Getting There ...

It rained yesterday and it looks like it will rain today. Dull and overcast as i look our from my window.

Feeling a but better now , not constantly sneezing,although still troubled by some  catarrh  which i shall remedy with some medicine today. Also, all that coughing is making my chest and stomach hurt a bit but that will fade too. Certainly not one hundred per cent but getting there..

I was going to go for an induction to start a new course, i do not feel like it, so shall phone them up to see if i can move the induction date towards the end of the week.

Nope, the way this weather is looming it ill be a day to stay in and recover.

A Sanders Morning

So, to cheer me up a bit, here is another fine piece of jazz that makes me feel good , once again by Pharoah Sanders (last time i posted Blase) and from the album Thembi, the title track.

Then i shall travelling different plains of existence in Astral Travelling -

Pharoah Sanders -  Thembi, 1971.

Pharoah Sanders (sax, bells, percussion); Michael White (vlolin, percussion); Lonnie Liston Smith (piano, claves, percussion); Cecil McBee (b, finger cymbals, percussion); James Jordan (ring cymbals).

Enjoy/

Carol Kaye

Here is an inspiring video of perhaps the least known base player, Carol Kaye, and her long career as a bass player who can play the funky licks.. Spend just over an hour with her story. Remarkable.

Enjoy.

Book 48 - Frank Furedi "Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?"

Frank Furedi "Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?" (Continuum)






In this book, Frank Furedi argues that genuine intellectuals have largely disappeared from the public sphere - paradoxically, given that we supposedly live in a knowledge economy supported by an expanding higher education sector. The result is that potential intellectuals have taken up other, narrower, roles e.g. lobbyists, policy-advisers. This has impoverished public life. Furedi identifies the causes of this decline; the bureaucratisation of the university; reverse snobbishness; obsession with inclusiveness and relevance at all costs. In the final chapter he suggest where we should go from here.

Succinct and thought-provoking.

Stranded

Spent most of the afternoon listening to CD's - Pharoah Sanders "Thembi" and in particular this one -



This is a fascinating collection of songs from old 78's that have been collected by Christoph Wagner. There are Irish tunes, Serbo-Croat, German, Finnish, Norwegian, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Mexican, Swish and Austrian etc. I have been trying to find You Tube tracks of these tunes but none seem to exist, apart from this Jewish one by Morris Goldstein "Die Griene Cuisiene"

and this one by Finnish emigrant Arthur Kylander - Oi kuinka engeliksi mielin

Plus this one by another Finn  Hiski Salomaa  and the song Lännen lokari

This is an old Finnish immigrant song from the USA recorded in New York at 01.06.1930.
In fact Hiski Salomaa wasn't the most famous singer at Finns ballrooms, but he is one of those few, whose songs has been recorded and recordings has survived through these years.
These songs are mainly stories about hard work, homesick and clever notices about their new home country.
Finnish immigrants were known as "quiet people", they were hard workers working mainly as loggers and miners.
At free time they gathered together at their Halls where this kind of travelling musicians were entertaining them.
In some songs they are using Fingelska, an language including some words from English.
I hope owners of the rights want to see this as an honor to artist, which it really is !
And same goes to these random photos, which I have found from net.
My hope is , that everyone can just listen to these songs and think some minutes of those hard times, which these brave men and women has spent far away from home. Enjoy !

Enjoy.

Mockingbird Axed

So Michael Gove , our Education Minister , wants to relegate or remove American classics such as To Kill A Mockingbird from the English curriculum in our schools. Another philistine move from this weedy government that i find abhorrent. -

From a Guardian headline on my tablet

"To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men axed as Gove orders more Brit lit.  New English literature GCSE ditches American classics for pre-20th century British authors such as Dickens and Austen".

The article continues - "Last year, Gove, who has said children should be reading 50 books a year from the age of 11, told a conference of independent school heads that he would much prefer to see a child reading George Eliot's Middlemarch than one of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight vampire novels.

The actor and writer Emma Kennedy tweeted: "But why would Gove want children to learn about tolerance and doing what is right rather than what is popular?"
The Department for Education said: "In the past, English literature GCSEs were not rigorous enough and their content was often far too narrow. We published the new subject content for English literature in December. It doesn't ban any authors, books or genres. It does ensure pupils will learn about a wide range of literature, including at least one Shakespeare play, a 19th-century novel written anywhere and post-1914 fiction or drama written in the British Isles.

"That is only the minimum pupils will be expected to learn. It is now up to exam boards to design new GCSEs, which must then be accredited by the independent exams regulator Ofqual."

The direction on the syllabus content published by the department last year, and which exam boards must follow, specified: "Students should study a range of high-quality, intellectually challenging, and substantial whole texts in detail. These must include: at least one play by Shakespeare; at least one 19th-century novel; a selection of poetry since 1789, including representative Romantic poetry; and fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards. All works should have been originally written in English."

The exam boards – and indeed individual schools – are free to add any extra books they see fit, but the new rules have left them very little room for any 20th-century writing from outside Britain.

Although pre-20th century literature will now dominate, Anita and Me, Meera Syal's 1996 story of a British Punjabi girl in the Midlands, and DNA, Dennis Kelly's 2007 play about bullying, are understood to have made it on to the list."

When will this government leave schools to set their own lists from a recommended reading list and not interfere. 

Book 49 - M. R. James "Ghost Stories"

M. R. James "Ghost Stories" (Vintage)




"It was a horrid, grotesque shape -- perhaps more like a toad than anything else, and there was a label by it inscribed with the two words, 'Despositum custodi." Maybe not exactly the type of ghost story you'd read around a campfire, holding a flashlight under your face, but really ideal for stormy autumn night.

My one recommendation is to space them out.

I read a few back-to-back over the course of a night, and they sort of blended together. They were still enjoyable, but to get the most out of them, it helps to perhaps read one story a night. My personal favorites were Casting the Runes, The Tractate Middoth (which reminded me a bit of a creepier, less zany version of The Golden Child), The Ashtree, and Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance.

The stories generally feature some poor luckless soul who accidentally and innocently unlocks a horrible, centuries old curse. M.R. James was a Cambridge academic and it is fully apparent -- the stories feature scholars, dusty old libraries, antique books and ancient texts, and incorporate archaeology, theology, and mythology. I had to look up several bits of untranslated Latin. I hope that isn't a deterrent. The stories are easy to read, but they do take for granted that the reader is intelligent and literate, or has access to google or a good Latin dictionary.