Biblio Cyrus

Listen to past episodes here: http://www.camfm.co.uk/shows/biblio-cyrus/

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Biblio Cyrus enters The Secret Garden

This week Biblio Cyrus welcomes editors of The Cambridge Tab Mollie Wintle and Will Heilpern onto the show to talk about Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 classic The Secret Garden.

The novel tells of a selfish girl called Mary who is sent back to England after her mother dies of cholera in India. Locked away in a giant manor house, she passes her time exploring the corridors and grounds, eventually stumbling upon a garden that has been locked up and left unkept. The book charters Mary's growing relationship with the garden, which proves life changing in so many different ways.

We will be looking in particular at the spatiality of the garden and what it might mean in modern contexts. Is it a private space? Is it one antithetical to the city? Does the garden have restorative qualities and do gardens and humans share a vital interdependence?

We will of course be playing the usual eclectic mix of Miley Cyrus, including a few racey cover versions of her work, whilst using the trope of the garden to reflect upon spaces of intimacy and intersubjectivity in the singer's own life.

Can Miley, like a garden, ever be tamed? Can we, like the sickly protagonists of The Secret Garden, be cured by Miley?

Miss our last episode in which we talked Roald Dahl's The Witches with Sophia Vahdati? Listen back here on our Cam FM webpage.

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Biblio Cyrus talks Roald Dahl and The Witches

This week's show will see us turn back the clock to what will have been, for many viewers, their first tastes of reading: Roald Dahl.

The Witches (1983) tells the story of a young boy who lives with his Grandma having been orphaned at an early age. His Grandma teaches him that witches do, in fact, exist in reality and not to believe adults. We learn how to recognise a witch, how to protect ourselves against them and what fate would befall us should we ever be unlucky enough to encounter one.

This is a tale of transformation, abjection and feminity. It is also a tale of childhood, fear and the maternal body. Roald Dahl teaches us that the future will never turn out the way that we planned it, and that maybe this is for the best.

Dahl's cult classic will incite discussion into femininity, the female body and the 'dangers' of female sexuality as historically engendered in the figure of the witch. We will also be discussing metamorphosis, memory and childhood.

Interspersed with all this will be, of course, our infamous soundtrack of Miley Cyrus. Miley's own career and media presence will highlight ways in which the figure of the witch has lingered on in depictions of female sexuality and discuss how this figure could indeed be seen as feminist and subversively critical of the same patriarchy that invented her.

We will be joined in the studio by Sophia Vahdati, student of French and Spanish, who is looking forward to a trip down memory lane.

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Biblio Cyrus Talks Travel Lit With Patrick Brooks

Biblio Cyrus will be celebrating its 5th show anniversary this week. Happy Birthday Biblio Cyrus - we remember when you were but a babe in arms. Much has changed since that day.

In order to mark the occasion, we will be focusing on travel literature, and in particular Jack Kerouac's 1957 cult classic "On the Road". Francesca will sadly be absent from the studio this week as she is on mysterious business abroad, but will be hopefully telephoning to say hello. Whilst it will be a pleasure to hear of Francesca's exploits, the call will serve as an interesting demonstration of the relationship between travel and tele-technologies and how the virtual spaces encouraged by radio might inform our readings of the texts. 

Cambridge Tab features tyrant Patrick Brooks will be our guest for this week. He will fuel debates about movement, borders and heterotopia.

Travel literature fuels our contemporary cultural imagination. As travellers make 'pilgrimages' to the bus of Into The Wild, we reflect on the ideology of the traveller.

Is the traveller white, male, middle class? Where does the Gap Yah cult come into this? As always, Miley Cyrus will problematise the discussionwith her own travel aesthetic. 

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Biblio Cyrus talks Master and Margarita

It was Biblio Cyrus’ pleasure to welcome Tab columnist Hunter Allen and Cambridge Russianist Alex Watsham to the Cam FM studio to talk about Bulgakov’s cult masterpiece ‘Master and Margarita’.

The novel turned out to be extremely close to Alex’s heart, being despite its surreal twists and terms “entirely about the human spirit”.

Hunter talked interestingly about how the novel has fed the cultural imagination outside of Russia, discussing several dramatizations.

In a new feature of the show, King’s College undergraduate, actor and director George Kan performed a reading from the text.

Discussion passed from censorship, temptation, good/evil and magical realism onto the life and work of Miley Cyrus. As an artist constantly encountering questions of censorship, we asked what it really means to be the girl who “can’t be tamed”.

Missed it? Listen here:

http://www.camfm.co.uk/shows/biblio-cyrus/

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Biblio Cyrus swaps e-cutes for cyrillic in a discussion on Master And Margerita

This Sunday, Biblio Cyrus will be moving away from a January comprised of French texts, and enter into the slavic.

Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, published in 1967, remains a highly controversial work that was indeed censored in the Soviet Union for its inflammatory political polemic.

We will be talking good, evil, temptation and the affect of the free spirit in an unfree body or unfree world with relation to Miley's corpus. If the young star "can't be tamed", then do allegations of her being a "media puppet" or "slave to the industry" have no weight whatsoever?

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Andy Martin discusses #Mileysentialism on Biblio Cyrus

Last Sunday saw Dr Andy Martin enter the Cam FM studio to discuss his books Sartre v Camus and Waiting For Bardot. Also up for discussion was of course Miley her self, and the new modes of being, un-being and nothingness that she proposes in her public performance.

Listen to the episode here:

http://www.camfm.co.uk/shows/biblio-cyrus/

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Andy Martin discusses Sartre, Camus, Existentialism and Miley

Join us tomorrow Sunday 19th Jan at  6pm on Cam FM for the 2nd show of the term.

This time hosts Ben and Francesca will be joined in the studio by Dr Andy Martin, professor of French at the University of Cambridge. Andy will be talking about two of his books, "Waiting for Bardot" and the more recent "Satre vs Camus" which both deal with themes of existentialism and challenge the boundaries between creative and academic writing. Andy, who has enjoyed a lifelong passion for surfing, will also be talking about the merging of personal experience with academic writnig and his infamous Becksistensialism; a blog combining French philosophy and David Beckham.

Miley lends herself extremely well to the existential tradition, herself representative of the identity crisis of #JustBeingMiley. We hope this will provide fertile soils for thought!

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Biblio Cyrus Returns JANUARY 2014!

Biblio Cyrus is so excited to announce that the first show of 2014 will be this  Sunday 12th at 6pm.

This week hosts Ben Dalton and Francesca Ebel will be discussing Zola's classic 1857 novel "Thérèse Raquin". The novel is usually classified as 'realist' or 'naturalist', yet we will be exploring the veracity of such claims through the spectre of the "dangerous", "untamed" sexual female body.

Themes of the animal v the human, death, painting, prophecy and paralysis will also frame the way in which we incorporate Miley's greatest hits, investigating how the singer's own career resonates with Zola's work.

Expect the Cyrus favourites Wrecking Ball, See You Again and Can't Stop plus many more!

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We were delighted to premier our series Biblio Cyrus with a discussion about Nabokov's Lolita interspersed with the usual eclectic mix of Miley hits. Francesca Ebel - of Tab column fame - was the special guest on this week's show, but will be staying on as co-presenter in the future.

The discussion of Lolita lead us to notice unexpected resonances with the representation of the (young/pre-pubescent) female body in Miley's own career, from Hannah Montana to those infamous VMA awards with Robert Thicke. We looked particularly at the implication of the male gaze in the work of both Nobokov and Miley.

Our next episode will be in January when we will be talking to Cambridge professor Andy Martin about his new book 'The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus', his philosophical brand Beckistentialism, and Miley's own relationship with the Sartre's philosophy of being focusing in particular on her Hannah Montana years of #justbeingMiley.

Untill then!