What I've been listening to/watching on YouTube

I know I've been going on about this, but I also want to add that Last.fm and iTunes do not show what I have been mainly listening to, because lately it's mostly YouTube music videos, which are not counted. The playlist recently has been:

Leona Lewis "Run" (embedding not allowed): Link

Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down:



Odetta - Cotton Fields:



James Taylor & Carly Simon - Mockingbird:



The Pogues - A Pair of Brown Eyes:



The Incredible String Band - Witch's Hat:



Each one is favourite for a while but some, such as the Duran Duran/George Best tribute and David Bowie "Bring me the disco king" and Blondie (hachachacha) - can't resist - Atomic, terribly louche but so evocative of the era; I can see that there are troubling images in it, perhaps "glamorising drug-taking" (a stupid thing to do) but also what's with the lady with the black eye?; still, for the music. (Some versions of the video cut off the naff intro bars.) Also - partly for the local connection - "Duffy - Warwick Avenue" (embedding not allowed). There are others, too many to list but you can find them all here.

Blondie - Atomic:



David Bowie - Bring me the disco king:



Duran Duran - George Best tribute/Ordinary World:



As I look back through my favourites list, I feel the enthusiasm coming back, but I can't list them all again. Unfortunately some have disappeared (and keep reappearing and disappearing) from YouTube, such as everything by Diana Ross and the Supremes, though I've managed to capture some of them with Real Player. I think the best pop video ever is probably the Supremes "You keep me hanging on", for the sheer joie de vivre - it makes me smile all the way through. So does the live video of "Where did our love go", one of the best live videos, I think, though the audience are like statues and the dancing is a bit lame, but the sound - ah, the sound. I have a soft spot for the Ed Sullivan Show clip of "Love Child" too - a great song and a great Diana Ross performance.

And I've just remembered, I've been enjoying Oasis (how many years late?), at least these two superb videos. "The Masterplan" is inspired by L. S. Lowry's paintings - beautifully drawn, especially at the beginning and end.

Oasis - The Masterplan:



Also this one, "Stop crying your heart out", which would have made the perfect and sinister lament had Barack Obama not won the US presidency in November, which thankfully he did. So we are left with this incendiary, ambivalent image of either doom or hope, not sure which.

Oasis - Stop crying your heart out:



I've also been playing some of the ones embedded elsewhere in this blog, which you can find by scrolling down, and some of the ones on other people's blogs, which you can find by clicking on the links to the right. I don't want to duplicate what others have posted, including some of their own creations and favourites (Mikey's, for example).

Ossian

Here again again

I think I said this before, but it just came up in discussion tonight. Agnostics cannot say they believe in God, therefore they are a subset of the set of all atheists. In no way can they be called believers, they are merely in denial of their atheism. They cannot be a subset of the set of all believers because their set does not intersect with the set of all believers, they are non-believers, their belief is non-existent, it is a dead parrot.

I don't believe that anybody educated and conversant with manifest reality truly believes in God. Anyone who claims to is only fooling himself or herself, but they all get together and play "let's pretend" and "la la la we're not listening".

I'm not happy that there is no God but then as somebody said, "if God lived on our street people would break his windows."

Ossian

Let's reunite Ireland as a British dominion*

It's never too late. Step back, rewind, start over. A united Ireland under the British crown as before, with its proud capital in Dublin and its own sovereignty the same as Canada's or Australia's. I am a republican in the generic sense not a monarchist, but the petty nationalists have divided Ireland. That's exactly what they've done, not united - divided. I expect to be reviled by all sides for this idea, but this is the way to a united Ireland. It does not entail any loss of real sovereignty, laws or anything else, and it incorporates Northern Ireland into the Republic. If you claim to be for a united Ireland, you've got to start loving your unionist countrymen and give them what they want. Within a family, one sacrifices for the benefit of another. We should sacrifice our separation from Britain in order to regain our own unity on the island of Ireland. Does anyone doubt that countries such as Canada and Australia are independent? We had unity before, which was worth more than the present botched independence, but we squandered it. That is my opinion and I might be wrong, but there it is.

Update: Let me put it this way, if I were a classical cartoonist or painter of allegories, I'd depict Ireland as beautiful, innocent Unity being sacrificed on the altar of Independence by malodorous, vicious Pride.

* I'm currently reading "On Another Man's Wound" by Ernie O'Malley, and I guess this blog post makes me a "shoneen". But please remember, I am not suggesting that Ireland be ruled from London, I'm suggesting a way to reunite Ireland with rule from Dublin. We should never have given up on the "Home Rule" path, which would have led to complete independence with unity. Instead what we have done is divided Ireland and "gone off half-cocked" with the present botched independence.

Ossian

From one of the Dublin Fusiliers

To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,—
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

-- Thomas Kettle

(Born 1880. Died 1916, battle of the Somme. Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kettle)

I used to have a book of poetry by Thomas Kettle, which I was given as a gift, and it had its pages uncut. I wish I knew where I left it. I must have given it as a present to somebody. I think I know who. It can't be found now for love nor money, just the exact one. It's possible it was never properly published. Of course I did cut the pages, and it had this poem and one of the others I remember I used to like was called "Ennui" - it wasn't mainly war poems.

Thomas Kettle was an interesting character, a leading nationalist who followed John Redmond's decision for his Irish Volunteers, a nationalist movement, to enlist in British regiments to fight "for the rights of small nations" after Belgium had been invaded. It was on the promise of Home Rule for Ireland, which had been passed by Westminster in 1914, at Gladstone's third attempt, but then suspended because of the outbreak of war.

Whether it would have followed had not Pearse et al struck in 1916, who knows? Even in the treaty negotiations later an offer of dominion status similar to Canada's, was spurned. Wouldn't that have been far better though, even from a nationalist point of view, because afterwards they might have voted away the link anyway, like Australia keeps threatening to do? Oh well. Let's invite the Queen to Dublin, it's past time. Let the dead bury the dead. I'm not very sure what it means, but it's something a little short of letting bygones be bygones, perhaps.

The following, if it's still there (they come and go on YouTube) is a lament for a son going off to war, "Oh Danny boy, the pipes - the pipes are calling..."



(Diana Krall with the Chieftains)

Ossian

The New Writer's Handbook, Volume 2: Books for Writers: Scarletta Press

I have an article in this. Just got my free copy today. (Amazon/Willesden Herald partner link)

The intro by Ted Koooser is interesting. He was US Poet Laureate for a while. He talks about writing "from life" and the comparative poverty of writing from imagination. In one example he says that when describing the scene at a birthday party, it's the lace that's coming away from the edge of a table cloth, or the bent tine on a fork that will evoke it, and not the candles flickering on top of the birthday cake. In other words, he claims that imagination will tend to the cliched. He makes a strong case, but I'm not sure he didn't imagine that lace himself just then, if you see what I mean. It's worth getting hold of the book just to read his intro, really, but there are loads of other interesting articles as well.

Ossian

Literary day out

Litcamp

I particularly enjoyed Jay Barnard's (link) poetry reading and Courtia Newland's story, which I'd already read somewhere. It is going to be on BBC4 Afternoon Story next week. There was a very funny story from Gavin Inglis, as well as lots of other delights, some from people listed in my links over there ->.

I offered to provide "post-it note critiques" for short stories, simulating the conditions of reading for a short story competition. About twenty or so landed on my table in the reading room. One thing that occurred to me was that this was a very good way to make enemies and fail to influence people. I felt that I should have worn full Venetian masquerade get-up, like Salieri in the film Amadeus: it was I who needed anonymity, not the writers.

Anyway, I really like reading this way and commenting, though I'm completely unqualified. I wrote on large post-it notes, mostly having to write on the reverse as well, and also marked up the text. There were one or two I'd seen before, amazingly enough.

I left some copies of this competition flyer (A4 version) on the books table there. Here is a version for Letter paper size. Please feel free to pass them on, copy, republish, etc.

Ossian

I raise a glass to Boris Johnson

When given a choice, always vote for the one who would not side with mass murder for any cause, that's what I say. Boris Johnson would be the first politician to be hanged by any tyrant - such as Livingstone, if he could - because Boris speaks as he finds and he stands up for the human, not for dogma. He does not finesse with questions of human rights with hanging mullahs and truck bombing fascists etc etc. Etc.

Ossian

Sacred River cover (2001)

 

This was a magazine project that I tried to initiate but it never happened. The brilliant picture (from Egypt) is by Anne Warwick © 2001.

Ossian

I like London in the rain*

I wanted to write something about Lewisham, where I was last Thursday evening. It was raining and just still light, with the street market closing. I love the half light - and rain, and rivers. There's a river called the Quaggy that runs through Lewisham. It used to be called the Lee Bourn, according to an information plaque. I was a bit tired - hadn't slept since Tuesday night - and didn't feel like taking pictures but everything was ravishing, especially the tables covered in bunches of bright yellow bananas put out in front of market stalls for workers going home, and more ranks of darker things further back, as the vendors were packing up. I really didn't want to go anywhere, and if not for convention I would have stayed there gazing around (and maybe slept in a doorway - no not likely) but I had to move on.

The trees along the banks of the Quaggy are infested with plastic shopping bags, by the way. If one-use plastic bags are banned, as seems likely, places can be cleaned up and it will be well worthwhile. It has been in Ireland.

* Blossom Dearie (April 28, 1926 - February 7, 2009 - r.i.p.)

Ossian

Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize

The Shakti Bhatt Foundation announces the inaugural 2008 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize (caferati)

"September 27 would have been the writer and editor Shakti Bhatt's 27th birthday. To celebrate the occasion, her friends will read from her work and remember her with poetry, short fiction, and music...The Shakti Bhatt Foundation will announce the inaugural 2008 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize."

The award is for books published in India. Shakti was one of the contributors to "New Short Stories 1". (Tributes)

Ossian

That was a cold night

That large cover is supposed to protect the whole sofa, but this fellow decided he had a better use for it last night. Came down this morning to find he'd got under it. Our boiler is broken, awaiting repair, so the house was very cold.

Ossian

Young pigeon

When I saw a bird like this in the grass at my primary school, I wondered if I'd discovered a new species. That was easily possible, then. In my mind I was always attributing marvellous discoveries to myself. I think I was really insane, if a child can be insane. A friend's kid, not so long ago, told me his teacher was an alien. Maybe insanity is the normal condition of childhood.

Ossian

King of the birds

I see wrens from time to time and the other day I saw four (this is one of them) at the same time in a dead tree by the window of my writing shed. The king of the birds, according to folklore. They are noisy beggars, for something that could be mistaken for a queen bee as they dart rapidly by too fast to see clearly. They fly low and I've seen them going under a shed and under a building, which must be how they earned their latin name troglodytes troglodytes. Their "song" sounds a bit like some sort of drill.

Ossian

Patio scene

 

Vernal squalls shake the may tree, blossoms fall like paper snow.

Ossian

Doubt is faith

The word faith relates to its counterpart, doubt. Doubt is not disbelief, doubt is merely a condition of less faith. Whoever talks about doubt necessarily talks about faith, in small quantities. To say "I doubt something" is to say "I have little faith in it", not the same as saying it is indubitably false. Faith is therefore a scale upon which doubt is measured. Doubt is, in effect, a sub-set of faith in the lower degrees. Faith therefore includes doubt, and doubt is a degree of faith. In this way, faith contains doubt, and doubt is a lesser part of faith. The future of religion could well be to appropriate doubt, to co-opt the agnostic. Not for me though.

Ossian

Insurrection

RTÉ Easter Week schedule 1966 commemorating the 1916 rising

I've always remembered the brilliant dramatisation "Insurrection" (written by Hugh Leonard) and wished I could see it again. There are several excerpts from it online now. (Why don't they put the whole thing up?) Although it looks different, naturally dated somewhat, I still think the clips are great.

From Episode 1
From Episode 2
From Episode 3
From Episode 4
From Episode 5
From Episode 6
From Episode 7
From Episode 8

The RTÉ archives also contain marvellous interviews with survivors such as James Connolly's daughter, recalling her and her mother's visit to him before he was shot. Every day of the week has a separate page with a list of the special schedule for TV and radio and clips, though it's a pity how many have been lost. (I know, one could say that about people as well.)

Here is a clip from an interview with Kathleen Clarke widow of Thomas Clarke, one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic (all shot). "You must make your goodbyes as casual as possible...I didn't really ever see that he'd come through, I must say."

Kathleen Clarke is also in this clip, talking about P. H. Pearse. One gathers that she remembers him not with any fondness, as an exceptionally silent type.

Former president Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh recalls the looting in O'Connell Street and his failed attempt to deal with it under orders from General (James) Connolly. Connolly subsequently talks about sending somebody to shoot some of the looters: "Shooting over their heads is useless. Unless some of them are shot, they won't stop." Ó Ceallaigh requests and is allowed to be excused from that duty. He doesn't know if it was actually done. Here he is again, talking about the release of Bulmer Hobson.

"Seán F. Kavanagh, a member of the Irish Brigade, recalls meeting [Roger] Casement at the Hotel Saxonia in Berlin on 10 April 1916." (About Roger Casement)

"In this [vivid] extract, Norah Connolly O'Brien recalls making her way back to Dublin and her concern to find out how her father was." She recalls a friend telling her, "They're all dead and slaughtered. She battered us with words..." In another extract, she describes her [and her mother's] final visit to her father before his execution." Very beautiful, the words, but heart-rending. Because of Connolly's injuries his execution was worse, if that is possible, than the others: they shot him sitting in a chair.

After the surrender, the hostility of other Dubliners to the rebels as they were marched away, is recalled by one of the prisoners. He thought that there was nothing left of Dublin, it was all fire, "still burning."

There are other recollections of the leaders, people and events as well as coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies, the march in Belfast, and speeches by that sanctimonious old prig De Valera, who was largely responsible for the miseries of Ireland after 1916.

I was 11 in Easter, 1966. For the fiftieth anniversary of the rising, we had three giant new flagpoles installed by the entrance to the De La Salle primary school in Finglas, and we'd been practicing for weeks to sing on the occasion of their inauguration: The Foggy Dew and Roddy McCorley. About the hemp rope on his neck, the golden ringlets clung.

We were then all bused into O'Connell Street on Easter Sunday and marched to Croke Park for an extraordinary pageant. There were parades and displays by hundreds of variously costumed people portraying Irish history. Here's an archive recording about the 'Aiséiri' [rising] pageant. The whole effect of the commemorations was an inoculation of nationalism that never needs any booster shots. The next time I marched from O'Connell Street was the Wednesday after Bloody Sunday in 1972, with 100,000 in protest to the British Embassy.

Perhaps I should close with the special version of the national anthem that was used at closedown every night for the week, with drawings of the seven signatories ending up with Pearse, proving again that the writing of poetry is no guide to good character.

Ossian

Blather

I heard Gwyneth Lewis say, in a television interview, that the trick of being a poet was knowing when not to write, when to shut up. There are a lot of people around who seem to think they can write a continuous stream of poetry, but these people are not Dante's or Shakespeare's; they are modern McGonagle's, dressing the banal in florid words. They persist in trying to say ordinary things in an extraordinary way, but isn't poetry just the opposite: extraordinary things said in an ordinary way? Perhaps it's extraordinary things said in an extraordinary way, yes that sounds better. To be prolific to that standard requires something more than pretend genius.

Ossian

Time is leaking

Time is leaking out of us like blood from the wounded, and with it whatever strength we thought we had. At comically long intervals we remark how time flies. Less of us remains, less and less, till we completely evaporate. The nests we gathered round us will fall to bits and new noises will replace our songs, till everyone who could have remembered our singing is gone as well. And the saddest part of all, we will never get to know what happens to the world, how it all turns out.

Ossian

Wild violets

Ossian

John McGahern

Obituary in the Times

“I must have been extraordinarily happy walking that lane to school. There are many such lanes all around where I live and in certain rare moments over the years while walking in these lanes I have come into an extraordinary sense of security, a deep peace, in which I feel that I can live for ever.” (McGahern about walks to school with his mother)

I idolised John McGahern in a way that would surely have horrified him. He was dreadfully shy. I'm not going to tell you what a fan I was over him, thirty very odd years ago -it's too embarrassing. I think I've read nearly everything he wrote, except "Memoir", which I heard him read on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime.

I was lucky enough to see and hear him at the Small Wonder short story festival last September, which I wrote about here. He was amusing and generous with his readings and the question and answer session. He asked the audience what they wanted to hear and they opted for a scene from Memoir, which he retold without appearing to read from the book. It was about an occasion when his father had him by one ear to drag him to a football match, and a priest had him by the other ear insisting that he come to Sunday school, and it was outlandishly funny.

His prose is the most meticulously self-effacing of any writer I've read. Just one little example, he would write "small coloured lights" where a lesser author would write "fairy lights" or "christmas lights". That example is from "That they may face the rising sun" (renamed "By the Lake" for the US). The Times obituary calls it a book "in which nothing happens". Funny, because everything in life and death happens in it, but that's nothing apparently.

Ossian