Icarus @ 59 # 201

Just a short blog, been in London all day again today but I post this picture which I took in Brisbane. Its the Australian connection. This week I have spent a lot of time with three of them and I am inordinately fond of them. So this whole piece is on an Australian theme and I can cap it with Dan's latest rant. I love these videos he does. Mostly because its great to see him growing up and having fun - and he has a very dry sense of humour...

And just for luck, this Aussie band are just the bees knees:

Icarus @ 59 # 200

So today it was my turn to give a paper at the conference. I had to close after 3 Australians (actually if I am fair, 3 extremely smart, over-smart, too fu&*ing smart Australians - what was I doing in their company). We had a coherent 4 person panel (it was five in Madrid but Julian couldn't make London).  But this is worrying, it was commented that I had a very funny paper, made everyone laugh and (well) they seemed to enjoy it. That's a real worry because its a serious paper, and... well... oh well, life can get very serious at times so never mind, it was all ok. And tomorrow I am up at 5.30 again, to go to the University of Middx, its 10.30pm now, I have been up since 5am.... zzzzzzzz - next Friday is looking good, from here... But I leave you with the name of a poet, Yusef Kumunyakaa. I like him, we could be pals. This is a poem set to music and I really like it, sorry for those who don't but its been a long weekend (actually a working week that never stopped).

Icarus @ 59 # 199

I have been in London all day, ooh, I love it there. I have always had a soft spot for the place. Train to Victoria, a couple of tube stops to South Kensington, a stroll round the Natural History Museum, the Albert Hall and into Imperial College London for a conference - and, if I am honest, mostly I hate academic conferences but today was a good day. I feel like an old lag when I go to these things, even the organiser hugged me (and I know for a fact he doesn't actually like me) you get collared by younger academics who are looking for advice and even old friends who want your input (which is immensely flattering) and I have friends there too. All my Australian comrades that I managed to get to Winchester on the cheap and old friends too. But today one of my favourite poets gave (yes gave) me a copy of her book - look out for Katherine Coles, The Earth is Not Flat and she has agreed to be involved in my next project - I lie, ongoing project which is finally coming to a head, but hey...(back tomorrow - 6am rise, 7 train, 9 first paper... ooh coffee at the station - if anyone is in Brighton train station at 7 tomorrow, hmm double Caffè macchiato sounds just right, I will return it with a smile). It would be honest to say I get tired, just like anyone. But being an academic, working on a Sunday, tch, och, hoots, its brilliant. I post a picture of Dan because he (like me) is having a great life (I miss him every single day but I am so happy he is having an Australian experience - in Canberra I believe, though goodness who knows where he is - isn't that great too)  I am working with Australians this weekend and I know he is in safe hands. Now I realise that  last night I forgot to post, so, and its late after a long day, but maybe I am up to date if I post now (before midnight). But finally, if you have ever walked out of the TUBE in South Kensington, through the tunnel to the Albert Hall, Natural History and Imperial College you will know its a buskers haven. Today I heard this, its been a long time, I have this album (Red Pump Special) on vinyl and we played back up to Rab a time back (thinking about it now it was (cripes) over forty years ago - I always thought I was a better songwriter than him (hmm.. I still am).

Icarus @ 59 # 198

Check this dude out on the crossing, his hat and feet are a textual intervention. I have had the two days of two days, a pop-up-poetry cafe and a serious international symposium with great interjections from colleagues and postgraduate students and colleagues from Australia, Winchester via Poland, Australia via Africa and America, blimey, Universities are great places - and I am so proud of my own students. But in many ways I feel like the dude in the picture, walking the walk, bringing those amazingly interesting people together and then sloping off as they enjoy the limelight - yay! They deserve all the plaudits they get. Last night at the poetry cafe we catered for 25, small gathering, who could expect more, we got 45, today we catered for 20-ish, it was an academic gig, pulling together people and ideas, we go 40-ish - I forgot my own maxim, my glass is half full not half empty - and my inbox is full of plaudits. And now, hmm, its friday night as I write this cos I am off early in the morning to London and Imperial (to a conference) my glass is fully empty, time I did something about that - it is friday after all. Now where's my hat, shoes and... (check the two-tone pic) baggy trousers?

Icarus @ 59 # 197

Ochone, I promised a blog a day for 365 days but sometimes time just runs away so this is the best I can do for now. Please send parachute and water...

Icarus @ 59 # 196

A Sunday morning cycle ride around Blakers Park is a joy, especially in the sunshine. Just the job to blow away the cobwebs. Its only a small park but like most Brighton parks, they Victorians really knew how to adorn them. timepieces like this, water fountains and the like are a joy to stumble across. This picture doesn't really do the intricate metal work justice - and yes that is a whale as a weather vane on top, I have no idea what the narrative behind that is at all. Although, you have to trust me on this but its not the Leaning Clock of Brighton, that fault line is mine and I blame it on the fact that I was sitting on my bike at the time I took it. But its a bright sunny morning and I have loads to do because this week I have visiting Australian academics, another Pop-Up-Poetry Cafe and a Symposium with the title, 'Make Every Word Hurt' to host, which all gobble up precious time. This is a great version of the Sandy Denny song - and it has the great intro line where Nina Simone quotes Faye Dunaway about not being able to do everything, 'you use up everything you got, trying to give everybody what they want...' This so rings true for many of us.

Icarus @ 59 # 195

The narrative behind these 'anonymous' figurines in Arezzo is the invisible men and women who just get on repairing and fixing and maintaining the fabric of our lives while we get on with what we do - and conceptually is a nice idea. They are there to be seen everywhere, of course. I engage with them at the University, the gardeners and porters and cleaners because early on I realised how important they were to the fabric of the place where I worked, indeed on a day-to-day basis I have more conversations with them than anyone else on campus. Universities are funny like that. Yesterday I had a chat with a former Pro Vice Chancellor who still does a little work with us and he was saying that Universities are full of self-employed people who research and work independently and then come together every semester to teach (and indeed much of that is done independently). In some ways I find this a little sad, many of us try to encourage a collegiate world by organising 'inclusive' events, this week I have organised a research symposium with colleagues, research students and visiting scholars from Australia - and others do other things but often it falls to individuals and we are like these figures, just beavering away while the world turns - it was ever thus. So if you are working away today, maybe listen to this duo and remind yourself its ok to get up an dance every now and then - no one will be watching (and even if they are so what):

Icarus @ 59 # 194

Pi is an unusual symbol to see displayed as graffiti and I was intrigued by this when I saw it. Pi, the number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159, which is subject to infinite refinement hence there is no perfect circle (we will never know the ultimate Pi). A Socratic Circle, on the other hand, is about working together to construct meaning and arrive at an answer that can be agreed upon. Thus, in some way we can begin to deduce the difference between the mathematician and the philosopher. Of course the poet is a different matter. He or she can only assume they are giving meaning and they don't even ask for agreement, they just expect you to at least try to understand what is being said. All very confusing I guess and then we realise that mathematicians and poets have more in common than we think. But imagine a poet and philosopher and mathematician going into a bar, the philosopher says look at the perfect circle that beer glass has left on the table, the mathematician says, its not perfect, it can never be so, and the poet, well he took a long swig of his beer then said, squaring the circle is for dreamers. As Auden writes, 'When we genuinely speak, we do not have the words ready to do our bidding; we have to find them, and we do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it.' I like a bit of Pi, its food for heroes:

Icarus @ 59 # 193

I did a little edit on this and now we can manage to see a little more than before, at least we can see the battlement top of the museum and the ghost of the building. I quite like this picture, the old and the modern combine in a blur with sharp edges, a bit like how I feel sometimes (don't we all). But I have been listening to some oddities and I thought I would post them here. Ewan McCall wrote this for Peggy Seeger in 1957, isn't it amazing when a singer then goes onto make it something different and their own. This song is truly something! About forty years ago I heard it on the radio while driving around Cockpen Church at about three in the morning after a gig and I had to pull over. I can still see the moon shining through the turrets on the bell tower, while Gowkshill glimmered in the distance... 'and the moon and the stars were the gift you gave - and here is the Poem-a-Day'

And then there was the old hippy John Sebastian, who was never really a hippy at all, singing The Room Nobody Lives In, such a gothic song and covered by Mama Cass, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello no less - but here's the boy who wrote it and my favourite version circa 1969 which I heard around fifteen or sixteen and learned to play on my sisters little Bontempi organ (but I was crap at singing it - because my voice didn't develop until I was, ooh, fifty-five, about the time I started this blog). It is Sunday morning and if these are too Sunday morning for you, ah well, at least the sun is shining and the day promises:
The room nobody lives in is up the stairs
And four doors down the hall

Icarus @ 59 # 192

I like the symmetry of this window (pictured left) the modern lines superimposed with the ancient reflected like a ghost from the past in the modern glass. Handbags, glad rags and the Piero della Francesca frescoes collude in a world of renaissance art and popular culture, like a scene from Derek Jarman's  Caravaggio, and I have been thinking a great deal about this in terms of what I want to write for myself - as an exercise in writing and composing, 'Beauty awakens the soul to act,' wrote Dante Alighieri. I have recently been alerted to a Poem-a-Day website and I will take the next six months of this blog to clip the link to their daily offering for those who like to be introduced to something new, just click here and it should take you straight to it: Poem-a-Day But for now, R.I.P Gerry Goffin, a fantastic wordsmith, this is a track from my childhood which I never forgot - who could forget?  One of the things I am writing now is a song about the soundtrack of my early life when I wondered where I would be now - and it was not here, that is for sure (I never thought I would get to here). Dante also wrote, 'Follow your own star...' and GF surely did, he wrote this with Carole King and Jerry Wexler and gave it to the amazing Aretha Franklin who made it her own, 'when my soul was in the lost and found, you came along to claim it...' oh yay!

and the Carole King version (ooh - I used to love that look and hairstyle:

Icarus @ 59 # 191

I like to take pictures of quirky things and this here is for tying your horse to. Not much use for it these days  (although they do hold a jaunting festival in Arezzo) but see how well it has survived in a medieval town, gorgeous isn't it? Actually its probably not medieval, there is little wear, and it was probably made by an apprentice blacksmith who was learning his trade, learning to work the metal, learning the craft of his art. In some ways I am a wordsmith, standing at the well, learning the same trade, thinking about how to shape narrative into an artistic form and I am excited by the things I am working on at the moment - which is new for me and an Icarus idea. Its time I put it down on paper and a beginning is already taking shape. For inspiration I am using the form Tadeusz  Różewicz uses in Mother Departs which is a book given to me as a gift by one of my PhD students. It combines so many different narrative forms, so we will see how it goes. I might even be able to persuade AXON to publish it in short form. But as I say its taking shape in pencil, in a notebook and in my head, which is good. Like the apprentice who made this ring, I am learning to do different things - like this piece, a classic track done differently, not for the punks out there:

Icarus @ 59 # 190

An art installation snapped on my iPhone. This 'light' is about thirty feet from tip to tip and its all I could do to get it in focus. Its actually attached to a museum in Arezzo although I couldn't get the light and the building in focus at the same time - not having a proper lensed camera. Actually, I have a cheek posting such a bad picture here but hey ho, I know what it all means. But now I am back to work big time, so much to do and to be done, a symposium to arrange and writing to be done and pictures to be processed and words to be composed alongside music to be written. But oh, I do love Italy, best of all the European countries I have been to - un bel di...

Icarus @ 59 # 189

On the move from Arezzo

Icarus @ 59 # 188

Now I thought some of my books were heavy but this one takes the amaretto biscuit. Carefully illustrated medieval text with lots of blue and gold annotation in the Duoma do Sienna and quite exquisite. The library is  truly a sensational place to visit and I walked around it twice just to take it in. And if you ever get there then take a look at the ceiling - wow, I busted my leg painting our's white. But while there really is something quite superb about all in the art done in the name of the church, one can't quite get the feeling that its not altogether equitable with socialist ideals. I confess I find that a little troubling. Still this music always helps to smooth a long day into a quiet night.

Icarus @ 59 # 187

San Gimignano, known as the 'city of beautiful towers'   had seventy-two towers in its heyday, and the city stood firm against Attila the Hun, now only fourteen towers remain and they are very splendid indeed. And here it is, pictured left, all wrapped up in its medieval finery. It was great to be able to take Abbi to see the city, especially before she goes off to see Sienna tomorrow - the contrast is superb and she is getting to see that Tuscany can't just be written as a whole when there is so much more about it. Indeed the term should really be the Italian Renaissances, i.e. the plural word because there is more than one Renaissance on display as you travel through the regions. Although, of course, all of it owes much to the medieval years, even if it can be terribly touristy but I am a tourist and I just love the atmosphere of it. I had a hankering to listen to this:

Icarus @ 59 # 186

Portobello in Arezzo, I couldn't resist it because we used to spend a lot of time in Portobello, Edinburgh as children (though we called it Portibelly). But I also like the colours in this picture, the man in the corner reading his newspaper with his little basket at the side of his chair. Sometimes its like that, all the things in the picture just hang together and luckily you have an iPhone to hand for snapping and loading up (ah this world of new tech). And I heard this music ghosting out of a window not far from where this picture was taken, it seemed appropriate to clip it here. But aside from all that, it is father's day and I will call my dad and Abbi has given me some Venetian glass - including a glass sweetie (because I am not a sweet person). Happy fathers day to the dads out there - and the mums, friends, aunties, uncles, bishops and all:

Icarus @ 59 # 185

Arezzo in Italy and guess what, there is an Arts festival on:

icarus @ 59 # 184

From the pictures you are a little stretched to see this as an Icarus boy and being Madrid they probably see it as an angel. Nevertheless, those are wings at the back of this slightly abstract figure (at least that is how I see them). Of course you have to be looking but that is part of the art process, to be looking for a story and I make no apologies for that. The paper and presentations went well yesterday and there are already plans to turn the papers into the basis for a book, so all in all a successful trip. And today I fly onto Rome and then drive into Tuscany, into the eye of a storm because much thunder and lightening is forecast. Oh well, all will be well. I have already done much listening and reading this trip - this is always a treat.

Icarus @ 59 # 183

Another room with a view - this time the other side as a storm gathers overhead. I love a good thunder storm, the noise, the lightening the sheer brute force of nature with the hump at the world for being so blooming wonderful. Little does it know we love this too. But that was last night and this morning has bloomed into warm Spanish sunlight and later I will give my paper, quoting Brecht and Euripides on conjoining critical and creative research (needs must if we are to change academic opinion there). But hey ho, its not another day at the coalface and I am still taking my Dad's idea to 'work on the surface'. And I found myself listening to this as I read myself to sleep last night, just the music to calm a storm. I always celebrated my mother's birthday a day later than everyone else, it was a joke between us. She  would have been eighty-one today (yesterday really) and she loved music:

Icarus @ 59 # 182

A room with a view in Madrid, not a huge amount to shout about view wise but the room is just fine. Its hard to get a handle on the city at the moment because at ground level there isn't a huge amount to see. Conference starts for real tomorrow, today was just a toe dipping in. But it will be good to take in some of the other things when I am here. I have a trip planned to the Museo Reina Sofia - which is near the hotel and I can walk up. Its just a case of fitting it in at the right time. I give my paper on Thursday morning and fly out on Friday so time is tight all round - but that's alright mama.

Icarus @ 59 # 181

This morning I am thinking about my son Dan. He is far away in Australia and in an hour or so I will fly to Madrid. This picture was taken in our favourite restaurant in Barcelona. Goodness, how cosmopolitan are we, we have a favourite restaurant in another country. But Madrid is a new idea, and I will be in a hotel just round the corner from the Santiago Bernabéu and he is a Camp Nou man. But aye well, he is in Australia, heading for hippiedom and Byron Bay so he can't complain. But one day we could watch Real versus Barca at the Bernabéu so I can just say I am checking it out. I love to travel, in fact we both love to travel and hopefully we will do more of it through our lives, especially together. Now I wonder if he will visit any art galleries in Australia or if he just indulges me... hmm. Drat, I forgot to tell him to look out for Archie Roach - note to self, email him - oh, took the children away, heartbreaking - how could anyone bear it:

Icarus @ 59 # 180

Yesterday was quiet a Sunday, Diane was running the Seaford Half Marathon, Dan is in Australia at Wes and Donna's beach house, Abbi travelled from Venice to Arezzo. The house was quiet and even the seagulls seemed quieter than normal. I had some work to do as an External Examiner which I did in the kitchen, with the back doors flung open to reveal the garden. There was a calm about the world, its as if the previous week's commemoration of the D-Day landing had finally come home to roost and we could be thankful for just being able to relax into our life. We have much to be grateful for for, but that calm is just how it should be and now we have a responsibility to spread it around the world. I wrote yesterday that Baudrillard thinks this new, western modernity is wrapped up in consumption, that we choose consumerism over the liberation and emancipation our fathers fought for and that, 'how men, betaking themselves for free men, have fallen into servitude.' Well he has a point but it only serves to remind us of our obligations to others. As I step into the last six months of my sixtieth year I will continue to remind myself of this - and I love how the music in this clip sways and ripples with life:

Icarus @ 50 # 179

This is a 1961 Fender Stratocaster and its mine. I bought it over forty years ago and it was in a right state. It had a sheepskin glued to the back, the black paint was chipped, scuffed and blistered in places, the fretboard needed skimming and only one pick up worked - but like an old painting, I just knew there was something hidden below the collected detritus.  So I bought it for £90, cleaned it all up, got the pick-ups rewound and generally nursed it back to fitness, and I have never wanted to replace it with anything else. That's not to say it don't have misfitted bits, the tremolo arm is wrong and the pick-up changer button is black - these were meant to be temporary but became things I just never got round to replacing. But back then it was a lifetime purchase, I had been saving for months and even traded my old Epiphone for it as part of the deal. Its the whole deal, it very rarely goes out of tune and still plays like a dream. Jean Baudrillard, in one of his pessimistic rants, said, 'the West's great undertaking is the commercialisation of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of the commodity...' But you know, I just can't agree with this. I could buy a shiny new Fender today if I really wanted to but I cling to this restored lump of wood with an affection that goes beyond aesthetic pleasure. Its a work of art, beyond beautiful and ugly, made at a time when we cared about wood and form. Just thought I would say - he's my proud and joy

Icarus @ 59 # 178

Ooh, blog 178, half way, half way down the stair, half way from here to there, it isn't really anywhere and doesn't mean much at all, except I am not at the bottom and I am not at the top, just nearer to there than here, so I think I will just stop... just for a moment to listen to this A. A. Milne poem being sung:

Icarus @ 59 # 177

This picture of me was taken by Dan in Barcelona. Early next week I am off to Madrid then Rome, and if I wanted to I could easily slip over to France virtually any time I like. Indeed, when I was a PhD student at the University of Sussex we used to do just that. A couple of us would get on an old bucket of a ferry in Newhaven (just up the road from here) with cheap tickets given away by The Argus. We used to work on the way over - reading each other extracts from our PhDs and discussing what we were doing before having a good lunch in Dieppe. Its easy to take these things for granted, being able to do what we like is one of the luxuries of being a baby boomer. But it would be churlish to forget what happened in the ten years before I was born, that allowed this freedom we now have. My own family, those who survived the war on both my mother and father's side, are slowly leaving us. It doesn't feel a time to regret but to remember and to acknowledge the freedom we now have as a result - throw those curtains wide, one day like this...

Icarus @ 59 # 176

I had some visitors last week, Jess, a PhD student from Byron Bay in Australia and Whit, a friend of Abbi's who had come to stay with us for a couple of weeks so she could see the UK. They both loved the quirkiness of Brighton, The Lanes, the North Laine, the noise, the music and the alternativeness of it all, exactly what I love about it. We had strolled past this shop down into Pavilion Gardens where there was a random, ramshakle steel band playing and we were given free ice cream (I know not why). But what I really like is how a cafe culture has evolved over the past ten years. It isn't the tidy outside tables of a familiar French town but something much more alternative where you can see a Rowlf the Dog busking piano requests in a battered old upright on wheels, vying for playing time alongside a blues player on a battered old National. All the town needs is some sunshine and it awakens. Of course I don't spend all my time in town, like some irresponsible flaneur, I have work to do, papers to write, articles to write, a novel to write but all the same, when I fancy a mosie I can - I am just waiting on a sunny day. 

Icarus @ 59 # 175

I grew up in the shadow of war. Born in 1954, the second world war was not long over, bread was still rationed and I had aunts and uncles who had been there or were still career army men and women and they were part of the narrative of my growing up. James running off underage and ending up in Italy, Nina meeting Bob, Michael meeting his German wife Erica during the tidy up, loads of stories of watching bombers flying over and tracer bullets in the sky, blackout windows, rationing,  and you can imagine what it was like being a child growing up with these stories, especially as they left the horror ones behind. And they merged into other stories of Leerie the lamplighter (because the streetlights were still gas) football matches that lasted a whole Sunday, my Dad going to the pit at the age of 14, my mum working at the brewery and the chemist, dancing on Saturday nights to live bands, real fifties dance bands. They were mostly told on a Saturday when we would gather at my Granny and Papa McKenna's in Dalkeith (Widburn to be precise) eat the never ending soup that was on the stove and play cards - Canadian Rummy. I know not how it ended up as 'Canadian' Rummy, I don't think we knew any Canadians, but that's what I remember playing at home too while listening to the radio on a Sunday. Goodness but we have travelled from then and sometimes its good to remember how we got here. I always liked this tune and although I hate the jingoism that seems to follow Elgar, that is no reason for not hearing it again as I sit in the kitchen, drink in early grey, contemplating another rainy morning, with the cats sitting at the back door, hating the weather as much as me:

Icarus @ 59 # 174

The Vatican and the Trevi Fountain in one day. I don't envy my daughter, Abbi, because I have been there but oh I wish I was there now. She is so lucky, imagine having to do this as part of a Module for your degree. The worst about it too (she says) is they have to eat Italian food (oh lordy, how could they stomach it). But seriously, isn't this what we bring them into the world to do - to see the great things and be in the great places and experience the experiences that come with it all? Oh yay, I say, go for it girl, I was eighteen when I walked in the same square, not much younger than she is now, and I have never forgotten it. Mind you, my mother and father  didn't come to spend five days with me when I moved into Tuscany. I have the resources to do that and I can only thank them for giving me the chance and the spirit and the guts to go. My mother would have loved Rome, I know this, being as she was a great fan of saying 'Viva el Papa...' Catholicism ran deep in her veins and she clung to her rosary beads to the last - but enough of that, this is a happy time and she would have loved these pictures, as do I. I guess its boring for some that these posts occasionally slip into the sentimental, well tough. In my ten minute slot its what I was thinking and that's just that. My mum hated this band so as I am her rebel son its good to play them - and this is a version of one of my fave Bob Dylan songs and Jagger was always good on the mouth harp:

Icarus @ 59 # 173

Its easy to forget that while Edinburgh is a city of learning and the Scottish enlightenment (Athens of the North to us) it is also a very Gothic city (Gothic not Gotham, although some might disagree). But of course some great gothic fiction comes from this great city, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner comes to mind and indeed The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde, because for all its London scenes, it always felt like an Edinburgh book to me - you could take Stevenson out of Scotland but you couldn't take Scotland out of the man, and I feel this about myself. I would like to spend an extended time back in my own home town, not for nostalgia but to re-connect with the art and culture and the people of my youth. Perhaps one day I will rent a house and do just that for the summer (although my memories of warm Scottish summers is definitely a return to a place that doesn't exist - nostalgia, this picture is Edinburgh in May, in the rain and boy was it wet.) No doubt the nay sayers will disagree, though. Now here's a funny one, I googled Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony and this came up - never heard it before, so this is a first for me and serendipity because Edinburgh is, indeed, a rock on the water:

Icarus @ 59 # 172

San Gimignano is one of my favourite places in the entire world and in two weeks time I will be able to take Abbi to see it. She is off to Italy to do her month of Renaissance art and what a treat that will be for her, and we will join her for five days (after all, its only a couple of hours away). And when I drove her to the airport this morning (at 4.30 a.m.) she said when she gets back she would like to visit the National Gallery in London with me, which will be great. Of course, I mentioned we could also consider the Tate and the Tate Modern, she hasn't responded to that yet - one gallery at a time. But its Sunday today and I have plans to play guitar in the garden, tidy my study and generally guddling around as I prepare for the summer. I have a paper to finish for Madrid but it can wait, its the 1st of June and it feels like summer is finally here. Time for some of this, methinks: