M. Allen Cunningham

The first prelude from Cunningham's book We Are Guests of Ancient Time: Essays & Variations on the Imagination, Memory, Seeing, and Media). (Music by JWC)Learn more about this book: https://www.atelier26books.com/we-are-guests-of-ancient-time.html

An audio excerpt from M. Allen Cunningham's talk "Reading, Seeing, and Self-Forgetting," delivered recently in an undergraduate creative writing course. Cunningham considers what a creative writing course can and cannot achieve, and explores the imaginative value of honing one's perceptions by "going beyond the edges" of one's own identity, perspectives, imagination, and discipline. One springboard for this lecture is Ali Smith's Artful, an assigned book for this course Other touchpoints include Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Cezanne, Harold Bloom, C.S. Lewis, Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Michael Oakeshott, and Lynda Barry. (NB: Cunningham's particular discussion of Rilke originates with Letters on Cezanne, edited by Joel Agee, and draws on the observations in Agee's introduction to that book.)Visit www.MAllenCunningham.com to learn more about Cunningham's work as a writer, teacher, and publisher.

A reading from John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Vol. III, Chapter 11 (1853)MUSIC:"A Simple Blur" by Blue Dot Sessions, courtesy of Free Music Archive

"This music is not only infinitely durable, but perhaps the closest that music has ever come to universality."Voice: Leonard Bernstein, Bernstein on Beethoven: A Celebration in Vienna (1970)

"I did not know what 'Information Retrieval' was and I did not wish to find out."Voice: Harold Bloom, Interview (2000)Music: "Glacier" by SalmonLikeTheFish, courtesy of Free Music Archive

Originally posted May 14, 2020, the 95th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: M. Allen Cunningham's lecture on Woolf's great novel, originally delivered to Creative Writing students at Portland State University.

Cunningham describes his book Q&A and then reads three short sections (which happen to feature a few "F-bombs", FYI). Inspired by true events, bold in the forms with which it evokes an agitated, media-soaked half century in America, Q&A urgently reimagines the misunderstood quiz show scandals in light of our own time, as a moment of cultural reckoning whose reverberations we feel all around us today: in reality television, TV politics, the triumph of incoherence, and the pandemic problem of how to be real in a world of screen-induced self-deception.This reading was performed via Zoom. View the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B57vdvR_XU.www.MAllenCunningham.com

Have you heard THOREAU'S LEAVES? Produced and hosted by M. Allen Cunningham, it's an immersive, atmospheric podcast dedicated to the celebrated and lesser-known works of Henry David Thoreau, one of America's greatest voices. Here's a sample episode for your enjoyment: "Loon Checkers" (subscribe at anchor.fm/thoreausleaves, or wherever you get your podcasts).More info at:www.thoreausleaves.com