By the Sea

A song for TFE's on-going poteen party. Since it's a bit of fun, I couldn't resist overdoing the sound effects a bit...

By the Sea by Dominic Rivron

The View from the Mantlepiece

This little collection has sat on our mantlepiece for quite a while. The pine cones were gathered from under the tree that overlooks Arthur and Evgenia Ransome's grave in the grounds of Rusland Church in the Lake District. (I didn't realise when I collected the cones but I read somewhere afterwards that Ransome had actually chosen the spot and remarked to the vicar how nice it would be to be buried under that particular tree). Behind them Che, James and Virginia (all finger-puppets I've been given by kind, good people at various times) sit in a row. Well, stand, or whatever it is finger puppets do when they've not got a finger stuck up them.

I often wonder what they're saying to each other, Che, James and Virginia, on a set dominated by giant pine cones...

Limitations

Driving down
the motorway
the spray rises
from the wheels
like precious dust.
Sidelights shine
like rubies. This is
our nature, what
we are. It is
as amazing as
a beaver's house
or the intricate nest
of the Bower Bird.
It is also the case
that if we are to survive
we must change what we do.
We must not be
deceived by our
intelligence or our
imagination
into thinking
that we are what
we want to be
if in fact we're no more
than what we've become
or, to put it
another way,
into thinking
it will be easy.

After the Rain

Jackdaw
on the sunlit grass
like a hole
in space:
black,
jackdaw-shaped

Bloggers do it with Audacity

I never fail to be amazed that with free Audacity sound recorder software you can do what it took a machine you'd have to save up for to do twenty years ago. I thought I ought to try recording myself (as suggested by TFE and Poetikat: see previous post) singing Purcell's Fie, nay prithee John and overdubbing it.

I then thought I'd provide a "solo" version for anyone keen to sing along to. You can pick it up by ear or preferably follow the music - you can get it here and print it out. If you can record it (without me in the background: play me through half a set of headphones as you sing along) create a Soundcloud account(easy) and deposit it there, tell me where to get it and I'll try to create a mass bloggers ensemble, overlaying the tracks! Now there's a challenge. Don't go thinking you need a great voice (I haven't got one): it's more about going for it! The most important thing is to sing along with me as in synch as possible using the SingAlongaDom track, preferably singing the same notes.

If you try recording yourself I'd suggest printing out the page with the music on even if you can't read music. You'll be able to follow it to some extent and it'll make a difficult job easier. Also if you use Soundcloud make sure you "enable download" when you upload the file (it's obvious when you come to it). Also, don't delete your contribution from your own computer once you've uploaded it just in case I have download problems.

Fie, nay, prithee John by Henry Purcell

SingAlongaDom by Henry Purcell

It's More Fun with Three...

I've just spent a very enjoyable few minutes singing a drinking song by Henry Purcell (1659-95). It's a three-part round. You may know it:

(Voice 1)Fie, nay, prithee, John,
Do not quarrel, man!
Let's be merry and drink about;
(Voice 2)You're a rogue, you cheated me!
I'll prove before this company,
I caren't a farthing, sir,
for all you are so stout!
(Voice 1 or 3)Sir, you lie! I scorn your word,
or any man that wears a sword!
For all your huff, who cares a damn,
and who cares for you?

Singing it, I found myself reflecting on the words. I've never had any truck with the "things were better in my day" view of the world. It's reassuring to see that the current preoccupation with  the with alcohol-fuelled, yob culture is a preoccupation with something that has been around for a long time. At least we don't wear swords anymore.

If you want to sing the song, the sheet music can be found here.

The Importance of Coming Together

The days are getting shorter and darker. The air smells of fire. Everything is wet and brown. Nothing will really dry out now until the Spring although soon, it will freeze. The leaves that are left on the trees are hanging, limp. You can still hear the birds singing but there are fewer notes, more rests.

One of the highlights for me of this time of year has just passed: bonfire night. For the last couple of years we've let off our own - this year we went to a display. We were driving home through Bedale when we saw a massive pile of pallets topped with a guy in the field where they usually hold car boot sales. It was already late afternoon so we decided we'd go home, drop off our stuff, grab some hats and coats and come back.

Bedale is not a big place and it was amazing to see how when thousands of people descended on it the usual rules ceased to apply. People just parked where there was a space to park: the whole place bristled with parked cars. The atmosphere was great and the fireworks incredible. I don't know how long it went on for - I lost all sense of time. The combination of the charity shop LP box favourite, The Planets Suite (which I really like) played full blast and a sky full of spectacular fireworks was overwhelming. Communal, exciting, straightforward, emotional, like a football match with the competitive bit taken out. Somehow they worked the Dr Who theme into it as well (and that would make the hairs on the back of my neck if I had any stand up on end even if I heard it through the world's tinniest clock radio). Part of me (not the hedgehog and cat-lover though) wishes we did it every Saturday night, from when the clocks go back to when they go forward again. But it would pall. Oh well, roll on Christmas...

Robert McTavish: the Unsung Mountaineer

Exploring the links list I mentioned in the previous post, I came across a dead link. Yahoo Geocities sites, apparently, have ceased to exist! Fortunately, I was able to retrieve information from the page I'd linked to and I thought I'd publish it here. Apologies to anyone already familiar with McTavish's doings...

Though many have heard of Sir Hugh Munro, creator of the famous list which gave birth to the sport of "Munro bagging", few have heard of Robert McTavish (1746-1795) - the unsung founder of Scottish mountaineering.

McTavish grew up in a fashionable suburb Edinburgh. He was a bright lad, though attracted from an early age to the hills. Often, his parents would frantically scour Edinburgh in search of him. More often than not, they would find him on the summit of Arthur's Seat.

The young McTavish went on to study law, but when his father was tragically killed by a horse, he inherited his father's fortune which, sorry to say, had been made in the slave trade. McTavish, an admirer of Thomas Paine, who held high hopes for the turbulent political changes of his age, always felt uncomfortable about the source of the wealth which allowed him to pursue his first passion: mountaineering.

McTavish was a contemporary and friend of Burns, who he met at a country dancing school in 1776. The "twa Rabbies" as they were known were a familiar sight in the dives and fleshpots of Glasgow. Burns wrote an epitaph on the occasion of his friend's untimey death (he died of typhus, aged 49):

On Mr McTavish
McTavish is to heaven gane
And mony shall lament him.
His talents midst the Bens they lay.
The English nane e'er kent him.
 
He scaled a' the fearfu' hichts
He hirpled doun the glen.
A braw, braid laddie was our Rabbie -
When will we see his likes again?

The dismissive reference to the English alludes to McTavish's education. His father had sent him to England to study law at Oxford University. He returned to Scotland an Englishman in language and manner, though as all who knew him could testify, still Scottish at heart. Burns was no doubt amused that the English were wholly unaware of McTavish's achievements. Unlike that of Balmart and Paccard, who had made the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786, McTavish's achievements were unknown and unsung outside his native country.
 
McTavish was also known to McGonnagal, who wrote of him:
 
In Praise of Robert McTavish
How much praise can I lavish
On Robert McTavish?
From the loftiest Ben
To the leafiest Glen,
From Arthur's Seat to Ben Nevis,
He explored every crevice.
The bold mountaineer
Was totally without fear,
And only the very cynical could doubt
The voracity of his account of the ascent
Of the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Skye.
 
from "Forgotten Scotsmen" (1896)

How much credence can we give to McTavish's accounts of his doings? His journals leave us in little doubt that in his short life he scaled most, if not all, the peaks later catalogued by Munro, plus many lesser peaks besides. Living as he did prior to the age of Victorian reductionism, he was not particularly interested in the height of the hills he climbed, or in listing them. Unlike Munro, he successfully ascended the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Skye.
 
The peaks of the Cuillin on Skye were undoubtedly McTavish's favourite hills. The southerly peak(625m) of Bla Bheinn remains un-named and it has recently been suggested that the peak to be officially renamed Sgurr MhicTammas, in homage to the man.

Signals from Outer Space...

I bet no-one who visits this blog ever goes right down to the bottom of the right hand margin - and I don't blame them. Few people reading through their favourite blogs have time to linger that long on any one. There's a whole list of links down there.  I suppose they're there for my own benefit as much as anybody else's - it's a convenient place to put them. They're easier to access than bookmarks, and because they're listed, I'm reminded that they're there.

I've just added one. An astronomical poem on Poet-in-Residence's blog reminded me of a page I created a long, long time ago (you can date it by the corny design): How to Receive Radio-Signals from Outer Space - with a Wok! We'd been on a visit to the Jodrell Bank Visitor Centre. It's a great place to go. Standing at the foot of the huge Lovell telescope and looking up is a breathtaking experience. I can't think of any more impressive recent man-made structure in Britain. When we got back I wondered how crude and simple a radio telescope could actually be made to work. I had a go making one out of a wok. Once I'd cobbled it together, I optimistically stalked round the garden at night in my headphones, waving the wok, but received nothing. All I proved was that someone can, for the most rational of reasons, be involved in an activity which appears, to the outsider, to be totally senseless. Next morning, as I was telling Karen what a dead loss it was, I waved it in front of the window to demonstrate - and it worked! Well, sort of. It wasn't sensitive enough to pick up the distant hiss of the Milky Way, but it could receive radio waves from the sun. At least it worked better than the TV camera I made, when I was six, out of a cardboard box and a toilet roll. We'd been on a visit to a TV studio: some people never grow up.

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

You can Listen to Penderecki's Threnody here

To the Woods...

Poet-in-Residence left a short comment about coppicing on this blog today. I started to frame a reply and soon realised my comment was turning into a post in its own right - and one which quickly turned from metaphorical to literal coppicing.

Some years ago I tried coppicing -or something very like it- for a living. My great plan was to find bits of old woodland people wanted cleared and offer to do it in exchange for the wood I cut out. This I'd make into charcoal and other green (as opposed to seasoned) wood products. The charcoal (which I made in oil drums - at least I hadn't invested in an expensive kiln) was a flop, along with the besoms, but scout patrol poles, tree stakes and clothes props sold like hot cakes. Well, almost. Pickup-loads of logs were reasonable money makers too, but exhausting to do with a chainsaw and an axe. The most interesting part of it all was building a traditional shaving horse and learning to make traditional wooden tent pegs with a draw-knife. Had I been doing this during the First World War, when many thousands of them were needed, I would have been onto a good thing. The demand, though, is not quite the same these days.

It might not have been a great success as a business but it was great fun. There's something about working with iron tools and fire that makes you feel like a minor operative in Mordor. Climbing trees to lop off their branches was like being paid to play. But not enough. In the end, I was making 80p an hour, so I sold my chainsaw. This was a bit of a wrench, as I had worked hard to get a certificate (and I can recommend the course to anyone looking for a holiday with a difference). I bought a cello with the proceeds. I never looked back.

All that remains is the pleasure of walking round woods when you can recognise the old ways people used to use them. For example, you can often find the remains of hazel coppices with oak trees (known as "standards") left to grow in the open spaces left by the lower-growing hazel. The theory was that with space to grow, the branches could curve outwards in the shape necessary for the prows of ships.

The Tweets of the Dead...

Something I read on Dick Jones' blog a while ago got me wondering just how much of the early internet (well, the stuff I knew when we first got a PC) is still there? I still update my very old “tripod” site now and again, although it is rather like the old broom that's had three new heads and three new handles. This is almost certainly the case with most sites. Publishing what you want on the internet is almost as easy as breathing – but then so is deleting it.

I hunted round to see what I could find of the sites I used to visit back then. Perhaps it reflected what I spent my time looking at, but it seemed to me that one of the most enduring aspects of the internet was humour. There are people out there tending archives of jokes, urban myths and funny stories the way other people tend window boxes. I quickly found the rinkworks dialectizer (if you don't know it, try sticking your deathless prose in its cockney translator) and The Fun People Archive. (The latter, run by one Peter Langston, was a manually compiled and distributed mailing list. You sent in jokes and stories. He sent them out. I sent one in, once). The Archive was the first place I came across the case of the infamous exploding whale. It sounds like an urban myth, but, as you probably know already, it isn't: the original news-footage can be seen on YouTube. I suspect the details have been exaggerated over time, but I rather like this story as it's the only non-fictional case I've heard of of a whale getting its own back, even if it was posthumously.

It's only a few decades since the hapless Oregon Highways Department blew up the dead whale – but what would it be like if the internet had been around for a thousand years? The peasantry wouldn't have got within a hundred miles of it – but it would be good, now, to be able to read about the day-to-day lives of the barons and their hangers on, the monks, etc. I'm not just thinking of graphic descriptions of the black death and suchlike, but more commonplace, day-to-day trivia. Come the Restoration, Samuel Pepys would have been one among hundreds. Then there would be Oscar Wilde's Twitter page...

And what will it be like in the future? What if people in, say, 500 years time can read internet content going back hundreds of years?

This is all a bit of a game, I know. Machines are more vulnerable than books and, as I said earlier, deleting is easy. Most of all, no-one is going to want to keep skyscrapers full of computer hardware running just to preserve the tweets of dead people. But it does make you think. It's good to know there are web-archaeologists out there lovingly zipping up files and folders of web-obsolescence, preserving the way things were. I mean, can you remember when Yahoo looked like this?

Reading about Writing

Revising the last poem I posted (Rocking Stone Flat) I was reminded of something Charles Olson said. Originally, it ran:

it strikes me now
that now is then and time
no more than a list
of things to do. That then
is now and here I am
in the same wild place... etc.

Something about this passage annoyed me. The poem seemed to lose all it's energy here and fall flat. I changed it to:

it strikes me now
that now is then and time
no more than a list
of things to do. This is
the same wild place... etc.

A bit better, I thought. I had been too pleased with the "now is then" idea, I decided, and had footled around with it as a consequence.

... That then  
is now and here I am

had to go.

As Charles Olson said:

" A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, different from the energy which the reader, because he is a third term, will take away?

This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by...

FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT...

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION."

Charles Olson (1951)

I like reading what writers say about writing. It was pure coincidence that last night, after reflecting on Olson, I picked up Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia and came across this. It's good advice, although I'm not sure I can live up to it and I sometimes come across writing where I'm pleased the writer has ignored some of it (I quite enjoy blogs, for example, when people go off at a tangent):

"A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it...

One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish...

When  several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing  to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it...

Properly written texts are like spiders' webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm."
 Theodor Adorno (1951)

Lazarus

I found this TFE Monday Project a particularly difficult one. I tried to approach it from several different angles and, in the end, having ripped up a couple of poetical efforts, I decided to approach it musically.

Lazarus is a short piece (37 seconds) which combines electronic sounds with the "real" sounds of the human voice (reading fragments of Plath's Lady Lazarus) and a German military band from the WWII era. At one point the band overwhelms the voice, but then the voice gets the upper hand, even multiplying to become three voices. The voice has the last word. I've half a mind to develop it into something bigger. It was made using the freeware Studiofactory programme -an exciting piece of software which emulates a synthesizer- and Audacity sound recorder software.

Finally, if your laptop has speakers like ours I can definitely say you need headphones to hear it!

19th October: There seems to be a problem with embedded sound files this evening of all evenings!  It seems to be working better now, but if you have problems you might find it works better if you try listening at http://soundcloud.com/dominic-rivron


Lazarus by Dominic Rivron



*

I went for a walk yesterday afternoon over Rocking Stone Flat, a small but wild expanse of  moorland just outside Halifax. Although I'd not been there for years and years, and found I'd forgotten quite a lot about it, I have always thought of it as one of my favourite short walks in the Pennines: something about it feels intensely wild to me, even though it's right next to a road and a windfarm. I also spent a lot of time writing yesterday: a  post I'll be posting later this week and the poem, below:

Rocking Stone Flat

Reaching the edge
of the Flat, I find
I'm looking down
on a green rooftop.
There is a shape to things here
my mind makes sense of:
I've been here before.
And then there's a print,
in the peat, of a running-shoe:
I used to run along this path
a long time ago
and it strikes me now
that now is then and time
no more than a list
of things to do. This is
the same wild place
where the wind grazes
the tops of the grasses
and looking down on rings
of lichen on a stone
is like looking at a picture
of clouds in the sky.

Come Join the Dance

I pasted a few of these Soundcloud tracks a while ago. This one bears a strong family resemblance to Bottletops.

Come Join the Dance by Dominic Rivron