Like many another poetry-loving boy I grew up knowing and reciting the lyrics of William Blake. But it was only much later, during the 1980's, that I ventured into Blake's longer and more involved prophetic poems. One of my guides was the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, whose Fearful Symmetry (1947) was one of the first books to appreciate the scale and the reach of Blake's poetic achievement. Another was the English poet Kathleen Raine in books like Blake and the New Age, from which I would draw my title, and the two volumes of Blake and Tradition. By 1987 I felt ready to share my discoveries, and, happily, both Frye and Raine, along with a number of other Blake scholars were willing to take part. Barry Macgregor read from Blake's work, and Lister Sinclair, who introduces the proceedings, also helped to choose the incidental music. Here are the three programmes that resulted...
William Blake: Prophet of a New Age Part Two
William Blake: Prophet of a New Age Part Three
Crime Control As Industry
Late in 1992, at the recommendation of Ivan Illich, I travelled north on the overnight train from Hamburg to Oslo to meet an old friend of Illich's, Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie. Through books like Limits to Pain, Christie had helped to create the climate in which prison rates in industrialized countries had consistently fallen between the 1950's and the 1980's. Then the rates made a U-turn and began to rise, in some cases catastrophically. Christie soon realized just how convenient these rising rates of imprisonment were for the new neo-liberal political regimes that were then emerging and consolidating themselves. He perceived the prison boom as an acute political emergency and, when I arrived in Oslo, he was about to publish a book called Crime Control As Industry: Towards Gulags Western Style? (In later editions of the book, the question mark disappeared.) We spent parts of several days in recorded conversation, not just about the new prison economy, but also about the origin and development of his approach to criminology and community. As it turned out, our collaboration would continue through several more Ideas series in the 90's and eventually result in my publishing a book of my own called The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (House of Anansi, 1998.) This joint undertaking began with these three broadcasts in March of 1993...
Crime Control As Industry Part Two
Crime Control As Industry Part Three
Puppet Uprising: The Art of Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater
This series was first broadcast in December of 2002. I would like to dedicate its appearance here to the memory of my friend Taylor Stoehr, who patiently urged it into existence. Taylor and I got to know each other when he took an interest in my book Ivan Illich in Conversation. (Illich had been a good friend of Paul Goodman, and Taylor was Goodman's literary executor, as well as the author, by then, of several books and long articles on Goodman's life and work.) As our acquaintance grew into friendship, and Taylor got to know the work I had done at CBC Radio, he began to insist that Peter Schumann, the founder, director and inspiration of the Bread and Puppet Theater belonged in what he generously called my "pantheon." I resisted, repeatedly, on the grounds that Peter Schumann was, and is a great visual artist whose work would be quite impossible to represent on radio. Taylor did not relent, and so I eventually agreed to call on Peter at his and the theatre's home in Glover, Vermont. Peter didn't initially seem that interested in the idea of a radio series, but he did remark at that meeting that he had always been dissatisfied with video representations of his pageants, circuses and puppet plays. That made me understand, on reflection, that Taylor might be right after all, and that radio, whose subjects appear only in the imagination, might be a very suitable medium to convey something of what Schumann and his many collaborators have accomplished. Eventually Peter and I sat down for a long interview in the CBC's New York studios, everyone else concerned proved friendly and cooperative - except for the late Stefan Brecht, the author of a marvelous two volume study of Bread and Puppet who curtly rejected my advances - and the series was made. For me it resulted in friendships, and an attachment to Bread and Puppet that continue to this day. I hope new listeners will agree that the series still justifies Taylor's marvelous confidence that it could and should be made...