Saturday 25 July 2020

Rough and Rowdy, Bob Dylan


'Considered, elegiac and richly allusive, this austere gem may be Dylan’s best album in 40 years' Bryan Applyard , Sunday Times july 2020
This is his first album since Tempest 2012. I read a wonderful review – “So Bob, you’re 80 next year; what have you to say for yourself?“ the overall effect is austere, serious and pared down. It is a mesmeric and magnificent piece of work. 
"The songs vary from romantic to surreal. His rhyming is as ingenious, playful and varied as ever.” Lyrically Dylan is operating at a peak not seen since his albums Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde. 
SONGS:   Key West (Philosopher Pilot)/ Black Rider/  Crossing the Rubicon/  I sing of love/  I sing of betrayal,/ I Contain multitudes/  False Prophet/ My Own Version of You. And the Lovely romantic ballad – I have made up my mind to give myself to you. Dylan writes, “Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be.’
Another link – the assassination of John F Kennedy at the center of Murder most foul, and in a sense of the center of entire album, suggesting, as it does, a dark cloud, which may be death or may be Trump, from which there is no escape.
On the Lyrics on Murder most Foul - “Visiting morgues and monasteries/ looking for the necessary body part” with Freud and Marx looking on. Plus others -   Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, the bluesman jimmy reed, Elvis, Presley, Allen Ginsberg, jack Kerouac, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Tom Dooley. This is an assertion that culture comes first, history is a footnote; a long one, but a footnote nonetheless. Culture, like the individual, contains everything, right or wrong, good or bad. Everything is double-edged. 
"Whitman was similarly obsesses with the assignations of his friend Abraham Lincoln. His two most famous poems – ‘Oh Captain! My Captain! – “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomd” – are about the terrible moment.. 
"The album celebrated the noble conviction – Whitman’s conviction – that you can’t sing about anything without singing about everything. With this album Dylan announces himself as Whitman’s child.  As a way of saying we contain, like Whitman all contradictory possibilities. 
“I’m not what I was; things aren’t what they were.” Back to when he told journalists, you cant put me in a box.”  The backing is sparse but precise,  and beautifully exact in its evocation of genres – ballad, blues and so on.. also a kind of list of American musical forms.” Whitman’s attempted to contain the entire country.  

Friday 24 July 2020

Lockdown Images



We live north of Glasgow, close to the Campsie hills, Mugdock country park, Craigmaddie reservoir, Loch Ardinny and only a short drive to the Trossachs and Loch Lomond.. Sometimes perhaps we don’t appreciate the sheer variety and beauty of the landscapes around us. During lockdown for 3 months Mugdock park car parks were all closed, to our dismay, and we weren’t allowed to drive, except for essential trips. The daily walk was a lifeline! (for our dog too).








We are very fortunate to enjoy the Scottish ever-changing and subtle light. During lockdown Scotland enjoyed weeks of the best weather – clear and fresh sunny skies – which was perfect.
For the first time small birds returned and the air seemed to sparkle and I thought, this was how the world used to be before the pollution with our air, road and rail traffic. There was a quiet stillness which was both odd and also reassuring.  







Tuesday 30 June 2020

The Poems of Ossian



Macpherson’s poems of Ossian translations from the Gaelic traditions – had a profound influence on many painters, poets and writers. And his books were read internationally. The poet MacDiarmid lamented for Scotia’s lost music. 

Professor Alan Raich writes in his National articles - Immense, deep ... and surprisingly rich: The legacy of Ossian
By Alan Riach Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University

“The poems of Ossian had a profound influence but the idea that Macpherson perpetrated a “hoax” persists. This is unjust and inadequate. In Fiona Stafford’s words, Macpherson’s Ossian is “pre-eminently a text of the margins – not in the sense that it is peripheral to serious literary study but because it inhabits the margins of contrasting, oppositional cultures.

For Macpherson’s ‘translations’ involved acts of interpretation not only between Gaelic and English, but also between the oral culture of the depressed rural communities of the Scottish Highlands, and the prosperous urban centres of Lowland Britain, where the printed word was increasingly dominant.”

In this context, they are “less the work of an inexpert linguist, or an unscrupulous ‘Scotsman on the make’ than a sophisticated attempt to mediate between two apparently irreconcilable cultures.”

The legacy of Ossian, beyond Macpherson’s actual works, is immense, deep and surprisingly rich. Images of Ossian have perennially been a subject for the visual arts. 
“To remember the great music and to look
At Scotland and the world today is to hear
An Barr Buadh again where there are none to answer
And to feel like Oisin d’ éis na Féine or like Christ.”

And it is not only paintings and drawings. The literary influence is there, too, and was felt early. Wordsworth (1770-1850), in “Glen-Almain; or, the Narrow Glen” (1803), a result of his tour in Scotland, writes:
“In this still place, remote from men,
Sleeps Ossian, in the NARROW GLEN;
In this still place, where murmurs on
But one meek streamlet, only one:”

Ghosts and graves and windy hills and caves are an essential parts of the story - 
as in the short, haunting poem
 Ossian’s Grave” by the Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41), here given in my own translation:
“In the Highlands of Scotland I love, 
Storm clouds curve down on the dark fields and strands,
With icy grey mist closing in from above –
Here Ossian’s grave still stands.
In dreams my heart races to be there,
To deeply breathe in its native air –
And from this long-forgotten shrine
Take its second life as mine.



** The Gaelic phrases relate to this. In footnotes, MacDiarmid explains “An Barr Buadh” is “somewhat in a state between existence and non-existence.”
And “d’ éis na Féine” is:  “A withered babbling old man, ‘Oisin after the Fianna’ (ie when his love for Ireland made him return to it from Tir-na-nog) in that immortal phrase which has in it more than Virgilian tears.”

In other words, the evocation of Ossian “after the Fianna” –
after his father and family and companions of high youth, health and vigour, have all gone into the past, leaving him old, blind and alone – delivers a permanent image of tragic and irrecoverable loss, encompassing and predating other ancient religions and civilisations.
And there is no fraud or hoax involved in that. Its permanence is also Ossian’s legacy.



Scots Top Ten!



According to the Sunday Times recently - 

Top Ten Films
Local Hero
Gregory’s girl
Whisky Galore
Prime o miss Jean Brodie
Trainspotting
Wicker Man
Braveheart
Shallow Grave
Geordie
Restless Heart
Del Amitri

Top Ten bands 
Proclaimers
Simple minds
Deacon Blue
The Blue Nile
Travis
The Waterboys
Runrig
Belle & Sebastian
Del Amitri
Iain Banks & Alex Salmond
William MclLivanney
Top Ten authors
Robert Louis Stevenson
JK Rowling
Walter Scott
Iain Banks
William MclLivanney
Muriel Sparks
Irvine Welsh
Alasdair Gray
John Buchan
Lewis Grassic Gibbons
Top Ten Artists
Charles Rennie Macintosh
Henry Raeburn
SJ Peploe
JD Fergusson
Joan Eardley
Jack Vitrianno
Eduardo Paolozzi
Alison Watt
Margaret Macdonald
John Lawrie Morrison

Top Ten Scots Songwriters
Robert Burns
Gerry Rafferty
Annie Lennox
Lewis Capaldi
Ricky Ross
Lulu
Fran Healy
Proclaimers