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.