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An enjoyable discussion: literary critic Adam Bradley talks to Michael about pop lyrics, melody and performance, and how they all work together
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000rmnj
Tuesday 26 January 2021
The Cat of Portovecchio
Pleased to see this on Facebook today, a photo and comment
by Efrat Sa'ar. on "The Cat of Portovecchio" by Maria Strani-Potts
"Finished reading yesterday this lovely book and really enjoyed it. It tells the
stories of residents in a fishing village next to the sea in
Warmly recommended!!!"
Monday 18 January 2021
Sunday 17 January 2021
Dorchester, Dorset. P.O.W. Camp, Dorchester, 1917 (film material)
Imperial War Museum, copyright IWM, IMW 441, Department of Information.
Watch:
Monday 11 January 2021
John R.T.Davies, Sound Preservationist. Ma Rainey, Prove It On Me Blues
I've just bought a rare 78 rpm record by Gertrude 'Ma Rainey, issued by Ristic Records in 1956 (one of 100 copies issued).
Hear Me Talking To You/ Prove It On Me Blues
Here's an interesting interview with John R.T. Davies (1927-2004), once known as "the world's leading specialist in the art of sound restoration":
http://www.vjm.biz/articles9.htm
More information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._T._Davies
"Prove It On Me Blues" is featured in the new Netflix film, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom:
Went out last night, had a great big fight
Everything seemed to go on wrong
I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone.
Where she went, I don't know
I mean to follow everywhere she goes;
Folks say I'm crooked. I didn't know where she took it
I want the whole world to know.
They say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me;
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.
It's true I wear a collar and a tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while
Don't you say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me.
Say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.
I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.
Wear my clothes just like a fan
Talk to the gals just like any old man
Cause they say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.
I've also just received the book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis, which I look forward to reading, in relation to "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.
Hear Me Talking To You
Ramblin' man makes no change in me
I'm gonna ramble back to my used-to-beah
Hear me talkin' to you, I don't bite my tongue
You want to be my man, you got to fetch it with you when you come
Eve and Adam, in the Garden takin' a chance
Adam didn't take time to get his pants, ah
Hear me talkin' to you, I don't bite my tongue
You want to be my man, you got to fetch it with you when you come
Our old cat swallowed a ball of yarn
When the kittens was born, they had sweaters on
Hear me talkin' to you, I don't bite my tongue
You want to be my man, you got to fetch it with you when you come
Hello, Central, give me 609
What it takes to get it in these hips of mine
Hear…
Sunday 10 January 2021
Friday 8 January 2021
Yiannis Chaldoupis Live! Funky Klarino, Chronia Polla!
Things are still wild in Epirus! Chronia Polla, Yianni! Happy Name Day, Happy New Year!
The sound of freedom.
https://www.facebook.com/chaldoupisyiannis/videos/3704845639559307
Sounds good from here, in locked-down Dorset.
Thursday 7 January 2021
Anthony Hirst, a new voice in English poetry
Anthony Hirst - a new voice in English poetry
Memorials, nightscapes, etcetera: poems of several decades, Colenso Books, December 2020
This is a substantial volume of poetry (275 pages), really four collections in one, a significant achievement by Anthony Hirst. The poems, written over a period of fifty years, are not presented chronologically, but they reveal many aspects and voices of a sensitive, thoughtful and radical poet, who has developed his own forms and stanzas, both short and long, who has mastered many tones and registers, and can surprise us by being provocative, at times self-mocking, at times unexpectedly open to laying bare his deepest intimations of mortality.
I have been reading them in sections over several years and more intensely in print for the last few months. Most of the poems I have read ten times, some of them more often, and each close reading of the book offers up new favourites, associations, dimensions and meanings. Some poems increase in resonance as a result of a delayed-action effect; new riches are uncovered with each repeated reading. I have come up with at least three versions of my ‘favourites’ list, which becomes longer with each listing, and currently stands at thirty-five poems, which I regret I cannot include here. In presenting this collection for ‘critical scrutiny’, Anthony Hirst can be confident that he will win many admirers, all of whom will come up with their own choices. There is so much variety of poetic voice and enduring value that it is hard to do justice to the range of inspiration and mood.
If I had to choose just two poems to quote in full, I would include one from the last section (Remnants of religion), called To the Ayatollah Komeini: an oblique tribute, and another from the first section (Memorials), called The last breakfast.
Some poets seem familiar, especially if they have submitted their work regularly to journals. Others, like Anthony Hirst, prefer to save their poems until they are satisfied with the sequencing and grouping, the subtle interplay and retrospective cross-associations of late-discovered patterns.
This is a brave collection. Occasionally the reader may feel like an intruder or voyeur, although even the most personal or erotic poems cannot be categorised as ‘confessional’, since they may be more fictional than autobiographical, unlike some of the poems on religious topics. If there are any indirect influences, which are really references to other poets, one might point to Cavafy and Seferis, and to some fellow-feeling with Wordsworth and Bashō. The notes at the end of the book are very enlightening and scholarly in their own right, but are not essential for an understanding of the poems.
Greek locations occur frequently, Corfu, Crete,
It’s a strange sensation to read poems which evoke so many similar
or shared sensations, observations and images. Some of his poems written in
East Africa and the
Anthony Hirst’s acute observations and angles of vision are very much his own and I quote a few striking examples at random:
At breakfast, two rabbits on the lawn,
aware of me but unconcerned,
knowing about glass and the doubtful
reality of what’s behind.
***
Half a Cornish pasty in the mud.
Point down, mouth up.
Still fresh. Almost inviting.
***
…through “art” our own
small opportunity to add
our shards to the untidy heap
that constitute our foolish species’
supposèd understanding of itself
and its domain…
In his dedications, addressed primarily to the younger members of his family, Anthony Hirst suggests that the family's future generations and other readers may, “years from now, find things here to surprise, inform, amuse, perplex, disturb or even shock them”.
I am certain that he will find those readers, both now and in the future, and that he could well be right about the range of reactions to individual poems and sequences.
This essential collection is available from the publisher, colensobooks@gmail.com, at the selling price of £13.75.
ISBN 978-1-912788-05-7
It will shortly be available from amazon.co.uk
Two poems by Anthony Hirst:
The last breakfast
On the morning of the day he died,
after Ralph, the night-nurse, had gone home,
my father, forty, months now in bed,
announced — so, years later, I was told —
that today he’d like a proper breakfast.
And though she knew he’d never eat it,
my mother went downstairs into the kitchen.
Fifteen minutes later, I would guess,
she came back carrying a tray
(bacon-and-eggs, buttered toast and coffee)
and found him standing, clutching the cill
of the window he’d pushed open wide,
leaning out in his striped pyjamas,
gasping for breath in the summer air.
She held him, and helped him back to bed,
covered him up and, once his breathing
settled, went downstairs again to phone;
came and sat with him, now barely conscious,
until she heard the doctor’s car outside.
Sensing the condition of his patient
and deciding that the end was near,
he filled a syringe with morphine, sufficient
to ensure there’d be no more distress.
On the morning of the day she died,
my mother, twenty-six years later,
emerging briefly from her coma —
where, perhaps, wandering in the past,
she’d finally retrieved the husband
she’d never had the chance to mourn
and whose face, she had once said to me,
she couldn’t remember any more,
and had at last mutely understood
her own condition — now announced,
having eaten nothing for a week,
that today she’d like a proper breakfast.
To the Ayatollah Khomeini : an oblique tribute
I have read in translation a speech you delivered,
some months before your death, to teachers and students,
members of religious institutions,
on the third of Esfand thirteen-sixty-seven.
And from that seamless flow of twisting rhetoric
there fell into my lap, like a diamond
flung from the unravelling turban of a dervish,
one short sentence, startling in its imaginative power.
Speaking of the Shah’s time you recalled
how the “ulema and clergy” of your faction
“prepared themselves against all kinds of poisonous arrows
being fired at Islam”, and then you declared —
and these are your words as they’ve reached
across the frontiers of language — “They arrived,”
you said, “at the slaughter-house of love.”
“They arrived at the slaughter-house of love.”
I saw this sentence poised on your narrowed lips,
like a burning angel emerging
from the dark cavern of the mouth of God,
tiny as the struggling figures of Rustam
and the White Demon on the spine of Rushdie’s Verses;
poised for a moment before he leapt
across the fourfold abyss of language and culture
and race and religion, over the disjunction
of time and date between us, into my mind,
where, as he grew to full stature,
with a creaking and grinding of rusty hinges
a great door opened and I looked
into the Slaughter-House of Love.
And there they were, “the World Devourers”,
mild mannered, awkward of speech,
with their thin smiles and their pale skin,
proud horses once, between the thighs
of the Spirit of War, now riderless,
their “explosive wrath” all spent
against the towering adamantine walls
around the Slaughter-House of Love.
And they were there, “the seekers and enthusiasts”
who had “torn away the black breast of ambition”
and, fulfilling their pact “with the white dawn of love”,
had “achieved their goal of martyrdom”.
But they were small, so small, less than atoms,
not visible to the naked eye,
not though they gathered in their thousands —
so vast this Paradise, so limitless
this Slaughter-House of Love.
And the infant girl was there,
she who was buried alive, and when asked
for what crime she was thus slain
replied with questions of her own:
Do you burn books, do you cover
the faces of women for the same un-reason?
Is it for fear of the flames that flicker
behind the dark screen of your eyes?
Tell me, is it there
the Slaughter-House of Love?
I swear by the turning planets
and by the stars that rise and fall
I do not hate your religion
any more than I hate my own,
but I hate all religion when it makes
hatred a virtue, when it sits easy
in chambers of commerce with makers of bombs,
when it “cleanses the jar” in contempt
from which your “own child Mustafa drank water”,
when it would rise up and kill to defend
from words printed in books the Lord of Creation,
or the Word Made Flesh
from the Slaughter-House of Love.
O come, let us reason together,
in the name of the Compassionate the Merciful,
untouched by any insults which our mouths can fling,
immune to the “poisonous arrows” of our hearts,
beyond our reach, unknowable, enthroned forever
in the Slaughterhouse of Love:
when the earth is rocked in her last convulsion
when each soul shall know what it has done,
may we not both be victims, you and I together,
in the Slaughter-House of Love?
Wednesday 6 January 2021
William Barnes, Thomas Hardy, Jim Potts: Dorset Poems, Dorchester, Winterborne Came, West Bay, Burton Bradstock, Maiden Castle, Beaminster
Eight poems, a folk song and a short story by Jim Potts, The William Barnes Society Newsletter, no 81, Autumn 2020.
With many thanks to the Editor, Dr, Alan Chedzoy, for the kind invitation, to the William Barnes Society Chairman, Mr. Brian Caddy and the Honorary Secretary, Mrs. Marion Tait.
Monday 4 January 2021
Saturday 2 January 2021
Happy New Year, from Dorchester
Wearing a Christmas gift sweat-shirt from the USA. With Muddy Waters. I was also given T-shirts with Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker. No cultural appropriation intended. Cool!
Friday 1 January 2021
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