FiftyFive ~ # 55

I am getting a new guitar, how cool is that, as cool as I look here? Well you can speculate, surely! This is the guitar I am getting and I am so excited I can hardly wait to play it in the garden - and what with summer coming too, it is a timely addition to the pile. It has been an odd couple if days because we are "voting" today and the lead up to an election is always stranger than most days. In my street alone there are posters for Labour; Lib Dems and the Green party - no Tory; BNP or UKIP but I bet they lurk behind their curtains, snooping on the rest of us - oops does that give me away, or am I lurking behind a curtain too by laying a false trail? And this curtain idea reminds me of something I read recently by a poet I know:

Every story begins in silence. The house. The things inside the house.

Everything outside the house silent, and straining to hear

the quiet closing of a door in a

dwelling where no foot falls

And I am hoping she doesn't mind me quoting it - actually too bad if she does, that's blogging for you. Its by Jen Webb and her collection entitled Proverbs from Sierra Leone. I am also currently reading another fantastic collection of poetry, Chora, by Nigel McLoughlin - who is another friend and he sent me the most delightful hardback copy. How lucky is that, folks who send you books of poetry, people who give you guitars (thanks Neil) and fantastic songs like this to listen to - which was also sent to me. I am a lucky boy - oh and I have a new name, yesterday I was Dadobiel (I know not why but D. has a rationale) and today I became Dadorooney (cheers A.) but its nice to have a change every now and then - after all, papa was a rolling stone:

FiftyFive ~ # 55

I have seen bizarre guitars in my time but this one for the "octopus" is the strangest. Actually is a work of art by Rudi Mantofani but hey - I can make up a story. I have a new guitar story though. D. was playing his own guitar yesterday - in fact playing Paul McCartney's Blackbird and guess what, he is going to show me how to play it. How did that happen - he just sneaked up and played something he can teach me. And that is such a good feeling when that happens. Then I helped him with his Macbeth homework, though, so its a fair swap. And there we were, swapping guitar stuff and I played some slide over something he was doing and it was such good fun. Bit like these two guys because I thought, time to check out some new music for a change and these two playing together seemed to hit the bill. Its a bit rough in places but they are just hanging together, enjoy:

FiftyFive ~ # 55

It is early to be writing this, about 6.30 on a Saturday morning and I have been up since, ooh, 5.30 because I can never sleep these days. But it does mean I get to see a lot of sunrises - though the screech cat doing the hokey-cokey, in and out, shaking it all about is a distraction. I received a gift yesterday, it came by post, a book entitled Barrie Kosky on ecstasy in a series entitled Little Book on Big Themes, Melbourne University Press, and its just the most wonderful little book. Indeed, I am so taken with it I am planning to contact the press about a potential title. Anyway, Kosky in a section on Lenny Bernstein and Mahler's Second Symphony quotes part of the libretto:

Mit Flugel, die ich mir errungen

In heissen Liebesstreben

Werd ich entschweben

Zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug

gedrungen!

(With wings that I have gained

Shall I soar aloft

In love's ardent striving

To the light to which no eye has

pierced)

And I am once again fascinated by the wings and flying and the theme of ecstasy in the Icarian theme. Kosky describes Bernstein as flying, "I was electrified. Did music really have the power to do this to a human body?" "Bereite dich zu leben!" (Prepare thyself to live!) - the Icarian connections just fly in and out of my field of vision, like the pair of blackbirds who have built a nest in the ivy growing up my back wall, ever recognisable, back again (they must have enjoyed last year so much - one likes to hope - and of course the screech cat just yawns as they peck for worms in the lawn, her own flying days are but dreams for she sleeps more than anything). And now I am off to the gym - where I heard this track come round on my iPod, long time no hear but I like it:

FiftyFive ~ # 55

I bought a copy of Iraq: the borrowed kettle by Slavoj Žižek yesterday. The title is taken from the old Freud joke:

1. I never borrowed a kettle from you
2. I returned it to you intact
3. the kettle was already broken when I got it from you

implying, of course, that I had returned a broken kettle. Ok so its not hugely funny (are all jokes supposed to be) it does demonstrate a point which is being played out in our daily politics - words are dissembled and sentences restructured and everyone claims to be saving the world but their rhetoric is full of broken kettles. Stories are like coincidences though. Having havered on about Icarus and the work I am doing, the reading and the planning of papers, I find that in the same Journal I published, Jesus, Judas, Jimi and John, my old friend Jeri Kroll published, Living on the Edge: Creative Writers in Higher Education in exactly the same ISSUE: Vol 14 No 1 April 2010, see: http://www.textjournal.com.au/april10/kroll.htm, and guess who makes a guest appearance? I quote, "WH Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' responds primarily to 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus' (c1558), a famous painting by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel... On one level readers are invited to contemplate a 20th-century poet's sophisticated appreciation of Brueghel's painting, which was described to me when I first saw it as a supreme example of ironic understatement. Brueghel in his turn was responding to the well-known myth of Icarus..." The coincidence that she was writing her paper the same time as I and we were both, at the same time, musing 10,500 miles apart on the same thing (see: http://fiftyfive-fifty-five.blogspot.com/2009/12/fiftyfive-9.html ). Of course, it is the well known myth itself and the way we can intervene in the story which really interests. For the few words we get from Ovid and others can only tell a little bit of the story - and indeed the perceived wisdom; Daedalus telling Icarus to fly the middle way is surely a bit of a "borrowed kettle story" - so I will look at this idea some more. Though the this intervention of Lord Frederick Leighton's Icarus - adapted here and bungy jumping is a bit of fun - as is this Freaking News site: http://www.freakingnews.com/Frederic-Leighton-Paintings-Pictures---1238.asp. The broken kettle story reminded me of an old Scottish tale which my granny told me (and I suspect its much travelled in other cultures). One day I saw her planting pebbles in the the lambing field and asked why she was doing that. She replied, it's to keep the wildcats away from the wee lambs. I replied there were no wildcats this far south and there have been no sightings of any. There you go, she said, it works, the wee lambs are safe! Aye it works in a logical sense (though the vegetarians might disagree). But I also like the way songs play around with logic like this - last time a pondered posting this - here it is - Make Every Word Hurt:

FiftyFive ~ # 55

We don't collect art so much as have pieces that accumulated through the years. I particularly like this piece which was made by my neighbour Kate. It is called Private View and is made out of metal. Isn't it great - it hangs in the front room. I might commission some miniature Picasso pics so I can have an alternative exhibition. I could have my own private viewing too - its a thought. At the moment I am still researching the Fear of Flying, Falling and Laughter paper I am to give in Australia. At the moment I am looking for the Freud essay, 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death'. When he wrote, "Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life may not be risked." This idea on risk taking does just address the Icarus effect, it addresses the whole idea of creativity and being creative and risk taking and I am matching it with the Adam Phillips question I posted before, "...what is the fear of being laughed at a fear of?" But enough of all that - spring has sprung, the leaves are turning green, the plum, damson, apple and assorted other blossoms are popping out all over the garden. I was doing some work on Anne Tyler (novelist) the other day and suddenly realised that she and Lori McKenna (songwriter) could be soul mates - I wonder if there is something about Quakerism in them both. Anne writes these wonderful wimin stories - not feminism (as such) but about wimin who spend a long time saying nothing (in that Quaker circle idea), then change their lives, even though they almost always return home to do so and Lori, now a mother of five who never wrote song until she was 27, always writes positively about her relationship#, - how romantic is that and while I have been a fan of her's for a long time (see Kitchen Tapes - literally recorded in her kitchen) this is the first time I have heard this particular song - though I couldn't decide whether to post How Romantic is That, which is a sunny side up song or the sunny side down, Make Every Word Hurt - perhaps next time. # on scanning more of her most recent stuff I might have to re-visit that positively idea - if you get a chance check out Make Every Word Hurt and Drinkin' Problem. What I like is how (like Anne Tyler) she takes snapshots of small town stories and sings them straight.

FiftyFive ~ # 55

When D. saw this this picture he said, "Dad, I can't remember you when you had brown hair." I know what he means, its hard enough for me to remember and it was curly too. Though I confess I still have that shirt - not sure you can see the pink in it, the picture didn't scan as well as it should have. This picture was taken before D 'n' A were born but not much so its makes it seventeen years ago - A. will be seventeen in a month's time. I am sitting in a cafe in France, which I did in those days and I plan to do so again some time this summer - even if its just a day trip to Dieppe for I truly miss France, the coffee and pastis and the cafe babble and... and... och, nostalgia, eh? This might be the last clip I post from JB but I like this song too, I think I might have been seventeen when I heard it... or twenty-two or thirty-five or... sigh: