Set it to Music

 The Owl and The Pussycat - The Bards // The Seventh Seal - Scott Walker

 I am listening to a compilation called 'The History of Northwest Rock vol 2: The Garage Years. One of the songs compiled is The Bards' take on Edward Lear's magnificent nonsense poem from 1871. The poem has wonderful memories for me of my grandmother, and the only downside is that they don't manage to fit in my favourite line (someone please put 'runcible spoon' into a song):  

"They dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon"

 This in turn, naturally led me to think of my favourite Scott Walker song 'The Seventh Seal' in which he recounts the events of Ingmar Bergman's cinematic masterpiece as an equally powerful pop song. If you do not have the mettle to sit through the film, you can at least listen to the song, which will give you enough knowledge to follow a conversation about the film with people you are trying to impress, or even subtly divert the conversation with the comment "have you heard Scott Walker's interpretation of 'The Seventh Seal'?" which will surely garner you respect and admiration from all (and therefore continue the conversation along lines well traversed by you. A win-win situation).

 Here are a few choice lines from the song:

Anybody seen a knight pass this way / I saw him playing chess with Death yesterday / His crusade was a search for God and they say / It's been a along way to carry on 

 My life's a vain pursuit of meaningless smiles / Why can't God touch me with a sign / Perhaps there's no one there answered the booth / And Death hid within his cloak and smiled 


 My life's a vain pursuit of meaningless smiles is such a wonderful phrase.

A spanner in the works

The door to my mind / forlorn fishing nets / dual 'Persona' /Naval Star gazing

It feels like lately I have been swamped by a deluge of swedish vocabulary, verb tenses and other such thrilling components which make up the untamable beast known as svenska. It is not as bad as it sounds, in fact, I thoroughly enjoy learning languages; nothing is so satisfying as drunkenly rambling in another language and people being able to understand you, as my friends and I discovered on saturday night. While my previous party trick may have been exclaiming 'How did I get so drunk?' in swedish, I am now able to give a detailed description of this inevitable demise.
Last night I prepared for my final swedish test by watching Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) without subtitles. Judging by todays effort in my listening comprehension, it was perhaps not the most suitable method of practice, but in any respects the most engrossing. I am satisfied by the fact that I understood enough to figure out the plot lines.


The above film still is not from Smultronstället but another Bergman film, Persona, featuring the same actresses, Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Thulin. I have always liked the director who has a stable of trusted actors whose names become synonymous with the directors own.

I am also now completely intrigued by star charts, islands and fishing nets, to add to the ever growing list of 'things that inspire me that I really should do something about'. These include birds, faux bois, whittling, and such like. A collection of "things" laid out like in the positions of stars / faux bois embroidered stockings / balancing bird Alexander Calder-esque mobiles / whittled bath feet / tunnels of fishing net / on an island?

It all makes me feel rather intrepid. I definitely have more exploring to do in the coming warmer climes.
Spend my winter thinking, and my summer doing.

The mind boggles.