#AprilCountry, April 29th – “People And Their Problems”, Billy Joe Shaver
“People and their problems are giving me a pain / People and their problems are messing with my brain / I try to help them some but they always stay…
Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”, the poetry of loss, and bereavement
The poetry magazine Magma has a call for submissions for a special issue on Loss. The deadline is April 30th – so you better get writing if you want to enter…
The Band, Martin Carthy, Anton Karas : The Third Man Theme
Originally posted on The Immortal Jukebox:
You listen to a piece of music; a song or a symphony and by some miracle of neuro-chemistry it is encoded into your memory.…
Cobra 18 is dead, but his legacy (and remaining semen) lives on
Obviously this kind of thing is totally mundane for The Irish Field, but I did find the opening line of this story (paywalled, so see photo) quite, um, arresting. And…
#AprilCountry, April 28th, “Harper Valley PTA”, Jeannie C Reilly
Country music is, with the partial exception of hip hop , the only popular music genre to preserve the narrative song. Songwriter (amongst other things) Tom T Hall is known as…
“Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it” – Anne Boyer on the inspirational imperative
I posted before about the inspirational imperative, the the endless pressure to be “inspirational” as the response to stress, distress and setbacks. This passage from Anne Boyer’s New Yorker essay “What Cancer Takes…
L.M. Sacasas on accusations of romanticising the past.
At The Frailest Thing blog, L.M. Sacasas identifies something I’ve often noticed and wish there was a handy word for: Steven Pinker and Jason Hickel have recently engaged in a…
#AprilCountry, April 27th, “Cool Water”, Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash, in the last years of his career, made a series of albums which mixed new compositions, country standards, and versions of contemporary songs from unexpected genres, such as…
Séamus Sweeney 