Icarus flying home # 24

Little-wordy-rapping-hood

The 64,000 thousand dollar question is how many words does it take to make a book. 64,000 words done and I guess about 6000 to go and then off it goes. I am so tired I have hardly anything to blog because I can't think - except to say the new song is coming along well. Got a really cute chorus which I like so that will do for starters. Haven't read a book in ages or a poem or a cereal packet, just the spines of the books on the shelf in front of me as I type and type and type in time to the music I listen to while doing so. I stuck my iTunes on shuffle to see what came up - and it was this - just love it - ...he just smoked my eyelids and punched my cigarette, oh Mama can this really be the end, to be stuck inside a mobile with the Memphis blues again...

Icarus flying home # 23

I have been writing all day, bogey, bogey, bogeyman and then I was thinking about my back pages and so I sat in the garden and wrote a tune - not quite a song yet, but hey, there is/are only so many words a man can write in a day. Although, listening to Bobby's words here, I should go back to a time when I didn't care what the words to the song were, just so long as the song sang well, ah but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now - sigh, I will mutiny from stern to bow... enjoy, here's the Byrds doing it for real - doncha just love those boys

Icarus flying home # 22

Phew- it was hot
I had to get my belly out

Joni has been on my mind for a time now because I really like this song and I just found it and it feels right for tonight. Once when I was working in London a friend of mine asked if i could stop singing the same song as I worked. It was River and I hadn't realised I was doing it. Isn't that odd, 'I wish I had  river i could skate away on...' I was older then, I am younger than that now. But this is a good un...mistakes and all...

Icarus flying home # 21

Oh your a mean old daddy
but you're outa sight

Rumour has it that the sun has been shining all week while I have been taking my hermit vows and writing what just might turn out to be rubbish. Sigh upon sigh upon sigh, finding the right words is harder than it looks sometimes. This is Easter weekend and I am taking Dorothy Parker's advice and listening to a saeta. These are performed during Holy Week in Spain and were much loved bu Lorca. This one I am posting is quite modern but there is something quite exotic about it - and it is the amazing Antonio Canales, I have to get me a pair of those shoes. But if the sun is shining out there, I will dress like the picture aside and maybe go for a wee walk - ¡Adiós Amigos!

Icarus flying home # 20

Who is that guy

I'm not sure I recognise myself in this picture but it is me and only a week or so back when the shaving had stopped. It's worrying, I had stopped shaving for 6 days and this is day 4, oh my goodness. And look at those glasses, Asda special because I stood on my best ones and haven't the time to replace them - memo to self!!!! Today has been a good day, hit 50,000 words which is a good milestone in the writing stuff - and I have had masses of distractions but what the hell. I am shoveling words like my dad shovelled coal and he had a harder life than me so I am cool with that. I also wrote a song this week which is good and worked on an other, which is gooder (goodness isn't the English language a bummer). But if I count the words here, I have probably typed around 4000 today, which is ok, not a bad tally, but in among them I have a great secret to impart! Are you listening? Writing is easy! Honest! It's just a question of getting the right words in the right order - hmmm, didn't realise that did you? But keep your eyes on the prize and remember, others are less likely to have our chances to be heard:

Icarus flying home # 19

Banjo Blues

I am out on my feet, too tired to think. Writing this Bogeyman is doing my heid in. It's relentless. But after my last blog when I mentioned Wallace Stevens talking about Erfahrung and the idea of ‘lived through’ and ‘narratable’ experience and then I read Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote this on the manuscript of his Duino Elegies (1924),

Happy are those who know:

Behind all words, the unsayable stands;

And from that source alone, the infinite

Crosses over to gladness, and to us –

Free of our bridges,

Built with the stone of distinctions;

So that always, within each delight,

We gaze at what is purely single and joined.

And I love that idea of the 'unsayable behind the words' so I will say nothing else tonight, for I am too tired, except, perhaps, to play banjo. Or maybe I will just listen to this - such a delight, The Chieftains with Sinaed O'Connor.

Icarus flying home # 18

Under a parasol

This is my new record (see clip) remember those days when you got a new LP and you would take it round to yer mate's house cos he had a better stereo and you would just chill, listening, not saying much, though occasionally  replaying a track as you tried to work out the chords. Now of course the chords and the words are there at the hit of a return key to google (where would we be without google). Wallace Stevens has been my poem a day buddy this week, this is from ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’,

The poem refreshes life so that we share,

For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies

Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,

To an immaculate end, We move between these points:

From that ever-early candour to its late plural

What's not to like in that "ever-early candour to its late plural" - love the idea that takes us from the connection made in the arrested moment, the moment of surprise and wonder and awe, the ever shifting but impermeable connection in the ongoing shift through the lived through and narratable. Poets huh, don't they just have the soul of it all?

Icarus flying home # 17



The Last Picture Show

And now today the new part of the Bogeyman commences, though I have a feeling it will take less time the effort will be no less intense.  But I am buoyed by these words of Robert Frost:

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned in life: It goes on."

I miss my Danny, this is his last school pic ever,  he's having a wee holiday with his cousins and I will drink a glass of wine while listening to this  from The Chieftains and Diana Kroll, a great folk/jazz crossover of a great song because I like it and also its so hard to sing it well, without sounding like an auld pub crooner at chucking out time - Scotland was fu' o' them when I was growing up. Goodness, I am beginning to sound like Marcel Proust.

Icarus flying home # 16

Writing and writing and writing...

Part One of The Bogeyman is written - phew, well almost, 37,000 words with notes to be tidied and revised but the chapters seem to hang together and that is the main thing for now. Next section should be easier (he says in hope) and shorter too, so I will begin that tomorrow. And during the writing I managed to meet my old buddy Icarus and engaged him in a dialogue with Telemachus, which is interesting and one of these days I will make a link between the boy who was given wings and this other boy who was given a boat because it got me thinking about W.H. Auden again, just riffing really:

                                                             ...the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on...

Well who could have imagined that the two boys could cross paths, like I said, just riffing but isn't that how it takes off. But I will leave this post with some words from Wallace Stevens, who I have been reading just for fun

The house was quiet and the world was calm
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm…

Icarus flying home # 15

Twang

I have been doing a bit of banjo playing and a wee bit of guitar too, tonight and it is great to unwind. Now I have set myself a task because I taught myself a song - well, actually, I fiddled around with a tune and thought, ooh I know what that is and so I worked it out and if I had a mind to I could record it and post it but I don't know all the words just yet. Here's a Willie's version - probably not the one everyone knows but I like the rough edge that is missing from Elvis' and besides Willie is country and I have a soft spot for that stuff but I have a mind to record a version of my own one of these days.

Icarus flying home # 14

Here come the bogeyman...

I think this is going to be the cover of the book I am writing right now - if it ever gets finished. I have never had so many crisis (is that the plural) as I am having now but I think it's because I think everything I read on the subject just makes me angry or sad, sometimes pleased but rarely do I go, wow, that really is something. Maybe I am wrong though and I will get panned by those same critics - yikes. Maybe I should look for a decent song to blog, just for the hell of it. Hmmm, Lennie usually gets things right, let's try him. I know where I was when I first heard this, and who I was with. Me and my sister Irene, in the living room in my parent's house, I was about 16 which would make her about 6 and she said, 'do you like this song?' and I said, 'aye, do you?' and she replied, 'I do if you do...' when I get to this age I am going to wear a hat.

Icarus flying home # 13

That's it for the day, have written myself into a bucket and now the words are just a blur. Not even sure The Bogeyman is making sense anymore but at 35,000 words its at half way and the hard bit is done - for now. I read a quotation today and I am still trying to figure out what I make of it. It is from S. Y. Agnon's novel, A Guest for the Night:

I do not remember whether we talked, or whether we walked in silence. Perhaps we were silent, perhaps we talked. when the heart is full the mouth speaks, but when the soul is full a man's eyes look with affectionate sadness, and his mouth is silent.

Words to make us think, but I have thunk all I can today and I am all thought out so I will drink a glass of champagne for my boy's birthday. Sweet sixteen from a sentimental auld fool - here's tae us!

Icarus flying home # 12 in silence

I can see up your nostrich

Today, well tomorrow if you are reading today early because I am writing this last thing at night, my son Dan is sixteen - sigh and he is such a beautiful boy and such a joy. Yesterday he was talking to me about Of Mice and Men and how the most important part of the novel that everyone misses is the issue of loneliness, which Steinbeck does so well. And I know he is right, the solitariness of Steinbeck's work followed me through my own teenage years; how astute of him to be so critically attuned. But most of all he loves a good laugh - hallelujah to that! Here is the most Holy Order of Silent Monks saying just that:

Icarus Finding Foucault... and Peanuts

 

I was sent this clip (above) and the Foucault connection cannot be denied - love it to bits, for I just had to do some Foucault today too, when I was talking about 'normativity' and stuff. Sometimes I think we just invent this academic language to keep ourselves looking as though we actually know what we are talking about - which writing often reveals we don't. I have been writing The Bogeyman for weeks and I am not sure I know what any of it means. Like Levi-Strauss too, I forget what I have written very quickly. Hmmm, that could be ageing brain cells. Today I wrote:

It is impossible, I suspect, to propose a non-exclusionist normative definition of textual engagement in writing for children, but surely a normative structure that clarifies the intrinsic distinctiveness of child-centred storytelling can be proposed?

What on earth is that about? Damned if I know and damned if I don't - sigh! Its a bit like posting one of your favourite songs and remembering that the lyrics are not very cheerful - even if the song is a bit of a romp. E.C. made this a hit, but this boy deserves to sing it for himself, cos he wrote it - what's so funny about peace, love and understanding: