William Blake: England’s Radical Prophet and Visionary
A talk given by Andy Wilson for the Blake Society at St Luke’s Community Centre, Islington, London, on 24th Nov 2021, for the residents around Bunhill Fields, where Blake is buried.
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Poems and Podcasts
Videos and podcasts of various discussions. Updated regularly.
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Blake and the Mad Crew: The Ranters and the Historians
While A L Morton thought Blake may have read the work of the Ranter, Abiezer Coppe, modern historians say there is no evidence of Blake being familiar with Ranter texts. How much do Blake’s ideas overlap with The Ranters? I look at the Justification of the Mad Crew (1650) to compare.
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Brian Catling: Avoiding Blake: Defeated by a Flea in the Ear, a Talk to the Blake Society
Brian Catling gave a talk to the Blake Society about his relationship to Blake, running a meter over his work to detect splinters of Blakean influence, from his early confusion of Blake and Bunyan, to his use of Blake as a character in his novel, The Erstwhile.
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Iain Sinclair: Blake’s Mental Traveller and The Gold Machine, a Talk to the Blake Society
In Sept 2021, Iain Sinclair gave an improvised talk to the Blake Society about how Blake’s poem, The Mental Traveller, became the map and model for a lifetime of journeys and pilgrimage quests. The Mental Traveller was an awakening, to be experienced but not yet understood. The poem returned at various points in the years that followed, until it was acknowledged as the secret code for Sinclair’s most recent book, The Gold Machine, a late-life expedition to one of the sources of the Amazon, in the footsteps of his great-grandfather.
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Michael Tencer: Affirmisms
Fed up with the wholesome goodness that pops magically out of the negation of the negation every time you try it? Try Michael Tencer’s affirmation of the affirmation instead to experience a life crumbling like your teeth in dreams.
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Video Interview with Andy Wilson re. William Blake vs the World
John Higgs recently published his book, William Blake vs the World—a ‘countercultural’ take on Blake’s work, written for a non-academic audience. Here, Conor Kostick interviews Andy Wilson about his review of the book and more generally about Blake’s relevance to the countrculture.
Read More Blake in Beulah: A Review of John Higgs’s ‘William Blake vs The World’
John Higgs’s new book promises a contemporary take on the works of William Blake, making them relevant to a modern audience generally, and to the counterculture in particular. So, how well does it live up to its promise?
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Conor Kostick: Art and Revolution – A Review of John Molyneux’s Dialectics of Art
The topic of art and revolution deserves a much better book than John Molyneux’s The Dialectics of Art. This critical review explains why.
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The Fall and William Blake: Before the Moon Falls
The Fall’s Before the Moon Falls, W.B., Jerusalem and creating a system of your own
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Blake’s Annihilation by the Eye of Ra: On Snakes, Seraphim and the Solar YHWH
What did Blake meantby saying that when he looked at the sun he saw a choir of angels singing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, and how does it relate to his depiction of apocalypse.
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Blade Runner’s Fallen Angels
The film Blade Runner is hugely successful, but what does it mean? As the makers hint, the key is to watch it through the eyes of William Blake and his mythology of liberation.
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