Dave's Outlandish Blog

Wednesday, 26 August 2015

Funkadelic in the rain

Its been raining hard here the last few days. Properly leathering it down, to use a leicester slang term. To compensate, I've been listening to this: When it gets wet, get funky! D

Monday, 24 August 2015

On folk songs

Last saturday I went to lewes with my new ladyfriend to a folk night in Lewes.

Lewes is just up the trainline from falmer and differs from Brighton in its rural situation and sleepy Royston-Vasey-esque vibe. It has its own currency, its own brand of beer and an annual bonfire parade, on the 5th of November, in which townpeople march through the street, dressed as red indians and pirates and wheeling effigies of the pope which are then blown up in various bonfires around the town. They also carry burning crosses, representing the protestant martyrs killed by Mary Tudor in the 16th century, which are thrown into the river in rememberance, and drop carry firecrackers which explode loudly in your face when you least expect it. I've been 3 times over the years and it is bacchanalian (lots of drunk brightonians make the pilgrimage every year despite pleas from the local council to stay away), incredibly weird and noisy and very politically incorrect, and also very exciting.

So its an odd place, but with a very rich local culture for those who like these sorts of things, and fine music scene. It being mid August much of the life of the place is in the various pub gardens scattered around the town, and if I had been thinking clearly I would have simply found a nice pub with a few friends and enjoyed it. But I had an itch, and it needed scratching.

I've been into british traditional music for a few years now - since the early 2000s, when as a nerdy undergraduate student at UEA in Norwich I would ransack the University CD library for new and appealing sounds. It was there discovered the masterly work of Martin Carthy and the Watersons, and subsequently began to weird out my flatmates by playing their bare, unvarnished, almost punkish a capella singing every chance I got.

Now the folk road is in many ways a lonely road. Its been said - I think by Joe Boyd, the producer who was at the heart of the folk-rock scene in Britain in the 60s and 70s - that the UK is noteable in the contempt in shows towards its traditional culture. Whats more, like all subcultures, the folk scene is, or can be, in my opinion, a bit of a claustrophobic place, with a hobbyist mentality that makes it a bit inward looking and precious. It is a bit mad, basically, and movies like Inside Llewyn Davis, and the stories about Bob Dylan being called 'Judas' for going in a pop direction are accurate in the basic observation that living in the past isn't really entirely healthy.

That being said, the music itself can still be remarkably beautiful. The songs, polished through centuries of collective use, often have emotional weight and a depth of poetic resonance that mean that sung with feeling, they hit home as accurately and exquisitely as any blues or soul song (And of course, the blue is folk music).

The night itself was nice, a trifle odd, with a range of performances from a mix of people, all committed amateurs. It was entirely egalitarian and so I did a couple of songs ('The sheepstealer' and 'Thorneymoor Woods' - both poaching songs) which went down well. More enjoyable was a long ballad called 'the two sisters', sung by a lady who also acted as compere for the evening, about a murder near a town in the scottish highlands. The way the story unfolds with brutal exactitude was as chilling as any Johnny cash song or gangster rap track, but this time recounted in a soft alto voice to a lilting scots melody by a lady who is someone's grandmother.

I am not sure whether the experience of last week means I'll be more involved in folk music. But I found it moving and enjoyable, and it reminded me of the power of a great song to tap ones emotions.

Thursday, 20 August 2015

Reading Burke and O'Connor

So, I have been working on a research project that is connected to my Phd project that finished last year. I must confess, however, that i am getting a bit tired of the academic life after what has been over 7 years of intellectual toil. I know that it is something that I'm good at, and indeed can make a contribution with, but I think basically it is not making me happy. So I'm going to keep on an meet my responsibilities while I try to figure out what I am going to do next.

In the meantime I've been trying to incorporate more creative stuff into my life. That has meant writing, but also reading. And I love reading. I have my parents to thank for this, who are both readers and writers (my Dad is a Professor of American History and my Mum a multi-talented speech and language therapist who has published on allotment gardening, diego rivera and the calumet copper strike of 1903). I think reading only academic work can leave one craving for the emotional reaction one gets from well written fiction.

My go-to writer for a satisfying read is the American crime and mystery novellist James Lee Burke. His Dave Robicheaux novels are consistently absorbing, moving and brilliant, and also very violent, but operate on a mythic plane that transform his characters - cops, mobsters, poor rural people from Louisiana and Montana and Texas - into heroic figures in a medieval romance. He's also not afraid of including supernatural elements, reflecting a deep and mordant spirituality rooted in Burke's own recovery from alcoholism and his Catholicism, traits shared by Robicheaux himself. The most recent book of his I read, 'Light of the World' takes this to new levels with its apocalyptic showdown between Robicheaux and his partner and best friend Clete Purcell, and the principal villain, the demonic serial killer Asa Surrette, in a Montana landscape haunted by the ghosts of the Nez Perce and the private spectres that many of the characters carry around inside their own heads.

Anyway so I've been reading that. Also I've started looking into the work of the more famous southern novelist Flannery O'Connor, an acknowledged influence on Burke but also on the worldview of people like Nick Cave. She was an incredible gifted writer with a profound intellect who was also a Catholic, in a part of the world (South Carolina) where the majority of the population were Southern Baptists or other Protestant free church denominations. The book I read of hers, 'Wise Blood', is incredibly bizarre and powerful, a fable, basically, of a returned soldier from WW2 who goes back to his home state having lost his faith, and is so disgusted at the religious complacency and hypocrisy of his people that he founds a 'Church without christ', and starts preaching on the street. It ends in a shocking and bewildering fashion but is also very moving and isn't by any stretch of the imagination an atheist novel, rather showing the desperate, crazy attempts of ignorant people for some kind of meaningful transcendence in a culture that is suffocating in its narrowness of vision.

Why am I getting into Catholic writers? I don't necessarily think their catholicism defines them, as their writing is beautiful. However there is something about the worldview of catholicism, of the idea of 'the human comedy', of grace, redemption and the reality of good and evil, plus a certain skepticism toward the claims of modernity that can make for very compelling writing.

As for an assessment of my own spiritual worldview in my writing, I guess i better write something first...

Monday, 17 August 2015

This, that and 'the Other'. Or why its generally better to suit up and show up.

Yeah I know. How long has it been this time? A year plus? How embarrassing. Please accept my apologies and a free copy of my future bestseller, 'fifty shades of brown - english cookery through the ages' (pending its existence).

So the big news is I am finally starting to commit to this writing lark. A friend of mine, an opera singer, who seems to attract these situations, told me about an encounter he'd on the train. He was sharing a cab with an old lady, and they got talking. Apparently the woman who is now in her 80s and 'not crazy', was told as a child she was a 'dreamer'. To which portentous augury from the fates she responded by ignoring it, doing nothing with her talents of prophecy and falling into a unsatisfactory marriage. Several marriages later she is now alone. She is now 'a poetess' (my friend is french) and writer, who has recently published a book based on a recurring dream she had about the end of the world. 'Her life is now beginning' says my friend. As I don't want to have to become an elderly woman before that happens, I thought I'd jump the gun.

What I've been doing since is committing to an hour a day, just turning on the tap and seeing what comes out. I have a purple A5 ring binder (aka ' my papers'), and I am filling it up. Some of it is okay, some frankly is gobbledeygook, but then that is gobbledeygook that is deeply original and unique to me. The useful thing I am finding is 1) I am getting better already and 2) this feels necessary, not just an indulgence. So even if this is a load of cobblers, be warned, there is going to be a load more of it...

The other big news is of such bigness I am hesitant to relate it here, except to say it involves a person other than myself. In my anthropological training we talked a lot about 'the other' and its centrality to social research, but I never really understood the profound centrality to everything, perhaps because I'm a bit self absorbed. People are like doors, they can open you up to whole new vistas of experience, and allow for traffic in things and words and ideas that result in change. In my research fieldwork I learned that West African communities value relationships as much as material goods, because relationships increase the flows of people and wealth (and, in the body, fluids vital to life) while isolation cuts off these flows of exchange and negates life. The worst thing you can be in West Africa is anti-social. Wealth is people.
And love is being for and being open to the other (Forgive me if I state the obvious, but I'm a slow learner) resulting in a sense of being that is wider and deeper than that of a single individual.
So yeah. I guess the general point of these musings is its better for me to show up and write something less that stellar because you, dear reader, are more important than my lack of faith in my own abilities.

Avanti!
D

Saturday, 4 January 2014

Wild Nights and Football Chants

Greetings. Its been a little while since I took the time to write on these pages. I don't know if those fine souls who stumbled this way over the years and read my posts have been missing me, but if so, I apologise. What to say? Life. Downs and Ups. Maybe one day i'll tell you the tale of how I came to be a 30 year old social scientist living in North Moulescoombe. One day-but not today...

I suppose the big news is my thesis is submitted, after a last heroic lunge for the finish line back in August. And inevitably, things look different. During the slog itself, it was like pulling teeth: stress and much flailing around, doubts even to its value. After the deadline, and I'm thinking about doing some more. Weird. Just goes to show that ones perspective is often quite narrow.

Christmas came and went. I took the coach up to my mum's place in leicestershire, along with 20-or-so other last minuters, on Christmas Eve. It was a good few days, of being-with and not-doing, of roving out across muddy fields, playing silly games. This time of year has power, despite the wheelbarrowloads of commerce and distraction we've put on it. A time for families, and therefore these days of migration, of returning home, to find the 'safe harbour' as always suddenly slightly different. This time it was the street lights. The council has taken to switching them off (or at least some) to save energy. I didn't notice it at first, until I nearly ran into a bollard during a late night stroll. 'Bollards!' I cried. Anyway, the drop in light pollution gave the starlight a brightness I only remember seeing last in West Africa, as I sat on the bench outside the old house looking up on Christmas Eve, feeling a bit like one of the Wise Men in the story, sans frankincense or indeed, an excess of wisdom.

Now I'm here in Brighton again, back at the grind, but with a clearer picture of my next move. The weather has been wild and soggy. While we were away, the skylight in my office space blew off, dumping a load of sawdust and rainwater onto one of the vacant desks, nearly obliterating one of my friends' work. It has since been fixed. Recently, during another late evening typing session, we could hear the Albion fans over at the stadium, their voices carried across campus by the wind. I'm at home right now, nice to be indoors on another wild night...

A thousand miles south

A thousand miles south its still one o'clock

Its just hotter

As I sit on a plastic stool in the dust

Watching a woman chopping greens into

a plastic bowl

While a pot of oil steams on coals and branches

Red with foam

and a chicken avoids my gaze

I've been here before

Further south

on a fading spit of rock and sand

fishing boats all around

that man sat in chains;

who did the same and worse

and got

what he didn't deserve

Fishing boats all around

'Do you remember me?

Your friend, where have you been?'

Too late

We flee again

to cows cars

traffic

kids in the streets.

Sunday, 5 May 2013

Reduced to clear

It occurred to him, dully, while he was vainly trying to remember what he needed to buy, that perhaps the fruit and vegetable section had been designed to resemble an actual market, with wicker-work baskets of baking potatoes and onions and courgettes stacked in rows of controlled disarray, as if deposited by busy stevedore at the docks. And in the absence of docks, some interior design kid working at the head office had thought to provide them in facsimile, as if the fulfil some subtle need people had for bustle and abundant disorder.

Maybe.

He let out a sigh. Onions. Did he need then or not? While he stood there blinking a maroon-shirted employee – a girl, brown hair tied back behind a white paper hat - rolled past a towering stack of cellophane wrapped aubergines.

It was about five-thirty. He’d just got off work and he’d remembered that Nina was supposed to be coming over later, and he’d promised to cook. She was probably still in the car but he knew he’d better get himself together before she got back.

It was one of the things he both appreciated and vaguely resented about Nina. She wouldn’t let him off the hook. Before they’d met he’d happily let himself slip into a routine of slowly spreading disorganisation, which seemed to have been his default state for years, since he’d been at Uni and the early dutiful enthusiasm drilled into him by his mother had been overwhelmed by the temptations of 9 hour weeks, and the dawning knowledge that he could write an essay pretty much blindfolded. With Nina, it wasn’t what she said, it was how she looked. It was a look that, when they’d come home to his flat on their 4th date 3 years ago and seen the chaos of his front room, told him that he’d better shape up. It was a look that said ‘I didn’t know people still lived like this’, a look reserved for social workers and government officials inspecting condemned factories.

He picked up a couple of onions and dropped them into the basket, a plan forming in the back of his mind. It involved kidney beans, he decided, and headed over to where he dimly remembered they were found. The place was busy with post-work shoppers, student couples in narrow cut jeans and big jumpers, hipster mums and dads, mostly. The queues at the checkout snaked back in anxious antipation, the ambient sound of squeaking trolley wheels and murmured conversation punctuated by the beep of the tills and the self issue machines.

It was its own society, its own cultural world, this place, Nick thought as he mooched along the aisles. He caught sight of himself in the reflection of the glass in the vegetarian foods section, his black overcoat and too-long sideparted haircut, his face still youngish even with the beard that Nina had started to comment on again. He thought, on days when he was being charitable to himself, he could still pass as a latter day Freidrich Engels, or one of those fin de siècle intellectuals who wrote about industrial society and would have been sorrowful atheists, despite their abiding belief in the commonality of mankind. When he’d mentioned this, Nina had raised her exquisite eyebrows and remarked that she liked her fin de siècle intellectuals more when they’d has a shave. Then, seeing his hangdog expression she’d given him a kiss.

She was good for him. He knew this. His friends told him, repeatedly, and occasionally he believed them.
He arrived at the canned foods section, and scanned the shelves intently. A little old lady was gingerly checking something in her purse, her trolley parked a little way up the aisle. An older gentleman, who Nick took to be her husband, was waiting earnestly further up the aisle, a slight tremor animating his bald head as he stared back at her. Nick waited patiently for the lady to finish what she was doing, and then reached down and grabbed a can of kidney beans and dropped them in his basket. Suddenly his phone rang. He fumbled in his pocket and pressed the call button. It was Nina.

‘Hey babe’

‘Hi Nick… are you free to talk?’
‘Um, yes…’ why wouldn’t I be?, he thought. Her voice sounded awkward, formal. And immediately his heart gave a lurch.
‘Listen, um, this isn’t easy for me to say, but… okay, so I’m not coming over to yours tonight. The thing is…’

He didn’t remember the rest of the conversation, although it had been mostly horrible and obvious and inevitable, and afterwards, he’d recall how he stood there dumbly as she’d laid it out for him, his shopping basket at his feet, the old couple shuffling up the aisle. He could have sworn that the old man had turned and looked at him for a second, as if he somehow sensed what was happening, with that look that all coupled men give in situations like this, an expression of pity and relief, that he himself had made it through.
After she’d hung up, Nick looked at his shopping, at the red onion and the can of kidney beans, then stared around. The old couple were disappearing around the corner to the next aisle. A voice was talking over the tannoy asking if John could proceed to the checkout. The noise of the supermarket continued unabated, as people queued and paid and bagged up and chattered to each other about nothing much and their trolleys sqeaked along the disinfected lino floor. Out of ideas, he picked up his shopping basket, and walked down the aisle.