Good Night

Book 11 - Seamus Heaney "Station Island"

Seamus Heaney "Station Island" (Faber & Faber)



He is a writer of the immediate and the physical. He writes with the feel of the iron in your hand and the soft humus sinking beneath your feet. He writes the bite of the wind, and the romance of expectations met and surpassed, or crushed as the case may be. Yet for all the present and gross of his writing, there remains a sheen of the mythic and the sheer understanding of the immortality of the classic as it mingles constant with the world around us today.

Here there is history as a series of ghosts as one walks the stations in search of - what? Here is a man cursed to be a bird, seeing the world from a new perspective and trying to make sense of the insensible. It's a romance that is difficult to characterize firmly, and even more difficult to fully understand, as all of Heaney's work tends to be. Layers upon layers, yet the beauty remains undeniable.


The lesson, ultimately, seems to be that it is impossible to ever choose a favourite work of Heaney's. It's all brilliant, all different, and all undeniable. It is deep meditation on the wrenching emotional cross-currents of the conflict that blighted Northern Ireland and the role of artists in witnessing and addressing that world. The beauty and fluidity of his verse are breathtaking. He is a master. It is a book to read over and over again.

Morning Thoughts

Good morning dear readers. Doing nothing today. Decided to stay at home and read, listen to music and so on. Eeking out the money until payday comes which is hopefully Friday.
Jobs in Dover and Folkestone have been moved to next Tuesday now. Monday I will be in London. It will be my first visit of the year,



The coffee table near the bed and a cup of hazelnut flavoured coffee. Books by the side to read, of course, as none is too far away from me.

I might do some hoovering if I feel inclined.

Avant Garde Videos from UBU Web

Some avant-garde stuff from Ubu website -

Music with Roots in the Aether - Terry Riley 1975

https://UbuWeb Music with Roots in the Aether - Terry Riley 1975


Morton Feldman & Iannis Xenakis

http://www.ubu.com/film/feldman_andriessen.html

Laurie Anderson - Collected Videos

http://www.ubu.com/film/anderson_collected.html

Poems Of The Week

Walls are symbols, they divide us physically and metaphorically, and act as security or psychological barriers. Here are some wall poems.

The Walls Between Us

by Simon Currie

The Senior Lecturer in Philosophy,
expert, maybe, on Ethics (what we owe one another),
hears through the open kitchen window
a hubbub she cannot fathom.
It comes from over the high wall that separates her
from the neighbours. Shouts and cackles in unfamiliar voices
mingle with the breaking of glass, the clang on metal.

The only time she has wished the wall not quite so high,
she gets on with the washing up. But her mind reaches for Heidegger.
His Being and Time dealt with man’s role in a world of objects.
This seems to cover whatever is going on next door.
He championed Hitler, Kristallnacht synonymous with the breaking of glass.
His Predicament of Human Existence was real enough to him
as he pedalled out of Freiburg to escape the Allies.
Yes, he was good on Angst
But the laughter she hears is carefree. Joyful even.
There seems no need to go round.

Later on, she will learn the truth, not from Philosophy,
opaque on rules of behaviour, but from common-or-garden gossip.
The woman next door has gone away for a “dirty weekend”
with someone else’s husband.
He has left in her drive his brand new Lamborghini.
The jilted wife, not content with cutting off toes and collars
from all his socks and shirts, has ventured out with a posse
of friends and children from the neighbouring village,
as medieval enemies did from walled towns on hilltops,
to give him more of what she feels is owed him.


Where There’s a Wall

Joy Kogawa


Printer-friendly version
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
a ladder perhaps and a
sentinel who sometimes sleeps.
There are secret passwords you
can overhear. There are methods
of torture for extracting clues
to maps of underground passages.
There are zeppelins, helicopters,
rockets, bombs, battering rams,
armies with trumpets whose
all at once blast shatters
the foundations.



Where there’s a wall there are
words to whisper by loose bricks,
wailing prayers to utter, birds
to carry messages taped to their feet.
There are letters to be written —
poems even.



Faint as in a dream
is the voice that calls
from the belly
of the wall.

Just Wondering

Do you like rainy days or snow days better?

What's the best thing about your life right now?

How big is your bed (king size or petite?)