Category Archives: Script for audio journal

Letters From Quotidia Postscripts Edition 4

Letters From Quotidia Postscripts Edition 4 A Brief Encounter, Dixie, Two Love (2 versions)

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia Postscripts Episode 4 – a podcast by Quentin Bega for listeners who enjoyed that Irish phenomenon- the crack! in the 200+ Letters and Postcards From Quotidia over the past 17 months. Quotidia remains that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

One of the  sites I frequent when hoping a passing poem might solicit me is allpoetry.com. And so it was when I sought out an appropriate verse to accompany a song I had written from the depths of memory. Like most guitarists (and I use this term very loosely in regard to myself!) I have a large store of riffs and chord sequences built up over the years. One sequence from, oh! Good Lord! it must be… forty years ago, popped into my head the other week trailing remnants of text behind it.

This was the chorus, of the song, A Brief Encounter, you are shortly going to hear. I was able to stitch together the words with a modicum of mental exertion and invention. The image of an old man with a suitcase, waiting in the rain on the side of the road surfaced- and that was me off and running- or should I say, driving. [insert song]

That was the something new of the triad that defines these postscripts. The poem that was passing by on the allpoetry site was The Latest Decalogue by Arthur Hugh Clough [pronounced ‘cluff’] who was born in 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria and who died in 1861 at age 42, when she had been on the throne a mere 24 of the 61 years of her reign. Like so many Victorians of his ilk, he led a life jam-packed with travel, incident, and endeavour.

He was a fine poet whose experiments in extending the range of literary language and subject were ahead of his time. This poem remains one of my favourite pieces of verse because it exposes the hypocrisy of those who cloak their venality in pious platitudes. Here is  The Latest Decalogue by Arthur Hugh Clough

Thou shalt have one God only; who/Would be at the expense of two?/No graven images may be/Worshipp’d, except the currency:/Swear not at all; for, for thy curse/Thine enemy is none the worse:/At church on Sunday to attend/Will serve to keep the world thy friend:/Honour thy parents; that is, all/From whom advancement may befall:/Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive/Officiously to keep alive:/Do not adultery commit;/Advantage rarely comes of it:/Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,/When it’s so lucrative to cheat:/Bear not false witness; let the lie/Have time on its own wings to fly:/Thou shalt not covet; but tradition/Approves all forms of competition.

Some things never get old- the sentiments expressed here apply with as much force now as back in the high Victorian era in which they were written! An American near contemporary of Clough was Ambrose Bierce. Wikipedia informs me: He was the tenth of thirteen children, all of whom were given names by their father beginning with the letter “A”: in order of birth, the Bierce siblings were Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia.  

Now, I don’t know if that shaped who he turned out to be, but he left us  his version of Clough’s poem. However, he is best known for the acerbity of definitions in his masterpiece, The Devil’s Dictionary. Here are a few of them for us to ponder: Christian- noun, one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbour. Fidelity- noun, a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed. Love- noun, a temporary insanity curable by marriage.

Bierce, like his English counterpart lived a full and adventurous life. And he lived a lot longer. He served with distinction in the Union Army during the Civil War, receiving newspaper accolades for his daring rescue under fire of a gravely wounded comrade at the battle of Rich Mountain. He sustained a traumatic brain injury at the battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, but he survived and thrived, to an admirable extent. Wikipedia tells us, Bierce wrote realistically of the terrible things he had seen in the war in such stories as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, “A Horseman in the Sky”, “One of the Missing”, and “Chickamauga”. His grimly realistic cycle of 25 war stories has been called “the greatest anti-war document in American literature”.

 In October 1913, Bierce, then age 71, departed for a tour of his old Civil War battlefields. According to some reports [ he made his way to Mexico and] joined Pancho Villa’s army as an observer…Bierce’s ultimate fate remains a mystery. He wrote in one of his final letters: Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia! A remarkable man, I think you’ll agree.

Now for the something old component of the postscript: since I’ve spent a bit of time in America in the Civil War era already, what about a song that captured the milieu of all sides of the conflict- Dixie. A contested song, in lots of regards, I suppose the song prefigures the popularity of  Lili Marlene composed as a German love song during World War One which became popular among Allied and Axis troops in the Second World War.

Dixie was written by Daniel Decatur Emmett (October 29, 1815 – June 28, 1904) an American songwriter, entertainer, and founder of the first troupe of the blackface minstrel tradition, the Virginia Minstrels. He is most remembered as the composer of the song “Dixie”, probably written in 1859. Much to the chagrin of Emmett, who was anything but a Southern sympathiser, the song became identified as a Southern anthem and was used as a campaign song against Abraham Lincoln’s run for President and was played by General Pickett during the Confederate charge at Gettysburg.

Both Union and Confederate composers produced war versions of the song during the American Civil War. These variants standardised the spelling and made the song more militant, replacing the slave scenario with specific references to the conflict or to Northern or Southern pride. After the South surrendered to the Union, President Lincoln had the song played by the White House band in an effort to support the reunification of the United States. 

Indeed, Emmett’s song was a favourite of Lincoln’s, who said after the war ended in 1865, “I have always thought that ‘Dixie’ was one of the best tunes I ever heard… I insisted yesterday that we had fairly captured it.” Its popularity is enduring and a testament to the power of music to move people and I offer it here in the spirit of Lincoln- one of the best tunes. And thanks to Wikipedia and the Songwriters Hall of Fame for most of the material on this fine song. [insert song]

Which leaves only the something borrowed bit to do. And this is borrowed from the repertoire of Jim, who as well as sea songs, sang many of the ballads in our folk group, Banter. This song concerns a bunch of young soldiers discussing their sweethearts- long a favourite in Irish pubs and clubs. Not sure of its provenance or whether it has much of a life outside Ireland and the diaspora, but when Jim sang it in the clubs here in western Sydney it had some of the older women in tears. Here’s a couple of  versions- I couldn’t decide which was better so I give you both- first a swung version with full band, the second is more subdued in even eights: [insert songs]

No point in my trying to predict, at this stage, where the next postscript may go in search of attachment. Instead, here are lines on the waste of war by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, born in  1850, her first poem published when she was just 13. Here are lines from Woman and War. We women teach our little sons/ how ignoble blows are, school and church/ support our precepts and inoculate/ the growing minds with thoughts of love and peace…Oh men, wise men, superior beings say,/ Is there no substitute for war?/.If you answer “No”/Then let us rear our children to be wolves. And teach them from the cradle how to kill.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text.

For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2022 combo for music composition.

Letters From Quotidia Episode 198 Counting Game, 25 Minutes To Go

Letters From Quotidia Episode 198 Counting Game, 25 Minutes To Go

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, episode 198– a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

Antepenultimate- a fancy way of saying third last of a sequence. And that is what this post is. I may have mentioned before that I intended to call a halt at Letters From Quotidia, episode 200 for a couple of reasons: first, I need a break away from the regular discipline of putting the music and text together in order to consider what form, if any, the Letters in future might take and second, 200 is a nice round number. Unlike, say, the number 153, which was the number of fish landed by  several of the disciples after they had returned, somewhat bewildered, to their former occupation of humble fishermen after the upheavals surrounding the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. According to the gospel of John, the story goes: they had been fishing all night to no avail and, as they approach the shore a Man there asks how many they caught. When they reply, none, He tells then to cast the nets to starboard with the spectacular result reported. This man was Jesus in His penultimate appearance to the disciples after His resurrection.

You can expend a rather large quantum of time in chasing the significance of the number 153 down the multitudinous internet rabbit-holes that may open up before you in your quest. I was attracted to the link to Archimedes who seems to have had a thing about the number. Others, the parish priest of St Joseph’s Kingswood included, feel the number symbolically represents all the peoples of the earth that the apostles should fish for rather than the finny denizens to be found in the waters of Lake Tiberius. And, of course, numerologists have had a field day with this number which I will not expand on here as the post is only 20-odd minutes in duration and it would require more time than exists in this or any other universe to properly expound the product of this particular rabbit-hole!

Now for some sanity in the form of extracts from poetry, the first is from Numbers by Mary Cornish, a poet from Washington state in the US: I like the generosity of numbers./The way, for example,/they are willing to count/anything or anyone:/two pickles, one door to the room,/eight dancers dressed as  swans. .// Next are some typically sardonic lines from another American poet, Carl Sandburg,Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head./Arithmetic tell you how many you lose or win/ if you know how/many you had before you lost or won./ The poem ends with the following conundrum, If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she/gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is/ better in arithmetic, you or your mother?// Finally,  to a poet I admire and rate highly, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He wrote thoughtfully on the purpose of our existence in his poem, A Psalm of Life with the epigraph, What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist. Its first and second stanzas are, Tell me not, in mournful numbers,/ Life is but an empty dream!/For the soul is dead that slumbers,/And things are not what they seem.//Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not its goal;/Dust thou art, to dust returnest,/Was not spoken of the soul.// A quatrain that moves me each time I read it is, Art is long, and Time is fleeting,/ And our hearts, though stout and brave,/Still, like muffled drums, are beating/ Funeral marches to the grave.// The final stanza appeals to each one of us, Let us, then, be up and doing,/With a heart for any fate;/Still achieving, still pursuing,/ Learn to labour and to wait//

It’s amazing how many songs have numbers in their title: Eight Days a Week by the Beatles, One by U2, 9 to 5 by Dolly Parton- just to name three! For my original song I’m going to reprise one from way back last year, from Episode 68, to be precise. It’s cheating, I know, but it’s my party and I’ll cheat if I want to– isn’t that how the song goes? Anyway, it’s my party and now we’re going to play Counting Game. Even if you’ve played it before! Ready? [insert song]

Longfellow’s exhortation that we should be up and doing…still achieving, still pursuing could well have been the motto for the subject of the rest of this post: Shel Silverstein. He was born in Chicago in 1930 and died in 1999 at his home in Key West, Florida. In his 68 years on earth, he crammed into it a lot of living and a lot of loving. Poets.org gives the following biographical details: “A cartoonist, playwright, poet, performer, and recording artist, Silverstein was also a Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated songwriter. His books, which he also illustrated, are characterised by a deft mixing of the sly and the serious, the macabre and the silly. His unique imagination and bold brand of humour is beloved by countless adults and children throughout the world.”

A few lines from his poem Mr Grumpledump’s Song gives the flavour of his wit,Everything’s wrong,/Days are too long,/Sunshine’s too hot,/Wind is too strong./Clouds are too fluffy,/Grass is too green,/…Mr Grumpledump concludes, Kids are too noisy,/Shoes are too tight./ Folks are too happy,/Singin’ their songs./Why can’t they see it?/Everything’s wrong!// One of my favourite Silverstein songs is, Still Gonna Die where, tongue in cheek, he itemises all the health routines, diets and fads for a longer life you may sample, but ends each verse with the kicker, you’re still gonna die!

Other songs of his you may know include, Tompall Glaser’s Put Another Log on the Fire, The Unicorn, made famous by The Irish Rovers and Sylvia’s Mother, by Dr Hook. But he could write more than novelty songs, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, follows the disillusionment and mental deterioration of a suburban housewife, who climbs to a rooftop “when the laughter grew too loud”.  Marianne Faithfull, who recorded a memorable version of the song which featured in the film, Thelma and Louise, said that her interpretation was that Lucy climbs to the rooftop but gets taken away to a mental hospital, and that the final line / As she rode along through Paris with the warm wind in her hair/ are actually in her imagination at the hospital. I think it’s a masterpiece that reflects the lives of far too many women.

A lot of people will have heard what may be his most famous song, A Boy Named Sue, memorably recorded live by Johnny Cash at San Quentin on February 24 1969. And the song I’m going to cover is also one Johnny Cash recorded at Folsom Prison in 1968. It’s called 25 Minutes To Go It’s about a man who is about to be executed by hanging, and he’s counting down how much time he has before the trapdoor opens, starting with 25 minutes. The song is a shout of defiance and two other references come to my mind; first, Dr Johnson’s observation that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully; second, George Orwell’s 1931 short essay in story-form, A Hanging. Based on his work as a policeman in Burma in the 1920s, it is an early example of his mastery of the English language and a telling indictment of the absurd cruelty of capital punishment. I would encourage any lover of language to read it. Now, 25 minutes to go. [insert song]

Listeners to my past eight posts may wonder why there has been nothing about Ukraine in this one. But it has been there, I think, as a  low and subterranean murmuring, much as the heroic defenders of the last scrap of Mariupol taking refuge in the tunnels under the vast steelworks, may, and here I hope against hope, survive against all the grotesque odds stacked against them by the overwhelming juggernaut of Russian military might bearing down upon them. But whatever the case may be, I will publish this post as soon as I record it- and the last two posts as well.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text.

For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2022 combo for music composition.

Letters From Quotidia Episode 195 Space Oddity, Morning Dew

Letters From Quotidia Episode 195 Space Oddity, Morning Dew

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, episode 195– a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

I have a foot in both camps-  that of the Arts, especially literature and music, and that of the Sciences, particularly cosmology and biology. A couple of items from my news feeds caught my attention today as I was pondering how to begin this letter. The first was a Sky News Australia piece on the International Space Station:

A highly anticipated change of command ceremony between the United States and Russia has taken place on the International Space Station at the end of March this year. Despite mounting tensions between the two countries, NASA has repeatedly reaffirmed that it continues to work closely with Russian space agency Roscosmos. Eyes have been on the ISS since war broke out in Ukraine but tensions on the earth did not reach into space. Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov in his handover address affirmed those on the space station were “one crew”.

The second item was from Science Alert with the dread-inducing, eye-popping headline, How a Zombifying Virus Can Manipulate Caterpillars Into Killing Themselves. It sounds like something out of a horror movie. What happens is a group of insect-infecting viruses known as nucleopolyhedroviruses (NPVs) get into a host organism, for example, cotton bollworm caterpillars. NPVs are known to drive their caterpillar hosts to the top of plants before dying, whereas the more natural behavior is for the caterpillars to sink to the earth before pupating. If caterpillars are dying up at the top of plants, it presumably gives the host virus more opportunity to spread further, whether that’s being carried on the wind or chewed up by a predator.

OK so my question is: what sort of virus has infected the brains of humans that propel us to climb the ladder of increasing risk and conflict seeking out a mushroom-cloud-shaped apotheosis? Or is a compulsion towards violence hard-wired into our DNA? In further science news I learn that the puzzle pieces are all assembled now. The human genome has now been completely mapped according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but after reading through the material and listening to interviews with a couple of scientists I realised that there is still a lot more work to do and that we will not be able to excise the errant genes that may cause this propensity to violence any time soon. It’s akin to the mapping of an alien planet but not really being able to determine what is actually on the ground. Sorry to get your hopes up- no rescue from the worst elements of ourselves just yet.

But it’s time for a song.  And we’re returning to the International Space Station for this one. Written and recorded by David Bowie, it was first released on 11 July 1969, nine days before Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. And it only took 44 years for Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield to give us all a treat by filming himself singing Space Oddity while floating on the International Space Station in 2013. [insert song]

Here are three stanzas about our companion satellite by the wonderful American poet Emily Dickinson, The Moon was but a Chin of Gold/A Night or two ago—/And now she turns Her perfect FaceUpon the World below—/Her Forehead is of Amplest Blonde—/Her Cheek—a Beryl hewn—/Her Eye unto the Summer Dew/The likest I have known—//Her Lips of Amber never part—/But what must be the smile/Upon Her Friend she could confer/Were such Her Silver Will—//

On TV tonight I watched a BBC newscast about the Red Cross trying yet again to bring in desperately needed food to Mariupol and ferry out some of the 100,000+ citizens still trapped in a place that resembles not so much an enclave of God’s green earth but a blasted and apocalyptic movie set on the cratered, airless, dusty surface of the moon. And there are military planners who would like to reduce the other port cities of Ukraine, notably Odesa, to a similar state.

On the same BBC newscast, I watched people in the centre of Odesa listening to warning sirens-perhaps more cruise missiles coming in from ships lurking over the Black Sea horizon-they were listening without flinching or moving, so inured have they become to the sound. But the camera caught a young boy, traumatised by his experience of sirens, explosions and horror in other places he and his family had to flee from, being led away from the open square to, presumably, shelter out of the camera’s view.

And in the midst of this sombre scene, the redemptive power of song, as members of the Odesa musical community filled the square with sound that uplifted hearts rather than cast them down. The Ukrainian president, Vlodymyr Zelenskyy, in a surprise address to the 2022 Grammy Awards on 3 April, said to all of us, Our musicians wear body armour instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded. In hospitals. Even to those who can’t hear them but the music will break through anyway…we defend our freedom to live, to love, to sound. On our land, we are fighting Russia which brings horrible silence with its bombs. The dead silence… fill the silence with your music. Fill it today, to tell our story. Support us in any way you can. Any, but not silence. 

Music has played this role throughout history. Just think of the rich gift of American music to the world, particularly that brought by the slaves to the New World has blossomed into jazz and the blues and rock music. Another native of Putin’s city of birth was the Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. He wrote a symphony to memorialise the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis between 1941-44 when, over 872 days, a million people starved to death: he wrote, My idea of victory isn’t something brutal; it’s better explained as the victory of light over darkness, of humanity over barbarism, of reason over reaction. Plea to V.P. Read again your own history before allowing the brutal siege of Mariupol to continue! It mimics that of the Nazis of your own birthplace.

Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson wrote the song which concludes this Letter after seeing the 1959 black-and-white film On the Beach The film depicts the aftermath of a nuclear war. The final scene shows, and thanks, Wikipedia, for this dramatic sentence: The empty windblown streets of Melbourne are punctuated by the rise of dramatic, strident music over a single powerful image of a previously seen Salvation Army street banner: “There is still time .. Brother”.

Bonnie wrote the song, Morning Dew, the first of her career-and what a first!- after friends she was staying with in L.A. went to bed. It has endured down the years, being covered by a wide range of artists. It was first released in 1961, As recently as autumn 2021 she was touring at the age of 81- what a woman, eh? The song has universal themes- which I will not insult you by explicating here- the 21 year-old Bobbie Dobson set it out as clear as the morning dew [insert song]

And now I look to C.S. Lewis’s sane advice when confronted in the mid-20th Century with fears of Armageddon,: when it comes [let it] find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds. Or Robert Frost, who asks us to reflect with an equanimity bordering on Stoicism, on the beauty, fragility and transience of life in this short  poem, Nature’s first green is gold,/Her hardest hue to hold./Her early leaf’s a flower;/ But only so an hour./Then leaf subsides to leaf./So Eden sank to grief,/ So dawn goes down to day./Nothing gold can stay.// To conclude, may I rescue that Salvation Army banner from the empty, end-of-the-world-streets of Melbourne and wave it above my head without irony but with a lot of desperate hope- there is still time…brother. ‘til next time!

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text.

For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2022 combo for music composition.

Letters From Quotidia Episode 131 No Angel Will Interfere, After All These Years

Letters From Quotidia Episode 131 No Angel Will Interfere, After All These Years

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, episode 131 – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

Forty-six years ago, we lived in Gwynneville, a suburb of Wollongong, between the botanic gardens and the university. I drove a white Ford Falcon station wagon from that quiet little suburb to Warrawong High School 10 klicks along the Princess Highway for the five years or so we lived here. I was involved with a couple of folk groups and heavily into the pub and club scene, as you do when you’re in your mid-twenties. Ends of a candle and the burning thereof springs to mind. If I spent three evenings a week at home, it was only because I needed to recuperate from the ravages of the other nights and, it may be, that in some dark and narrow crevice of conscience, I conceded that I owed some time to the needs of my wife and two kids.

Husband and father of the year was one title I could not aspire to, even were that honour to be limited only to the dozen or so residences of the short block we lived on. Listening to our collection of LPs while having a drink or two after the kids were in bed was a scene of marital contentment in those intermittent evenings of domesticity. Linda Ronstadt and Kris Kristofferson were on heavy rotation, blasting from our junkyard-purchased record player and we particularly liked his eponymous first album which we had brought out with us from Belfast. That year we were also knocked out by The Carpenter’s album, Horizon. So, with a drip feed of songs such as  Linda Ronstadt’s You’re No Good and I Fall To Pieces, or Kris Kristofferson’s Help Me Make It Through The Night and Sunday Morning Coming Down or Karen Carpenter’s beautiful rendering of Desperado and Solitaire it was inevitable that, notwithstanding my commitment to folk music, I would write  a country-influenced reflection on where I was at that year when I got around to writing a song about it.

As I said in the last podcast, I changed the title from Three Views of You to No Angel Will Interfere. Should you happen to be as self-absorbed as I was back then, I can recommend song writing as an antidote to that condition. In the song, I was able to look at myself from my wife’s point of view, in three vignettes or snapshots. Did it enable me to amend my behaviour for the better? Yeah, a little bit. And, little by little is an effective long-term strategy, for, I’ve been reliably informed, that after fifty years of marriage, I’m almost house-trained. Almost. [insert song]

The phrase, after all these years, is in common use, one might even say, a cliché. Back in 1975, Paul Simon was crazy, after all these years and as outlined before, I think I was too, at that time. Which is the theme of the second half of this podcast. Shakespeare, in Sonnet 19 tells us, Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,/And make the earth devour her own sweet brood. Robert Herrick, in the 17th Century, advised the virgins to make much of time: Then be not coy, but use your time,/And while ye may, go marry;/For having lost but once your prime,/ You may forever, tarry. Carl Sandburg, another poet I’ve quoted before, in his free verse poem, Clocks, written towards the end of the First World War, observes: Here is a face that says half-past seven the same way whether a murder or a wedding goes on…And of course, there are wristwatches over the pulses of airmen eager to go to France.

Well, I could go on, and on. But time’s passing and- oh, what the heck! I can’t resist quoting Phillip Larkin’s brilliant poem, Days : What are days for?/ Days are where we live./ They come, they wake us/Time and time over./They are to be happy in:/Where can we live but days?// Ah, solving that question/ Brings the priest and the doctor/ In their long coats/ Running over the fields.

You know, once upon a time, I was a zealot, opposed to anything that approached the maudlin, the nostalgic, the rose-tinted survey of the good old days- Happy Days, anyone? Why on earth, I wondered, would anyone living in the 70s wish to look back to the 1950s? Not me. The repertoire of songs I covered were focussed on highwaymen, outlaws, lusty sailors, and suchlike. Well, I’m no longer living in the 70s (incidentally, Australian listeners of a certain age will recognise that phrase as a song and album title of a popular Melbourne group at the time, The Skyhooks.) Now to the present: I’m living through my 70s, if my luck holds out, that is!

But back in the day, as the young’uns express it, my claws were sharp, and I would rip to pieces anything sweet or sentimental. However, devouring time does blunt the lion’s paws, and, gradually, my repertoire of songs has broadened, and, as several people have noticed, my beam also has! I’m as likely to sing a sweet song of remembrance now as one about a bloody battleground. Our 50th wedding anniversary has come and gone, and I am still unable to treat my wife to a relaxing weekend in some posh harbour digs here in Sydney, thanks to continuing COVID lockdowns. My younger self- even one of a just few years ago, would not have believed I would sing this next Foster and Allen hit from a long time ago of a long-married life- After All These Years, but there you are, and here we go! [insert song]

For next week we will leave the gentler and more elegiac world of this podcast for one more in line with themes of war and desolation. The Foggy Dew is a song of war, written by a Catholic priest, in about 1919. And there is a family connection here which I will explain in Letter 132. The original composition is from the nineteen seventies, and I was living between and among the genres of country, folk, rock, and pop as well as more apocalyptic and experimental genres. As I look, now, at the original manuscript page, I see written at the top in black ink-well, it figures- song/poem/fallout/ and under this the word “Descent” with the words “working title” in brackets. Oh, enough said- I’ll see you all next time…

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text

For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22  also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments

Music accompaniment and composition software: Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2021

Letters From Quotidia Episode 130 Avondale, Another End

Letters From Quotidia Episode 130 Avondale, Another End

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, episode 130 – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

In Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin, there is a gravestone of unhewn Wicklow granite. On it, is inscribed one word. Nothing else is needed. Such is the fame, among the Irish, of the person there interred, that anything else would be superfluous. And the word? Parnell. Also known as “the uncrowned king of Ireland,” Charles Stewart Parnell was born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family which could boast links with American naval  hero Admiral Charles Stewart as well as the British Royal family through his great-grandmother who belonged to the Tudor family. He was a complex mix of conservative inclinations and revolutionary entanglements. Having little detailed knowledge of the Irish tradition of resistance and its luminaries, he would, nevertheless become its figurehead in the imagination of the Irish struggling classes at home and abroad.

So then, what is a toff like Parnell doing in such company? Well, you know, he is not alone. Sir Roger Casement, another scion of the Anglo-Irish establishment and, incidentally, one of the earliest human rights activists in that he revealed the atrocious treatment of native workers at the hands of imperialists in the Belgian Congo. This place was also known as- thanks to Joseph Conrad-  the heart of darkness. He is celebrated in song as a hero of the Easter Rising of 1916. And, if we skip back a couple of centuries, we find a descendent of the French Protestant Huguenots who fled to Britain, one Theobold Wolfe Tone, a founder of the United Irishmen. Not one of these men lived to make old bones:

Tone was dead at 35 under unclear circumstances, Casement was hanged for high treason at age 51 and Parnell died at age 45, after a scandal involving his long-time mistress and mother to his children, Kitty O’Shea. Being a hero is tough in any tradition. But if you’re Irish, and you want to come into the parlour of nationalistic Ireland’s prim regard, you’ll need to be squeaky clean in the eyes of the gatekeepers of traditional sexual morality as well as possessing the usual comprehensive skill set of those who aspire to be leaders of others.

Dominic Behan wrote the  first song of this post, Avondale, a short, melodious tribute to Parnell. Like that headstone in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin, it provides little in the way of information about its subject. But its evocation of the lovely surrounds of Parnell’s birthplace is a feature and he bestows a heroic epithet on the  charismatic and talented leader of the Irish parliamentary party- one better than, adulterer, which cruelled his career and Ireland’s hopes of achieving Home Rule. The heroic epithet?- Avondale’s proud eagle. [insert song]

As a postscript for those who may not have heard my other podcasts where Dominic Behan songs feature: he was born in 1928 into the literary Behan family of Dublin. A prodigious talent as a songwriter and singer, short story writer and novelist, he was also a playwright who wrote in Irish and English. He died in 1989 and I’m sure I will sing one or two more of his marvellous output before I finish my podcasts. A final point: it tickled me to learn, as I was researching the background of Avondale, that he lifted– in the way of folk artists everywhere who often “borrow” from other sources- the tune of a 19th Century loyalist song, “The Orange Maid of Sligo”! 

But now to the second song of the podcast, Another End. When I came across the original, smudged and fading photocopy of the lyrics- produced using a portable Remington typewriter, one of my prized possessions, I read the note at the bottom of the page where I had appended the following info: “This piece is experimental. The meaning is not only read across the page as usual but also vertically, or down the page.” I cringed with embarrassment and would have chucked it onto the reject pile which was gathering around me but for the fact that I came across another page where I had set out chords for the songs (18 in all) which I had recorded onto cassette tape for a record executive in Paris, where my sister, Monica, assured me, she could get a hearing for them. I don’t know what became of the tape- another of life’s little mysteries- although I can see, in my mind’s eye, an unopened cassette tape arcing through the Parisian office air into the cylindrical filing repository for all such unsolicited items.

But back to the present; before the song joined the winnowing accumulating around me, I played through the chords several times and, in a short time, recovered the simple melody from my memory. So, the song made the cut. Older and wiser now, I will not duplicate the arrangement of words on the page which certainly looks tres artistique. And my reason: I think, for the time being, I have provided quite enough hilarity out there at my expense! The song was written largely towards the end of 1979 when I was wondering if I would ever get a job again and finished in January 1980 when I learned that I had obtained temporary employment at Roger Casement’s old school, Ballymena Academy.

Another End shares DNA with the song, No Surrender, found in  Letters From Quotidia, Episode 72, which was written in a caravan in 1995 from whence I set out on a brutal commute to a teaching job which commenced in the dark from the outer west of Sydney, all the way into Circular Quay and then to Manly across the harbour. It took three hours each way. Again, I wondered if there would be an end to the crushing tedium I endured. There was an end to it, of course, eventually, but until that time arrived, I lived within the following lines of Baudelaire: When a heavy lid of low sky/covers a soul moaning with ennui and fright/and the whole horizon is rounded by/ a black day pouring down sadder than any night:/…Long hearses roll, slow, silent, hypnotic, through my soul. Ah, yes you can always trust the poets of this world to find a match to the inchoate, emotional and spiritual tangle you find yourself in at times- but be aware that you may have to search long and hard to find that match. And, believe me, it’s worth it! [insert song]

Thanks to the discovery of lost songs, mentioned in my last post, I can tell you the name and genre of the next original composition: No Angel Will Interfere. Apart from the original title, Three Views of You, which I junked, substituting instead the last four words of the song, this simple country composition is just as written in Wollongong, New South Wales, in 1975. Three verses with no chorus, bridge or middle eight. The other song is one that, a couple of years ago, I couldn’t imagine myself ever singing. There’ll be more about this next week.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to, and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text

For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22  also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments

Music accompaniment and composition software: Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2021

Letters From Quotidia Episode 124 Don’t Get Married Girls, Take It or Leave It

Letters From Quotidia Episode 124 Don’t Get Married Girls, Take It or Leave It

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, episode 124 – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

The Slough of Despond, first appears in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress– and here I let Wikipedia take up the story: it’s a fictional, deep bog in John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, into which the protagonist, Christian, sinks under the weight of his sins and his sense of guilt for them. It is described thus:  

This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.

So, from fictional 1678 to present day Australia, the Slough of Despond has- like the COVID delta variant perhaps, hopped over centuries, continents and oceans, to come to rest in New South Wales, in 2021. This plucky state, once lauded as the little place that showed the virus what was what and who the big boy in the fight was proved to be- not quite that, as the Premier admitted defeat after seven weeks of increasingly futile lockdowns in Sydney and declared all of New South Wales similarly shut down to try to contain the proliferating plague at five of the clock past the prime meridian, on the 14th  of August in the year of our Lord 2021.

Nothing for it but poetry. I got this excerpt of verse by Jan Beaumont off the net from a site called startsat60.com: We may seem sweet old ladies/Who would never be uncouth/But we grew up in the 60s –/If you only knew the truth!//There was sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll/The pill and miniskirts/We smoked, we drank, we partied/And were quite outrageous flirts.//Then we settled down, got married/And turned into someone’s mum,/Somebody’s wife, then nana,/Who on earth did we become?//We didn’t mind the change of pace/Because our lives were full/But to bury us before we’re dead/ Is like red rag to a bull! 

Hear! Hear! Now for a song by Leon Rosselson who has been around the folk scene from the early 1960s. He is 87 now, still playing music and still an activist. Jim sang his song, Don’t Get Married Girls as part of Banter’s repertoire, but I utilise it here as it seems to fit in well with the verse that came before. [insert song]

Listeners to the Letters will be aware that I am a Boomer and a child of the sixties. The song of the second post, Let Them Not Fade Away, detailed my musical heroes- and the title reveals an homage to The Rolling Stones’ single of early 1964 which had the song, Little By Little, on the B side. (Boomers will not be puzzled by these references to B sides and the like). I bought the first four LPs they produced during this decade and regard them as ascending in excellence. Aftermath, the fourth, released in April 1966 was the pinnacle as far as the not-so-sweet little sixteen-me- was concerned.

I rated it as highly as The Beatles’ Rubber Soul which my older brother had bought me as a present  the Christmas before. I had, by this time, just about worn out my copy of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited released earlier in 1965. These three LPs were to enter the Pantheon of my musical greats and they remain in honoured positions to this day. As a mid-teen, my pleasure in listening to music consumed my being. I put it down to the hormones raging through my adolescent brain. But there could be another explanation- In post 90 of the Letters, I identified with the anguish the protagonist of Richard Power’s Orfeo felt upon learning that his diminished joy when listening to music was probably caused by micro-strokes in the area of the brain where sounds are processed.

The adolescent boy was courting his future wife and consumed by jealous thoughts as he listened to Take It or Leave It, track 12 of Aftermath. This laid-back, folk-rock composition by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, was written at the behest of their Svengali, Andrew Loog Oldham, when they were just 22 years old, a mere six years older than the teen struggling to find the chords as he played along to the spinning disc. So, here we are, 55 years later, and the gentle seas of  sixties’ nostalgia has washed up on the shores of my consciousness this song from all those years ago, which I here present to you instead of one of my own compositions. I regret to report that the furnace of creativity now takes longer to ramp up to a temperature capable of smelting the ore used to produce that precious material from which songs are fashioned. [insert song]

Instead of foreshadowing the brace of songs to feature in the next post, (although one will be from the folk tradition) I am reduced to raiding fortune cookie jars and rummaging through desk calendars for some pithy epigram to assuage your hunger for content. How about this, from Eleanor Roosevelt- It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Or, as the hopes of women and girls perish in these dark days of Taliban triumph in Afghanistan – Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons and daughters of God.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text

For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22  also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments

Music accompaniment and composition software: Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2021

Letters From Quotidia Episode 123: Dublin In My Tears, Sprawling Blue Bell (for Mary)

Letters From Quotidia Episode 123 Dublin In My Tears, Sprawling Blue Bell (for Mary)

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, episode 123 – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

At the end of letter 122, I indicated that I was lost in a labyrinth, facing the roaring of the Minotaur which stood between me and the fitting poem to accompany the songs presented here. Thankfully, the darkness transmuted into a hospitable tavern filled with folk music and the setting of just the poem I needed from a favourite poet of mine, John Masefield, poet-laureate of England from 1930 until his death in 1967. There are generations of former pupils (including my wife) who can still recite flawlessly his much anthologised and much-loved poem, Cargoes. But the poem I give here is The Emigrant and anyone who has been in this circumstance will relate to it, I am sure:

Going by Daly’s shanty I heard the boys within/Dancing the Spanish hornpipe to Driscoll’s violin,/I heard the sea-boots shaking the rough planks of the floor/,But I was going westward, I hadn’t heart for more.//All down the windy village the noise rang in my ears,/Old sea-boots stamping, shuffling, it brought the bitter tears,/The old tune piped and quavered, the lilts came clear and strong,/But I was going westward, I couldn’t join the song.//There were the grey stone houses, the night wind blowing keen,/The hill-sides pale with moonlight, the young corn springing green,/The hearth nooks lit and kindly, with dear friends good to see,/But I was going westward, and the ship waited me.

The website, poemhunter.com supplied me with the following interesting piece of information about Masefield: According to his wishes, he was cremated, and his ashes placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Later, the following verse was discovered, written by Masefield, addressed to his “Heirs, Administrators, and Assigns”: Let no religious rite be done or read/In any place for me when I am dead,/But burn my body into ash, and scatter/The ash in secret into running water,/Or on the windy down, and let none see;/And then thank God that there’s an end of me.

Listen now to what some reckon is the best Dublin song ever written- but it’s up against a lot of stiff competition, and not for me to judge. It was written by Dubliner, Brendan Phelan and Sam the Man sang it as part of Banter’s repertoire when we played in western Sydney. Phelan would have related to Masefield’s poem even though, as his song relates, he was travelling eastwards, toward England, where he still resides as far as I know. [insert song]

Writer’s block is (supply your own word or phrase or novel- if you must!) The next song not only blocked all attempts, on my part, to produce lyrics but put me in a full nelson and slammed me on the mat on every occasion I presumed the attempt over the past five years. So battered and bruised-psychically if not physically-I once more climbed through the ropes to confront my fearsome opponent, emboldened by the deadline for episode 123 looming a mere two weeks’ hence.

My Nemesis stood there smirking- looking very much like me– but fatter and uglier and lacking any of my residual charm if you want my unbiased opinion. Before we could get to grips, my wife interrupted proceedings and required my assistance with a number of lock-down household chores, so I gave my antagonist an I’ll be back soon, never you worry shake of my forefinger and left the field of combat. When I returned, he was lounging against the ropes, examining his fingernails- then he spat on the canvas mat and indicated that he was going to face-plant me on the globule of phlegm glistening there.

To show him I was not intimidated, I riposted: “See your signature move, the full nelson? The urban dictionary defines it thus:  A bowel movement in the like of the Mt St. Helens eruption. Usually impacts the entire restroom facility, including stall walls, porcelain, seat and sometimes the floor. Affectionately named after a construction worker named Nelson. And here’s how you would use it in a sentence, were you capable- Brian,  Don’t go into stall #2, I just had a Full Nelson. Bemusement shrouded his features, was he to take this as an insult or what? This gave me the opportunity to duck under the ropes again and make good my escape- this time to my room where I fired up the computer and had another go at the lyrics. So here I am, lyrics at the ready, and it’s up to you to judge whether it is worth the effort expended or whether a more fitting description of it would parallel the urban dictionary’s definition of a full nelson.[insert song]

It’s deplorable, I know but I am unable to provide you with a firm and fully formed idea of what comes next week. There are lots of folk songs that my modest range can accommodate, but I like to leave this choice to after I have managed to locate or compose an original piece- then, I like to twin it with an appropriate folk item. Instead of advertising some lies about the next post, I’ll finish with a poem written by an American girl, many years ago, that had a real impact on my students:

Remember the time you lent me your car and I dented it?/I thought you’d kill me…/But you didn’t.//Remember the time I forgot to tell you the dance was/formal, and you came in jeans?/I thought you’d hate me…/But you didn’t.//Remember the times I’d flirt with/other boys just to make you jealous, and/you were?/I thought you’d drop me…/But you didn’t.//There were plenty of things you did to put up with me,/to keep me happy, to love me, and there are/so many things I wanted to tell/you when you returned from/Vietnam…But you didn’t. A poignant and understated poem about grief, wouldn’t you agree?

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text

For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22  also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments

Music accompaniment and composition software: Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2021

Letters From Quotidia Postcards edition 30

Letters From Quotidia Postcards edition 30a

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, the Postcards edition, number 30, a podcast by Quentin Bega where you will hear songs from the repertoire of Banter, a traditional Irish folk group from Sydney’s outer west. The four songs are drawn from the traditions of the English-speaking world. I will cover the songs because of COVID restrictions. And, as always, Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives- but from time to time they encounter the extraordinary.

I will lead with a song I first heard in 1988 when I had returned to Australia from Northern Ireland. Kevin Baker, an old friend, met me in Wollongong and sang Superstar, a song he had written earlier in the decade. We had last met in Northern Ireland in 1981 when Kevin visited us in Cushendall. We spent a memorable week out on Lough Erne with a fishing group from the school I taught at, Kevin taking photographs and writing in his journal as the hunger strikes unfolded in the province.  In Wollongong, he presented me a copy of his CD Harvest and Heartbreak. On the cover he had written an inscription to my wife and me, generously crediting us with the words, who helped shape the beginning. Although he died on 22 March, 2021, his contribution to music, poetry and community lives on in the Illawarra where he lived for most of his life. [insert song]

The John Prine composition,  Hello In There, was one of my favourite tracks from Joan Baez’s great album, Diamonds and Rust. In the latter half of 1975 I’d bring it over to Kevin Baker’s place in Mangeton, a leafy suburb in Wollongong, NSW, and we’d drink some wine and play some music. This was one of my tracks for providing inspiration (along with the wine, of course). Kevin favoured James Taylor’s Fire and Rain as his go-to muse, as I recall. Prine, in an interview, said that he thought of hollering the title into a hollow log after hearing the reverb on Lennon’s Across The Universe and that was the starting spark of the song. He had an affinity for old people and said,” I don’t think I’ve done a show without singing it. Nothing in it wears on me.” Almost 50 years after hearing the song and using it frequently in my teaching career, I will echo John Prine- Nothing in it wears on me. [insert song]

Only Our Rivers Run Free is a fine composition, written by Mickey McConnell at age 18 in 1965. It’s a song that captures the state of politics in Northern Ireland at that time.  Mickey was born in County Fermanagh in 1947. I first heard this song from Planxty’s eponymous first LP released in 1973. Both main singers from Banter, Sam and Jim, have performed the song in the past, but in the age of COVID, I present it in their absence. [insert song]

The Ryebuck Shearer, is a spirited shout from the Australian bush tradition. First, big Geordie Muir, and then Sam the man, have taken the lead for this shearing song. Although it cries out for live bush instruments, we must content ourselves with a Band-in-the-Box/RealBand combo featuring me on vocals: [insert song]

That concludes the Letters From Quotidia project which commenced on January 11, 2021 and concluded on August 6, 2021- a thirty-week odyssey which comprised 150 posts featuring 240 songs and 150,000 words of text, which totals 35 hours of podcast time. Of course, that last stat could elicit the comment from a worker, say, Rudy from the factory- that’s no more hours that I work in a slack week with no overtime.

Where to from here? For the duration of the project, poetry has been a guide for me, and, although any one of a hundred poems could stand testimony to where this project finds itself, listen to these lines of that magnificent American poet, Walt Whitman, and they will fill this gap effortlessly, As I ebb’d with the ocean of life,/ As I wended the shores I know,/ As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok,/ Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant,/ Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways,/ I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward,/ Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems,/ Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot,/ The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe./  

In a COVID-ravaged world, the Doris Day song title Que Sera, sera suggests itself as a motto. But what this little black duck intends to do…oh, hold on! does anyone outside of Australia know what that phrase actually means? The site, World-Wide-Words, suggests that it references that wonderful Warner Bros cartoon character, Daffy Duck, and that it was taken up by Aboriginal Australians. Presumably they were able to identify with this black underdog (or should that be under-duck)!

Sorry, Quotidians, is my lamentable weakness for lame puns showing? But back to the possible reason for Daffy’s attraction for Aboriginal people, particularly the youth. It is plausible that they would find a rallying cry in his catchphrase- not this little black duck– as an indicator of ethnic pride.  “As his personality gained depth at the hands of Warner Bros cartoons’ directors, the little black duck became more self-analytical, competitive, peevish, paranoid, and neurotic”.

Mmm. Do I recognise myself here, I wonder? But World-Wide-Words goes on, more positively: “Daffy, like the Greek hero Sisyphus, is a victim of injustice who continuously protests. And it’s his refusal to surrender his will to the whims of the conspiring universe that makes him heroic”. Well, that clinches it! With my love of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and my fondness for popular culture memes, I will confess myself content to identify with that admirable cartoon character. In short, what this little black duck will not do is just fade away. And to quote another pop cultural legend: I’ll be back!

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter)

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

For recording and mixing down 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used

Music accompaniment and composition software– Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2020 as well as- for some 20 of the songs of year 2000 vintage- I used a Blue Mountains, NSW, studio. Approximately 48 Banter folk songs and instrumentals recorded live (“in the round”) with a ThinkPad laptop using the inbuilt mic.

Letters From Quotidia Episode 110 Now We’re 64

Letters From Quotidia Episode 110 Now We’re 64

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

It’s strange how the gravitational pull of the stellar personalities in our youth, no matter how fast and far we thought we had travelled in the years since, draw us into an orbit of obeisance, or, at least, sincere acknowledgement of influence.  Just over 10 years ago, as I lurched through the barrier of sixty calendar years on the planet, I began to think of eschatological matters with a little more attention: I mean, even with the most optimistic and deluded of outlooks, one would have to agree that the past was more packed with incident and longevity than the years ahead will prove to be.

So, I wrote a song which touched upon matters encompassing the fifty plus years I have known my wife. Now, as a personal aside, as I write this, we have just celebrated our 50th  Wedding Anniversary, in lockdown rather than in a swish apartment overlooking the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House-thank you COVID!  And, as Hendrix wrote in lyrics to the song on the B side of his monster hit Purple Haze which I bought way back in March of 1967, For fifty years they’ve been married and they can’t wait for the fifty first to roll around…  Anyway, back to the song at the end of this post.

As my inspiration, I took a song from the Beatles’ St. Pepper’s album, Paul McCartney’s, When I’m 64. Although the theme is “ageing”, Wikipedia informs me, it was one of the first songs McCartney wrote, when he was 16.It was on the Beatles playlist in their early days as a song to perform when their amplifiers broke down or the electricity went off. Lennon said, in his 1980 interview for Playboy, “I would never even dream of writing a song like that.” But, I did, at age 63. And I’m not Robinson Crusoe, in this regard either. Lots of other people, riffing off the McCartney song, have registered in song or verse or prose, reflections on reaching age 64.

And almost fifty years before the Beatles set the song in vinyl, T.S. Eliot, in one of his finest poems, explored age in a poem, the title of which, means old man– Gerontion. …Vacant shuttles/ Weave the wind.  I have no ghosts,/ An old man in a draughty house/ Under a windy knob.// After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now/History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/ And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,/ Guides us by vanities./… I was neither at the hot gates/ Nor fought in the warm rain/ Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass… I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:… These with a thousand small deliberations… multiply variety in a wilderness of mirrors…

McCartney was only 16 when he wrote his song; Eliot was twice his age- 32- when he wrote his poem. But neither, by any stretch, could be considered old. Are our senior poets, then, so immured in their senescence, that we can learn nothing from them? Not so! Carol Ann Duffy, that redoubtable poet (and laureate) wrote, introducing a selection of poems from senior British poets in The Guardian back in 2010, I invited the poets here to write, in any way they chose, about ageing. Our society, I believe, is turning gradually away from its obsession with “yoof” and “slebs”. We are beginning to realise that we face, at the very least, an uncertain future, one in which wisdom and experience – and respect – will need to be accorded a more important role. Nice thought, Carol Ann, if only it were true. Looked at any Tik-Toks recently?

All the old gods have become enfeebled,/mere playthings for poets. Few, doze or daft,/frolic on Parnassian clover, wrote Dannie Abse, a notable poet, who died at age 91, in 2014. For Ruth Fainlight, aged 85, and close friend of Sylvia Plath in the years before that poet’s suicide, ageing, means no more roller-skating./That used to be my favourite/ sport, after school, every day:… When I saw that young girl on her blades,/wind in her hair, sun on her face,… racing/her boyfriend along the pavement:/– then I understood ageing. Interesting, and amusing, is Roger McGough’s re-working of his famous 1967 poem, Let Me Die A Youngman’s Death, where he spurns the decorous, fading-away-like-the-smoke-of-a-blown-candle sort of death for one that is full of incident, violence, lasciviousness and noise- although not before the age of 73 at the earliest! Now, at age 78, he admits, My nights are rarely unruly. My days/of allnight parties are over, well and truly./No mistresses no red sports cars/no shady deals no gangland bars/no drugs no fags no rock’n’roll/Time alone has taken its toll.

I guess, that for Roger and me and so many others in- what do you call them- our golden years, a dose of Lily the Pink’s medicinal compound would be just what the doctor ordered! I’ll finish by reference to a poem by erudite British-based Australian poet, Peter Porter who died in 2010, aged 81, shortly after submitting, Random Ageist Verses, for inclusion in the Guardian article. In this short poem of ten quatrains rhyming abab, he ranges wittily across age-related themes, citing Churchill, Auden, Hardy and Hyden, with insights such as, Immersed in time, we question time/And ask for commentators’ rights/The amoeba has a taste for slime/ Among its range of appetites concluding with these lines that surely only the wisdom of age can craft, The greyness of the sky is streaked/Along its width with shades of red;/The pity of the world has leaked/ But who are these whose hands have bled? [insert song]

As a bit of light relief from heavyweight poets and the like, the next Letter poses  the sort of question that fans of pop culture lap up like Sylvester lipping his saucerful of milk: What do Porky Pig, Tonto and Dr Watson have in common? Intelligensia among you, however, need not despair: there are ample examples from poetry and literature to satisfy those whose brows range from middling to high. So, come one, come all, the sweet land of Quotidia awaits your call.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter)

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

For recording and mixing down 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used

Music accompaniment and composition software- Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2020 as well as- for some 20 of the songs of year 2000 vintage- I used a Blue Mountains, NSW, studio. Approximately 48 Banter folk songs and instrumentals recorded live (“in the round”) with a ThinkPad laptop using the inbuilt mic.

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition 24

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition 24

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, the Postcards edition, number 24, a podcast by Quentin Bega where you will hear the narrator singing the songs from the repertoire of Banter, a traditional Irish folk group from Sydney’s outer west. The four songs here are drawn from the traditions of the English-speaking world. In this edition, like the previous one, I will cover the songs because of COVID restrictions. And, as always, Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

Last postcard I told you that I thought I would have to reproduce all of songs here using my Band-in-a-Box and RealBand software, but, again, thanks to my chaotic digital filing system, I came upon this demo version of the first song for the postcard, featuring Banter!   Dainty Davie: The song dates to the middle of the 17th Century and it concerns the much-married minister of St Cutbert’s Church in Edinburgh- one David Williamson. At one point he was being hunted by English dragoons and, a guest of landowner-sympathisers, he was put in bed with the 18-year old daughter by her mother in an effort to hide him. The Mum returned downstairs where she plied the soldiers with liquor to deflect their ardour in searching for the minister. Pity she didn’t consider the ardour developing upstairs! Williamson repaid this act hospitality and concealment by becoming intimate with the daughter. This gallant was then required to marry the saucy young woman. The song is popular among both Scottish and Irish folk-singers. I think the lyrics of this version are by Robert Burns. [insert song]

It’s Heaven Around Galway Bay: This song I came upon by accident a couple of years ago. I was on You Tube listening to music of various kinds and came upon a Dublin City Ramblers take on it. I have since, listened to several versions but reckon that the DCRs is the gun version. A couple of us in the band were going through songs one night and I pulled out this song thinking that it might suit Sam the Man. He did sing it once or twice in practice but nothing eventuated. Still in Lockdown (though with restrictions easing here in NSW) I decided to give it a go. I don’t know much about this song. It was written by Eamon O’Shea (who, I found out, was a man called Herman Weight who lived in the west of Ireland) He adopted the name because it sounded more Irish! Apart from that, I found out that he is better known as the composer of the song, Come Down the Mountain, Katy Daly. But this is a good song, and worth keeping alive in the tradition.[insert song]

Missing You: Jimmy McCarthy has written some of the most important songs from the folk revival in Ireland from the late-1970s onward. Our group has featured Ride On for at least 25 years and songs such as Bright Blue Rose, Katie, As I Leave Behind Neidin, and No Frontiers feature as requests in the Irish program Sam the Man and I host every other Sunday for two hours between 10:00 a.m. and noon. I first heard Missing You  over twenty-five years ago when Bobby, who used to play with the group, Banter, featured this song as part of his repertoire. He left after a couple of years to return to Belfast. However, I didn’t pick it up until about five years ago.  I do like to track down originals, so, today, when I heard Jimmy McCarthy’s version (check it out on You Tube) I realised that his was the best version of all! Originals are usually best. If the band, Banter, ever gets together for public performances in the post-COVID dispensation, I think I’ll re-work the arrangement of the song and use  McCarthy’s vision as my template, rather than Bobby’s which leaned heavily on Christy Moore. [insert song]

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down: I first heard the song in 1971- the Joan Baez version. It wasn’t until years later that I came across the original when I watched the documentary by Scorcese, The Last Waltz in the mid-80s when I was living in Ballymena, Co Antrim in Northern Ireland. When Banter was formed in the mid-90s in western Sydney, Big Geordie introduced his take on the song to the band and we performed it, off and on, for the few years he was part of the band. It wasn’t until 2015, when Banter re-formed after a years’ long hiatus that I picked the song up and started to perform it. Levon Helm’s refusal, according to Garth Hudson, to play and sing the song because of his dislike of Baez’s version strikes me as odd. However, we can’t check with the source as, alas, Levon Helm is no longer with us. The version set down here is probably situated somewhere between Baez and Helm. Johnny Cash recorded a version that is worth a listen.

Ralph J. Gleason (in the review in Rolling Stone -U.S. edition only- of October 1969) explains why this song has such an impact on listeners: “Nothing I have read … has brought home the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is The Red Badge of Courage. It’s a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy, close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn’t some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.” Boy, that’s some heavy load to carry for any singer. But, here I go…where angels fear to tread, perhaps? [insert song]

The 25th Postcard features my version of that great Ewan McCall song, Shoals of Herring. The Old Maid in a Garrett gets an outlaw vibe treatment: and I do hope Sam can look past the theft of two of his favourite songs. I also present an expanded version of McAlpine’s Fulsiliers yet another song from Sam’s repertoire. I have added a verse with some lines from the man Dominic Behan used as a source for his lyrics. I end with a tribute to Kevin Baker, a noted  Australian songwriter, who died in March of this year. I cover what is probably the best known of his songs: The Snowy River Men.

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter)

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

For recording and mixing down 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used

Music accompaniment and composition software– Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2020 as well as- for some 20 of the songs of year 2000 vintage- I used a Blue Mountains, NSW, studio. Approximately 48 Banter folk songs and instrumentals recorded live (“in the round”) with a ThinkPad laptop using the inbuilt mic.