WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818, Frankenstein, Or, the Modern Prometheus, seems to me to clang like a hammer blow against a bell that tolls our self-inflicted doom.
To quote Victor Frankenstein–
None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder…
This is the very path that leads to our present orientation, adrift among the chemists and cognitive scientists proclaiming the drive to glory and victory over death is but the neutral path all the enlightened among us must tread. We are destined to be the maker of ourselves. Shelley disabuses us of this notion as have many who have come after her. But one lesson perhaps not often learned is that the novel is a treatise on being a parent. The microcosm of our social future in the world begins with the circumstances of childhood.
All of our music tonight will be from trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas and Keystone, his electric group. Our opening track is “Vitalism” and comes from the Burst section of his 2010 trilogy, Spark of Being. The music was inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel and emerged from a collaboration with experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison who produced a kind of adaptation of the novel, also called Spark of Being.
GUEST
Monique Morgan is Associate Professor of English Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is concerned with the ways literary form influences readers’ intellectual, ethical, and emotional responses, and with the interactions of different kinds of forms across genres, media, and disciplines. She is the author of Narrative Means, Lyric Ends (2009), an investigation of the narrative strategies of four nineteenth-century long poems. She is currently at work on her next book, Narrative and Epistemology in Victorian Science Fiction, which argues that many nineteenth-century science fiction novels expose and defamiliarize the patterns of rational inquiry that underpin both narrative form and scientific investigation.
RELATED
“Vitalism”–an 18th and 19th century quest for the spark of life, on In Our Time (BBC)
Frankenstein returns to life in ‘Spark of Being’
Dave Douglas
Trailer to the film Spark of Being
“The science of life and death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” by Sharon Ruston
MUSIC
All songs by Dave Douglas and Keystone from the trilogy of albums, Spark of Being.
“Vitalism”
“Spark of Being”
“Creature Code”
“Split Personality”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford
