Icarus at home # 17

Professing...

I have been writing the Bogeyman book all day and am fair puggled but the word count is slowly rising - although I will rewrite today's in a more approachable style because i have been trying to get the critical ideas down. It's the Paul McCartney, Yesterday idea, when he wrote it the original words were, ‘scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs,’ which he thought, maybe not. That's what I think, I have the melody and the structure and the idea, its just that, not all of the right words are in the right order, yet. But hey-ho, the first month of the sabbatical has gone and how scary is that? March is marching round the corner and it will soon be spring, then summer then ooh, life goes so quickly. I never heard this version before but used to play this, circa 1970 (blah) on the southbound train going home, 'what will the passenger do when he hears...' sigh, its been such a long day:

Icarus at home # 16

Thinking too hard makes you grey

I recently wrote about a James Joyce anecdote and since then I have been thinking about it some more... let me repeat it here because I am trying to work stuff out. In response to Yeats' father's suggestion that if he gave him money he would only spend it on drink, Joyce replied: ‘We cannot speak about that which is not.’ It is Joyce’s reply which is of interest to me. Why indeed should he confirm the suspicions of a man whose question was rhetorical and was not going to indulge him in the first place? Sometimes writing about writing for children is seen to be just like that. As adults, we ask of children that which we have no right to receive answers to because the question is always rhetorical and the answer always already presumed, and thus always assumed that the child does not have an answer to give which we do not already know... It is almost a Wittgensteinian idea, is it not? Viz: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ Trans. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Sometimes it just does your heid in trying to get the sense out. Why are there so many words to clutter up our brains - that's what I want to know. Och, its Sunday, let's give it the elbow and go out to play on a day like this - "throw those curtains wide... " and crank it up

Icarus at home # 15

 

...up... up


Abbi Poem

and away...



My baby, wee Abbi,

wings waxed

in full

flight and sigh,

flying high,

not so wee now

I guess, but

cute as a button,
and oh so (so, so) very young...

Icarus at home # 14

A cart, indeed...

A friend of mine is playing Gloucester in King Lear and I was telling him about the time I saw Anthony Hopkins play Lear at the National, when he dropped Cordelia on stage. He wrote back saying, "Our Lear realised a few weeks ago that carrying Cordelia in his arms was not going to be an option, so he wheels her in on a cart...." Oh, the indignity for poor Cordelia the strong, truly the moral hero of the play, sacrificing all and transcending the traditional female role for the sake of loyalty, love, and truth... stuck in a wheelbarrow. This is for all the unreconstructed men out there who never knew Lear, or Tony Blair, or David Cameron or Sigmund Freud, Elvis, Mick, Cat... oh the list, the list - I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee... though actually if you listen carefully you will hear Mick singing backing vocals (such sweet irony).... and such fun!

Icarus at home # 13

At this precise moment in time, 18.21 on the BBC website, 300 people are still considered to be missing because of the Christchurch earthquake in NZ. Last time I was in Australia I met some New Zealanders and indeed know others independently. It is selfish but human to hope they are among the safe, though thoughts go out to those who are not. We live in a wonderful world full of sound and colour and sweet tasting morsels and poetry and singing and things we can touch and smell with pleasure but oh, it does have its prices to pay - such an oxymoron. Time to post this and reflect, methinks - the beauty comes with such joyous melancholy...

Icarus at home # 12 again

Writer's angst

And just as you post one thing about writing another comes along to tease the senses. This picture was sent all the way from Australia at the same time as I received an invitation to be on the Editorial Board of: Axon: Creative Explorations, which will be published out of the University of Canberra, Australia. She has got that Roy Lichtenstein anguished look down to a T which I like very much. Though I have been re-thinking my book this morning and have finally cracked "the order of things" as they should be presented - at the moment its a bit of a blancmange, wobbling all over the place and screaming to be put back into the mould. Or maybe I should just rely on a simple twist of fate...