Episode 354 - Beep Alonia

These podcasts are almost all dialogues with music. The music, such as "Beep Alonia" from 1964, touches a soft or sensitive spot in my heart -- and also one's brain, maybe -- and suddenly "the waters flow". Here I am thinking about contact with the supernatural, with God, really: the curtain coming down between "God and man" ('Modern Love', David Bowie 1983). Are you, dear listener, actually open to divine encounter? Or do you simply dismiss such a possibility, at least in practice? (I believe you probably don't.) Booth Tarkington's explicit regard for Charles Fort and Fort's writings is an almost unique instance of a mainstream writer's being open to the Beyond. And Tarkington was! The ending to his novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) is beyond unusual. It shatters almost every preconception you have ever had instilled in you -- about life, let alone death. Moreover, that ending is universally unread by the critics, and especially by the thousands of persons interested in Orson Welles' movie version. Why is this? Why the complete and IMO willful neglect of the entire "twist"-event that enables the resolution and ending of a great work of art? (I think it has something to do with "the world, the flesh, and the devil"...) Well, read the ending of The Magnificent Ambersons. It's just nine pages, and doesn't really need an intro. And then... then... consider a trip to Beep Alonia!