE & HIS SOURCES, BLAKE AS THINKER [was: Blake&Buddhism]
CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON'S RADICAL BLAKE
Blake discography, was Re: Something different -Reply
Re: Blake discography, was Re: Something different
Re: Blake & Buddhism & Sartre, Oh my!
Re: Blake&Buddhism? -Reply
BLAKE & HIS SOURCES, BLAKE AS THINKER [was: Blake&Buddhism]
-Reply
Re: Blake discography, was Re: Something different
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Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 20:46:32 -0500
From: tomdill@wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake discography, was Re: Something different
Message-Id: <98082620463249@wc.stephens.edu>
The summer 1996 issue of _Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly_ includes
a review by G.E. Bentley of Donald Fitch's _Blake Set to Music:
A Bibliography of Musical Settings_ (Berkeley, 1990). Bentley
includes a supplementary list of settings not mentioned in
Fitch's volume. Of course, neither the book nor the supplement
would include Finn Coren's work, which has been issued since
then, nor does it include Greg Brown's cd _Songs of Innocence and
of Experience_ (Red House Records, 1992) or the recent reissue
in a 4 cd set _Holy Soul Jelly Roll_ of Allen Ginsberg's "tunings"
of the Songs (and I have just noticed a listing for a videotape
of Ginsberg performing those Songs, but I have not seen it 'for
real'; there is also Krysia Kristianne's _The Tyger and Other
Tales_ (Sentience Records) which includes only "The Tyger";
Van Morrison's _A Sense of Wonder_ includes Mike Westbrook's
setting of "Let the Slave" and a couple of songs with Blakean
titles but Morrison's own lyrics ("Ancient of Days" and
"A New Kind of Man"). Loreena McKennit has some Blake
settings, but I forget which of her albums include them.
Someone on this list once mentioned a recording by Paul
Robeson of "And did those feet in ancient times," but I
have never found it.
There have been several recordings of both Vaughan Williams's
and Benjamin Britten's song cycles, but I don't know which
are available at this time. The Vaughan Williams group was
coupled, I think, with "On Wenlock Edge" on an old EMI
recording with Ian Partridge singing.
The Westbrook and Jah Wobble have been mentioned.
If they ever released a soundtrack album for the silm
_Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner_, it must have
included the choral version of "And did those feet"--surely
the most electrifying and savagely Blakean use of that
"hymn" in any context I know (I wonder if it inspired
Billy Bragg, though I find his version rather flat?).
I am sure there are more.
Tom Dillingham
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Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 20:43:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: mmahin@funtv.com, blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: BLAKE AND SARTRE?
Message-Id: <2.2.16.19980826233816.60ff85a8@pop.igc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Your input is most welcome, Michael. Unless I have missed something, you
are the first to link Sartre with Blake.
As it happens, today I did a CD-Rom search of the MLA BIBLIOGRAPHY on Blake
and Sartre and found nada. Blake and existentialism yielded but one reference:
AUTHOR: Davis, Alexander
TITLE: Romanticism, Existentialism, Patriarchy: Hughes and the
Visionary Imagination
YEAR: 1994
SOURCE: Sagar, Keith (ed.). The Challenge of Ted Hughes. New York: St.
Martin's, 1994. xv, 190 pp.
PAGES: 70-90
LANGUAGE: English
PUB TYPE: book article
DESCRIPTORS: English literature; 1900-1999; Hughes, Ted; poetry; sources
in visionary poetry; Romanticism; Blake, William
A search I did a year or so ago in some other database yielded only the
following:
TI: Blake Studies
AU: Stevenson,-Warren; Fox,-Susan-C.; Teitelbaum,-Eve; Curran,-Stuart;
Tolley,-Michael-J.; Hagstrum,-Jean-H.
SO: 2,i(1969), 1970.
LA: English
PT: book
PY: 1970
NT: Warren Stevenson, " 'The Tyger' as Artifact," 5-19; Susan C. Fox, "The
Structure of a Moment:Parallelism in the Two Books of Blake's Milton,"
21-35; Eve Teitelbaum, "Form as Meaning in Blake's Milton," 37-64; Stuart
Curran, "Detecting the Existential Blake," 67-76; Michael J. Tolley,
"Blake's Blind Man," 77-84 (See Bibliog. for 1969, Vol. I, Item 3579); Jean
H. Hagstrum, "Rebuttal"(To Tolley) 84-86 and "Reply"(by Tolley) 86-88.
DE: English-literature; 1700-1799; Blake,-William
I haven't checked BLAKE RECORDS or any of the supplements yet; I'll leave
that to someone else.
At 11:25 PM 8/25/98 -0700, Michael James Mahin wrote:
> While my readings of
>Sartre are limited to Being and Nothingness, Existentialism as a Humanism, and
>some of his plays, my study of these works has been exacting (as usual, I need
>to read more).
Though I have read Sartre's WHAT IS LITERATURE? and am now reading the
relevant selections in THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO SARTRE, I have not read
any of Sartre's other works on literature or on the imagination. Naturally,
Sartre's views on these matters would also be a necessary area of comparison.
>The points on
>which Sartre and Blake agree seem to me the major points of each man's system
>(albeit the issue of imagination). There is no God in either man's cosmology
>which is a somewhat trite observation, but fascinating nevertheless ....
>Each man's cosmological model moves towards or is based on the acquistion
of >Freedom.
How do these points of comparison uniquely relate Blake to Sartre as
distinct from other modern thinkers? The doctrinal points you cite include
Blake, Sartre, and countless other incarnations of the modern spirit of
individual freedom, self-realization, and the quest for justice. Also, it
seems that the universe of Sartre is far more austere than that of Blake who
claimed to communicate with angels and that mental things are alone real.
While Blake's "godlessness" is an important theological issue (Altizer has
dealt with it from the standpoint of Christian atheism), it would seem a
stretch to completely liken this to the secular atheist.
>If anyone wants
>to hear more, just ask.
I want all the details that you are willing to provide.
>What are the implications if the transcendent God of the Western Psyche
>has become unbelievable?" In seeking these answers, we will come closer to what
>Blake was intending in his poetry and prophecy. It is to our great benefit
if >we observe that these are the same questions that the Existentialist
Movement >would ask 130 years later. By examining the way both Blake and the
>Existentialists sought to formulate values based on the reality of
Humankind's >existence without
>th