Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

You may recall my lengthy post about attending the first of the 2007 Massey Lectures.

I just wanted to point out a couple of things about that:

• Ideas is currently hosting MP3 versions of the lectures. If you subscribe to the Ideas podcast, you would already have them, but you can download them directly as they appear on the podcast by pulling them off the podcast page. They only archive the MP3s for 4 weeks, and the lectures will appear over 5 weeks, so if you aren’t planning to subscribe to the podcast you’ll have to be careful about making sure you get all the components. The first lecture is going to expire soon, so go get it now.
• Speaking of that first lecture, if you listen to it all, you will eventually get to the audience Q&A part of the lecture. You will notice, at approximately… oh… around 63:23, just roughly, a very astute and interesting question coming from the audience. Apparently I have realized my dream of being not only part of an Ideas broadcast, but actually part of a Massey Lecture, kind of.

At the moment the first three parts of the lecture are available for download:

The City of Words: The 2007 Massey Lectures by Alberto Manguel - Part One

The City of Words: The 2007 Massey Lectures by Alberto Manguel - Part Two

The City of Words: The 2007 Massey Lectures by Alberto Manguel - Part Three

The end of ethnic nationalism, building societies around sets of common values, seems like a good idea. But something is going wrong. In the 2007 Massey Lectures, writer Alberto Manguel takes a fresh look at some of the problems we face, and suggests we should look at what stories have to teach us about society. From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Don Quixote to The Fast Runner, Alberto Manguel explores how books and stories hold the secret keys to what binds us together.

Tags: cbc,ideas,manguel,massey lectures

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.