Vala #3 and Blake’s Visionary Animism
Vala is the journal of The Blake Society. Issue #3 focuses on the Blake and Nature and features an article by Andy Wilson on Ecology and Blake’s Visionary Animism
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Author: Andy Wilson
Escaping the 21st Century: A Boy Scout’s Guide to Modern Literature
An alternative to those quizzes about how many dead Victorians you’ve read in the pursuit of cultural capital, a canonical education and the admiration of loved ones. Instead, here’s a list of 100 books that shaped me.
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Mike Westbrook, Phil Minton & The Lo-Fi Improvised Music Ensemble with Sue Lynch: Intimations of a Future for Blake’s Music
In November 2022, The Mike Westbrook Band and The Lo-Fi Improvised Music Ensemble performed settings of Blake’s texts that raise questions about how Blake has previously been made to sing.
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No Place Called Home: Jason Whittaker on William Blake’s Jerusalem and ‘Progressive’ Patriotism
The patriotic frenzy around Brexit and the death of Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor offers an opportunity to reappraise Blake’s song Jerusalem and the nationalistic impulse so many find in it. Jason Whittaker’s new book on Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ is reviewed.
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Thoughts on Blake, Blade Runner and Animal Solidarity
In researching for the recent Blake Society meeting on Blake and Blade Runner I discovered aspects of the film and Philip K Dick’s original story that radically change our understanding of the story and bring it more closely into line with Blake’s core vision.
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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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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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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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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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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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