I am listening to George Butterworth's - Bank of Green Willows. It reminds me of childhood and being ill in bed with the radio playing besides me. English pastoral music, a glorious hymn to the beauty of the natural world.
I have been reading a miscellany of things, George Orwell and his writing career through life, striding after the truth and then recording it. Often ill, he eventually became recognised as a writer and with the help of friends survived. Rebecca Solnit wrote of him in her book - Orwell's Roses. There is a biography on Wikipedia that is both long and well padded out. And I am glad of that deep need to record those who were thinking people, their thoughts perhaps obsolete today but recording the history of their times.
I have also been reading up about the Pegasus Spyware developed by the Israel's, which you can buy and then disrupt some poor governments election plans. (I wonder how much it costs;) The bug can be transferred from someone near to you, or it can come in on a link. Being targeted is a bit of a worry but then this comes with new technology and the internet. Did the founder of the internet Tim Berners-Lee ever realise what a catastrophic bomb he unloaded on the world?
Inasmuch as people try to track us and 'bot' us with silly ideas, there are always the champions fighting for cyber-security. Yin and Yang, good and bad, the two forces always fighting somewhere in the background. Overcoming the small pettiness and ambitions of humans.
Oddly enough, I've just been watching George Butterworth dancing on YouTube - it's true, there's an old film of him morris dancing from 1912. Just four years later he'd been killed on the Somme and the world was changed forever. I wrote a blogpost about Orwell and his time in Wallington after walking through the Hertfordshire village back in November 2015.
ReplyDeleteJust watched it John, everyone dancing beautifully and without embarrassment. I don't mean to be unkind there of course, but the neat turn out of the sisters in their gym slips and the men in their casual jackets so neatly dancing was fun. War is an evil thing, killed so many promising young lives, yet composers such as Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams seem to have captured the old England, or at least an idealised vision of it.
DeleteThank you. I shall try to find that novel, and some Orwell, too.
ReplyDeleteI am listening to quite a lot of Solnit Joanne, she has an American view, and so my more sober English view tends to question her thinking but she is very interesting and did I say I have just finished her - Recollections of a Non-Existent Life. As for Orwell, though I have not read 'Animal Farm' or '1984' (I do not have the stomach for cruelty) I have read a couple of his books.
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