once Upon A Time

Watching Episode 7 of Series 1 on the American television programme Once Upon A Time this evening I was surprised by the murder that occurred.  Given the gentle introduction of this series until this point (all the deaths so far have come about in the fairy universe).  The series, entertaining in its own way, is no less silly than it has been but tonight's episode took a surprising turn into darker territory than I'd thought the programme had been pitched at.  My surprise may tell us more, of course, about me but there you have it.  Silly but fun and, now, not as saccharine sweet as it has been until now. 

Roberta Joan Anderson

How long have I been listening to Joni Mitchell; singing along.  Forty years?  Forty five?  According to Wiki (so it must be true!!!) her first studio album was released in 1968 (I was eleven and have no recollection of any track from it).  But a year later cam Clouds and I do know Chelsea Morning and Both Sides Now.  I'm pretty sure that BSN caught my attention as a twelve year old, probably as a result of my big brother's record collection.  He would have been 15 going on 16.  He was into contemporary folk - Pentangle, Donovan (but not Dylan, funnily enough), Joan Baez, CSN&Y, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell - as well as - let's think - John Mayall, Cream, Hendrix (of course) and way out there on the Californian edge of blues-based rock n roll, The Doors.  You can see where my tastes come from.  Did we all look west ... to America?  Anyway, I've been listening to Ms Roberta Joan Anderson sing for at least 43 years. Still am.

So I'm sitting here in Sydney, early in May, listening to Night Ride Home (1991).  As I type, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, based on Yeats's The Second Coming, is playing.  Sing on Joni.  Sing along Dougie.

I love the whole album; no track is better than another but this poem / lyric / song never ceases to grab me.  The unanswered question is audacious, irrefutable, unanswerable: Who you gonna get to do the dirty work / When all the slaves are free?



Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free)

Magdalene is trembling
Like a washing on a line
Trembling and gleaming
Never before was a man so kind
Never so redeeming

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Ecstasy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

I am up a sycamore
Looking through the leaves
A sinner of some position
Who in the world can this heart healer be
This magical physician

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Misery
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, climb down, climb down he says to me
From the middle of unrest
They think is light is squandered
But he sees a stray in the wilderness
And i see how far i've wandered

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Apathy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Enter the multitudes
The walking wounded
They come to this diver of the heart
Of the multitudes
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done

Oh, all around the marketplace
The buzzing of the flies
The buzzing and the stinging
Divinely barren
And wickedly wise
The killer nails are ringing

Enter the multitudes
In exxon blue
In radiation rose
Tragedy
Now you tell me
Who you gonna get to do the dirty work
When all the slaves are free?
(who're you gonna get)

Very few degrees of separation

Wallace Stevens

Spike asked me this evening if I knew of a poet named Wallace Stevens.  I said I did / I do but couldn't recollect any of the poems.  Spike mentioned Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which I vaguely recalled.  We looked at the poem on line and I remember being introduced to it years ago at Stirling University as one of the literary links between Poe's The Raven and William Carlos Williams's The Red Wheelbarrow.

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called The Death of a Soldier, which I may have confused in my memory with a poem by Randall Jarrell.  I remember still the shock of reading the final line of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jacob's Room

I finished Virgina Woolf's first experimental work today (it was VW's opinion that her first two novels are conventional).  She tried to build a fictional world with none of the structure of the novel up to that point.  So there's no beginning, middle or end (the penultimate sentence is an unanswered question).  Time is pervasive but never chronological.  Architecture informs character, mood, perception but we seldom linger anywhere, in any building, for long (the Reading Room of the British Museum maybe; the Parthenon and St Paul's Cathedral perhaps but always in an elliptical manner, coming back and forth, moving in and out).  It's a short, affecting read.  I made what may have been a mistake by playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata from the point in Chapter Three that Woolf writes "... the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz." (page 54 in my edition, Oxford World Classics).  What a powerful (depressingly so) sense of a doomed, lost generation of young men it evoked.  It's as effective ... not quite maybe ... as the middle section of To the Lighthouse which may be unsurpasable IMHO.

Jacob's Room is an impressive read; eye-opening about what can be done with fiction; moving.  It's not perfect though (what is?).  The butterfly metaphor was overdone (particularly in the chapters before we get to London) and that social strata upon which VW turns her perceptive gaze was irritatingly narrow but given who she was and how the First World War affected her own connections I suppose one can forgive her.  It's certainly a novel to read but not on any day you're a bit depressed by life's ability to subdue one's enthusiasm.

Every Australian Counts

After breakfast at Bondi

How hard can life be?

Some numbers drive me nuts

Take 84 as an example.  I picked up my short essay on Defoe's Roxana from a tray outside my tutor's office this afternoon.  84%.  I ask you, what's that all about?

My mark is one point below a High Distinction grade.  One point.  I'd much rather receive a lower mark - the high-seventies or low-eighties maybe - because the mark would be clear.  Dougie, it would say to me, middling sort of effort.  Must try significantly better.  84 though?  That one point is within a margin of error that has nothing to do with careful assessment.  It's a message - not quite good enough for a High Distinction but very close, almost there, treat this as sign of encouragement, missed it be a whisper.

Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Good.  Got that of my chest.