THE CITY OF WORDS

Alberto Manguel, The Massey Lecture Series; Radio National; the Big Ideas; Queensland, Australia
2007, 38 min 56 sec

“This Sunday night on Radio National, the Big Ideas program begins a new series of six programs: the Massey Lectures, first broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last year. The lecturer is internationally acclaimed writer and translator Alberto Manguel, who has written novels, film scripts, essays and a range of non-fiction works. He has edited anthologies on a variety of themes including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places, A History of Reading and, more recently, The Library At Night.”

The Massey lecture series is titled The City Of Words and in it Alberto Manguel turns our attention to a variety of literary sources from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel to the Epic of Gilgamesh; from Don Quixote to Stanley Kubrick’s film of 2001: A Space Odyssey and many more. The aim is to address the problem of how we are to live together in this complex, multi-voiced world, where many of the voices are raised in anger and in fear.