The next theme for Culture Club is… ‘Reality’.

This was my choice, following on from our theme of ‘madness’ from last time.

Here are the works we’ll be discussing:

• Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths 
• Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire
• Henry Green: Loving
• Richard Strauss: Symphonia Domestica

Plus the following poems by Dylan Thomas:

• Ears in the turrets hear
• Poem on his birthday
• A winter’s tale
• Into her lying down head
• Love in the asylum
• Ceremony after a fire raid
• In country sleep
• Fern Hill
• From love’s first fever to her plague
• The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
• Especially when the October wind
• Light breaks where no sun shines
• And death shall have no dominion
• After the funeral
• A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London
• Poem in October
• Do not go gentle into that good night
• In my craft or sullen art

Finally the prose work by Dylan Thomas, A Prospect of the Sea.

The theme is a loose one – I guess it’s to look at how each of these works explores the nature of reality, and asks the question ‘How do we experience reality?’

I hope it makes sense. I’m currently reading the Henry Green, which is wonderful – I think I see why he’s been referred to as a ‘writer’s writer’.

If I get time I’ll write some thoughts (although time seems to be in increasingly short supply at the moment).