M. Allen Cunningham

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.

A reading from John Banville's novel Kepler, with music.