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  • History of Philadelphia Soul

    Class Schedule: Thursdays – Sept. 9, Sept. 16 and Sept. 23 | 7:30 – 9:00 PM

    This three-session virtual course taught by Kit O’Toole, traces the history of Philadelphia or “Philly” Soul, which greatly impacted not only the sound of 70s soul but the development of disco. Its lush string arrangements, horns, seductive vocals, and varied lyrical content added an element of sophistication to funk and soul, paving the way for disco and the 1990s neo-soul movement.

    The class will begin with influences such as Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” production, Motown’s pop/soul gloss, and James Brown’s “on the one” funk. Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the chief architects of the Philly Soul sound, will be explored in depth, as their compositions and productions resulted in classics by the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Billy Paul. The duo would also form the Philadelphia International label, whose legendary house band MFSB helped craft the sound. Along the way, the sound helped create disco and influenced acts as diverse as David Bowie, Hall and Oates, and Jill Scott. In addition to multimedia presentations, group discussions will further enhance understanding of this greatly influential genre.

    Zoom Link will be provided upon registration.

  • CANCELLED – Tuesday Night WORLD Record Club: Gilberto Gil’s Quanta Live

    DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.

    It’s just like book club but with albums! With new advances in technology, the way we consume music through our devices, apps and on demand streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes is making the idea of the “album” as an art form extinct. Get together with other music enthusiasts on Tuesday nights to discuss some of the greatest records of all-time! Listen to the album beforehand and then come prepared to discuss. This event will featuring Gilberto Gil’s Quanta Live will be hosted by Monmouth University Professor Meghan Hynson and is cosponsored by the Institute for Global Understanding.

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

    Freedom, by the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, is a masterly novel of contemporary love and marriage, a brilliant charting of the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire.

    Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter, once an environmental lawyer, taken a job working with Big Coal? Most startling of all, why has Patty, the perfect neighbor, turned into the local Fury? Patty and Walter Berglund are indelible characters, and their mistakes and joys, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, have become touchstones of contemporary American reality.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

    Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week. Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 
 

    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Patti Smith, Just Kids

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Patti Smith, Just Kids.

    Patti Smith’s definitive memoir: an evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, Scribner’s Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol’s Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years–the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup.

    Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Toni Morrison, Beloved

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The magnificent Pulitzer Prize–winning work that brought the wrenching experience of slavery into the literature of our time, enlarging our comprehension of America’s original sin.  Upon the original publication of Beloved in 1987, John Leonard wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “I can’t imagine American literature without it.” Nearly two decades later, The New York Times chose Beloved as the best American novel of the previous fifty years.

    Set in post–Civil War Ohio, it is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has withstood savagery and not gone mad. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at “beating back the past,” but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in her memory; in Denver’s fear of the world outside the house; in the sadness that consumes Baby Suggs; in the arrival of Paul D, a fellow former slave; and, most powerfully, in Beloved, whose childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who has now come from the “place over there” to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. The Crying of Lot 49 is Thomas Pynchon’s classic satire of modern America, about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in what would appear to be an international conspiracy. When her ex-lover, wealthy real-estate tycoon Pierce Inverarity, dies and designates her the coexecutor of his estate, California housewife Oedipa Maas is thrust into a paranoid mystery of metaphors, symbols, and the United States Postal Service. Traveling across Southern California, she meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run.

    In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl’s halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That’s how this extraordinary autobiography began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humour and originality found in his songs.

    Born to Run will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll. Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs (‘Thunder Road’, ‘Badlands’, ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’, ‘The River’, ‘Born in the U.S.A.’, ‘The Rising’, and ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’, to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 


    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

    This acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from an award-winning author “pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale” and includes a foreword by N. K. Jemisin (John Green, New York Times).

    When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others’ emotions.

    Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 



    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available. 

  • Tuesday Night Book Club: Liz Moore, Long Bright River

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack and Michael Thomas, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion!

    This month’s novel is Liz Moore’s Long Bright River. In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don’t speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

    Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey’s district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit—and her sister—before it’s too late.

    Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters’ childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.

    “[Moore’s] careful balance of the hard-bitten with the heartfelt is what elevates Long Bright River from entertaining page-turner to a book that makes you want to call someone you love.” – The New York Times Book Review

    We are still waiting for more information about whether we will be able to hold this event in person. However, we are also committed to continuing offering access virtually to Tuesday Night Book Club for all our new audiences! You can register now for Zoom access to the event. When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation. 



    Please stay tuned for more details about an in-person location for this event when more information becomes available.