7198: Satyajit Ray — The Uncompromising Eye of Indian Cinema | pplpod
Satyajit Ray had no film training when he began shooting Pather Panchali. He pawned his wife's jewelry to fund it, shot on weekends over three years, and produced a film that Akira Kurosawa said made ...
16 Jun 24min
7197: D.H. Lawrence — Banned Books, Scandal, and the Fire of English Literature | pplpod
D.H. Lawrence wrote novels so frank about sexuality that they were banned, burned, and prosecuted for obscenity. The 1960 trial over Lady Chatterley's Lover became a landmark case for free expression....
16 Jun 21min
7196: Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Opium Dreams and the Messy Genius of English Poetry | pplpod
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan after waking from an opium dream and was interrupted by a visitor before he could finish it. The fragment became one of the most famous poems in the English la...
16 Jun 22min
7195: B.B. King — The Man Who Made Lucille Sing and the Blues Weep | pplpod
B.B. King named his guitar Lucille after nearly dying in a fire caused by two men fighting over a woman by that name. He played her every night for the next fifty years, developing a vibrato and strin...
16 Jun 20min
7194: Rimsky-Korsakov — The Naval Officer Who Became Russia's Greatest Orchestrator | pplpod
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval cadet who composed a symphony while sailing around the world, despite having almost no formal musical training. He later taught himself harmony, counterpoint, and o...
16 Jun 21min
7193: Percy Bysshe Shelley — The Unburnt Heart and a Radical Poet's Wild Life | pplpod
When Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was cremated on an Italian beach, his friend Edward Trelawny reached into the fire and pulled out his heart, which had refused to burn. The organ was kept by Shelley's...
16 Jun 23min
7192: H.P. Lovecraft — The Tragic Recluse Who Created Cosmic Horror | pplpod
H.P. Lovecraft died in poverty at forty-six, unknown outside a small circle of pulp magazine readers. Today his invented mythology — Cthulhu, Arkham, the Necronomicon — is embedded so deeply in global...
16 Jun 21min
7191: Domenico Scarlatti — How Spain Transformed a Baroque Italian into a Genius | pplpod
Domenico Scarlatti spent the first half of his career in his father's shadow, writing competent Italian operas that no one remembers. Then he moved to Spain, heard flamenco guitars and castanets, and ...
16 Jun 18min
