The English faculty of the University of Cambridge recently survived the execution of a marathon reading of “Paradise Lost” by John Milton. The reading occurred in a small studio described as a “large black cube in the basement [...] with an absolute minimum of visual stimulus, allowing listeners to remember Milton’s own blindness and to relate it to the kinds of darkness—moral and visible—which he imagines in the poem.”

Moreover, those who had seats in that dark cube seem to have been trapped for at least a full book: “A video feed of the reading was relayed to a lecture room in the Faculty building to enable people to listen to less than a full book, or to follow the reading no matter when they arrive or need to leave.”

The joy of all joys here is that the University of Cambridge is planning to release the recorded reading as a podcast, which will eventually be posted on their site. This might be useful to those of you teaching the text: just refer your students to the iTunes music store, and they can turn it up to eleven, rocking out to “Paradise Lost” as they roll down the main drag on Saturday nights.

Just make sure they don’t get the poem confused with the self-proclaimed ‘Gothic metal pioneers’ that also go by the name Paradise Lost. On second thought, that might be one way to make grading essays more interesting?