Violins, Dirty Shoes and Broken Biscuits: Laurie Lee as unknowing British Beatnik
At one point among the most celebrated writers of his day, Lee’s legacy in contemporary culture is accompanied by an eerie silence. Along with Down and Out in Paris and London, Midsummer Morning, is one of the definitive chronicles of the aimless wandering generation of Europe caught between two world wars. Each town with a real identity, and most characters displaying an at times laughably innocent vision of the world, the book portrays what feels to me at least as the last embers of an authentic European experience, before the destruction of war took place, and the subsequent white-washing of mass tourism took hold.
Robert Greer on the oft-overlooked early British beatnik, Laurie Lee.
things to charm a storyteller
Listener and broadcaster in Radio Benjamin have a furtive, strained relationship. Inhabiting the same room — for ‘the radio listener, as opposed to every other kind of audience, receives the programming in his home’ — the two are invisible to one another. Benjamin’s broadcast is a space of compromise, where the valence of sound is afforded only by the conspicuous loss or suspension of sight and touch.
Polly Dickson on Walter Benjamin‘s Radio Benjamin, edited by Lecia Rosenthal.