FiftyFive ~ # 46

It must be the rain doing this to me. Tomorrow it will be March and I am still trying to bottle sunshine. What can be done to raise the spirit from the downright dreich into sunny climes. I have been listening to a lot of African music lately. Am I trying to bottle the sun or just re-introducing myself to different rhythms. And I was reading The Puppet by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and loved this:

If for a moment God would forget that

I am a rag doll and give me a scrap of

life, possibly I would not say

everything that I think, but I would

definitely think everything that I say.
I would value things not for how

much they are worth

but rather for what they mean.

And so now I think I will dance instead of saying everything that I think, and while I dance I will definitely be thinking about things to say - take it away Salif, no one does it better than the Mali man - Tekere!

FiftyFive ~ # 45

Italo Calvino (again) has suggested that we may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: "...one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression." And if we think about it this can be extended to five through the senses and then beyond using the combinations of them. But I was thinking the other day about the sixth sense, not one of the five which we use to hear, see, smell, touch or taste but the one that makes us feel, for what sense records joy or pain or anger or love and then there are the associates, desire, passion, none of them a visual or a verbal expression. Writing "oh" so it can be seen as a visual image on this page, or uttering "oh" so it can be heard as a response to a visual seems to deny the expression its wider legitimacy when it is even a silent reaction to the sixth sense concentration of the soul miner; where the immediate reaction is one without language, of a Dialektic im Stillstand - dialectics at a standstill - for there is no way to express what it is; no language, however precise in choice of words and expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination (to paraphrase Calvino again) can match a moment of realisation that "oh" doesn't even get close to, for even the combined hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting don't come close to being able to give it sixth sense definition - such vague clarity; such transparent mystery, such an "oh" ... and this clip is an "oh" for the ears and eyes and a wonderful heartbeat, can you smell it, taste it, feel it echo inside as something indescribable. Close your eyes and say "oh", I defy you not to sway while you listen:

And here is Robert Juniper again, in playful mood this time, will the little fish say "oh" when she gets caught or will she be forever ellusive - and indeed will we ever know... oh!

FiftyFive ~ # 44 (again)

I have an idea that this posting reeks of nostalgia but hey, who cares, does this clip not resonate with all of us at some point. I happen to think this is one of the best, observant songs ever recorded. There is an innocence, of course, because she was young when she wrote it, but does it capture that moment - hmm, I think, Janis Ian has it spot on and I confess, sometimes I still feel like this - sigh and let's be honest, it is an Icarus moment, how must the boy have felt, and didn't we all feel like this at some point, time, moment...

FiftyFive ~ # 44

'O sole mio

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day

The air is serene after a storm

The air's so fresh that it already feels like a celebration

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day

But another sun,

that's brighter still

It's my own sun

that's upon your face!

I do like a sunny day and standing in the sun reading a book in my favourite pink t-shirt is about as good as it gets (standing because I needed the breeze around my knees). And I am still on an Icaran theme, for is this song (lyrics above) not an Icaran moment of flying. Not only is he facing the sun but is also hovering over his lover - "It's my own sun that's upon your face!" Such a joyful image of jouissance and carefree flying. And I have stolen this music clip too - I think this was the very first operatic song I ever got and understood. I was sitting in the front seat of a car with a dear friend and he introduced me to it. Just blew me away, especially knowing we both fancied the same girl (no I am not saying how it turned out). In Bizet' song, the duet comes at a point, early in the story, when the two characters, Zurga and Nadir, acknowledge that they're both in love with the same woman, Leïla, but they decide to give her up. Surely, the men declare with deep emotion, no woman is worth jeopardising their lifelong bond for (hell, yeah). When she reappears in their lives the result is a life and death struggle, and as the final curtain falls, their whole village is burning to the ground! So much for eternal friendship - what a beautiful thing is a sunny day:

FiftyFive ~ # 43

I received an Icarus email this morning just as I was putting a research idea together on an Icarus theme. Then serendipitously I was looking at the blog of a good friend of mine and there he was again, flying though my sky in the strangest image, for it was a song. Such a strange thing but I confess I think he is going to be with me for a long time. In thinking about Icarus though, I was reminded too of something Italo Calvino wrote, for I have been reading a lot of his stuff recently. He ends a piece on exactitude by saying, "I leave you this image... so that you may carry it in your memories as long as possible, in all its transparency and its mystery." And I am so taken by that idea, the transparency and the mystery wrapped together, the clear; lucid; simple; precise and intelligible twinned with the ambiguous; secret; obscure; vague and unintelligible. It is precisely that Icarus idea, the constant tension between the known and the unknown, the knowable and the unknowable, how high is too high, and flying so close to the sun because, 'O sole mio, its my own sun and that is such a nice Icarian image too. I stole the clip that accompanies this from another's blog and I have included the Neapolitan and English translation of the lyrics because they speak of an Icarian moment to me - love this, it is musical sunshine, transparent mystery - such joy!

Neapolitan lyrics

Che bella cosa e' na jurnata 'e sole
n'aria serena doppo na tempesta!
Pe' ll'aria fresca pare già na festa
Che bella cosa e' na jurnata 'e sole
Ma n'atu sole,
cchiù bello, oje ne'
'O sole mio
sta 'nfronte a te!
'O sole, 'o sole mio
sta 'nfronte a te!
sta 'nfronte a te!
Quanno fa notte e 'o sole se ne scenne,
me vene quase 'na malincunia;
sotto 'a fenesta toia restarria
quanno fa notte e 'o sole se ne scenne.
Ma n'atu sole,
cchiù bello, oje ne'
'O sole mio
sta 'nfronte a te!
'O sole, 'o sole mio
sta 'nfronte a te!
sta 'nfronte a te!

English translation
What a beautiful thing is a sunny day,
The air is serene after a storm
The air's so fresh that it already feels like a celebration
What a beautiful thing is a sunny day
But another sun,
that's brighter still
It's my own sun
that's upon your face!
The sun, my own sun
It's upon your face!
It's upon your face!
When night comes and the sun has gone down,
I almost start feeling melancholy;
I'd stay below your window
When night comes and the sun has gone down.
But another sun,
that's brighter still
It's my own sun
that's upon your face!
The sun, my own sun
It's upon your face!
It's upon your face!

FiftyFive ~ # 42

Leafing through Leopardi's Zibaldone, Italo Calvino highlights a section which translates as, "...the light of the sun or the moon, seen in a place from which they are invisible and one cannot discern the source of the light; a place only partly illuminated by such light; the reflection of such light, and the various material effects derived from it; the penetration of such light into places where it becomes uncertain and obstructed, and is not easily made out, as through a cane break, in a wood, through half-closed shutters, etc., etc.;" and I have often thought about this (for I have know in for twenty years). And Calvino says Leopardi is asking us to savor the beauty of the vague and indefinite - is this not a persuasive thing? An idea on being open-hearted and open-minded to the possibles of life. And this another thing about being fifty-five, you don't close off to possibilities and ideas and smiles from across a crowded room. Why should we, we still retain the idea that the vague and the indefinite are all stored in the cupboard of possibles - at least that is how I feel about it. The subtlety of vagueness, what an intriguing phrase (which I have just written), perhaps I could incorporate it into a chapter in a book - on Icarus, say, for it intrigues me and while in a academic circles we seek clarity of language and of thought, perhaps the vagaries of vagueness are awaiting instruction on how best to be expressed - hmm. And then there is clarity and I have always been partial to Gary Snyder for that very reason and so why not, if I were in a country mood might read this:

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”

And then what music can we get to accompany vagueness and clarity - the wonderful Prefabulous Sprouts, why not let the stars go free, we will still see the light in a place from which they are invisible, will we not:

FiftyFive ~ # 41

I have never really seen myself as a flowery person, though I do like flowers in the garden and I bought some for the pots today. Partly its to do with the colourblindedness and staying away from blandness. And in truth I think I have a jumper in all the pastel colours available in the primulas I bought today and colourful jumper wearing is the same idea (although I see The Guardian today rejects pastels for sherbet - which of course really only reveals the paucity of the English language when it comes to description), though this picture is also me in my favourite t-shirt which seems to get in lots of the few pictures there are of me (not many at all - and some definitely not for public consumption) and I guess that comes from whoever takes ownership of cameras. I have always been a camera person. The one I have at the moment belongs to work and is too heavy and clumsy to slip into a pocket. What I plan to get is a "Flip" which can take still and movies too - for I thought blogging movement is the next way to go with it, so watch this space for sherbet porn (not). But today I have a gripe. Milan Kundera likes to compare and contrast and in an essay entitled, The Torn Curtain, he says, "When Picasso painted his first cubist picture, he was twenty-six: all over the world several other painters followed him. If a sixty-year-old had rushed to imitate him by doing cubism at the time, he would have seemed... grotesque. For a young person's freedom and an old person's freedom are separate continents." To be honest this troubles me and I rebel against it, rail against it and even curse against it (fuck it - sometimes that is the only dignified response). OK I can see the point that someone my age shouldn't be following trends but when I look back at music, for example, I hear people being lauded for stuff I was doing better when I was their age and that was thirty years back in 1972 or thereabouts. In some sense they are only regurgitating what my generation pioneered. Thus, if I sit and write a song, which I did recently, it will be in a style I have played for a long time and any comparison with someone like Fleet Foxes (as suggested by a student recently - oh gawd, can't stnd them) is only to say, I was doing stuff long before them and surely there is something a bit undignified in a new band doing a sub Mamas and Papas or whatever. The young surely need to look that way, forward, and to consider why they are impersonators when they should be pissing on the corpse of the past as they plough their own way forward. And then to cap it, yay as a friend of mine would say, yesterday I heard Roger Daltry of The Who being interviewed and the inevitable question about that immortal line, "I hope I die before I get old..." came up. Daltry's answer was well rehearsed but the same as mine, we both do hope we die before we get old! For age is a state of mind and if the body gives up when I am a young and spirited eighty-eight-year-old then fuck yay, all the better I say. I have used this clip before but like it for three reasons - 1) "exercise that mind"; 2) I play guitar just like this; 3) I am not troubled by the religious sentiment of the song, I just like the sentiment and 4) there is no four in "three reasons", do you think I am senile... if you could see me now or hear me even we would be laughing! May you stay forever young for that is exactly how I feel right now - yay!

Then again, rarely do I post two clips but this is another Bob Dylan song and while the intro is a bit ropey, do stick with it, for its the lovely JB and Mama... ignore the picture, I was so much older then, I am younger than that now - though the nipples do seem to be in the wrong place - yay!

FiftyFive ~ # 40 (again)

When someone takes a picture of me now I am never quite sure if they are joking, or if I really do look like this. I look at an older man than I feel and it is quite disconcerting. And I have just been listening to a play on Radio Four, a romantic comedy by Michael Connolly about a nun and a priest in their fifties who leave their orders to get married and begin a new life together. It wasn't the best play I have heard on radio but it did signify something and spoke about being the age I am and how expectations and prejudices exist, still for people over forty (I expect that may be the cut off age). Though does anyone believe that fifty is the new forty, or whatever. Anyway, anyone with age angst can listen to the play on iPlayer, if they have the time. Personally I think it missed the mark but hey ho.

I recently posted a picture by Robert Juniper and here is another. It is a landscape but not as we would know, though it has the delightful chaos of being just what it is. For a colourblinder like me, it has that vibrancy of colour I can really relate to and I find it, and indeed his work, one of my finds at fifty-five, and so I happily post it here. I will not post all my finds-at-fifty-five in this blog (a man must have his secrets) but suffice to say I am younger than my picture suggests and a great deal happier than I look. And so now for some happy music, hmm, what to choose, perhaps a banjo, or a guitar... nah, if the youth think we wallow in nostalgia, then who am I to spoil the myth - lets have some Canadian raunch - kick here and get your dancin' boots on - let me get a big hell yeah - hell yeah - from my kinda girl! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btQOND5PGSs sorry I can't embed it but hell yeah!

FiftyFive ~ # 40

When I lived in London I was asked to play guitar for two girl singers and one of them, Faye, asked me round to her house to work on arrangements. We spent an afternoon working stuff out, and then regularly just generally writing material and getting a set together. On the first Sunday her dad came out of a room just off the hall and began using a carpet sweeper and generally tidying up. We chatted and I offered to make tea while he got on with the business of cleaning. He said he didn't want to leave it to his daughters because he didn't want them to grow up expecting to have to clean up after some man - and he hoped I would understand if I stuck around. Besides, he said, it helps me think... when I am coming to a part of a story I can't quite get right I dust and clean - that's funny I said, I cook. Me too he said then he held out his hand and said, I'm Jimmy, its better than calling me Mr Ballard - J.G as was, he was writing Empires of the Sun... sigh, I never met him again, Faye preferred an American guitarist who spent most of his time in NY. But what it taught me was that thinking and writing are often different exercises and sometimes the best thinking can be done away from the tools designed to help - such as the typewriter or computer. But still I look for something different and I found this - which I had never heard before, Empire of the Sun, hmm, making connections:

FiftyFive ~ # 39

Some days there is no time for anything but still snatches of sunlight cross my borders and connections and ideas leak and seep into my subconscious and I think, how long can it take to write it down. This poem came to me via Edinburgh and its called 'George Square', which is indeed in Edinburgh and I duly pass it on for I love it and while you read it listen to the equally lovely Toumani Diabate playing 'Cantelowes' because it is equally astonishing:
George Square

My seventy-seven-year-old father
put his reading glasses on
to help my mother do the buttons
on the back of her dress.
'What a pair the two of us are!'
my mother said, 'Me with my sore wrists,
you with your bad eyes, your soft thumbs!'

And off they went, my two parents
to march against the war in Iraq,
him with his plastic hips, her with he arthritis,
to congregate at George Square where the banners
waved at each other like old friends, flapping, where they'd met for so many marches over the years,
for peace on earth, for pity's sake, for peace, for peace.
Jackie Katy

FiftyFive ~ # 38

I was tidying my wardrobe this morning and realise I have 14 jumpers just like the one I am wearing in this picture. Mostly all different colours but apart from a black cashmere they are all pastels, pink, pale blue and so on and my favourite is lilac I think (well it looks it to me). And I wondered if I should feel guilty about having so many but I don't. I have had some of them for years and get new ones as presents and so because I have so many I rotate them and they never wear out. But then I was thinking about lilac and I am wearing it at the moment and I was thinking about making connections and remember reading about this picture, it is Alice holding lilac from the an exhibition of the photo-illustrations of ALICE IN WONDERLAND by Carmela Llobet which was held in Barcelona. And I remembered how much I loved Barcelona and how I will go back there one day and also remembered I have a lilac tree among the fruit trees in my garden - and today there is a thrush singing in it and so even though it is still bare, spring is nearby and it made me think of Amy Lowell's lilac poem which is too big to blog here but it begins:

Lilacs,

False blue,

White

Purple,

Colour of lilac...

Then there was the wonderful Jeff Buckley - so this is a lilac posting in delightful chaos:

FiftyFive ~ # 37

Edward Said once wrote that stories are the means by which imperial ideology is enforced, where the "...power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism." And of course this "imperialism" runs through all sorts of ideas, for the word is loaded with images of domination and subordination, such as the image or idea of the patriarchal. But I think I am with Joseph Conrad who wrote, "I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace..." I am pondering this because I am re-reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera and it is unsettling to realise that in the seven narratives that make up the book, the laughter of the angels is the most disconcerting. Their idyllic vision and their desire to promote it is understandable, even desirable, but revealingly it cannot be tested since it conveniently lies in the future. But what does that future hold? Is it Conrad's peace or is it the constant struggle against conflicting imperial ideologies and then it comes to be true that the idyllic vision of one is another's fear. And it is this terrorism plays on, and I now have no idea why I am writing this, except that it occurs... and I am mulling Obama's first year and the hopes that came with his election, and I guess this song too, which some of us played:

FiftyFive ~ # 36

I love airports, the buzz and the excitement of travel, to and fro, there and back. And I hear Heathrow has just installed these scanners (see pictures aside) where we can be body scanned and I like that too. In fact I demand my picture when next I go, especially since I have been spending so much time in the gym, for I will not look like this for ever - indeed, I don't want my picture in twenty years time, best get it over with now. But the thing that escapes me here is why they have their hands in the air, like they are already arrested terrorists. I mean I would like one hand on my hip and the other waving in a camp manner while I am saying, "hello sweetie". That would confuse the poor policemen and they wouldn't know whether to tune into racism or homophobia or both. But of course I do them down unnecessarily - only a bit off ribaldry. This morning I was reminded of Erik Satie, whose music I adore and so, since we are in a black and white picture mode, here is a little black and white film too.

FiftyFive ~ # 36

Sometimes a day creeps upon you and you have no idea what it is going to be like. Yesterday I was immensely happy in my day, but as it progressed it just got better and better. I was teaching for the first time this year and that was nice but a whole bunch of other things swung into place too and it was just good and nice, for it had music and pictures and wonderful juxtapositions in a delightfully chaotic kind of way: and Baudrillard came in to it as well, "...the secret of philosophy may not be to know oneself... but rather to dream what others dream..." and as it carried on today I found I had been dreaming as others dream and thinking about Wiliam Butler Yeats when he wrote:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet,

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

And he was such a sweetie in unrequited love, but in my dreaming I was feeling the soft treading as such a joy and it is a joy (and I would have told him so). And that feeling carries on today. So I have included some dancing music in this post - should anyone feel inclined get up and do so. Or indeed it is music to levitate to (which is always fun I find) - so hit me - because I hope to go and see this movie - and one day I may write about the time I. and I walked (very difficult for him) through Edinburgh new town during the Edinburgh Festival and we stopped for a glass for he was parched:

FiftyFive ~ # 35 (again)

This is a corner in my kitchen today, as I write, and these instruments linger there daily by the wine rack and the basket of snacks and crisps and dipping chips and stuff and I spend lots of time in a chair nearby as food simmers and tatties boil and cabbage comes to the boil (I really like cabbage - is that odd). But there is some nice wine in the rack, all French, for I live close by (indeed some people can swim over, though not not me) and have no more room in the garden to plant trees to offset my carbon footprint so it seems sensible. When I was a postgraduate at the University of Sussex, we used to go to France once a month on the ferry. We would work on the way over on the ferry, reading papers to each other or just reading our research. Then when we landed we would have a huge seafood lunch, like mussels in cider with oodles of wine. Then we would hit the supermarket to buy wine, beer and fags (not me) and get the ferry home. On the way back we would invariably play the "pub quiz" 3-4 PhD students and we only one once in three years, well how am I supposed to get celebrity questions, I hardly watch TV. But this weekend I am showing this picture because it reminds me of my very best friend Gordon (aka Rocky) who sent me a whole bunch of poems this week to celebrate Edinburgh's www.carryapoem.com and he is now a Scottish politician and me a professor and goodness were we wild, remember The Clash in Glasgow and Bruce at the Astoria -and this is for the memory o' the top o' Leith Walk and Bruce and that wonderful gig we went to see, you and me, before the bairns and the middle aged men we became (though aye guid for a' that - even if you're still a Hibbee) - this will provoke a memory - but before I post it, remember The Rezillos - and "...careful with that glass, Eugene?

FiftyFive ~ # 35

The world's leading industrialised nations have pledged to write off the debts that Haiti owes them, following the devastating earthquake last month. Wouldn't you Adam and Eve it (thank you Paul Klee - picture aside) - Canada's finance minister announced at a summit in Iqaluit, northern Canada, that the G7 countries planned to cancel Haiti's bilateral debts. Jim Flaherty said he would encourage international lenders to do the same. Some $1.2bn (£800m) of Haiti's debts to countries and international lending bodies has already been cancelled. Am I pleased? of course I am but the tragedy would have been so much less of a disaster if this had happened before the earthquake, for the poverty and poorly constructed buildings from poor materials meant that people dies just from being poor. And some were dying already and the mortality rate was grim before the earthquake but the question remains, will this allow them to start again? Start afresh with hope and a real chance, or will it all slip and slide in the mud that is international politics and aid for the poor. I really don't know but I hope I continue to care. We are big Steve Earle fans and I like this song very much, its about NYC and who can blame them:

FiftyFive ~ # 34

I wasn't going to do this posting today but my ancient cat has me at the kitchen table after letting her out then in then out then in then... but also because last night I was sent this wonderful picture, entitled, Balancing Act, and the title is as obvious as the delightful chaos around it. I really, really like this, its by Robert Juniper, who is a West Australian painter, who I am assured is a lovely man who is irredeemably drunk but can really paint, and he keeps the most beautiful Rhodesian Ridgebacks and likes to smoke a pipe outside over a little fire in the bush, and talk in a desultory fashion about colour theory and wine - which is just fine by me. Isn't it odd - and this is just an observation - but in the northern gemisphere (sic) we would just call him an Australian, but down there he is a Western Australian and that says much about the way we shorthand our way through life and indeed goes back to reacting to huge events - like hurricanes - when we should be more alert to the daily and finer details. Of course we would soon become overwhelmed by the minutia of life but it pays not to ignore it from time to time. And there is a wonderful section in Invisible Cities by my beloved Italo Calvino where he explains how a knot appeared in the wood of the chess board that Kubla Khan and Marco Polo are sitting at, and it is a metaphorical reference to look at life deeper than hitherto we have don - and I don't have a copy here (mine was destroyed by a satsuma) but one day I may transcribe it. But all remains to say, this is all for now, for I am off to the airport with A. who flies to Finland. But all men choose the path they walk...

FiftyFive ~ # 33 (once more)

Though never let it be said that life is too serious to laugh, like when you burn your syrup as it simmers in the pan; or you find out that the pesky squirrel out the back has eaten all your daffodil bulbs and the expected flowers will never come; or the smell coming out of your bag is the satsuma you forgot to eat, last semester, and now you need to buy a new copy of Invisible Cities; or you forgot to take that t-shirt out of the washing machine when you were helping out by sticking your daughter's tennis whites in to wash, so she could wear them in Finland - she looks nice in pink - hmm... ; or, like the time you filled the car up with petrol - and it takes diesel, or - goodness but this is cathartic... time for Tim's view of a happy life methinks (though tongue in cheek):

FiftyFive ~ # 33 (again)

I wasn't so young when this picture was taken, around thirty-three (same number as this post - and ouch, were I there again) certainly not a babe (my son D. said, "...dad I don't remember you when you had brown hair..."). Much of the ten years prior to this picture being taken were spent singing and writing and playing guitar and harmonica and just doing stuff that appealed - and at this point I was still playing live, here and there. But my last post on Haiti received a response which awakened something else in me - something which was present then and perhaps is not so clear now - though I am writing an extended piece which has a similar sentiment. In an email conversation we were reminding ourselves how 30,000 people die of poverty and needlessly of hunger every single day - look there goes another 30k since you last read. And that's the problem, isn't it. Tragedy becomes a cause, a 9/11; an earthquake, a hurricane instills this sense of horror, when what we really should acknowledge is that there already existed and exists still great sadness in the world. And she wrote, "...the chicness of tragedy leaves me crawling under the covers to push my pillow into my mouth so I never have to talk again..." And we are/were right to be outraged by such chic causes, such as the one launched for Haiti, which ignore the existing tragedy it was built on. But then, I guess the world would also be worse without the chic causes too, so we are damned if we do and damned if we don't, because what more can be said. What I don't do anymore (and I wish I did) was some of the kind of writing and singing that presented this and these issues to a newer audience - in the way that the wondeful Joan Baez trumpeted all her life (and dreaming of Joe Hill). There are so many ways to raise awareness and singing was one way I liked and like and am close to. Thus, and in deference, this is a truly wonderful song and I don't know if Joan ever sang it, and I have a copy of Archie Roach singing it on my iPod - but I really love this version. So let's keep those old protest flags flying; even if I am pretending the picture above is really me, it is as I once was and I don't have a Dorian Gray-like picture in my attic, for you still cannot buy my soul...

FiftyFive ~ # 33

I like getting sent things and email is a great addition to the post. All kinds of things drop onto my mat and in my inboxes (for I am greedy and have more than one). And this was sent to me recently and isn't it wonderful and it is a textual intervention on the Montage track, called, strangely enough, My Love Has Green Lips - and indeed all of this fits with the idea of montage, does it not. And I wish I had it framed in my study and I may yet do that, or simply print it out and stick up with a piece of bluetac (is that how you spell it - and does it really matter, the word I used says what it implies, does it not). I am happy to report that the top of my thumb, which I cut off while slicing an orange, has grown back on. And that is another remarkable part of life, too. How we repair and grow whole after disappointment (see Overtime) though, of course, not all of us can or do - fragile guitar/guide less car. But this poem reminds me that life has many twists and turns and nooks and crannies and that the words of others are just as legitimate as our own and hearing them and seeing them written down is surely one of the great privileges in the world. The words of others that were worth writing or saying or dreaming, no less legitimate for their articulacy (or not). And I was thinking recently, why does it take tragedy for us to sit up and notice? Haiti was a disaster before the earthquake, steeped in poverty and deprivation and yet sitting in the shadow of one of the richest places that ever existed. But I guess its human nature, for we can't bandage all the thumbs in the world - though we can think about them as our own thumb repairs itself. And I have and I do and have done small things, though never enough I fear. Welcome to my Friday morning, it rained all night, last night, and the fecund spring is beginning its push. Everything is late in the garden this year - after the snow. But I fancy there will be stirrings underground and soon the crocuses will be followed by tulips and daffodils and then we will be reborn. A song about a fast car and escaping and bandaging a thumb follows next, and A. and I love this and since she flies off to Finland tomorrow its posted for her:

FiftyFive ~ # 32 (in overtime)

Sometimes a word sticks in my head, like serendipity, or curious, or verisimilitude and actually that word catches this post for me. Overtime is a positive sounding word that says what it means, at least usually. It means extended working hours and time in excess of a set period, and yet what happens when it is actually used to deal with time cut short; and when it has only the semblance of being true? In this case, it only seems true because in the hands of a real wordsmith it is amazing how a single word can be stretched to the limits of its meaning. And I try to tell my students this, and I ask them, why use that word when another is better, or try thinking about it in a different way, see how it can be stretched and turned; and the limits of meaning can seem both true and real and yet not, all at the same time. I love such language games and this post is indeed about "overtime" but referring to "time cut short" because of the verisimilitude of the lyrics - and well, I adore this song, for no one does the hall of pain better then Lucinda Williams. This is not me, I am not in that space, I am just the water carrier, admiring a master wordsmith work the anvil - of course she cheats a bit, its really two words, but hey, she's a writer, she is allowed - wallow and swallow that lump in yout throat:

Overtime

That's what they all tell me

That's what they say to me

Overtime

Your blue eyes, your black eyelashes

The way you looked at life

In your funny way

I guess out of the blue

You won't cross my mind

And I'll get over you

Overtime

Your pale skin, your sexy crooked teeth

The trouble you'd get in

In your clumsy way

I guess one afternoon

You won't cross my mind

And I'll get over you

Overtime

FiftyFive ~ # 32 (again)

It might be suggested that a pantomime dame, a political cartoonist and a professor have little in common but this morning we all stood together, naked and laughing at the absurdity of it. And in its own way there was a meeting of minds and ideas, for we all write. I was at the gym after today's first posting, getting myself ready for a day's writing and my companions were doing the same. The pantomime dame was the very, wonderfully camp, Bryan Ralfe, now appearing in Sinderella (yes that is the spelling and this is he: http://alternativepanto.com/cast/brian.html) and the politcal cartoonist was Steve Bell, seen in today's Guardian having a reply at the Pope's socially dubious "Your equality laws are unjust..." views http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/cartoon/2010/feb/03/equality-laws-pope-uk-visit and you have to click on this to see it for I can't infringe Steve's copyright. But the symmetry of the entire piece lay in me pointing out that we, standing in the buff as we were, could be the audience in Steve's cartoon, sitting with the Pope, watching Bryan's Sinderella, for it all fits - I am the portly one with the glasses sitting in front of the Pope. Of course exchanges like that can only really happen in the locker room. So I abandon Starbucks and Costa Coffee and pastry shops for real exchanges - locker room philosophy remains intact. Let's go swimming with Loudy:

FiftyFive ~ # 32

I met and shook hands with Terry Pratchett in October of 2009, when he was awarded an Honorary Professorship at a ceremony in Winchester Cathedral. He was smaller in stature than I had expected (I have no idea why) and there was a frailness there, though he had and impish sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye that obviously signalled how happy he was to be there. Having recently been knighted too he seemed to be enjoying the view from his stature (and who can blame him too). But he has crossed my path again. I rarely watch television but his Richard Dimbleby lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, delivered by Tony Robinson, was riveting. The "Death" in the title was, of course, not me. Terry has Alzheimer's and his lecture was a heartfelt and reasoned entry into the "assisted death" debate, it can be read here: http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search?search=A+better+way+to+die%2C+Terry+Pratchett&sitesearch-radio=guardian And why, you might ask, am I concerned with such an issue at 5 am his morning. Well I am not really, I just like to read the philosophical ideas of living. Not the abstract musings but the constant, well thought out debates which confront our lives. And something nice popped out too - for all Terry's impishness of thought and ideas (and wonderful writing - the joy of some of it is astonishing) he and I share a love of Thomas Tallis. Neither of us are religious in a conventional sense but something binds us in this short clip.

But in case anyone thinks I am maudlin at 5am, far from it, I find the whole piece uplifting and inspiring. Plato wrote that, "...music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue." And there is something satisfying in that idea. So listening to Thomas Tallis at 5 am in the morning is food for the soul, and if accompanied by a cup of early grey tea laced with honey, well all the better for it. But listening to Terry's Pratchett's lecture reminded me of something else, too. As we go through our lives, bumping thoughts with others, crossing into the thoughts and deeds of others, criss-crossing through our lives, interacting with others, few know what each other really thinks. And life becomes narrated through the slippage (as Luce Irigaray would say - though I can't lay claims to Écriture féminine) but through those half heard and half considered and half thought at attempts to understand what others mean and want and need, as we care for our own thoughts, needs and desires. I had no idea when I shook hands with Terry Pratchett that he wanted to be in control of his own death and yet as someone who wants to be in control of his own life I can see where he is. And so this morning I share my love of Thomas Tallis and a cup of earl grey tea and a very small fragment of my life, here, with another wonderful Icarus image that speaks of joy to me.