[Probably not such a] Naughty Boy, Sam Smith - La la la (Lyrics / Lyric Video / Letra) #songlyricsunday

7clouds videos are awesome - along with Rachel Reyes - they are my first choice for videos which emphasise lyricism.



and here come the words [thought NOT the style!] for my choice of #songlyricsunday for 5 January 2020:

[Intro] Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain) [Verse 1] Hush, don't speak When you spit your venom, keep it shut I hate it When you hiss and preach About your new messiah cause your theories catch fire [Bridge] I can't find your silver lining I don't mean to judge But when you read your speech, it's tiring Enough is enough [Hook] I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it, I'll find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na [Verse 2] If our love is running out of time I won't count the hours, rather be a coward When our words collide I'm gonna drown you out before I lose my mind [Bridge] I can't find your silver lining I don't mean to judge But when you read your speech, it's tiring Enough is enough [Hook] I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it I'll find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na , la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, oh) Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (I found a way to block it, I go) La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain) I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak Cause if my heart can't stop it I find a way to block it, I go I'm covering my ears like a kid When your words mean nothing, I go la la la I'm turning up the volume when you speak (when you speak) Cause if my heart can't stop it I find a way to block it, I go Na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na La la na na, la la la la la na na na na na (Tu meri mauja hain)

And then I realise there's a reason that YouTube does that when it comes to lyrics - or the 7clouds people did what they did.



When I was a little girl I discovered author Dorothy Edwards and illustrator Shirley Hughes for the first time in a simple novel / anecdote format - the series My naughty little sister.



It was one of my first conscious trips to a beach house; subject to a friend from the civil service.



So in the best traditions, or perhaps defiant/oblivious of these same traditions, I wrecked the entertainment room with Trivial Pursuit cards all over the floor.



The outdoor landscape of that beach house though! It had a big tree at the back. I was trying to trust trees and treehouses again after I had a nasty splinter at home walking on the top of the house [my treehouse had two floors] and it was on my foot. I remember going on the porch to get the splinter out with a needle.



Some three weeks before [12 December 1990] the wonders of the video cassette recorder were revealed to me and one of my very first picks was Pippi Longstocking which was a highly musical version and vivid. I had read the Astrid Lindgren books first in the library especially Pippi in the South Sea Islands with my grandparents so I knew the Ville Villa Kuella.



And Scrubbing Day was incredible - so was Running Away and the whole The First Noël feeling when Pippi and friends came to the orphanage. I loved the Head Girl - the first I recognised as Head Girl. I had not even read Blyton school stories yet in January 1991 - that pleasure was to be some eight months away with Elizabeth Allen and The naughtiest girl in the school.



I too had been considered - one of - the naughtiest girls in my school. I think of Hermoine Granger and that scene in the film of The Philosopher's / Sorcerer's Stone.

That witch really needs to sort out her priorities! - Ron Weasley - Harry and Hermoine's friend

One of the naughty things I did was blow on another student's whistle with the residue of a frozen ice. I did not quite have the mens rea involved [guilty mind in Latin] because I wanted to know how Melisande's whistle worked and if it had nuts in it like the Physical Education teacher's whistle did. The Phys Ed teacher was yet another champion of mine - and a broker into the system. Some years later on she would have us learn and support Italian lessons. And because of this she was a really strong connector - especially when it came to a question on Copernicus/Kopernik when we were studying the stars and astronomy.



Love La la la because it has the idea of preach speech in it and it has been so popular in so many countries.



Here is a quote that shows what I [and Beverley Eley] mean by PREACH SPEECH - it is also a good introduction to a book which showed me so much about biographical craft and graft - The book of David - it is also good for anyone who wants to know It's all right to be different:

[... earlier there was something about Democritus and the atom in that paragraph]Not only is his memory phenomenal, his wit is dry and clever. One day he walked into a conversation about homilies, proverbs and adages. After patting and kissing those close at hand [my emphasis], he walked away with the comment, 'Preach speech ... it's preach speech'.

By what yardstick do we measure someone like the eccentric, yet greatly gifted, David Helfgott? [says Eley on page 7 of The book of David in its 5th printing from 1997]

Eley and Helfgott [David and Gillian] are very good friends and her biographical practice is exemplary. Hoping the Gleniffer house where she and her husband John [who The book of David is dedicated to - for being someone who BELIEVES IN LOYALTY FRIENDSHIP AND JUSTICE - if books were tablets and stones - they would be carved in like that] is okay and the land too. That land is called the Promised Land and again Eley and David Helfgott are neighbours.



Had a great time watching Marianne and Leonard - words of love - so many people came by including in groups. Of course So long Marianne is a very important song. And Marianne was such a very generous and kind person. I think of Axel who is over 60 now and was only 6 months old when Leonard Cohen came into his Hydra life - in all my years I had never heard it pronounced like that so I could imitate it and reference it. Shows you how few of my resources are Greek. And the archivist really made the film, I do believe. I would sell the farm on it. Along with Broomfield of course who had a connection - intimate connection - with Ihlen from Oslo [and Paris and London and Hydra and one more place]



What did I want to talk about with the Naughty Little Sister and my experience?



When she was in a school choir one day; she and her friend Bad Harry la la la la'ed to the Christmas carols particularly Away in a manger which was the very first Christmas carol I connected with in 1985-86. Another early one was The first Noël - ten years later I connected so hard I named a character Noelle. She belongs to the gaggle of Gilberts - the five who were born on a student exchange. [and, yes, that is five at the same time in the same caul so to speak!]



And then I remember the Blubber singing lessons in Judy Blume - especially Miss Rochelle - great name for a musical person. My 1999 self thought this too - one of the times she and my 1994 self were in agreement [the former self was the one who read the book for the first time - and she was up for it six months later when she was sick and the world didn't make sense - she also enjoyed Paul Jennings' Quirky Tales where Linda thought salt was sugar and sugar was salt and No was yes]. So there was a young girl called Rochelle who absolutely loved music and was a flower girl. And then there was breathing and melody and harmony which I confess I really did not get until Grizel Cochrane had lost her harmony book in The head girl of the Chalet School which came with me in a Lion King bag along with a manuscript - that one was about a student called Tadeusz Meliński who studied temporarily at the London Progressive College. I got quite far in the writing of Educating Tadeusz laying and paving the ground [like crazy paving in my last].



Yours truly has also discovered Music from Ceefax which is the British Broadcasting Corporation teletext service. Especially looking for ocean music and ship music and sea shanties. After I watched Little Women in the Greta Gerwig mode and went to a park and a public house, I found many of them. It was when I became sick of Scouting and Guiding songs around the campfire and the Jamboree setting that I wanted to find some sea songs.

Many of you who have read Blubber will remember that Jill Brenner was quite the stamp collector - and she knew how to bargain and broker and write good letters. What she was not so good at doing was keeping her nails tidy and unbitten. Now nerves will do that to any person - and she was carrying around the sort of nervery which would make an animal pace and scratch and do various other displacement behaviours.

People often feel misplaced and displaced too. Especially when they feel their love is running out of time and that their words mean nothing.

Hope your lives feel Funktastic this week and for the Epiphany tomorrow. Imagine that - the first Monday of 2020!

Finally deck the halls with boughs of holly fa la la la la.

La la la  was released at the Jingle Bell Ball of 2013 and subsequently charted in many nations. And it had so many remixes - I chose the Sam Smith one because it had lots of resonance and was best-known perhaps ...

In Australia it peaked at number five; hit number one in the Commonwealth of Independent States chart as it did in the Czech Republic; number two in Denmark and Germany; number six in France; and it's probably time to point out the Hungarian charts and their genre diversity as well as media diversity [stream and radio]. A lot of central European nations [Poland too] have their dance charts and in this La la la came out 9th in Poland and 6th in Hungary. Seems the Romanians loved it and put it on number 1. Top 15 in Venezuela - 14th actually - awesome!

The US charts were much more mixed. Somehow the Brits bought more than a million copies. At least two charts showed top 20 and one was actually 10th. The Rhythmic seems open for debate.

And when hearts can't stop it they find a way to block it.

Trying to block this earworm [though I don't want to so it will stay] of La La Land which I think many of my #songlyricsunday companions and compeers have chosen.

 

Last #songlyricsunday for 2019: Crazy paving and quilts - sweet natural love - passion and activism drive creative and vicious madness

My final #songlyricsunday post is around two quotes and one song - Melua [performer] and Batt [songwriter]'s The closest thing to crazy.

When first I listened to Closest thing to crazy in 2005 on the television I thought How far from crazy I was. And those times when I had felt excruciatingly sane [intensely painful; embarrassing; tedious; awkward - thanks Apple Dictionary].

Other people have done it too - like Mike Batt the writer and a band called Blake which does choral and chamber work.

A continual thread in my life since the early 1990s has been mental health activism and advocacy in the best traditions of the World Health Organisation and everything short of that.

The lyrics which caught my ears were Feeling twenty-two acting seventeen. One of the big things about mental health and emotional distress can be a disconnection/dissociation between chronological age; developmental expectation and experienced reality. This can be echoed and has resonance in significant relationships and attachments. And I was reaching a lifestage when I was technically beyond the reaches of youth mental health - which is often provided through the auspices of student life and psychiatric/psychological aftercare services.

Often this conflict and dissonance can productively be tackled through creative work like writing; art; music or whatever outlet and input you have.

How can I think I'm standing strong
Yet feel the air beneath my feet?
How can happiness feel so wrong?
How can misery feel so sweet?

How can you let me watch you sleep
Then break my dreams the way you do?
How can I have got in so deep?
Why did I fall in love with you?

This is the closest thing to crazy I have ever been
Feeling twenty two, acting seventeen
This is the nearest thing to crazy I have ever known
I was never crazy on my own
And now I know that there's a link between the two
Being close to craziness and being close to you

How can you make me fall apart
Then break my fall with loving lies?
It's so easy to break a heart
It's so easy to close your eyes

How can you treat me like a child?
Yet like a child I yearn for you
How can anyone feel so wild?

How can anyone feel so blue?

This is the closest thing to crazy I have ever been
Feeling twenty two, acting seventeen
This is the nearest thing to crazy I have ever known
I was never crazy on my own
And now I know that there's a link between the two
Being close to craziness and being close to you
And being close to you
And being close to you

My 2019 self picks up on the folie a deux aspect. And the correlation between being close to craziness and being close to you. It can also be about the intense friendships that we valorise in youth - and/or the lack and the disappointment we perceive as well as the imbalances and the indifferences involved.

And that strong feelings and yearning are often associated with children - at least the relatively uninhibited expression of these. I think Batt is trying to say something.

Especially when he writes How can happiness feel so wrong? which I associate intimately with scrupulosity [a feature of much obsessive-compulsive disorder and also the personality type version which is closely linked - especially those with a religious content and/or background - though not exclusively so - we Humanists feel it too] and with depressive and anxious thinking - both of which can insinuate and make themselves feel right - especially in terms of traumatic spirals of shame and of guilt whether connected with action or feeling.

How can misery feel so sweet? - that ambivalence is very familiar to high achievers. And to sensation seekers and those who demand a heap of themselves. Again - there is a strong ambivalence in the push-me-pull-you feeling - which is associated with attachment. You can hold the misery and the sweetness and they touch on and with one another - and of course the happiness contains the wrong even as wrong runs and walks away with happiness and sweetness.

An earlier Song Lyric Sunday was about dreams and lullabies and sleep.

And it is so good to know that you are never crazy on your own - that crazes HAVE A CONTEXT.

This I recognise through all the fads that any well-constituted young person or student at any level experiences. The crazes and dazes and lazes I tried to represent through my writing - like Bourdieu and his habitus and [re]production.

There are crazes which tell you to murder your mother or your little sister or your governess or your cousins. If not literally; metaphorically or through tools.

And if you are lucky and if you are sensible ...

Standing strong and feeling the air under your feet - air is supposed to be up there and around us all. We do all breathe it. And some good advice is to breathe between spoonfuls and hopefully breathe between sentences - this saves the Wall of Text effect.

What a wonderful sensory and cognitive image for Ms Melua to put to life through her singing and launch her impactful career.

Before I introduce my first quote - which is from a very fine man called Edward Everett Hale from old-school Boston [MA, USA - as contrasted to the Lincolnshire version in the United Kingdom] I would like to make some last and ancillary reflections.

Oh break the fall with loving lies. I know those as consoling fictions most particularly and poignantly from a certain Brian Friel [Irish playwright who died recently] when I first encountered them in January 2001 [about six weeks later than I should have - a failure to get the books and the scripts you see] and his introducer for Faber and Faber.

Wild and blue hmm? It does seem like a lot of relationships that people will enter to in this New Year 2020; especially if they are visiting a new city and/or a new country.

Edward Everett Hale claimed kinship with Keller through her Mum, Kate Keller. Kate Keller was a New England transplant to the Southeast of the USA during and just before the Civil War which bitterly divided that country. He was also a New England priest.

His words are quoted on page 87 of Joseph P. Lash's authoritative biography of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy - see I knew the Irish dander would come into handy here!

Lash describes Everett Hale as "one of New England's divines and social reformers" - in 1871 - some 9 years before Keller was born in 1880 - he started a group called Lend a Hand which was a very fine community organisation which advocated social work.

Poor, staid Laura Bridgman, who had been brought up in all the conventionalities of the most rigid New England propriety, used to say Helen was crazy. It was the craziness of sweet natural love.

Edward Everett Hale

[Lash 1980: 87] 

I think too of a young man identified as William who said Crazy is just a word in Torey Hayden's ground-breaking first work which was also published in 1980 One child. In French you would call it Enfant [but there is a much more evocative title] and in Polish Dziecko [which makes the ONE child part very clear]. Finally read it in late 2007. I do know that in German too it is called Meine Zeit mit Sheila.

Hayden's new book is called Lost Child and concerns a young lady in Wales who is known as Jessie. She has many of the calling cards of Reactive Attachment and characteristics of disinhibited social engagement.

And, oh, yes, the thing about sweet natural love which must have been lacking so much in Bridgman's upbringing and marked her so hard by the time she was 58. We know that she sought out so very much of it and needed lots of it. Partly due to the way Howe treated her.

And that Annie Sullivan said It is not a teacher the deaf-blind need ... it is another self. And she did try as far as she could be to represent that other self. Fraiberg writes very well in her Insights from the Blind which was very current when Lash was writing. Lash's principal biographical interest and original contribution to the Keller-Sullivan canon in the 1980s was in the socialism of Keller and the appeals she made to this compassionate conservatism which is what I would characterise the tone of Bostonian life at the time of Howe and Anagnos who was Howe's son-in-law.

I seem to remember how Keller grew like a clinging vine which brings home the nature of this love and this attachment - and how the adoration of Annie satisfied this side of her nature [the affectionate; ideological adolescent development].

Where Everett Hale says rigid I would say strict and then I had to go in and type the quote again a second time.

When you contrast the conventionalities as they were in the late 1800s you naturally - if you are an English Literature person - go thirty years into the Victorian era. What book do you expect I would pick up? And more specifically, what piece of feminist literary criticism would spice up this piece?

If you guessed that the title had passion in it - as in Charlotte Bronte: a passionate life by literary critic Lyndal Gordon - you would probably be correct.

So in context Gordon wrote an invigorating chapter called The Public Voice. In my musical world it makes me think of Morrissette and Ballard's All I really want which is the very first single from Jagged Little Pill.

The public voice which takes in late 140s and early 150s is very much about Jane Eyre in 1847 which Bronte had worked on for two years while she was in Manchester. Gordon brings out a cancelled line in the manuscript which had me thinking - what else had Bronte left out to shape the text that she did and that we know a hundred and sixty years later?

Here it is for you:

If he was subjugated so was I - and that by a strange and resistless sway

Also this capstone foundation of a paragraph shows us to be very careful before we accept what is avant garde and vanguard in literary criticism and its fashions and furbelows.

Aristotle does show us - the educated person does not simply accept. Six servants Kipling demonstrates to us - five Ws and an H.

First:

The creative madness that Charlotte Bronte and other writers - Dickinson; Schreiner; Woolf; Plath - experienced in one way or another, is different from the vicious madness of Bertha. She is stupidly violent, like capricious fighter dogs with rending teeth. As Charlotte Bronte conceived her, Bertha was the cause of her misfortune, not her husband. It will not do to infuse Bertha with feminist sentiment if we care at all for what is there on the page as an emanation of its time and place. Women are not simply victims; they have, within them, the agency to discover gains in the most restrictive life. This is what Charlotte sought to show.

[Gordon 156: Charlotte Bronte - a passionate life 1994

which I am not sure if I read in 2002 first at the library - perhaps the September 2002 reading was another critic - Lucasta Miller I so strongly suspect

I know I read Gordon first myself in November 2017 around the second half of that month]

When first I read this excerpt in November 2017 ... the contrast between vicious madness and creative madness engaged me hard and would not leave me.

Someone very close to me reminded me that some eleven and a half years before, I had enacted a form of vicious madness [which is to say May 2006].

I experienced it in relation to a younger literary peer who had seemed to surpass me in accomplishment when I had stagnated for some ten months beforehand.

And over the years we have shared so many interpretations of the madness of Bertha and how Charlotte Bronte conceived her.

When we care about what is on the page - and only what is on the PAGE - and not what may lie in the world beyond the page [for example in Batt's The walls of the world].

Gordon of course is right - fundamentally right - about the agency to discover gains in the most restrictive life.

The dog is often a harbinger of fear and of trauma. They are also very comforting and play roles of help; companionship; care; empathy. Some ten years ago I read a wonderful passage about animals and unconditional love - which is again in contrast with inhumanity to humanity. Or Cards against humanity especially in a behaviourist manifestation.

What I would add is - feminism is not primarily about victimhood. Patriarchy and misogyny depend upon the manufacturing and reinforcement of victimology. Perhaps this makes me a radical feminist as opposed/a natural step from liberal feminism. Certainly the feminism as it was practised and experienced in the 1990s and crystallised and became an efflux in the 2000s.

Some really great essayists people can and should read:

1. Coventry by Rachel Cusk
2. Make it scream make it burn by Leslie Jamieson
3. Trick mirror by Jia Tolentino

In their different ways they show agency and gains discovered in lives which are more or less restricted; whether by self or others or society and the interactions and relations involved.

Their passion is informed and their activism infectious.

Also I question creative madness and I problematise it especially in relation to Woolf and Plath and even Schreiner who I first encountered from a friendship with Vera Brittain and also Winifred Holtby. Literary life during the First World War and even during the Second was really something especially when you follow women poets and novelists and activists like Vida Goldstein and the women in Wayward Women which is an exhibition at the Old Treasury Building.

I had read Brittain back in July-August 1998 when I encountered Testament of Youth. It is a formidable text which saw me through so much during that period.

Another element is obviously colonialisation and the West Indies. Now I was not particularly naive at that point [which is to say May 1995 when first I read Jane Eyre] to West Indians in Britain and indeed the wider Commonwealth - had indeed put my hand at creating some and did over the next few months; like Sally Wallace who is a competitor to my romantic heroine in Mysterious Girl Conspicious Boy. Dorothy Edwards and her story about dinner ladies was a big inspiration to me in 1991 in that regard [The cat flap and the apple pie]. Obviously the racialisation/racialised identity and the Blackness/Brownness.

These women of course have agency too as Sue Sharpe's Just like a girl shows us. And I think too of Grace Forrest's philantrophic and social justice work.

If you were picking up what I was dropping in my Words don't come easy post [the one about Don't] I discovered much more Glenn Mederios especially his duet with Elsa - Love always finds a reason / Friend you give me a reason.

There was Nothing's gonna change my love for you and Lonely don't visit me any more.

And also why thirty matters. Not thirty years, exactly [even though the thirty-year rule is such a big thing in the public service and when we have literary and journalistic embargoes on our Right to Know as in the European Court of Human Rights and other places]. I was meaning more like thirty percent. In the Bourse there is often a thirty percent return for an exceptional stock or a well-performing equity. And when the reference point is something like a hundred, well, 70 to 130 can mean a big difference. Two deviations either way. And sometimes 30 words a minute in the typing world can make a big difference.

Then I remember that thirty is also three multiplied by ten and we have thirty days in our months like April and like June and indeed like September and November.

I am writing Crazy paving and quilts on the 30th day of the month.

I am wishing you, too, a happy New Year [and I realise that if I want to book the old Krakow restaurant/hotel that Jan Morris told us about in Fifty years of Europe for New Years' Eve I should have done it on 15 October 2019 - a date which proved very significant in my professional and personal life - she calls it a very pretentious kind of restaurant] and Sylwester and a great New Year's Eve however you define and choose. I will remind you that we have still 18 years to fix the New Millennial Bug - the one that is in 2038 and every second on the computer is 999,999,999,999 repeating.

Now if such a bug were on smartphones - and on iDevices - apparently my iPad's Photos app is not working so well just now and has not done since a big zoom.

It was offered me that I perhaps delve into the latest iThing and I am accepting and I am in process. Right now the Dreamy Fish is a heavyweight and it has a World Clock which takes me through Kuala Lumpur and Kiev and Tehran and Montreal and Caracas and St Peter Port and Paris.

Remembering the Suffragette Ribbon and the Artists' Society which I wish to visit in mid-January 2020. The Romanesque architecture is brilliant and invigorating to use two words.

Ah - the vulnerabilities in the devices and our selves.

What I was hinting at last month [and probably ten days ago also] was a concept of developmental vulnerability - which is measured in six fields. Roughly language; social; gross motor; fine motor; emotional and a sense of general/holistic health and fitness [the sort that Marilla Cuthbert alludes to through the narrator when she talks about a sense of humour being an indication of the fitness of things]. We call this a comprehensive assessment and we try to do it at certain intervals - so that it is not a big and scary thing - but can be met with equanimity and with fidelity and a Middle Way such as is embodied in a Yusuf Islam song.

Still want to say Chocolate Buddha is a very fine production and I think Geoffrey Falk has a critique of it in his Rock and holy waters - which is an example of #yourfaveisproblematic - especially when Christopher Cross's Arthur's theme is almost entirely encoded through dhimmis - probably not quite so when You say it's for harmony and for tolerance - and my own hypocorism comes up. [Someone may look for another hypo- word in relation to my interpretations of harmony and tolerance - especially during my campaigning days and years!]

We call this thing psychoeducational and psychosocial. I think of it as like a spider's web or like a plot with Louise Bourgeois and Maman the spider - she knits it and then she stays away.

Wonderful song from Wilbur the pig - it is called I can talk - in the 1973 Hanna-Barbera adaptation which defined a generation's experience of Charlotte's Web on screens big and small.

Thirty years ago I saw it as a puppet production.

And there is still Hugo's Notre Dame to read - thinking too of St Patrick and his Cathedral and the Artist's Trail for the Heidelberg School. And the big tinny bells and the roses and the hedges. The Lutheran church is very dignified and active and unpretentious.

I am working through Endacott's trilogy of the Seven Lakes and also the book about Freya. I have read Unreliable Memoirs and seen Jojo Rabbit. Very glad I took the chance to buy this self-published Australian author who uses an awesome designer and illustrator. The King, Gidyon, reminds me of a few people I have known - especially the moment he tries to teach advanced mathematics to seven and eight year olds in the Royal Families and not the Assassin Family which his retainer and special person Elen-ai [who is of very low birth and rose up through the ranks through loyalty and dignity and protection] is part of. And to think he is only seventeen still! It is a year after the Queendom of the Seven Lakes which I read over Christmas and Boxing Day/St Stephen's Day 2019.

Janine McCulloch's book about Provence and Cote d'Azur from 2013 was one of my more planned impulsive purchases. She describes the markets and attractions and cities and villages with panache and with a honesty worthy of more than the lifestyle work she is too often pigeoned in.

There is one other nice book I read through the break - it is a story in pictures by the author of the Lunch Lady series who uses minimal colours to express and make testimony to his grandparents and his mother Leslie and his father Brian Hennessey [yes I know - very Irish - in contrast to the Polish and Swedish in the grandparents' diaspora life]. It is the second graphic novel I have read in 2019 since Roz Chast's Can't we talk about something more pleasant which is about the illness and decline and legacy of her troubled relationship with her ageing parents as they go through the chronic and the terminal and the quotidian. I do like the way Jarrett has gone through things and done things and showed us his artistic efforts and career and how he influences the next generation who in turn influences the next and it is never ever one way.

The direction is like the thing we call crazy paving which would describe lots of cobblestones and also the crazy quilt. When I think of the latter I think of Moorhouse and Hogan and Lily and Jack and Maddy and Spike - I have not quite got up the guts or the garters to buy Unconditional Love. The legacy of the haute behaviourism of the second half of the 1990s is not quite resolved, particularly the bits which clash with the eclectic humanism I adopted and adapted. And then I realise how far I have to begin!

I trust I will meet the challenge with decency; dignity; diplomacy - finding my own language of worth and corresponding with and through all the worthy courses of present communication and future life.

Goodbye, au revoir, do widzenia ...

#songlyricssunday WORDS DON'T COME EASY F. R. David - "Melody so far my best friend"

3 November 2019: [a fortnight ago] there was an emergency in Dresden relating to the neo-Nazis and more specifically the political pressure group PEGIDA. Very discombulating to see them on the top of the Yahoo.co.uk news page and the situation in Dresden more generally.

10 November 2019: [last Sunday] I watched part of a film called BALLOON which is about two East German families trying to get around the Berlin Wall to the West. That week there had been lots of celebrations about the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall - I learnt a lot about journalists and Stasi informers. [That was a story which unfolded with my youth].

One of the scenes which moved me really hard was the youth confirmation of the 14-year-olds who were in the eighth grade or the third form [as lots of Europeans call that school stage/year - and still did in the 1970s and 1980s where Balloon is set - until about the National Curriculum in 1988 in the UK case and everyone had years except in grammar and more traditional schools]. The father - Strezlyk - sees a lot of nonsense and balderdash in it.

The last scene I saw was the first attempt at the balloon and then the blue screen kept breaking up from behind. It is a terrible thing for those with migraines and with photosensitivity; at least moderately disruptive and intolerable for every patron. You do get a complimentary drink and/or something to eat that you choose. You do get to know your patrons and the people.

It was a serious matter when it got into the advertisements which tell about future movies.

So that evening, after I went to a nearby park of native shrubs and trees with a lookout which is closed on Sundays, and to a ramen restaurant some way away in a food court, and the Housemuseum to see some challenging and provocative modern art - I drew a concertina door with two folds.

The outside is the setting up of the balloon process by the families.

There is a statistical opener which tells about the escapes from East to West Berlin and from East to West Germany from 1976 to 1988. So many attempts; so many failures.

The inside is a whole lot of nature in three colours [purple; red; yellow] and Zentangle-inspired artforms. It has been four years now since Zentangle was introduced to me.

Inside of the fold: various shrubs and trees and yellow cloud forms as well as scallop patterning

The outside of the fold shows the setting up of the balloon and the trial balloons

and then the family being triumphant - there were two families; eight members.

Some were young girls; some were small boys.

And this is roughly what happens when the world is upside down.

We do in fact see the world this way with primitive maps - however that was the scanner

Which leads me to the earlier Disney film - Balloon for 2018 was the very first German telling/narrative - which was made in 1982.

It provoked a lot of imagination and empathy for things which are often very hard to talk about and/or witness.

Like F. R. David and his piece of Italo-pop or Euro-pop which I am going to share with you today through Song Lyric Sunday. The prompt for 17 November 2019 is Do and Don't. Jim Adams has been using some very clever grammatical prompts.

What do we do when words don't come easily?

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see - 
I love you
Words don't come easy

Words - don't come easy to me
This is the only way for me to say -
I love you
Words don't come easy

Well, I'm just a music man
Melody's so far my best friend
But my words are calling I'm wrong
and I, I reveal my heart to you
and hope that you believe it's true 'cause

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see -
I love you
Words don't come easy

This is just a simple song
That I've made for you on my own
There's no hidden meaning, you know
and I - when I say I love you, honey
Please believe - I really do 'cause

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see -
I love you
Words don't come easy

It isn't easy
Words don't come easy

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see -
I love you
Words don't come easy
Don't come easy to me
This is the only way for me to say -
I love you 
Words don't come easy

Words don't come easy

thank you Golyr for the clean reproduction of the text - diest sehr gut!

When this song came to the consciousness it was only really in Monaco and France; a year later it became a hit for the whole of Europe.

If you liked easy listening and ballads and songs which didn't announce themselves though they had a beat and a self-definition Words don't come easy was a natural choice.

Love the modesty of the narrator and the way he talks about himself - I'm just a music man.

And the simple song verse. Some people may want to shake the narrator and/or kick him somewhere.

One hopes the hearer will respect the narrator enough to see - and not see past - words - don't come easy and their relationship is one which transcends and doesn't depend on words.

In late October 2019 I was fortunate enough to discover Deezer.fr which was an incredible streaming experience. For 30 days you can listen to all the music free and even make comments.

Soundcloud has been kind as well. I was tempted to listen to Ok boomer so I did. And then some rapping about a toy/console character with a co-producer Poloboy21 who is about 18.

So many hidden meanings; so many implicatures and inferences we make. And love drives us to understand them all - and hope for what we do not understand and cannot undertake - yet!

The narrator is very innovative and creative in finding ways for the person - and for the listener/reader/receiver - to understand.

Of course this makes me think of love languages.

I particularly appreciated the way Rachel Reyes made a lyric video.

The don't is especially powerful in this song because it would be a very different song without it. 

We would have our usual suave and articulate hero who would be very hard to relate to - someone who is in a romantic novel. 

Now those people can be complex and intriguing characters - even in a comedy of manners like Vanity Fair which I am very glad I did not binge upon when the opportunity was offered to me. 

I do still want to know what happens to Becky Sharp and Steyne and Rawdon the younger - I did feel the narrative change its tone when Becky and Amelia were mothers and Jos was in India being a nabob - specifically Bengal [now Bangladesh if in the East].

I am thinking that Melody so far my best friend is the most powerful of the lot - the one single lyric. Unfortunately it is not an earworm - though the concept and the idea certainly is

Repetition of Words don't come easy is a good one.

That is repeated four times at the end of each verse plus chorus. As if to say "Words don't come easy but if you keep at it they WILL come or they MAY come".

"Try not to worry because everyday concerns would bring them out".

Wikipedia reminds us just how big a hit this Italo-pop piece was on the British charts in particular. Number two! And that was in 1983. So you see it was a slow burn.

Its genres are soft rock; eurobeat; synthpop. Some incredible equipment was put onto it; a Simmons; a Lind; a Oberheim.

Someone who was instrumental [I think the pun is allowed] in putting it together was one Roberto Fozzini. He is the songwriter.

In the 21st century - which leads us to 2000 - there was a French-language version with Winda.

A whole generation of children and adolescents had grown up into their loving and dating years.

And by [7 December] 2006 when the video above was made an era had ended.

Seven years longer than I had any reason or right to expect.

YouTube had mainstreamed and mainlined into all our musical brains.

Chart positions for Words don't come easy as of 1982 and 1983:

Did you know, first, that it sold a million copies in France and indeed across lots of French overseas territories - like the ones in Africa; Asia; the Pacific?

Springbok Radio in South Africa absolutely loved it. There was a lot of big trouble with Apartheid which did affect a lot of people in the Commonwealth. I was still so little when the Rhys Muldoon issue came through - I am thinking Jim Bolger and Greg Chappell and Chappeli.

Perhaps Laurence was still alive.

Australia reported it by the end of 1983 as #49 - wow! the top 50! When I think of all the good Australian and international songs which you can experience on nzoz83 - and that I have shared with you in the past - I think Words don't come easy deserves to be up there.

Number one was an acclamation in Sweden; Switzerland; Spain; Ireland; Italy; the whole Eurochart [if you want to listen to decent European music - you could do worse than start there - or maybe with Caroline or Luxembourg like Robin Carmody of High-functioning human fame - or Humain a niveau-haut which is what I would have grown up with] Austria and Belgium [the Flanders version]. Switzerland and West Germany were into it.

Now if that isn't an advertisement for detente and/or European unity I don't know what is.

We do badly need it now - especially on 12 December 2019. Badly.

Lots of debates on the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Independent Television in the next few weeks.

On two separate Dutch charts Words don't come easy came #2 as it did indeed in France. And The Official Charts Company of the United Kingdom.

The Commonwealth of Nations was far more mixed - Canada thought this song should come ninth. I am sure the Quebecois market/vote drove it - though there is no reason English Canada shouldn't have liked such a smooth song. 

New Zealand made it seventh and Australia's Kent Charts put it as 12th.

Meanwhile on the hot 100 of Billboard Words don't come easy was 62nd place.

Turns out there were several remixes within the 1990s - 1997 and 1999 respectively in Finland and France - these were both in the top 30 - 12 and 27 for the Finnish and French ones.

Another Don't song I like very much and discovered in early 2001 is Heart don't change my mind in the Elaine Paige version - though it was sung by Streisand and Glen Medeiros who I think I will explore more during the week [especially a lyric video of Lonely won't leave me alone - when you think this situation is pervasive and permanent this is when you are in big big trouble and disturbance. Systemic work helps too - there is a Minister for Loneliness and another for Social Inclusion].

During the week. too, I am seeing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and its Second Part.

#keepthesecrets is reminding me of Luria and Vygotsky and a cognitive test.

It is about buttons and instructions.

And commands in particular. "Don't press; don't press; press" and "Press; press; don't press" is said to 3 year olds; 4 year olds; and 5 year olds by an experimenter/examiner.

Vygotsky was the First Master of Inner and Private Speech.

So he wanted to see how far and how much the children internalised these instructions and related ones in real life and culture.

I learnt of this examination in James Britton's Language and Learning.

Probably somewhere after the children's dialogues and before Participant and Specator which I feel is the meat and potatoes of this book.

I think also of expressive; transactional and poetic and what a tightrope and precipice it can really be.

Children do play still in the 21st century - however the play behaviour of the children of the 1950s and 1960s was wow especially Alison and Claire Britton - Claire was a perceptive and caring young lady by the time she was written about as a late teenager.

[and she is part of the inspiration for all the responsible and competent eighteen-year-olds I write about who have an ethical system and a humanitarian streak.

The fault is to me, though, that it breaks down in the early twenties, more or less catastrophically].

Wednesday last [13 November 2019] I read a wonderful report by a Consultant Psychiatrist on Attachment and in particular the First Year Cycle - which had been spoilt for me by certain populist Americans from 2002 to 2008.

Something important I learnt: you need only be 30% sensitive or have sensitive interactions for that proportion.

Thirty percent of anything is bloody significant. Especially it could sway cognitive or linguistic delay or deviance.

As I said words don't come easy - but they don't have to to be socially significant or valid.

#songlyricsunday Andrew Gold's LONELY BOY

Song Lyrics Sunday has a really awesome theme this week - it's about Drifters, Vagabonds, Loners and Transients.

"Listening to music may cause uncontrolled outbursts of joy and happiness and also lead you to becoming more energetic, creative and spontaneous, so stop by for some fun".

Jim Adams made a new picture too or icon. It was so good to see the icon on Twitter. Felicia and others had it up there.

Reminded me a lot of my youth in graphic design and illustration/communication. Where every effect was the best effect and could be all layered on at once in one composition. One example of this was in February 2004 when I was designing a Small Press promotion with a dog and the dog was asking questions that people might need to know about the literary journal. And there was also a woman answering the questions. I used an application called Inspiration which is supposed to be for idea generation and outlines.

I made a much more streamlined musical subject page [this was on paper and pre-press; not the Web] some nine years before and I coloured it in on the weekend. And it did get an elephant sticker and a signature from a young lady friend with whom I worked on a puppet play three months later [it felt like years] and I used it again a year later in a smaller version in a proper music composition book such as I was drooling over back in the 1980s [November 1988 - because of cards and cakes and streamers and Doctor Who and newsagents and stamps of the stamping/scrapbooking kind and Letraset letters which were really cool in the time. Now that newsagent has not been a newsagent since 1997 and there are no newsagents in that village. It is instead a Thai restaurant which has a Bangkok garden feel].

In the 1980s I also thought bits and bytes were very cool indeed and synthesisers - finally got to see how a Roland one works in 1992 and in the late 2000s and early 2010s have made some dips into music production especially through Garage Band. They were on exercise books and lots of definitions/glossaries.

Right now in October 2019 I am learning how Catalina - MacOSX 10.15 - is working. I really love the Visual Notes structure and making new folders for each project like a blog roll. The three new apps are Apple TV; Podcasts and App Store Arcade of 100 games after which you pay a nominal monthly subscription amount. And then I realise the amount is, like, my whole pocket money for 1994.

No wonder I became a writer! Okay, the whole picture is much more complex than that. I will try to explain. There was a Home Computer Show and a lot of humanitarian and anti-poverty aspirations and inspirations. Also Fern Gully inspired me when we saw it as a class in the TV room. I had to learn how to spell bodacious and share it with the form. This was before mass multimedia though we did have classic Macs.

So this video of Lonely Boy by Andrew Gold was one of the very first videos on Music Television in 1979 - the track was made in 1976. And there was a vinyl record which spoke to me in Hunters. Hunters is a secondary market warehouse which I dropped into after a road trip.

Genius.com tells us there is an 8-minute video on YouTube which describes Gold's composition process and how he feels about Lonely Boy and how it fits into the album What's wrong with this picture? The album I saw was a compilation album.

And oh, the Rhino lot are so brilliant.

Noticed that Lonely Boy was also in a 2016 movie called Nice Guys. And then I think of Annastacia and Men are not nice guys.

I think we all want sometimes to be a "nice boy" or a "nice girl" or "nice" in whatever gender format/configuration you come in and find for yourself and evolve.

We want this because we don't want to be lonely or isolated.

Being a loner of course is something else.

Sometimes it is something we choose - something we take on because we can't be anyone or anything else. Sometimes it is a way of letting baggage and luggage go. [Don't forget your toothbrush - as a famous UK and Australian parlour game show used to say!]

There was a lady named Sula Wollf who wrote a really good book called Loners: the life path of unusual children. It came my way some time between 1995 and 1998.

There and these were people who were profoundly content with their aloneness.

Also - big difference - and deep similarities - between being alone and being lonely. Especially hard to understand when we are young and still beginning to form attachments and face the possibility of being abandoned like the narrator does in 1953.

I remember when I read Ramona the Brave and the thing which really moved me was Ramona's Mum talking about how love is not like a cup of sugar. Reflecting on that excerpt and my reactions nearly 30 years later: It is more like Parkinson's law - "Love expands to fill the time for its completion" and when it gets fuller and fuller and fuller - I think I saw love then as like a balloon full of rice or sand - such as might be in a sensory room in 2019 - in a Montessori-type setting for children and seniors together or another intergenerational gathering.

When I was a geographer we talked a lot about resources - finite and infinite - and about phenomena - especially the global variety. There was fishing and overfishing and there was the Aswam Dam in Egypt and Israel. There were so many aspiring geographers who did not even know that Africa was a continent - and that Europe isn't. It's a peninsula extending from Asia.

Further, my writerly self in 2001 had the whole Britain is an eighth continent thing going on - as in, I was against it.

For so long [1950s-1970s] the public servant class/civil servant class called Europe the Continent in their missives and memoranda of misunderstanding and especially in their cocktail parties. By the time yours truly began seriously to think of Europe that usage was more or less depreciated and pretentious. I know that after I read Europe by Norman Davies in December 2001 and Europe: a history by Tony Judt in March 2005 - magisterial texts both of them.

Christian Davies made a wonderful intervention in the London Review of Books. Let us say that if I had been privy to the "fake news" about a "concentration camp" in Warsaw in the Second World War - yes, there was a building; yes, it was temporary ... and ... In 1995 we did not refer to "fake news" or "alternative facts" when we discussed the 50th anniversary of the Second World War. We called that sort of thing "pettifogging" and it was a thing you tried not to do - especially when it came to ghettos and concentration camps.

Danusha Goska who wrote Bieganski and Save Send Delete puts it clearly in the headline: Decent people reject anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

Anyway - Polish parliamentary election tonight / tomorrow morning. And there is a lot of "respect yourself in the morning" in the air / being able and willing to do so.

There are a lot of "watermelon rainbow radish" issues going on - in case you think this is word salad; watermelon radishes are delicious right now. And the rainbow is a coded reference to all the people outside the heterosexist hegemony at the moment.

Ramona had an elder sister in her life - Beezus or Beatrice - and she eventually had a younger brother Algy who was a bit like a rat. I always wondered how Algy grew up with his formidable sisters.

Patrick Melrose has been much on my mind last week and this week - I love the way people have adapted Edward St Albyn for their own purposes and played with the five books. Patrick, of course, was a VERY "lonely boy" and he fills his loneliness with self-harm; self-injury; self-abnegation and of course indulgence in all the substances of dependence that were current from 1967 to 2003. He is very versatile in that regard!

Written By

Andrew Gold

Backing VocalsLinda Ronstadt

Lead guitarWaddy Wachtel

Rhythm GuitarDan Dugmore

BassKenny Edwards

DrumsMike Botts

Electric PianoBrock Walsh

Arp String EnsembleBrock Walsh

Sleigh BellsMike Botts

HandclapsAndrew Gold & Peter Asher

Sampled In

10 AM by Left Boy

Cover By

Lonely Boy by The Almost

MUSIC VIDEO

Lonely Boy
Andrew Gold

[Verse 1]
He was born on a summer day, 1951
And with a slap of a hand, he had landed as an only son
His mother and father said, "What a lovely boy
We'll teach him what we learned, ah, yes, just what we learned
We'll dress him up warmly, and we'll send him to school
It'll teach him how to fight, to be nobody's fool"

[Chorus]
Oh, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

[Verse 2]
In the summer of '53, his mother brought him a sister
And she told him, "We must attend to her needs
She's so much younger than you"
Well, he ran down the hall and he cried
Oh, how could his parents have lied?
When they said he was their only son
He thought he was their only one

[Chorus]
Oh, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

[Bridge]
Goodbye Mama
Goodbye you
Goodbye Papa
I'm pushing on through

[Verse 3]
He left home on a winter day, 1969
And he hoped to find all the love he had lost in that earlier time
Well, his sister grew up, and she married a man
He gave her a son, ah, yes, a lovely son
They dressed him up warmly, they sent him to school
It taught him how to fight, to be nobody's fool

[Chorus]
Oh, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

[Chorus]
Whoa-whoa-whoa, oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy
Oh, what a lonely boy

Some wonderful instruments in this lot for example handclaps and bells of the sleigh variety. That transition from summer to winter.

That repeat line: They dressed him up warmly; they sent him to school

It taught him how to fight, to be nobody's fool.

My other favourite Nobody's Fool song is Avril Lavigne's Nobody's Fool. And I may have written a lyric / poem around this sort of theme.

Another earworm which is going around is Against all odds - take a look at me now. Phil Collins and Mariah Carey each do an exceptional version - the one which caught me twenty years ago nearly [while seeing The King and I - the one with Jodie Foster as Anna Leonowens] I heard in a cafe/diner situation in December 1999.

The bridge in Lonely Boy - exceptionally powerful. It has a Sylvia Plath feeling "Goodbye Daddy I'm through" - did buy an Ariel this year or at least a Collected Poems.

Thinking of Ryan Michael Hunsaker and how hard it is to recoup - even to recapitulate - eighteen years of basic mistrust - either cumulative or consecutively. Or, really, any period of mistrust longer than a few weeks or months. Hunsaker is a brilliant man who broke away from behaviourism in the education system.

And that We'll teach him what we learned, ah, yes, just what we learned.

Sounds like a piece of cross-cultural and transcultural learning - fatal line in multicultural mental health.

And when he ran down the hall and cried - so many of us did not have a hall or a Hall.

Halls, of course, can serve and function as shelters for learning and for community.

Our Lonely Boy did not have that - it makes a big difference - even and especially to an abandoned two-year-old!

He probably did not even have a place for his tears that was outside of himself. That is such a vital and basic thing. For the children in North Syria who are on Kurdish land.

That whole "Jeffrey Archer and the Kurds" thing!

And you twist yourself in perceptions and justifications and conceptions.

In the face of lies - as you are facing the lies - and, even, yes, telling the lies.

And the sister growing up - that would have been later on in the 1960s.

And the kid's growing up would have been in the 1970s or 1980s.

They say, of course, "If you remember the 1970s you weren't there".

Remembering that wonderful Rebels and Revolution show at Victoria and Albert which is travelling around the world. I saw it the week before the Eurovision Song Contest at a Museum and we ate 1970s food and there were little children there. Children who engage and are engaged.

Engagee is a Sartrean word. And that gentleman wrote Words or Mots. And that was about his childhood.

[Why are all the childhoods I'm talking about here male? Couldn't I have put a feminist spin on Lonely Boy? And it's women who make all the Lonely Boys out there - and are afraid to break them and shake them - isn't it? Whether this is realistic or not...]

Between Wachtel and Dugmore - and Linda Ronstadt's backing vocals - really makes the song three-dimensional and transcendent as opposed / juxtaposing immanent.

If I were to explain The second sex's argument to a questing five-year-old, I would be very careful not to say: "Transcendent is how men think. Immanent is how women think." and I would press on how they are socialised to do this. 

Socialisation is an immanent and transcendent ongoing quest.

I hope my analysis of Lonely Boy and Gold's process has helped you.