Icarus @ 59 # 171

My writing life comes and goes in cycles by virtue of my job and that is fine. This week I have had a house full of wimin but Jess goes back to Oz today, Abbi flies off to Tuscany for a month long Oklahoma degree module on Italian Renaissance art (ooh I could volunteer for that one - imagine, four weeks in Sienna, Florence, San Gimignano - time to sigh for) and on Tuesday Whit flies home to Oklahoma after touristing out here in the UK. So, apart from some PhD supervision, I will have this desk to myself - and I already have projects mapped out to sit alongside a new song and fitness for June programme. Not a bad thing when you are planning your sixth decade... zut alors! Today the sun is shining and I am sitting at the back door drinking early grey and listening to this because it came on shuffle - thankfully - all I ask, don't tell anybody the secrets I told you...

Icraus @ 59 # 170

We live in a world of experts, there is nothing we cannot now know, isn't that the case? The internet has us switched into almost anything we would like to know. I mean I can know everything from the fact that Richard Thompson plays a Lowden guitar which I can't justify having on account of the cost, to the fact that Eleanor Marx Aveling, 16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898, also known as Jenny Julia Eleanor "Tussy" Marx, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl and might have been murdered. I was asked recently, with all this information to hand do we really need education? Well, I guess we only have to look at the way politicians cherry pick ideas to answer that. Surely the purpose is not to talk about things we can know but to really know about the things we talk about. And by that I mean to really know them, to be able to analyse ideas and thoughts and to encourage a view of the world in which the loonies don't get to run the asylum. Alas, I sometimes think they already are, and the problem is they don't actually know they are the loonies. But forgive me, last night I went to see Lion King in London. Good clean entertainment and it made me remember that while the good guys don't always get to rise to the top, when they do they still have a job to do (and sometimes they forget this). Getting to the Pride Lands is just the start, now he has to restore them. And I look now at Syria, Afghanistan, Thailand, Uganda... places of strife and ask, how is it still possible a woman and her unborn child can be stoned to death in broad daylight because her father had the hump with her choice of husband - it starts with one but we must keep pushing against the wheel - here's Richard Thompson and his Lowden - I need you at the dimming of the day:

Icarus @ 59 # 169

I was introduced to this poem many years ago by my English Teacher at South London College. I was doing a part time A Level in English Lit at night school. It was as recent as 1987, when I was in my early thirties (before I went to the University of Sussex) and the whole experience changed my view of poetry and indeed the world. The teacher, Jane, showed us a video of Maya Angelou reading it and wow... indeed she performed it and although the clip below is less demonstrative as she was in her one woman show (which I never saw) the poem is a loud and proud production:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

It changed my entire life. R.I.P., Maya Angelou, there will be few like you.

You may write me down in history

Icarus @ 59 # 168

Playing these takes time and effort - otherwise I just strum away here and there in hope that something comes from it. But I am coming to the end of a long haul of marking and writing and researching and I have plans to record some stuff I have been collecting over the past couple of years. Balancing this with a fitness regime that comes in fits and starts for the same time problems I have decided to to set up a time planner. It starts with this blog, first thing of course, followed by a run, breakfast, a working day (mostly writing from eight-thirty onwards) hmm, apart from the run, which I am just getting back into, nothing has changed. Time to think it all over again - forgive my thinking out loud here, its the only time I have to do this today. I was going to post Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle dueting on this (being as I had a duet theme going) - but this is her solo version (I think she sang it in tribute to Kate McGarrigle) and I couldn't resist it.

Icarus @ 59 # 167

Its not bicycle weather, or at least it hasn't been this past weekend, but I have high hopes for the coming weeks. But high on those hopes these past few weeks has been that the UKIP people would realise the stupidity of their little englander manifesto. Sadly this has not been the case and nearly four and a half million people have voted for them.   Also the fall of liberalism in the UK is a worry. I am not a liberal, socialism has too much of a pull on me but I have often seen them as the sensible opposition and often allies (compared to the Tories - who will have no choice but to go further right for the coming UK elections). Thus, the weather is the least of our problems and as I see Europeans lurching to the right and the rise of nationalism, even in Paris and around Europe, I really wonder where we are going. Part of me thinks - four and half million, well that's nothing, we have another fifty-six million to consider. But then again, I can see how and why this is a problem - we need to get more people to vote. One question I really want to ask (even of The Guardian) is why did the little englanders get so much coverage? For example the Greens got next to none at all, compared to last time. Its all a bit BC, bonkers-conkers, as we say in our house. My feeling is we are looking at the potential rise of a new Thatcherism unless we (all of us) wake from our political apathy.  I can't stand up, for falling down...

Icarus @ 59 # 166

Crossing the River Esk in Musselburgh reminded me that I lived along this river all my early life. I played around it, walked around it, swam in its tributaries and in Mussleburgh I watched in flow into the Firth of Forth. There is something about the connectedness of rivers, in London I headed to the Thames and I have been around some of the great rivers of the world. I guess you know where you are when you stand by them - though I have never felt compelled to jump. This is a grey old picture, yesterday was one of those Scottish days that said, 'Don't like the weather, wait five minutes, it'll change.' And change it did, though when I tried to 'run' for shelter in Newhaven, because we couldn't park nearby, were told the high security around the harbour was because the Queen was around (well, I hope she had her brolly come parasol, it was one of those days). Remember when music wasn't a polished, sterile, piece of coal but a rough diamond, mistakes and all - we were just watching the river flow, all tangled up in blue: