Lexington Community Education

Thu Oct 22 · 7:00pm

Recovering from Cultural Anesthesia & Returning to the Senses

Lexington Community Education · Follen Church · Lexington · MA · Lexington

Piers Kaniuka, who has worked with addicts for over thirty years, and Michael R. Spicher, a philosopher of aesthetics, discuss “cultural anesthesia,” a numbing of feeling “we drift into gradually through routine, distraction, efficiency, and environments that ask very little of our attention.” Kaniuka cofounded and directs Maine Recovery Collective, a residential treatment program; Spicher founded the Aesthetics Research Lab in 2016.

Thu Nov 12 · 7:00pm

The Other Side of Air: A Celebration, in Poetry & Music, of Rainer Maria Rilke

by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Mark S. Burrows)

Lexington Community Education · Follen Church · Lexington · MA · Lexington

Marking the centenary of Rainer Maria Rilke's death in 1926, the poet and translator Mark S. Burrows reads Rilke in his own English versions, with the sitarist David Whetstone accompanying. Burrows published a new translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus in 2024 and co-wrote You Are the Future with Stephanie Dowrick. Whetstone, a disciple of Ustad Vilayat Khan, toured for four decades with Robert Bly and Coleman Barks.