I Worn My Elbows by Ivor Cutler

Coleridge Binge, and the smell of second hand books

I tend to go through obsessive phases with writers and at the moment it's Coleridge.

I'm not new to Coleridge. I went through a Romantic Poet phase about twenty years ago, and read everything I could lay my hands on by Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and outriders such as Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. It all felt very fresh and real, and easy to relate to. Sometimes linear time doesn't seem to matter at all.

At university I studied Mary Wollstonecraft. It was an extremely interesting time for women, but they were limited by their biology in a way that men obviously weren't. Crude methods of contraception at best. Dropping like flies due to ghastly puerperal complications. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to her daughter, also called Mary, who of course grew up to write Frankenstein and have, I would say, a pretty grim time as Shelley's wife. Who knows what she might have achieved had she lived? She'd already visited Paris during the revolution, and written several books.

Frost at Midnight appeals to me especially, because I love the imagery of ice and frost and also because Coleridge set it at the fireside in his "cottage", which sounds not dissimilar to my own pretty draughty ramshackle and tiny mid-19thC. home.

Here is a link to Coleridge's cottage.

I really like my copy of Coleridge's poems. It's very small, circa 1900, published by Harrap, with a lovely illustration from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. You can stick it in your pocket quite easily. I bought it in a second hand bookshop years ago for three pounds. Where have all the second hand bookshops gone? Ruined by Ebay, that's where. It's not the same, shopping for old books online - you have to hold a book in your hands and SMELL IT to know if you want it or not.

Quote of the Day (2) Coleridge - a fragment from the life of dreams

'Call it a moment's work (and such it seems),
This tale's a fragment from the life of dreams;
But say, that years matured the silent strife,
And 'tis a record from the dream of life.'

S.T. Coleridge, Phantom or Fact (1830)

Petula Clark: La nuit n'en finit plus

'Pet' Clark is 79 years old today! Such a great voice.

An even better Scots wurd o' th' day

Still on page 143 and I've happened upon an even better wurd.

Drabloch, n. refuse, trash, applied to very small potatoes and bad butcher-meat.

Gosh!

When does one ever encounter bad butcher-meat in Scotland? I ask you.

Scots wurd(s) o' th' Day - "Dow'd fish"

Continuing the piscine theme, today's wurd(s) is DOW'D FISH.


Dow'd fish, n. fish that has been drying for a day or two.

Fancy!

From page 143 of Chambers's Scots Dictionary, 1959 reprint of the 1911 edition.

The Viviparous Blenny, or 'Dornicle'

Re. my earlier post featuring the Scots word 'dornicle'- I have now got round to Googling the definition given in Chambers's Scots Dictionary, viz. 'the viviparous blenny'.

It's a fish, basically, also known as the viviparous eelpout.
It is also the only fish which suckles its young. Who knew?

If you'd like to learn more, you can Google it yourself or look here.

Life is full of shadows and light

Life is full of shadows and light. The worst shadow I've encountered is child abuse. It is the ultimate evil.
I saw on the news that the Catholic church can now be held responsible for the abusive actions of some of its employees - priests, and care home workers for example. I'm glad, but at the same time it makes me feel sick because it brings back so much.
I heard many accounts of child abuse as a psychotherapist. All of them were soul-destroying. Some of them involved the church, but most didn't. Most involved 'grandad', 'stepdad', 'daddy', 'mummy's new friend', or 'mummy'.

Family photographs of Army dads in their smart uniforms, with bonny blonde daughters who look just like their proud, blind wives.

Young children climbing out of windows and running through the snow, barefoot in their pyjamas, to get away from 'grandad'.

Single parents, targeted by sickos who pretend to be interested in the adult, but who are really after the little 'uns.

A GP coming in to my room, white-faced after examining a five year old who had clearly been raped. "But couldn't she have said no?" Hardly.

Yes - this is what happens in our communities every day - every day! and I'm not exaggerating. What kind of species are we?

I don't believe in 'the family'. Certainly not the nuclear version. It covers too many shadows with its bright shiny surface.

"Oh no - grandad would never....you're making that up 'slap'."

Too often the truth doesn't come out till many years later. There are far too many horrible old bastards sipping pints in their local "oh aye, he's a great lad, salt of the earth", and pinnacles of the local community hiding sordid secrets who never get called to account.

Disgusting. Is there anything we can do to stop it? Not really. Some adults are born to abuse, or at least are so bent out of shape that it seems that way, and the 'family' will mask it all. I'm fed up trying to understand the whys of it. They know it's wrong, and they still do it anyway because they have the power to terrify their victim into silence.
This is what I meant in an earlier post "Are we innately good?"
I'm tempted to think not any more, but I'm not a defeatist so am hanging on in there.

Scots wurd o' th' day - Hecklepins

Today's Scots wurd is 'hecklepins'.

It's a word I use quite a lot. I used it yesterday and someone - a "blog reader" as it happens - asked me what it meant.
So, here's a helpful definition from Chambers's Scots Dictionary.

Heckle-pins, n. the teeth of a 'heckle'.

As in, "Ah'm oan hecklepins waiting fur mu results frae the doactur."

Or, "Ah'm oan hecklepins till ma gas bill arrives, ah'm fair puggled wi' it ye ken."

Hope that helps!

It might help to know the definition of 'heckle'.

Heckle, n. a sharp pin; a hackle, a comb with steel teeth for dressing flax and hemp; a thorn in one's side - v. to dress flax with a 'heckle'; to cross-question a candidate for parliamentary or municipal honours at a public meeting; to examine searchingly; to scold severely; to tease, provoke.

Find these on p. 256 of Chambers's Scots Dictionary, 1959 reprint of the 1911 edition.

As hecklepins is quite a well-known 'wurd', I'll give another couple, which I've certainly never heard of never mind used. And can I reiterate - I do NOT make these up.

Fisty, n. a left-handed person

Fissle-fisslin', n. a faint rustling sound.

Both can be found on p. 175, ibid.

A few thoughts on Abjection and Last Tango in Paris

I went for a walk round a nearby loch this afternoon; it was cold and clear and the trees were beautiful after two nights of frost, so I was hoping to take some photos of the reflections in the still water.
But my camera wouldn't work. It's OK - it does that occasionally. Then I thought I might take a photo on my phone, but the battery was flat. Then I thought maybe it's just as well not to share. A beautiful afternoon goes deeper than memory - it goes into the soul and remains there as part of you even when you think you've forgotten all about it. A photograph can't begin to capture that.
Then, I saw two young hen pheasants at the roadside, dead. They'd been hit by a car, very recently. They hadn't been squashed, and there was no blood. The way they'd fallen, one had her head lying across the other's neck, in an attitude of complete abjection, eyes closed in submission to the inevitable. It reminded me of Holbein's Dead Christ. (see The Powers of Horror, by Julia Kristeva)
It cut me to the quick but it was easy to resist the crude impulse to shed a crass, bathetic tear. Those deaths were worth more than that.
I've been thinking about Julia Kristeva in another sense today. I was thinking about Maria Schneider, who starred in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. She died earlier this year, aged 58. She was 19 when she starred in that film, and from then on it defined her. If you Google her, "butter scene" is almost top of the list. She is quoted as saying (this isn't word for word) "Never take your clothes off for shiny-eyed middle aged men, especially if they say it's for Art". I've seen that film half a dozen times. I had an obsession with Marlon Brando when I was in my twenties, and saw everything he'd been in as often as I could. I haven't seen Last Tango for maybe fifteen years; I remember thinking Brando's performance was extraordinary. However, there was definitely something about the subtext which unnerved me, which I couldn't quite articulate at the time. I wanted to like Brando, I really did, and my sympathy was with him rather than Schneider's callow film-making boyfriend, but there was something horribly repellent about him.
I now think of the film as an unpleasant exercise in sadism, but I'd be interested to watch it again in case I'm wrong. Bertolucci made an effort to redeem it through intellectualising a basically tawdry premise; Maria Schneider as the centre of his stereotypical shiny-eyed middle-aged fantasy of no-strings no-holds-barred sex with an easily malleable and disposable stranger. Schneider as plastic doll, in other words. Brando, an only slightly less shiny eyed middleager, was playing both sides - only he was worse than Bertolucci because of his duplicity and because I am sure that he knew better but was too jaded to care very much.
What has this to do with Julia Kristeva? I haven't time to explain! She refused to accept the label of "feminist", which is precisely why I like her work so much, but her analysis of the male gaze surpasses anything else I've read. No polemic, no rigid position-taking, and that has to be good.
More *at some point*

Quote of the Day - WB Yeats

"Although I know when looks meet
I tremble to the bone
The more I leave the door unlatched
The sooner love is gone
For love is but a skein unbound
Between the dark and dawn..."

Verse one from Crazy Jane and the Journeyman, by WB Yeats (great title!)

Oban community fireworks fiasco

If you've never strolled along the Oban sea front of an evening, eating fish and chips while watching the gulls wheel high above the ferries and the fishing boats, and planning a trip to Mull, Iona and/or Staffa the next day - you've never really lived. South of France? You can keep it.

Scots Wurd o' th' Day - Dornicle

Haven't done Scots Wurd o' the' day for ages, as I mislaid my Chambers's Scots Dictionary. But now I've found it again.

Today's Scots wurd is "dornicle". It's a noun, apparently. The definition given is as follows: "the viviparous blenny".

I'll be honest - I'm none the wiser, and I can't be bothered Googling it at the moment. Might have a look later on.

Great Swears Of Our Time #7

Nothing like starting the day with a good old swearing session.

Bill Hicks - Little Miracles