I'm getting tired of useless desires...: September 2012

Saturday 29 September 2012

John Grant: Queen of Denmark

John Grant - Queen Of Denmark.mp3 Listen on Posterous

I wanted to change the world
But I could not even change my underwear
And when the shit got really, really out of hand
I had it all the way up to my hairline
Which keeps receding like my self-confidence
As if I ever had any of that stuff anyway
I hope I didn't destroy your celebration
Or your Bar Mitzvah, birthday party or your Christmas
You put me in this cage and threw away the key
It was this 'us and them' shit that did me in
You tell me that my life is based upon a lie
I casually mention that I pissed in your coffee
I hope you know that all I want from you is sex
To be with someone who looks smashing in athletic wear
And if your haircut isn't right you'll be dismissed
Get your walking papers and you can leave now

Don't know what to want from this world
I really don't know what to want from this world
I don't know what it is you want to want from me
You really have no right to want anything from me at all
Why don't you take it out on somebody else?
Why don't you bore the shit out of somebody else?
Why don't you tell somebody else that they're selfish?
A weakling coward, a pathetic fraud

Who's gonna be the one to save me from myself?
You'd better bring a stun gun and perhaps a crowbar
You'd better pack a lunch and get up really early
And you should probably get down on your knees and pray
It's really fun to look embarrassed all the time
Like you could never cut the mustard with the big boys
I really don't know who the fuck you think you are
Can I please see your license and your registration?

So Jesus hasn't come in here to pick you up
You'll still be sitting right here ten years from now
You're just a sucker but we'll see who gets the last laugh
Who knows, maybe you'll get to be the next queen of Denmark

John Grant: Queen of Denmark

John Grant - Queen Of Denmark.mp3 Listen on Posterous

Friday 28 September 2012

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Autumn in Literature

William Shakespeare personified autumn in Sonnet 73:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

William Blake - “O autumn laden with fruit” - and John Keats with his “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” both wrote odes “To Autumn”.

In the simply-titled “Autumn” John Clare noted “The summer-flower has run to seed / And yellow is the woodland bough / And every leaf of bush and weed / Is tipt with autumn’s pencil now”.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning told us in “The Autumn” that “Waving woods and waters wild / Do hymn an autumn sound”, while a poet she influenced, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote “Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf / How the heart feels a languid grief” in “Autumn Song”.

Some of these celebrate the maturing year while others mourn its aging. It’s a matter of state of mind and art.

The less familiar Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas also addressed the theme of falling leaves and an end of things in his more month-specific poem “October”:

“The green elm with the one great bough of gold

Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, --

The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,

Harebell and scabious and tormentil,

That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,

Bow down to; and the wind travels too light

To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern…”

But leave it to Edgar Allan Poe in “Ululame” most mournfully to use the month as a metaphor for sorrow and loss, particularly referencing the death of a woman – a subject distressingly close to Poe:

“The skies they were ashen and sober;

The leaves they were crisped and sere -

The leaves they were withering and sere;

It was night in the lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year….”

There are more optimistic opinions of October, of course. Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885) reckoned that “Suns and skies and clouds of June / And flowers of June together / ye cannot rival for one hour / October’s bright blue weather”.

The great bucolic New England poet Robert Frost seemed to have mixed feelings in “October”, concentrating on the stillness and maturation of the month, the gradual shortening of the days and the almost teasing, nature of the slow turn towards winter, beseeching the month to keep the harsher weather at bay:

"O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

But to end on a thoroughly cheery note, here are words from “Old October” by a poet from the American Midwest, James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916). He was known as the “Hoosier Poet”, often writing in Indiana dialect which we can follow well enough.

Like Edward Thomas he cites the elm tree in the first few lines:

“Old October's purt' nigh gone,

And the frosts is comin' on

Little HEAVIER every day--

Like our hearts is thataway!

Leaves is changin' overhead

Back from green to gray and red,

Brown and yeller, with their stems

Loosenin' on the oaks and e'ms;

And the balance of the trees

Gittin' balder every breeze--

Like the heads we're scratchin' on!

Old October's purt' nigh gone.”

But Riley is not lamenting the onset of October, rather its ending, likening this to the departure of a friend. Hickory nuts falling, he suggests, are the sound of tears falling at the sadness of this departure:

"I love Old October so,

I can't bear to see her go--

Seems to me like losin' some

Old-home relative er chum--

'Pears like sorto' settin' by

Some old friend 'at sigh by sigh

Was a-passin' out o' sight

Into everlastin' night!

Hickernuts a feller hears

Rattlin' down is more like tears

Drappin' on the leaves below--

I love Old October so!"

Thursday 27 September 2012

Today's Photos: A Short Autumn Walk

“The best we can hope for is our legs never give way from paddling so hard just to stay afloat & our hearts never turn to stone to sink us”

Wednesday 26 September 2012

John Vance Cheney: Tears & The Happiest Heart

Tears (1892)

Not in the time of pleasure
Hope doth set her bow;
But in the sky of sorrow,
Over the vale of woe.
Through gloom and shadow look we
On beyond the years!
The soul would have no rainbow
Had the eyes no tears.
- The Century Vol. 44, Issue 4 (August 1892)