Chance conjunction of the day

The conjunction came from a song lyric and a book fragment, within not very minutes of each other.

The song lyric came first; it was playing as I worked on the text of an article about statistical testing:

She was physically forgotten,
Then she slipped into my pocket
With my car keys.
She said “You've taken me for granted
Because I pleased you...”¹

I was hungry so, when the track finished, paused the player and put aside the article for a while to get a bite to eat. Filling the gastric gap with a sandwich from my right hand, I picked up the book with my left to give my mind a brief change of scene as well. The book was an old favourite (in fact, I find that I already referenced this same line from it, earlier this year ... I'm getting repetitive) which is, to embroider the conjunction (or to suggest that am stuck in a particular past), very close to being coeval with the song:

There’s a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it: “I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it”.²

It's so easy to take someone for granted and lose the idea of them ... not just a significant other, but oneself and (the thought that occurred to me in this case) those friends more removed as well.

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1. Paul Simon, "Diamonds on the soles of her shoes" on Graceland, 1986
2. Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency Ch.3. 1987, London: Cape. ISBN 0224024647

It's a mystery

Mysteries come in all shapes, sizes and kinds.

My first attempt to reach Topsham, yesterday, went well for the first couple of hundred kilometres but was thwarted in the last five ... a threatened suicide closed rail and road routes for long enough to lose me the evening. My second try, today, seemed to be following suit, as a fellow rail passenger was taken ill in the same last stretch and had to be airlifted out; but the evacuation was swift, and I arrived in time. Such an unlikely coincidence on the same line, on two consecutive days, constituted my own small personal contribution to the mysteries of the universe.

The mysteries for which I had come, however, were well worth the effort. I was there to see Ray Girvan (of JSB blog) play bayan for Estuary Players' production of Tony Harrison's The Mysteries, and even though I wasn't able to stay to the end of the evening, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The production was staged in the main body of St Margaret's parish church, and wonderful use was made of the setting: stage in the altar area, music section in the adjacent arch, audience in the pews. Eden's tree of the knowledge of good and evil was embodied in a human figure holding the fatal fruit. The shepherds and magi seeking the Christ child arrived (with sheep and dromedaries respectively) up the main aisle. The humour of the original mystery cycle was perfectly handled, with modern twists – the lamb taken by Mak the sheep stealer, for instance, being played by Shaun the Sheep, while the dromedaries were accompanied by Monty Python and the holy grail style clipclop sound effects.

Not that the humour was over dominant. The story of Abraham and Isaac (from Genesis 22), from which every fibre of my being has always recoiled, here became something to draw me in and break my heart. Mimed, to the solo accompaniment of  a haunting song from the music section, it highlighted the human pain at its heart, moved me to tears and became my high point of the night. Truly beautiful.

My only regret was that I couldn't, for much of the time, isolate Ray's bayan (my original reason for being there) from the amplified electronic instruments around it. He came through identifiably at times, probably because I was consciously tuned to listen for him, but was often lost as an individual voice – but his playing was, of course, a component in the overall success which is what really matters.

This is, I realise, a bit late to be singing the praises of a production whose last night I have just left. But if you are within reach of the Estuary Players’ next venture, I thoroughly recommend marking it on your calendar.

Don't marry her...

Camille Claudel is, to my eyes, a far better sculptor and greater artist than Auguste Rodin; her work is consistently warmer, more imbued with emotion, more genuinely passionate. That she is less celebrated is partly a result of the breakdown and subsequent incarceration which cut short her career in middle age, partly the perennial problem of female artists being consistently written out of art history by a male establishment.

A very good and thought provoking recent lecture, in which the mutually dependent/destructive symbiotic/antagonistic artistic relation between the two was the focus, has had me mentally revisiting their work and the interaction which it displays. A meandering journey which brought me to Claudel’s L’Age mûr and paused there.

L’Age mûr is usually seen as a despairing autobiographic public cri de coeur in the face of Rodin’s refusal to leave his lifelong partner Rose Beuret. In this interpretation, the elderly woman at camera left is the implacable fate Clotho (representing Beuret) leading the unresisting central male figure (Rodin) away from life in the form of his younger lover (Claudel) who pleads on her knees at camera right.

Looking at the sculpture today, it suddenly merges in my mind with the lyrics of a song: an equally passionate and doomed cry of anguish from a lover who also finds that she cannot use youth and flesh to overturn more compelling loyalties.

The song is Don't marry her, sung by The Beautiful South. There are two slightly different versions, the original release and a later radio edit which (this being a family show, and since either would equally do for my present purposes) I've decided to choose here:

Think of you with pipe and slippers
Think of her in bed
Lying there just watching telly
Think of me instead

I'll never grow so old and flabby
That could never be
Don't marry her, have me...

Melded together, as they now are, sculpture and song both appear to me in a sadder and kinder light.

Of course there's nothing unique in this context about these two particular pieces; it just happened that way. I could equally well, perhaps, have alighted on Tracey Emin's Everyone I have ever slept with 1963–1995 tent and Alanis Morissette's You oughta know...)

---

• Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray, Don't marry her. 1996 (quoted radio edit: 2002)

Rain man

Outside a café in the rain misted square at the heart of a small market town, a busker (probably in his eighties) plays a plangent harmonica: Malvina Reynolds' What have they done to the rain?

Haunting. And well worth every cent of my five Euros.

The girl on the hat-shelf

A couple of weeks or so ago, when I enthused about song as meme, Ray Girvan rightly reminded me that it is “...a very mutatable one, unless continually reinforced by knowledge of some canonical version. The very tendency to fit misheard lyrics to known words (even if semantically ridiculous) is part of that process.”

It will not be news to anyone who is a fan (and perhaps of Woodstock vintage...), and of no interest to those who are not, that Joan Baez is on tour in Europe. Having just heard her sing for the first time in many years, my partner and I fell to discussing her songs, and discovered a disagreement between us over the meaning of a particular line from the third stanza of Diamonds and rust: “The girl on the hat-shelf". One thing led to another and thence, inevitably, to one of the many lyrics websites ... where we discovered that for more than thirty five years we've been mishearing the line. It's not "hat-shelf" but "half shell".

[Edit: as Ray has subsequently pointed out, in a comment to this post, the "half shell" probably refers to to Botticelli's The birth of Venus ... an interesting iconographic extension to the Marian image of "The Madonna" on the previous line. My assumption before this had been that "the girl on the hat-shelf" was Baez's position as a lover taken down and put back at Dylan's convenience.]

Unable to believe this we searched further and, eventually, alighted on Baez’ own web site which confirmed our mistake ... but not before (in our certainty that we were right) we'd done a web search for "the girl on the hat-shelf". That search netted us just one hit: a Harry Potter fan fiction site. It seems that Harry Potter fan fiction makes frequent use of lyrics from this song; but I'll stick with this one instance by Morag X Henegev because, apart from replicating our own mishearing, it introduces several others (I should point out that it would seem Henegev is not a native English speaker, which greatly increases the difficulty of transcription).

Here are the two versions of that stanza...

As Baez sang it	As Henegev heard it
Well you burst on the scene Already a legend The unwashed phenomenon The original vagabond You strayed into my arms And there you stayed Temporarily lost at sea The Madonna was yours for free Yes the girl on the half-shell Would keep you unharmed	Well, you burst on scene Already a legend A young, washed phenomena The original beg-a-bong Heading straight into my arms And there you stayed Temporarily lost at sea The Madonna was yours for free Yes, the girl on the hat-shelf Could keep you unharmed.

Anil clemore bartat

There is, currently, a local teenage craze for singing the old Yorkshire dialect song On Ilkla Moor ba' t'at for no apparent reason.

Chatting to some of them, I discovered that they believed it to be a completely nonsense song devoid of any meaning, also that they believed it to have been made up by Himmie O'Connor – a former member of their group, since moved away.

Interested by this, I asked one of them, Donal, to write down the nonsense sounds which they sing. Looking at his transcription I was struck by how closely the sounds, despite being divorced from meaning or origin, match the actual words of the song. This seems to me a vivid illustration of the power of song as self perpetuating meme.¹

Below is a tabulated record of Donal's transcription, actual Yorkshire dialect form, and BBC English for the changing key line in each verse. Anyone who knows the song (which will include most Britons of my own generation, at least) can skip straight down to the table; for those who do not, I'll give a quick explanation here...

The Ilkley Moor of the title is a place, an open and desolate area between the Yorkshire towns of Ilkley and Keighley. The song contains several stanzas (the exact number depends on the version you hear), each of which follows a rigid abaabbb structure. The "b" lines are repetitions of the title; the "a" lines are repetitions of a single key phrase which changes from stanza to stanza. So, for example, the first stanza runs thus:

a: Weer 'ast tha bin sin' ah saw thee?
b: On Ilkla Moor ba' t'at
a: Weer 'ast tha bin sin' ah saw thee?
a: Weer 'ast tha bin sin' ah saw thee?
b: On Ilkla Moor ba' t'at
b: On Ilkla Moor ba' t'at
b: On Ilkla Moor ba' t'at

(The spelling actually varies according to source; to avoid disputes here, I have asked a Yorkshire born and raised colleague of my own age, who still speaks dialect at home, to write the words as he knows them. his word is, for the purposes of this post, law. The number of stanzas is decided by those Donal's transcription.)

To save space, the table below gives the title (also the "b" line) just once, followed by the key phrase from each stanza also only once.

Stanza	Donal	Dialect	BBC
Title/"b"	Anil clemore bartat	On Ilkla Moor ba' t'at	On Ilkley Moor without a hat
1	Thar spin a cotton merry Jane	Tha's bin a-coort'n' MaryJane	You have been courting Mary Jane
2	Thar sparnta catcha deetha code	Tha's bahn ta catch tha deeth o'cowd	You're going to catch your death of cold
3	Then oosalata berrythy	Then oos'l ha'ta burry thee	Then we'll have to bury you
4	Ant wermzal common eeteeyoop	An' t'wurms'l coom'n yt thee oop	And the worms will come and eat you up
5	Thent dooksal common eetoop worms	Then t'dooks'l coom'n yt oop t'worms	Then the ducks will come and eat up the worms
6	Boo tossel go Anita docs	Boot oos'll go an` eyt oop t'dooks	But we'll go and eat up the ducks
7	So woozel Allah ettenthy	So oos'll all ha' etten thee	So we'll all have eaten you

---

1. Having transcribed, Donal conceded that there did actually seem to be some real words – something that he had not realised before – even though they made no sense as a group. This additionally illustrates something about language learning which has recently become political in the UK in connection with phonic spelling tests for six year olds. As a child's fluency with language increases, so will the tendency, when told to write down a spoken nonsense word (eg: "OSC"), to substitute one to which s/he can assign semantic meaning (eg: "ask"). This leads to children with more developed skills paradoxically performing less well in the test.

Not trawling but drowning

[Having finished writing this, and just as I am about to post it, I look at the accretion at its end and realise that it is going to drive Julie Heyward, who views footnotes with disfavour, to distraction. Apologies in advance, Julie.]

My fascination with the idea of drowned geographies started (back in the prehistoric days of 1977) with a Richard Cowper¹: short story, Piper at the gates of dawn². It then took a quantum leap forward when I later heard a folk song about "the trawler fleets of Trowbridge"³.

Trowbridge is a smallish town in the British county of Wiltshire. It is a fair way inland, and not near any significant body of water. The lyrics were intended as a nonsensically humorous send up of traditional sea related folk song, but they latched into my imagination and stayed there vividly. I was writing a fair amount of short fiction at that time, and tried many times to do something Cowperesque with this image of trawler fleets sailing out of a once landlocked town. It never happened, but the idea never went away, either. I have, ever since, played with maps and tried out the idea of flooding different landscapes to different contour lines – first on paper and then, in later years, digitally. To be honest, in retrospect, the maps were probably of greater interest to me⁴ than the nominal objective for drawing them...

All of this floods (excuse the pun) back now because I have just read Ray Girvan's JSBlog post on Floodland, which I immediately went out and bought because (a) it plays to this drowned geography weakness of mine and (b) Ray's recommendations are usually good⁵; it's joined the end of the "to be read" queue.

More immediately, however, I was (given this fascination of mine) obviously unable to ignore Ray's mention of a global flooding visualiser at flood.firetree.net. Hardly had I finished reading his post than I was over there and (of course!) flooding Wiltshire to see the effect on (where else?) Trowbridge.

There is, alas (or perhaps, if you are an inhabitant of Wiltshire, fortunately) no way to flood the countryside around Trowbridge to such a depth that trawlers could realistically operate out of the town. At thirty metres rise in sea level, Trowbridge would remain landlocked. At thirty five metres (the site won't do this; I had to revert to manual inspection of Ordnance Survey maps) it would acquire a coastline on a shallow lake in a wetlands region.

Despite its inland location, Trowbridge has a "Bythesea Road". At a little less than forty metres rise in sea level, this would live up to its name by becoming the town's seaside promenade.

At forty metres it would become a town on one minor arm of an inland sea (as shown in my illustration here – click it for a larger view).

At fifty, most of the town itself would be submerged, leaving two small parts of it at north east and south west on a pair of islands. At sixty metres it would disappear almost entirely, apart from a few scattered islets at the mercy of the tides just off what would now be the coast of Steeple Ashton ... in a substantial sea which would certainly support a fishing industry but not trawler fleets.

No matter ... I enjoyed the adventure of vicarious post apocalyptic disaster. Tomorrow I shall almost certainly flood somewhere else...

---

1. I made no linkage then, and don't now, with J G Ballard's earlier Drowned world which, though it powerfully affected me in other ways, failed to evoke a concrete transformation of the world I know. Ballard's world was an obliterated world, not a transformed one.
2. To answer the obvious questions: there is a clear connection with Wind in the willows, but it isn't relevant here; possibly also with the Pink Floyd album released about eight years before, though I'm not aware of it and haven't checked. There can be no direct link to Van Morrison song written about twenty years later. Pink Floyd and Van Morrison also both drew their inspiration from Wind in the willows)
3. I can't, unfortunately, give any details of the song, as I'm unable to find any record of it ... I suspect that it was penned by the group who performed it, or by someone known to them personally, and never travelled widely enough to leave a permanent fossil record.
4. In Tesseract (no connection with the later Alex Garland novel of very similar title), a longer fiction which I never finished but which served as the spawning ground for several shorter ones, I also tried flooding various landscapes in South Wales not with water but with time ... the further the protagonists moved from modern infrastructures like motorways or centres of population, the further back they sank into the past ... it was fun to work on. I'm a dreamer at heart.
5. It was Ray who put me onto another superb novel in which drowned geography plays a major part: Ronald Wright's A scientific romance.

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• J G Ballard, The Drowned World. 1962, London: Victor Gollancz.
• Richard Cowper The custodians, and other stories. 1976, London: Gollancz. 0575020962
• Alex Garland, The tesseract. 1999, London: Penguin. 0140258426 (pbk.)

Superglued

I am standing in a shop, looking for superglue, when the ever present background music resolves itself into a song which I knew well when I was sixteen. As it happens, I recently saw the title in an internet jukebox listing sent to me by a friend, a couple of weeks ago; before that, I'd not thought of it for most of the 40 years since my teens ended.

I shall write more later, when I've time and space to think; for now, I'll just record the moment and then go back to finding that superglue.

[...time passes...]

And here we are again. It is later.

The song was by a group called Union Gap (which I always assumed, for no obvious reason that I can now justify, to be named after the place in Washington state, roughly equidistant from Seattle and Portland). Googling both song and group, now, I discover that memory is at fault: it was "The Union Gap, featuring Gary Puckett" (and, shortly after this one song which I remember, changed to "Gary Puckett and the Union Gap"). I have no memory whatsoever of Gary Puckett ... but then, I have rarely been good at knowing the names of individual members within a band.

Anyway ... to return to the subject ... the song itself was Young girl. In it, the first person voice is (to quote Wikipedia's delicately neutral wording) "a man distressed to find out his lover is under an acceptable age".

Perceptions change with time, age and experience. The reason I find it worthwhile to stop and think about this now is that, within the first few bars, I became aware of a sharp discontinuity in my own perceptions of this song between "then" and "now". What mix of time, age and experience, I am curious to know, accounts for that? What does it say about me, about the world, about the times?

When I was sixteen, we listened to Young girl often. In the youth club, on café jukeboxes, on the radio, on Dansette record players at home in our rooms... it wasn't in my usual line of musical preference (I was a folk rock sort of youngster) but it had a good, compelling tune and rhythm which got into my bloodstream and drove me along just as much as anyone else. The first two words, belted out loud but slow, guaranteed my attention ... and the next five, rattled off fast, held it:

YOUNG ... girl ... GetOutOfMyMind!

We (the teenagers around my age at the time ... or, more accurately, the teenaged boys around my age at the time), muttered to one another that the song was about Lindsey Cook*, a bubbly, vivacious and dramatically well developed fifteen year old in the class below me who spent all her free time with young soldiers (probably only a couple of years older than me) from the nearby military base. Looking back, I realise that this had less to do with moral judgment than with selfish envy: Lindsey, we felt, if truth be told, should be bestowing her attentions on us instead.

Now, four decades on, I find the song ... I can't think of a better word ... creepy.

Why is that?

Is it the result of working some of my time with vulnerable young people? Am I hearing echoes of two cases in which I saw young girls damaged by inappropriate relationships with older authority figures? Have I succumbed to that pernicious "bogeyman du jour", an obsession with fear of the pædophile behind every tree? Or have I just changed with the passing of time, become a boring old fart who has lost touch with his younger self?

Or all of the above, perhaps.

Whatever it is, I now feel my skin crawl when I hear the song (especially since discovering that Gary Puckett is still performing it today) – even as I find it impossible to eradicate the tune which, having been reheard, is now superglued into my neural pathways and won't ... “get out of my mind”.

---

* Not, I should mention, her real name.

A line back to my enemy

Chance connections...

Just over a year ago, I enthused over N D Wilson's fantasy novel 100 Cupboards. I then read the sequel, Dandelion fire, and was disappointed; it was well told, but somehow more ordinary than the first novel. Why do fantasy novels so often default to epic battles? I left it until now to read the third and final book, The chestnut king – which was better, though still less than the first. But, to get back to point: in this novel, a frequent image was the child protagonist following a grey fibre (invisible to others) which connected a wound in his cheek to the villainous witch who had caused it.

Now (this minute) I listen to Jesca Hoop (thank you, David) singing Enemy:

Beautiful
alone with my enemy
and share a bitter cup
of poisoning
my countenance
to see his face in mine
and follow every line
back to my enemy

The tenth anniversary of 9/11, as Jim Putnam posted on the day, has just passed. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, I received an email from an Arab friend (which Jim, always perceptive and thoughtful, disseminated) reminding me that 9/11 itself was part of a violent cycle of tit for tat ... that there is always a “line back to my enemy”.

A shame that while we keep lines of that kind always alive (the child hero of The chestnut king, by the way, used his grey sickness line back to his enemy first to spy upon her and then to kill her ... she used hers in much the same way), we put much less time and effort into establishing lines of communication back to the same enemies.

---

• N D Wilson,
  • 100 cupboards. 2007, New York: Random House. 9780375838828 (pbk.).
  • Dandelion fire. 2009, New York: Random House. 9780375838842.(pbk)
  • The Chestnut King. 2010, New York: Random House. 9780375838866 (pbk)
• Jesca Hoop, Kismet, "Enemy". 2007, New York: Red Int/Red Ink.

Good vibes down the time line

In the middle of a conversation with Clarissa Vincent, she used the expression "good vibes" ... and I found myself wondering whether the Beach Boys invented "good vibrations", or whether we already had them?

Being a terminal nerd (not to mention terminally bad mannered), I wandered off to find out.

The first use of the phrase, in a book in English, according to Google Ngram, is from 1893: Law and the prophets: a scientific work on the relationship between physical bodies, vegetable, animal, human, and planetary by one Frank Earl Ormsby:

"You are embodied for the purpose of expressing your own spirit, see to it that no one robs you of the right. Receive all of the good vibrations that spirits can give you, but do something for yourself, if you expect results."

From then onwards, occurrence of the phrase in literature pootles along close to the bottom of the graph (though with a modestly significant increase from 1925) until 1966 ... after which it rises to a maximum in 1972 before dropping off again.

The Beach Boys released "Good vibrations" in 1966. So, it seems that the phrase had already been in existence for a century, but my generation (actually, probably the previous generation ... I was 14 in 1966, 20 in 1972, not yet writing books) picked it up from the Beach Boys and made it mainstream.

After 1972 it dropped back, but remained regularly used, until 1988 ... when it surged again, reaching a peak between 2004-2006 from which it now appears to be dropping off again.

(I've looked for Law and the prophets in the British Library catalogue, without success; the Library of Congress (probably a better bet, going by the author's name format) isn't responding at the moment ... perhaps later...)

[Later addition, 1611Z: Library of Congress still isn't talking to me ... but I've found Law and the prophets in the Library of Michigan. Published in Chicago by A.L. Fyfe]

[Later addition still, 1626Z: Thanks to Ray Girvan, voice of JSBlog, for an actual copy of Law and the prophets, from the cover page of which I note that Frank Earl Ormsby was "a magian mystic" whose book was "designed for the instruction and guidance of students in the occult sciences". It makes for fascinating reading.]

[And again, 1639Z: from Livia Passini, an MP3 copy of Good vibrations ... complete with authentic scratched vinyl 45rpm clicks and hisses...]

Now playing...

... "A church is burning", sung by Paul Simon.

It used to give me the shivers in my mid-to-late teens. It wasn't just the protest song nature of it (though that was the genre that most moved me at the time) or the fact that it came from one half of Simon & Garfunkel (which, I confess, also gave it a head start for me) or the rousing tune (which certainly helped). I was also deeply impressed, then, by its ecumenicalism: the identification of a Jewish singer/songwriter with a oppression of Christian victims. Christian imagery ran through other parts of Simon's repertoire too: not always to Christanity's credit, as in "Blessed" for example, but ecumenical nevertheless.

It gives me the shivers still.

---

• Paul Simon, The Paul Simon songbook, "A church is burning". 1965, London: CBS.
• Simon & Garfunkel, Sound of silence, "Blessed". 1966, New York: Columbia.

Be careful what you wish for

When I was very small, my father used to sing (at my own urgently repeated request) a little one stanza song when we were playing out in the open air. I render it here with an attempt to recapture the particular cadence of his delivery.

I'm a lit-tle prair-ie flow'r
Grow-ing wilder hour by hour.
No-one tries to cultivate me
So I'm as wild as wild can be!

This memory lies dormant for weeks, months, years at a time, then springs to front of stage for no obvious particular reason to dance in my conscious mind for a day or two before returning to the wings. Inconsequential though it may be, it embodies for me something very personally precious about my father, and his relationship with me. A conversation with my brother, a couple of days ago, somehow brought it out for a spin in the light and it is sparkling still at the edge of my day to day thoughts, son on the spur of the moment I just did a search for it.

There are several video clips and MP3 files in the Google listing. I stuck to text hits, though, and the first I found was a partial reference within a longer anecdote. There was a small discrepancy (shown here in red):

I'm a little prairie flower!
Growing wilder by the hour!

Then there is this version, from Mudcat, which provides a whole song of which mine is the first stanza. Again, there are minor differences:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.

The International Lions also give a whole song but shorter than and only partially resembling as Mudcat's. Subtitling it I'm a little lion cub, add a line repetition and a wordless twirl to the end of each stanza:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder every hour;
Nobody cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as wild can be.
I'm as wild as wild can be,
Tu-ra-lu-ra, Tu-ra-le.

Wikipedia mentions the song only under its entry for Lesley Sarony, without attributing it to him, although there are a number of web pages which do make this attribution.

Courtesy of Google Books I find that The Rotarian, vol.13 #3 (September 1918) , gives exactly the same version as Mudcat but the previous month's issue (vol.13 #2, August 1918) adds the last line repeat (though not the wordless twirl) of the Lion's version. Exactly forty years later (vol.93 #3, September 1958), however, a couple of years after my father was singing it to me, has it as:

I'm a little prairie flower,
Growing wilder by the hour;
No one cares to cultivate me,
I'm as wild as I can be.

At this point, I realised that precious memory, whether accurate or flawed, was beginning to blur at the edges. So, I stopped looking. There can be such a thing as too much information, and there can be occasional limits to John's breezy (KJV 8:32) assertion that “the truth shall make you free”.

Bizarrest, bizarrer, and merely bizarre...

Within an interesting, as always, post yesterday (Bizarre notes, bizarre cheers), JSBlog commented that...

“... the more I read of US school/college traditions ... the gladder I am I went to British ones, where you can just attend, get your education, and leave. Ritual chants are just the tip of the iceberg of a set of effectively compulsory tribal systems...”

When I read it, I simply thought "hear, hear" (my limited observation of US academic life confirming my agreement) and read on. Having thought about it over the hours since, I still agree and just as strongly – but have also realised that British education is not itself free of bizarre undergrowth. While post-compulsory education in the United Kingdom (and more widely in western Europe) is certainly refreshingly different in that way from its US equivalents, there are oddities (I would personally say unhealthy oddities) further down the chain.

As a thirteen year old I moved from a coeducational Australian school where you sank or swam amongst your contemporaries according to the usual vagaries of children everywhere to a British single sex school. Here I had to be thrown into the fishpond. Teachers who would later send me home because I had forgotten my school cap showed no sign of noticing that green water running from my sodden uniform was forming a malodorous pool around my desk. The following day, I had to be stripped behind the fives court and then retrieve my clothes from the branches of various trees. Passing teachers again showed no surprise at seeing a slightly podgy boy climbing a tree in the nude to retrieve his underwear. I thought at first that this was dislike of me, personally; but as time and a half went by, I observed that it happened to all newcomers and staff even made jokes about it – except when a boy complained, in which case they made pompous remarks about the communal value of initiation ceremonies. Then there was the French teacher (reputedly an infantry colonel in the 1939 to 1945 war) who made us run around the grounds in our underwear, shooting each other with water pistols containing red ink ... and refused to teach us unless we took part. Let's not get into the strange behaviour (not, I hasten to add, paedophilic ... just ritualistically odd) of the games master during pre and post sports changing times.

Things have improved immeasurably in the decades since 1965 ... but I have heard of both the ducking and the stripping ceremonies in different schools within the past year, and while games masters are generally respected professionals, the occasional exception is not unknown.

Moving back in time, at ten years old I briefly attended a primary school on the Sussex coast. Daily assembly contained a number of mystifying rituals, including the singing (every day) of Sussex by the sea, then British grenadiers and finally Men of Harlech. (Each of these is available in different versions; the links are to the closest I can find to those we sang.) That sequence is interesting because, while all of them are of a martial cast, they become progressively more so. By the time we started the day's lessons we had imbibed enough blood and guts for a schlock movie. Furthermore, they become increasingly distant from we who sang them daily. Sussex, I concede, was relevant; but the clearly male voice, culminating in “the girls so kind that we left behind”, was odd for a school whose students were 50% girls. British grenadiers had no obvious relevance to anything at all. Harlech was the other side of the British isles and several centuries; not to mention the other side of the Saxon/Celt divide.

No ... I still prefer the British model to the US one; it has more flexibility, more freedom to choose ideas, less pressure to rigid conformity; the US system is at the "bizarrest" end of the spectrum, the British equivalents "merely bizarre" ... but we are not ideally housed for unlimited stone throwing.

Down through the layers of song

At JSBlog, Ray Girvan extols the joys of song "with layers of meaning".

Thinking about that, I realise that it holds the key to something about my own musical preferences which I have struggled to explain – to others or to myself.

On one hand, and it's perhaps the major strand, I have always been drawn to song lyrics; if they are backed up by good music, that's important too, but the lyrics come first. It started with attraction to storytelling songs (Woody Guthrie was an early childhood avourite) and then, in my teens, developed into "literary" ones. I love the verbal acrobatics of Catatonia, for instance, such as the line “so she buys wet fish” (in the Equally Cursed & Blessed song "She's a millionaire") which Matthews sang in such a way that “so she” slurred into “sushi” or the opening play on "treasure chest".

But then, on the other hand, I am primarily attracted to Kate Bush not by the lyrics (though they are interesting in themselves) but by the astonishing things she does with her voice.

Reading Ray's comments, I realise that layers of meaning are the key in both cases. Catatonia play with verbalised layers; Bush with the emotional effects of melody; both invite multiple readings of the result. Not that I reach the levels of layering displayed by Ray's German and Icelandic examples, but the principle is there.

So that's that sorted then; on to the next thing...

Another "great man" joins the throng

Though I always tend to think of it in a politicoeconomic context, the "great man" theory of history is a tough weed which can grow anywhere. One might think, from many accounts, that there would be no calculus without Newton, evolution without Darwin. Despite my admiration for the achievements of those figures, I doubt that their fields would have withered on the vine if they had not been born ... someone else, or several someone elses, would have come along. Leibniz, in fact did come along in the case of calculus; Russell for evolution; but even they were not necessary. The development of ideas had in each case reached the point where it was inevitable that calculus and and a theory of evolution would sooner or later emerge.

So it is in western popular music. I grew upon the myth that Elvis Presley had single handedly taken it by the throat and dragged it into a track where it wouldn't otherwise have gone. Later, the Beatles gained the same mythic status. Don Mclean dubbed Buddy Holly's death "the day the music died". I have no feelings one way or another about Presley or Holly; I enjoyed McLean's song, and was a Beatles fan in my day; but all of them rode a wave of the time rather than creating it.

Now, with the death of Michael Jackson, we repeatedly (five times in half an hour, yesterday evening) hear an American fan describe this too as "the day the music died". Not having ever been much affected by his work, I'm in no position to judge whether he was as great as everyone is saying he was; but I can see that he is already being installed as the latest "great man", and being credited with the same single handed paradigm shifting status. While rejecting that mythologising, I hope that he is remembered for his music (whatever its quality) and not for the freak show media circus around his life and lifestyle.

---

• Don McLean, American Pie, 1971

And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers...

Unreal Nature posts (here, and here, for example) raises once again the hardy perennials of "straight record" (which we are agreed is a nonexistent phantasm) and, more generally, the slippages of relation between signified and signifier.

I don't intend to go anywhere down that road, on this occasion. I mention it only because I have last night and today received an interesting illustration of the very different ways in which my "composition of mental objects", transcribed to page or screen, is reconstructed in the minds of my audience.

Six days ago, I took the photograph at the top left of this post. Because this has been a frenetically busy week I didn't send get around to out any of the week's Today pictures to its subscription list until, in a belated catch up, last night – hence the flow of responses now.

I won't trouble you with pointless (and inevitably unsuccessful) attempts to explain my own reasons for taking it, nor the composition of (my own) mental objects which it represents. I will, however, offer you the first three responses in the order I received them:

1. Invisibility is a great disguise when attempting to climb the neighbor's garden patch fence.

2. This one brings tears to my eyes – literally. Not that this photo has a grim message. It is a good shot, in fact.
   Back in the winter of 1941, there was a full page picture in a local newspaper that I will never, ever forget. It was [...] shot in Russia. It was Christmas Eve. With nothing but a barbed wire fence in the middle of a snow and ice covered field, a soldier [...] hung on that fence. I see that scene as though it were yesterday.
   Strange how the mind retrieves the past so quickly with a simple blue glove. I was a mere child in '41! The impact, indeed, must have been a powerful one to stay with me these hundred years.
   Tried to retrieve the photo [...] no luck. It may have been an AP or similar.

3. 'Somebody Loves Me,
   I wonder who?'

I love getting these responses back from other minds, like postcards which offer me tantalising glimpses of the ways in which my own compositions of mental objects transmute as their imperfect photographic record crosses the frontiers into unattainably fabulous and distant other lands.

---

Addendum, a couple of hours later: a thread has been running for a while in Photo.net's Philosophy of Photography forum, some of which has touched on this topic. A contribution from Fred Goldsmith just came in, and is a good example; I quote only the most immediately relevant part of it here:

"On a recent photo of mine, a friend wrote that he found it evocative but couldn't put his finger on what it evoked. I've had that sort of experience with photographs. I think there's something beyond representation going on there. Listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I may sense fate knocking at the door, yet Beethoven may very well have heard a child bang on the table in four successive beats and been moved by that to crank out a tune. Though I may experience, even hear, fate, I don't think it would be fair to say that fate has been represented. A subject of a portrait and I, together, may come upon a certain pose that works. That pose may simply feel right at the moment, very often the more significant aspect of the process of making a photograph than the actual meaning of what is being done. Viewers may see elements of dance in that pose, may interpret it as an ominous pose or a sweet pose, etc. I may simply have responded to the visual ease of the pose or the intensity of it, I may have liked how a shadow got created by the arms and legs. The viewer is, of course, legitimately seeing and feeling what he is seeing and feeling. But, in this case, has dance or any of what the viewer interprets been represented? I think there is not necessarily, though there may often be, such a direct translation from photographer through photograph to viewer as the word "representation" suggests. Many photographs are effective because they are illusions, semblances rather than representations. The expressiveness of a certain type of photograph may be more significant than its representational meaning."

---

• Post title taken from Joanna Newsome, The milk-eyed mender, "This side of the blue". 2004, Chicago: Drag City. DC263CD.

  And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers
  And we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words
  While across the sky sheet the impossible birds
  In a steady, illiterate movement homewards

Dancing at the edge of the world

Copied (with apologies for the "Growlery green"), because I would like to have said it myself, from the photo.net thread which I mentioned yesterday:

I find it interesting that so many adults are so uncomfortable playing with conceptual ideas.

You can ask a group of kindergarteners to think about almost anything -- say for example, "Are you a snail or a kangaroo?" and they'll have a field day "trying on" the two sides of the question and thinking about which one they are more like; in what ways and why -- and, I think -- learning from this imaginary exercise.

What you will almost never find is any one of the children saying, "I'm a human being. Therefore, I am neither a snail nor a kangaroo."

Correct. But that wasn't the point.^[1]

Long, long ago, I had a conversation with Ray Girvan about how frightened most people are of looking at themselves, their motivations, their natures, their place in their world, their mechanisms. I use the word "frightened" deliberately: fear, I think, is behind the reluctance to play with conceptual ideas. If we admit the existence of conceptual ideas other than the one we're comfortable with, to which we have nailed our lives, where will it end – and how will we get back?

I find this the most difficult part of teaching philosophy to students ... by late adolescence, so many of them have already discovered who they choose to be, and learned the fear of playing "what if?"

It's great, this feeling of being secure,
But I always thought there'd be more
... ... ...
Sometimes I'll slip away
I'll pretend that it all
Can go another way
... ... ...
I'll pretend life and dream that I
Can save the day.^[2]

Artists (writers of popular song lyrics included), I think, are the "jesters" which society tolerates because most people want someone else to take the risks of conceptual play on their behalf. Only to a certain extent, of course: Picasso went further than most people really want their surrogate play to venture.

---

1. Julie Heyward, Are you pursuing answers or establishing questions? Apr 06, 2009; 04:15

2. Melanie Safka, "Save the night" on Please love me. 1973 [lyrics ©1971], New York: Buddah. BDS5132/2318090

3. Post title ripped off from Ursula K Le Guin, Dancing at the edge of the world : thoughts on words, women, places. 1989, New York: Grove Press. 080211105X

Seasonal mondegreens

Since I learned the word "mondegreen" (for a misheard song lyric or other phrase) from Ray Girvan, a year ago, I have taken extra pleasure in what was already an amusing phenomenon. I was inordinately pleased, at the time, to discover one in my own back catalogue, and have since classified in retrospect a mental drawerful of oddments.

Two items from my own childhood which found a new place in the hierarchy of knowledge were lines of the Lord's Prayer from early school years ("Our father which art in heaven, Hello to thy name...") and a possibly Disney theme song about Davey Crockett ("Davey, Davey Crockett, king of the wild front here") from even earlier.

The past week has brought me two new examples from the same song.

The song is an old, traditional and anonymous one:

The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then,
Poor thing?

He'll sit in a barn,
To keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing,
Poor thing.

The two different children singing this on two separate days both seemed to think that Robin was a person, not a bird. They dropped the word "the" and sang "And what will Robin do then...".

More interestingly, both replaced the word "barn" in the first line of the second stanza. Child 1 sang "He'll sit in a bar", child 2 "He'll sit in a bath". Two radically different views of life and comfort...

Cockahoop

Having just gotten around to playing Cerys Matthews' Cockahoop, this is another of my "oh, God, Felix thinks he's writing for New Musical Express" moments. But: I feel a vivid necessity to write about it, and you have the misfortune to be the audience. Feel free to skip on to something else; I’m indulging myself.

Catatonia released four albums. Way Beyond Blue was interesting. International Velvet hit the button; it showed Matthews in control, with her mesmerisingly complex verbal games, presence, control and vocal power harnessed together as the engine of the whole band. Catatonia was not just one of the best selling acts, but one of the most literate as well. Equally Cursed and Blessed developed that further; but the first cracks were appearing too. Paper, Scissors, Stone was born as Catatonia died and Matthews disappeared from view; it was somewhat lacklustre, much of the sparkle gone.

But then, early this year, she came back: demons apparently conquered, new solo career, new album due out in May. Also, we were told, a new sound: acid rock behind her, she had taken on country and folk influences. I didn't think it sounded like my sort of thing, but her fightback inspired respect and deserved support, so a couple of months ago I bought not only the new CD Cockahoop but Paper, Scissors, Stone as well.

Both discs sat on the shelf, unplayed, through those two months. Then, yesterday, I thought "oh well; give it a try I suppose" and put on Cockahoop.

The title of the first song is "Chardonnay", which wasn't a good start; for most British listeners, now, the primary meaning of Chardonnay is not a wine or a region of France but a girl's name with overtones of social pretension. The opening bars and words reinforced my dismay, a sweetvoiced, swingalong, littlegirl countrystyle love song:

“Chardonnay, Chardonnay,
How I love you Chardonnay…”

I almost switched off, right there, and put the CD back on the shelf. But, luckily, I didn’t; and it gradually dawned on me that Matthews is playing games again – though in new ways, in a new vein. Under mocking guise of a love song she is probing her own recent past: the Chardonnay of the song is a lost lover, but a liquid one.

“…As I reach to hold you with my trembling hands.
In my hands, my trembling hands,
Chardonnay, Chardonnay,
You’ll be glad to hear me say
I will never need you more than I do now…”

It's hard to imagine anything further from "Goldfish and Paracetamol", the track that first hooked me to Catatonia; but behind the change of face, everything is still there.

The album is a delight, patchy but full of promise and new directions, Matthews as playful and complex as ever despite an almost complete make over. The fierce politics and the acute intelligence which dominated her Catatonia lyrics are still there, but have been moved to backstage while she concentrates on here and now. The title has been chosen very deliberately: this is an exultation at darkness left behind. When it was done, I stood in fact in heavy rain but felt like I’d just walked into April sunshine; which can’t be a bad return on £11.99, can it? Everything on the disc is her own material (or jointly written) with the exception of the last track which is the traditional spiritual “All my trials”; a deliberate arrangement, I’m certain. A phoenixlike renaissance; I'm reminded of the closing chapter of Iain Banks' Espedair Street.

• Way Beyond Blue. Catatonia. Blanco Y Negro, 1996. 0630163052
• International Velvet. Catatonia. Blanco Y Negro, 1997. 3984208342
• Equally Cursed and Blessed. Catatonia. Blanco Y Negro, 1999. 3984270942
• Paper, Scissors, Stone. Catatonia. Blanco Y Negro, 2001. 8573888482
• Cockahoop. Cerys Matthews. Blanco Y Negro, 2003. 2564603062