#reith lectures

[aphroditeslover11]

Ladies and gentlemen, I have found a certain somebody lurking on BBC sounds. I was looking for Bertrand Russel and stumbled upon this! All of the Russel lectures on ‘Authority And The Individual’ are there as well by the way.

[sad-wet-cat-hannibal]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0025vgy

U want to hear about men who perpetrated violence making positive change to overcome their trauma and undo bullshit gender rules?

Listen to this years Reith Lectures free on the BBC Sounds app. They're given by forensic psychologist Dr Gwen Adshead and this episode from Dec 10th she's talking about the links between adverse childhood experiences and perpetrating violence, recorded at a UK therapeutic prison for helping ppl convicted of violent crime to work through their trauma, no matter how long it takes, in a supportive environment.

There's a Q&A with the inmates and it's really positive.

(slightly paraphrasing from memory) "I went to the group with my Ugly Self, and they gave me acceptance."

It's a super important topic and I'm glad this year's lectures are focusing on it.

[semperintrepida]

I’ve never believed that fiction set in the past, or the future, is an inferior form of fiction. It demands the same attention to style and form as a story with a modern setting, and places a greater demand on the skills of placing information, and of managing complexity. Every page in a novel is a result of hundreds of tiny choices, both linguistic and imaginative, made word by word, syllable by syllable. The historical novel requires an extra set of choices—what sources to consult, what shape to cut from the big picture—what to do when the evidence is missing or ambiguous or plain contradictory. Most of these choices are invisible to the reader. You must be able to justify your decisions to the well-informed. But you won't satisfy everybody. The historian will always wonder why you left certain things out, while the literary critic will wonder why you put them in. "Because I could," is not a good reason. You need to know ten times as much as you tell.

—Hilary Mantel, from The BBC Reith Lecture #4, "Can These Bones Live?"

[scotianostra]

On 16th June 1971 Lord Reith died.

Born in Stonehaven in 1889, son of a Church of Scotland Minister. During advances in the First World War he would sing the “Old Hundredth”, in the belief that The Lord would not allow the interruption of the traditional Scottish Version of the Psalm.

Of his time in the trenches he wrote “I had never witnessed such sights before; this was indeed a battlefield. I had seen dead men and dead horses but never in these numbers.”

On 7th October 1915 Reith was sent to repair a section of a front-line trench destroyed by a mine. While carrying out the work he was shot in the head by a German sniper. Some of the bone in his face had been shot away and he lost a lot of blood but remarkably he was not dangerously wounded.

Reith was sent to Scotland to recover and after he was released from hospital he joined the staff of a munitions factory in Gretna. In March 1916 he was sent by the Ministry of Munitions to the United States to buy rifles. On his return he was transferred to the Royal Marine Engineers.

At the end of the war, Reith returned to Glasgow to work in engineering. He was the first General Manager/Managing Director of the BBC from 1922 to 1927 and set the non commercial model for the corporation that has continued to this day. Reith is regarded as the founding father of public service broadcasting

The Reith Lectures a series of annual BBC radio lectures given by leading figures of the day.are held in his Memory.

[period-dramallama]

I appreciate the Eamon Duffy article is behind a paywall.

But a LOT of people on social media are strawmanning, arguing against things Duffy never actually said. Quite probably they read the headline and got defensive.

What did Duffy say?

"I looked at the sources she used – what they say about More and what they say about Cromwell – and I showed that on key issues, she actually turned the sources upside down and made them say the opposite of what they were originally intended to suggest.

“Now that’s legitimate in fiction, but in her Reith lectures Hilary suggested that the literary novelist could bring genuine insight that the historian lacked. Maybe but I didn’t think that was legitimate if you’re actually falsifying the accounts.”

"Duffy added that his “final straw” was a subsequent newspaper article that used Wolf Hall as “evidence”"

What Duffy is saying:

-Mantel went against the primary sources

-you CAN go against primary sources in fiction because it's fiction

-it is possible (well, it's not impossible) for historical fiction to offer special insight that the historian doesn't have.

-BUT in order to obtain this special insight, you have to begin from a HARD factual basis. (Otherwise you're basically extrapolating from faulty data).

-don't cite Wolf Hall as a source.

What Duffy is NOT saying:

-wolf hall isn't a novel, it isn't fictional

-Mantel did not research

-liking wolf hall makes you a bad person

-historical fiction is an invalid genre and you are an idiot for liking it

-historical fiction is a nuisance that offers nothing at all, no insight, nothing special.

-historical novelists must be 100% factual at all times, they can't ever ever ever diverge from sources or contradict them.

-historical novelists can't invent where the sources are silent.

-every single primary source is 100% reliable and unambiguous.

But people are acting like he said things that he didn't say.

[chicago-geniza]

Okay!!! Good morning! We're making boring executive function to-do lists on Tumblr dot com again! Today we have taken meds, inhalers, vitamins; exfoliated, cleansed, shaved, and moisturized face; brushed and flossed our teeth; put on clean clothes and transferred dirty clothes to the washer; taken Focus weed gummy. In approximate order, we need to:

Drink Celsius ✅

Put on Wolf Hall

Refill weekly pill case

Make breakfast--probably more rice and leftover banchan with soy sauce + chili oil, bibimbap style. Oh that reminds me we need eggs next grocery run. And check EBT balance

Eat breakfast while watching Wolf Hall

Hang up clothes from dryer in bathroom

Queue up Hilary Mantel Reith lecture

SHOWER while listening to Reith lecture

Are you getting the sense that I can't do a task without music, audiobooks, podcasts, radio, or TV in the background? Well. You're right

Lie down after shower

Put on house socks and slippers

Put on classical radio in the kitchen

Today? Oh buddy. Today we start deep-cleaning an apartment that looks exactly like the interiors that those TikTik charity-case deep cleaners take on, because I am severely disabled and had a job for 8 months and could not take care of myself or my habitat while also doing the bare minimum in part-time retail

But by the power of weed and unemployment I will make this place fit for human habitation again

[justforbooks]

In her Reith lecture of 2017, recently published for the first time in a posthumous collection of nonfiction, A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel recalled the beginnings of her career as a novelist. It was the 1970s. “In those days historical fiction wasn’t respectable or respected,” she recalled. “It meant historical romance. If you read a brilliant novel like I, Claudius, you didn’t taint it with the genre label, you just thought of it as literature. So, I was shy about naming what I was doing. All the same, I began. I wanted to find a novel I liked, about the French Revolution. I couldn’t, so I started making one.”

She made A Place of Greater Safety, an exceptional ensemble portrayal of the revolutionaries Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins, but although the novel was completed in 1979, it wasn’t published until 1992 – widely rejected, as she later explained, because although she thought the French Revolution was the most interesting thing in the world, the reading public didn’t agree, or publishers had concluded they didn’t. She decided to write a contemporary novel – Every Day Is Mother’s Day – purely to get published; A Place of Greater Safety emerged only when she contributed to a Guardian piece about writers’ unpublished first novels.

Genre is a confining madness; it says nothing about how writers write or readers read, and everything about how publishers, retailers and commentators would like them to. This is not to criticise the many talented personnel in those areas, who valiantly swim against the labels their industry has alighted on to shift units as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Consider the worst offender: not crime, horror, thriller, science fiction, espionage or romance, but “literary fiction”. It can and does contain many of the elements of the others, but is ultimately meaningless except as a confused shorthand: for what is thought clever or ambitious or beyond the comprehension of readers more suited to “mass market” or “commercial” fiction. What would happen if we dispensed with this non-category category altogether? Very little, except that we might meet a book on its own terms.

Is last year’s Booker prize winner, Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a ghost story because its central character is dead, or a thriller because he has to work out who has murdered him? A historical novel because it is set during the Sri Lankan civil war, or speculative fiction because it contains scenes of the afterlife? And where do we place previous winners such as Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders or A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James?

Finding ways to describe narratives is not itself the problem, and nor is genre in the wider sense. An understanding of literary traditions that have formed over centuries and across cultures is not essential to the enjoyment of an individual book, but helpful to a broader appreciation of how texts interact with one another through recurring styles and motifs. The urge to categorise has had a deadening effect, reinforcing hierarchies that rely on an idea of what is “serious” and what is not, and by the genuinely liberating understanding of literature, in all its forms, as a playful, thoughtful, experimental tussle with words and ideas.

None of that means one mightn’t enjoy wandering down the forking paths of the literary woods. During the lockdowns, I found great comfort in psychological thrillers of a particular cast: a form of domestic noir in which the usually female protagonist’s apparently enviable life was undermined by a combination of unresolved dissatisfactions (a distant or otherwise problematic husband, a house renovation gone wrong, bills piling up, recalcitrant or troubled children) and an interloper, often in the form of a glamorous new neighbour. I was fascinated by the way these novels articulated a set of contemporary bourgeois anxieties – property values, long-term monogamy, school places, stalled careers – and then imagined how they might be alleviated by the arrival of a disruptor, only to discover that the status quo isn’t all that bad. Often set in smartish London suburbs, these books occasionally packed their casts off on holiday to a rented villa that not every participant could comfortably afford, and in which a body would quickly turn up amid the abandoned plates of tzatziki and glasses of retsina. I began to imagine that if I had the wit and skill to write a parodic mashup, I might call it Kitchen Island. But I don’t, because these efficient entertainments were also, at their most successful, impressively executed feats of plotting and atmosphere.

That I might feel these novels were, in that grimly joyless phrase, “guilty pleasures” because I read them more quickly than I might read the work of Jon Fosse or James Baldwin or Isabel Waidner is to misunderstand the potential of variousness. They were simply another facet of my reading life, speaking to a different impulse, yielding a different reward. I might eat a boiled egg for lunch and immerse myself in a complicated recipe of unfamiliar ingredients at dinner time; finish a cheerful romcom and then turn to a painstakingly detailed documentary. These are not perceived as contradictions, but as perfectly reasonable options available to those of us lucky enough to have them.

I’m returning now to a new novel, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, one of my favourite contemporary novelists. It is set in space, on board a craft circling the Earth, filled with astronauts from different countries and cultures, undergoing physical, mental and emotional changes. Her last novel, The Western Wind, was set in 1491, and she has also written about Alzheimer’s disease, Socrates, infidelity and insomnia. Categorise that.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Edmund Leach

Edmund Leach age 21. Via the deliciously indiscreet Love, Loyalty, and Deceit.

Edmund Leach was born in 1910. He came from Lancashire, England, and was descended from the families of that region who had grown wealthy running textile mills to make cloth. He was the youngest in the family and was his mother's favorite. As a result she constantly pressured him to excel and told him he was special -- as a result Leach spent much of his life as an intellectual maverick, coming up with unexpected ideas, criticizing others, and generally being unconventional.

Like everyone in his family, Leach attended Marlborough, a prestigious English public school (what Americans call a 'private school') and then went to Cambridge. The son of an industrialist, he studied engineering and mathematics, and excelled in school. He also fell deeply in love with a lady named Rosemary Upcott, but decided against getting married and settled down. Instead, he signed up with a British company for a four year stint in China managing their business affairs. Leach fell in love with China and Asia more generally. He enjoyed exploring areas that were new to him. At the end of his four years he returned to England intent on studying Asia as an anthropologist.

Edmund Leach in China in 1934. Source.

Leach began studying anthropology at the LSE, where he joined Malinowski's seminar. At this time, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown had different sets of students. Radcliffe-Brown's school was associated with E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Darryl Fforde and others. Malinowski's students included Edmund Leach and Raymond Firth. Leach's criticisms of social anthropology are thus usually aimed at R-B and his students.

By the late 1930s Leach married (not Rosemary, but a painter named Celia Joyce) and headed off to Highland Burma (now, Myanmar) to do fieldwork for his Ph.D.

Leach doing fieldwork in the Kachin Foothills. Via the Tabaiah biography

Unfortunately for Leach, World War II broke right after he arrived in Burma. Since he was a white man who had gone to Cambridge, he was made an officer in the army. He was familiar with the culture and language, and had engineering experience. So he "got shunted into a crazy cloak-and-dagger outfit" where he was put in charge of a group of Kachin fighters, went behind Japanese lines, hid in the forest, and conducted sabotage operations like dynamiting bridges. Leach hated it, and called his service "a strange mixture of the absurd and horrible". Worn out from living in the forest and ground down by dysentery, he returned to England. [quotes from Kuper interview]

After the war, Raymond Firth became the professor of anthropology at LSE, replacing his teacher Malinowski. He became Leach's advisor, which was slightly awkward because Firth had married Leach's first love, Rosemary. Throughout their lives Rosemary, Edmund, and Raymond would manage this slightly awkward love triangle, Edmund and Rosemary were only occasionally unfaithful to Celia and Raymond.

A rare short of Leach without his glasses, via the BBC. You can listen to Leach's prestigious Reith lectures on their website.

Leach got a position teaching anthropology at his alma mater, Cambridge. The professor there was Meyer Fortes, who Leach deeply disliked. They shared an office suite -- one of them had to walk through the office of the other to reach their own office in the back of the suite. Over time, Leach grew more and more prominent at Cambridge. In addition to receiving a professorship, he also served as the Provost of King's College for thirteen years. In essence, this made him the chief executive officer of perhaps the most prestigious college in the university. As a result, Leach had tremendous power and influence at Cambridge. Among other things, he used it to integrate King's, allowing women to study there for the first time.

While Leach was an insider in the university hierarchy, he was a bit of a bad boy intellectually. His groundbreaking 1954 volume Political Systems of Highland Burma took aim at nearly every aspect of structure-functional anthropology. In 1961 he wrote Pul Eliya, which is both an incredibly detailed study of the irrigation systems of a small village in Ceylon and also an unsparing criticism of many of his colleagues (including Meyer Fortes).

Today for Edmund Leach Week: The classic Edmund Leach look. Via his British Academy obituary by Stanley Tambaiah.

Leach was more interested in pointing out the shortcomings of others than he was with building his own system or school. However, he was constantly proposing new things. Leach was interested in using concepts of 'symbolism', 'communication' and 'structure' to rethink anthropology. He was a specialist on kinship, but also looked for patterns in biblical texts and myth. He had a characteristic approach to ethnographic materials, but rarely produced any sort of credo or coherent doctrine about his beliefs.

Edmund Leach (left) and Stanley Tambiah at Harvard in 1978, via Tambiah’s biography Edmund Leach.

Despite the fact that Leach did not train disciples, he did train a tremendous number of students. Many people passed through Cambridge, and even the ones who were not direct students of Leach were influenced by his unique style of anthropology. He reached the heights of the British academy and received many awards, inclusion a knighthood in 1975 (which he later made the subject of a lecture entitled "once a knight is quite enough").

Leach passed away in 1989.

Sources: Tambiah's biography of Edmund Leach as well as his obituary for Leach. The published letters of Rosemary Firth, Kuper's interview with Leach in Current Anthropology, and Leach's article "Glimpses of the Unmentionable".

[sirgawin]

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it - it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It's the record of what's left on the record. It's the plan of the positions taken, when we stop the dance to note them down. It's what's left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it - a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more 'the past' than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It's no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

Hilary Mantel, The Day Is for the Living (The Reith Lectures 2017), from A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing

[grandhotelabyss]

Have you read much African literature (apart from Coetzee?)

I confess (if this is a topic requiring confessions) that it hasn't been an area of focus for me. I've one read novel each by Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Salih (Season of Migration to the North), and Gordimer (The Pickup). I've read Soyinka's most famous play, Death and the King's Horseman, his state-of-the-world Reith Lectures (Climate of Fear), and a handful of his other essays on art, culture, and politics. I read Okey Ndibe's Foreign Gods, Inc., and then went to hear the author speak down the street at the Soap Factory, when it still existed; he and his book are very funny. I've read (I even taught) Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow; my friend from South Africa, Maurits, now a professor at the University of the Western Cape, pressed it upon me in graduate school after I conceded I'd only read Gordimer and Coetzee. And Alan Paton. We read Cry, the Beloved Country in high school; I think it counted as the non-European selection in 12th-grade world literature. If the colonial diaspora in Africa counts, I've read Olive Schreiner (Woman and Labour) and Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook); if the postcolonial diaspora in America and Europe counts, I've read Chris Abani (The Virgin of Flames), Teju Cole (Open City), and Marguerite Abouet (Aya de Yopougon). To what continent of the mind does Cavafy's Alexandria belong? Perhaps neither to Africa nor to Europe, to no land at all, but to the Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless, I have read Cavafy's Collected Poems. Some of Senghor's poetry, too, and his "Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century." Some of Ngũgĩ's polemics also, e.g., Decolonising the Mind, but not yet one of his novels: illustrating the geographic inequality still obtaining in what our Marxist friends call the "system" of world literature, I keep waiting for the call from Stockholm to impel me, though I do suspect the Swedes gave his prize away to his lesser-known exegete, Abdulrazak Gurnah. I want to read Gurnah's Paradise along with Ngũgĩ's Devil on the Cross. If only for a final reckoning with Marxism, I want to read Burger's Daughter by Gordimer. I know I have to read Bessie Head someday. Soyinka's seems a sensibility as bottomless as that of Joyce or Borges, so I know I have to go back to him, to all the plays and to The Interpreters and Aké and Art, Dialogue, and Outrage. I must return to Egypt—not to Cavafy's Alexandria next time, but to Mahfouz's Cairo, where I fear I've never been. Nuruddin Farah and I used to shop at the same grocery store, but I still need to read him. The to-read list goes on: Mia Couto, Christopher Okigbo, and especially Dambudzo Marechera, whose experimental and anarchic works I've only browsed, but whose cosmopolitan motto I admire: "If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you." And a book I should have read 20 years ago, 25 years ago—they should have just made us read it in Catholic school—which I still keep meaning to get to: the Confessions of St. Augustine.

[astrantiia]

I'm so sorry if this is random, but I stumbled across your page because of your photography of the recent blue supermoon and I have to say your photos are beautiful!! This led me to check out your other photos and I see we have similar interests in books too. I've just gotten really into astronomy and was wondering how readable "Black Hole Blues" is for a beginner? I'm a little daunted to tell you the truth because physics was never my strongest subject but I want to read it as research for a fantasy book I'm writing about black holes! ✩

hi! thank you very much, I'm glad you like my photos!

honestly, I haven’t read this book yet, but somewhere I saw a description that the author explains everything to a reader who is new in physics. I can also recommend “Black Holes: the Reith Lectures” by Stephen Hawking. Neil deGrasse Tyson also writes about astrophysics in a very interesting and understandable way, but I don’t remember if he has something specifically about black holes.

you can also find many interesting videos on youtube about this (for example what happens if you fall into a black hole etc.), and this can be more convenient because there are animations and pictures for better perception and understanding.

good luck with your research and writing! this sounds very interesting, I would love to read your book! :)

[so-many-hills]

When the musician Brian Eno spoke to the New Statesman in May, he seemed to be irritated about the art world, its inflated prices and its critical language that so few people understand. When the potter and painter Grayson Perry began giving his Reith Lectures last month he paid tribute to Eno’s 1995 “sabotage” of a Marcel Duchamp urinal in New York (Eno siphoned his own urine into the artwork to explore whether the piece might be more valuable if it had been “worked upon” by two people).

– The New Statesman (h/t The Browser)

[qudachuk]

From the surreal return of Boris Johnson at the Covid inquiry to sex etiquette at the theatre, it’s been a strange old weekNaga Munchetty (Radio 5 Live) | BBC Sounds The Reith Lectures (Radio 4) | BBC SoundsHelp I...

[msamba]

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Revisited, Series 1, Brian Cox on Robert Oppenheimer

Sarah Montague and Brian Cox reconsider Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith lectures. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, gave the BBC’s Reith lectures in 1953. Sarah Montague and Professor Brian Cox consider the lessons to be learnt from them today. The Reith Lectures began in 1948 on the Home Service, subsequently moving to Radio 4 and becoming a major national occasion for intellectual…

[origamiquotes]

No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does.

To create one needs a kind of formless roving of the mind to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere. It is from that swell that art emerges.

Chimamanada Ngozi Adichie, BBC Reith Lectures 2022

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001fmtz?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile