This is the third time this blog has featured a new guitar and I am beginning to think that's what birthdays are for - especially since this little beauty arrived on my lap waiting to be strummed. But yes while birthdays are the double-edged sword of ageing I have decided to cancel that part of the process and to stay forever young. Though I am not sure this blog will see it - for it has done its job and its time to move on to pastures new. This is my favourite version of a Bob Dylan song - especially when Joan introduces it by saying, "Exercise that mind.." It has taken me a long time to realise that is what blogging is about - its about keeping alert and so may you stay forever young!
I have a feeling this picture is where this blog arrived. I was writing The Ghost of Joe DiMaggio (no idea what is happening to it at the moment). But 55 is soon over and 56 beckons and I have a feeling it is time this blog moved on too - though to what is unclear. I do have 2 books to research and write in 2011 and being 56 allows me that extra maturity to do them justice. Nevertheless, one does need an outlet for the frivolous and the reflective and the flippant and the musings (abstruser as Coleridge would say - though that is asking for a suspension of disbelief - to paraphrase him again). But I can confirm the Icarus musings are taking flight and things are stirring there, like a lot of creative work and ideas and some critical too - ooh ooh ooh, doobie do - but a trawl around the Buffalo Springfield revealed this version of Expecting to Fly - "...you stood on the edge of your feather, expecting to fly..." good ol' Neil Young - this version has a wistfulness:
One of the great treats on the drive to Winchester from Brighton is the short trip around Arundel, especially at this time of year. Seeing the castle in the mist always brings a smile. This Gothic fantasy manifest reminds me of the history we carry with us as we travel through life. In my previous posting I said the world is huge, vast even and of course its history is long (lest we forget). But thinking about this picture led me to this music. This is only a short posting for I have no time but sit back and listen to simplistic minimalism at its very best:
This was my view of the Himalayas from the plane as I flew north over Asia from Melbourne. The world is such a huge place for an Icarus boy to behold, breathtaking and exhilarating at the same time but immensely humbling. And I was thinking, if the job of art and culture's is to help to adjust the inner life of a civilisation – providing soul food for the soul miners - we need to be aware how hugely vast the world is. It is all to easy to be sucked into the security of the small and parochial. I think that is what this year has taught me (or perhaps that should be reminded me). And yet still I know so little, I flew over this scene, yet a friend of mine is working in Zhengzhou in China, as part of her University's outreach - blimey! Mind you when I googled Zhengzhou it looked fantastic - though googling is something she may struggle with over there. Of course, imagining life elsewhere isn't so hard and every writer should be able to. Like this picture here which is a page on the picture book, KYOTO, we launched last month. Not the Himalayas but mountains from the mind on the issue of global warming - and did we have time to think about that, this week. 13 inches of snow in my back garden has to be a record (and a good excuse to sit in the kitchen and strum a guitar - and talking of which, who knows I may even get a new guitar this birthday - coming up. Though it will be my 56th and the end of the blog so I may have to think about that. 55@55 is kinda out of control, and nothing can go on forever can it?)Anyway this guitar style might serve as a clue:
This is the third time this blog has featured a new guitar and I am beginning to think that's what birthdays are for - especially since this little beauty arrived on my lap waiting to be strummed. But yes while birthdays are the double-edged sword of ageing I have decided to cancel that part of the process and to stay forever young. Though I am not sure this blog will see it - for it has done its job and its time to move on to pastures new. This is my favourite version of a Bob 
Dylan song - especially when Joan introduces it by saying, "Exercise that mind.." It has taken me a long time to realise that is what blogging is about - its about keeping alert and so may you stay forever young!
