A Bunny's Christmas in the Summerlands

I had a big long rant about Christmastime delusion, spending money to put yourself into crushing debt, just to be able to show how much you love your friends and relations, through the gifting of material goods, but, on reflection I deleted it all.

Blind rants rarely make for good reading.

Instead, I've had a day to think about things, have eaten roughly a gross of tamales, read some Dylan Thomas, and, in short, have decided that translating some Bertolt Brecht in honor of the occasion might not be the best thing to do. Not when the theme of the piece was survival, though removal of your humanity. Not when the Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast featured one of his poems, set to music.

So, I hope you'll forgive my bit of bourgeoisie sentimentality when I wish you a happy Christmastide, and hope you have somewhere warm to sleep, something to fill your stomach with, and maybe someone to keep company with, to help watch the wheeling of the year send us spinning back towards the sun, and warmth, and light, and life.

And for a gift? I'll let you have the Dylan Thomas that I read earlier, read by the man himself, in two parts:

A Child's Christmas in Wales:
Part One
Part Two

"Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept."

Stück Ohne Name

That I can never seem to write anything short, has long been one of my failings. Why this is, I don't know, and shan't speculate about here, simply because I don't want this to degenerate into a comic illustration of my point.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy writing long pieces. It's nice to work through things in words, and the challenge of tying everything together is always rewarding, and -- did I just do what I said that I wasn't going to?

Argh!

My point in saying all this is, that as interesting (or not) as longer pieces might be to read, they don't make for very good 'blog reading, simply because they take longer to write. As such, you'll have to forgive me if I fill the gaps between the meaty bits with incidental bits like this, where I'll cop out, and post a link to something that I've found, another blog, an interesting article, or, (heaven help me!) you tube clips.

Viz:


Okay, so it's just a sound recording, but, it's Helmut Walcha (my favorite Bach organist [yes, I have a favorite Bach organist. I'm a huge nerd]), playing BWV 578 - Little Fugue in G minor, on a proper Baroque organ. It's things like this that keep me coming back to Bach, over and over again, dispite all the other music I know, and love.

G'won. Listen to it all. It's only four-and-a-half minutes long :)

Signifiers; Signified

While the odds of anyone coming back to read this, at some future date are pretty slim (about the same as anyone coming to read them at all, really), I'm enough of a traditionalist to think that there should be some sort introduction at the beginning of things; where I, your humble narrator, establish my aims and try to excuse this little corner of mine.

While that's the ideal, I'm really not sure how to make it work, simply because of the vague nature of what I'm trying to do here. I'm not out to change the world, not out to win friends and influence people, not even out to impress the friends I already have. What I am trying to do is present myself, as truthfully, and apologetically as I can, all while ignoring the irony of my writing with a pen name.

What this all stems from is something that George Orwell said in his essay on Charles Dickens, about the nature of writing: "When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer ... [w]hat one sees is the face that the writer ought to have." While Orwell wasn't always right (there are some real howlers, for instance, in his 'The Prevention of Literature'!), it's thinks like this that make me love him, even when I disagree with him. Perhaps it's just that he too wrote under a false name.

In any event, it's a good aspiration - to write well enough, and true enough that you people out there on the other side of the monitor will come to know me as I am - so I'm claiming it as my own. I can't promise to always be interesting, or even coherent. I can only be me. I hope that's enough.