The Ballad Of Shirley Collins

I have just watched a wonderful DVD called The Ballad Of Shirley Collins. Shirley is our grand lady of English folk song and recorded Lodestar a couple of years back. She had been silent for thirty years before that recording.






Here is an interview she did a few years back.

Shirley Collins MBE is the most important living voice in English folk music. She travelled across the southern States of the USA in 1959 recording traditional songs with Alan Lomax, she was a key figure in the folk revival of the late 60s and now, after a lengthy absence, she is back making music.

Current 93 feat. Shirley Collins - All The Pretty Little Horses

From the 1999 compilation "Calling For Vanished Faces"
(DURTRO 043CD)

Shirley Collins - Death And The Lady

Enjoy.

Good Morning!

Book 61 - Nicola J. Watson (ed) "Romantics and Victorians"

Nicola J. Watson (ed) "Romantics and Victorians (Reading and Studying Literature)" (Bloomsbury Academic)





A very good book if you are interested in the subject - which I am and have studied - as if it is a Set Book for the OU degree course in the Humanities. It is often a delight to dip into and read back some of these studies and essays we had to analyse and write upon for the course. This is an updated edition from 2014.

Book 62 - Stanislav Lem "The Star Diaries"

Stanislav Lem "The Star Diaries" (Penguin Modern Classics)


The Star Diaries by Stanisław Lem is a group of short stories that the author wrote over a time period from the 1950s and expanded and reissued in 1971. This is the paperback resissue from 2015.

An amazing mix of science fiction and fantasy, philosophy and satire operating at several different levels. Lem uses the science fiction genre to satirise the human propensity to see itself as the pinnacle of development, taking different elements of human society and examining them through the lens of human and non-human cultures. But a well as this broad sweep, there is the more narrow examination of the absurdities of the Soviet culture in which he lived and wrote.

In fact, more so than Solaris, it is one of my Lem favourites. The character Tichy, a cosmonaut comes across as a down to earth average guy character, not perfect but a good egg mostly and we follow him through a series of Voyages which cover a chapter each and describe his adventures in space, on planets and various scrapes. He encounters strange space phenomena, alien civilisations, and even time warped versions of himself during his crazy adventures. The style is high farce but with some very interesting ideas threaded through the humour. Very readable and a book that I will always come back for. Lem's writing is always full of new surprises upon each reading as the reader matures. I first read this book when I was 13 and enjoyed it for its humorous space adventure aspects, but upon later subsequent readings I really came to appreciate the deeper side of his thinking on man's place in the universe, alien cultures and space exploration and colonisation. Star Diaries is a good introduction to Lems work and once you get his taste you will not be able to forget him. His passing was a great loss to the world of truly sophisticated Science Fiction writing.

Shun Li And The Poet

It has been a rather chilled out day reading and listening to music. For lunch, I had a jacket potato with cheese pasta and then followed by some very sweet tasty strawberries. However, on this nonchalant day, I also watched a DVD from one of my charity shop excursions.

The movie is called Shun Li And The Poet. From 2011 it tells the story of Shun Li (Zhao Tao) who has been working in a textile workshop in the outskirts of Rome for eight years trying to obtain the documents to bring her son to Italy. She is suddenly transferred to Chioggia, a small island town situated in the Venetian lagoon to work as a bartender in a tavern. Bepi (Rade Šerbedžija), a fisherman of Slavic origin, nicknamed by friends as "the Poet", has been visiting the little inn for years. Their meeting is a poetic escape from loneliness, a silent dialogue between different cultures. It is a journey into the heart of a deep lagoon, known to be a mother and birthplace of identity. But the friendship between Shun Li and Bepi disturbs both communities, Chinese and Chioggia, which hinders this new journey, which perhaps is simply still too scary. They part ways but, like the ocean, are drawn back together again. It is a wonderful and charming drama of loss and gain. I recommend it if you see it anywhere on DVD.

Just Wondering

What do you use to cope when you’re feeling uncomfortable?

What makes you feel unstoppable?

Do you eat the crust of your bread first, last or not at all?

Poem Of The Week

Following on from the book on the Romantics, this is my poem of the week.

To a Skylark

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY


Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its a{:e}real hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embower'd
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflower'd,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awaken'd flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match'd with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Good Night