Hey hey Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie & his "This Machine Kills Fascists" guitar

Woody Guthrie would have turned 100 tomorrow. So to mark the centennial of his birth, my top 10 facts about the great freewheeling folksinger:

* Woody was born in rural Oklahoma on 14 July 1912, the son of a cowboy.

* He spent much of his life rambling and roaming, singing and songwriting.

* He liked to scrawl “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitars.

* His best-known song, This Land is Your Land, was written as a kind of alternative American national anthem.

* His 1943 autobiographical novel, Bound for Glory, has become a classic of American literature.

* Bob Dylan famously idolised Woody Guthrie and in his early years stole from him shamelessly. Compare Dylan's Talkin' New York with Guthrie's Talking Dust Bowl Blues.

* While still in his forties, Woody was diagnosed with Huntington's chorea, an incurable degenerative disease that attacks the muscles and causes psychiatric problems.

* Dylan, Joan Baez and other young folksingers visited Woody in hospital during his final years, bringing along their guitars to sing for him.

* In the late 1990s, thirty years after Woody's death, Billy Bragg and Wilco recorded Mermaid Avenue Vols 1 & 2, two albums of new songs that contained previously unheard Woody Guthrie lyrics.

* Woody's songs still sound fresh today. I love these lyrics from Pretty Boy Floyd:
Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen

Are you listening, City of London bankers?

Happy birthday, Woody!

You can find out more at the Woody Guthrie website

Jesus, etc

Newsweek magazine, April 2012

I came across an interesting magazine article while in the States last week, written by the British-born blogger Andrew Sullivan. It made Newsweek’s front cover. Its headline urged me to "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus".

Sullivan is a Catholic. But he’s my kind of Catholic - the kind who rejects “supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms”. Sullivan prefers to keep things simple; to focus on “what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be”.

“Jesus’ doctrines,” he writes, “were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching.”

Like Sullivan, I’m also a Catholic. Not a lapsed one either; these days I bring my kids to church most Sundays. But I don’t follow all the rules, I don’t buy all the complicated theology, and I’m frequently embarrassed by the crusty and sometimes criminal antics of the church’s hierarchy.

I go to church because I believe we all have a thirst for God that is as natural as our desire for sex. We can deny it, just as those starchy Victorians denied their sexual urges. But it’s there: we are spiritual creatures. And it seems to me that the religion of my mother, my grandparents and my great-grandparents is as good a place as any in this flawed world to try to satisfy it.

So thank you Andrew Sullivan. Christian leaders of all stripes can continue to judge and denounce and obsess about others’ sex lives. Your little article spoke to me more clearly than all of them. Forget the church, follow Jesus. That’s it. Now, nobody tell that old chap in Rome but I feel like a man who has emerged from a confessional. 

You can read more from Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast

1963 and all that

To mark World Poetry Day, a short poem. One of my favourites...

Annus Mirabilis, by Philip Larkin

Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D H Lawrence

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Here's a recording of Larkin himself reading Annus Mirabilis - priceless.

Do you know any good poems worth reading today? Let us know.

Goodreads, anyone?

CS Lewis said we read to know we’re not alone. That could explain why Goodreads is such a great website. I put short reviews of every book I read there, and I’m always looking for new goodreads friends - so if you’re also a member, please get in touch. Here’s my profile page. And here's my latest book review.

On the skids

Had he not drunk himself to death in 1969, Jack Kerouac might have been celebrating his 90th birthday today. He would be younger than Prince Philip.

Of course longevity was always an unlikely prospect for the poster boy of the Beats, the man who wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time…”

Here he is giving a toe-curling interview to the Italian writer Fernanda Pivano near the end. It'd make Oliver Reed blush. Not a great advert for whiskey.

Old age should burn and rave

John Cale is 70 today. Last week it was Lou Reed. Odd to think of the Velvet Underground as septuagenarians. Here's Cale doing a great musical performance of Dylan Thomas's poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

Choose your weapons

They fuck you up, your wife and kids. They may not mean to, but they do.

Once upon a time I had a life. I had a job. I ran marathons. I socialised with friends and bored them rigid with stories of the time I hitch-hiked alone through Central Africa (have I told you about that trip? Don’t worry, I will).

And then – BOOM! – a tiny creature wrapped in a blanket was placed gently into my clumsy hands. His name, we decided, was Matthew. Sleep appeared to be alien to him. From that day forward, I have never looked up.

And fate wasn’t done with me yet. Two years later – BOOM! - another boy, Luke. Work offered redundancy; I took it. I was hoping to combine freelancing with childcare; a naïve and foolish plan. Now, of course, I spend my days wiping bottoms, washing clothes and worrying about head lice. The missus brings home the bacon. I am stuck at home ironing. Somehow I have become a stuck-at-home husband. My name is Simon and I am a stuck-at-home dad.

Do I give a shit? To be honest: not really. I signed up for this and I’ve no right to complain. We’re not short of money. I’m content with life. I love my boys, and the missus, and would do anything for them.

Yet something feels odd, a little emasculating, shameful even. Is this really how things were meant to be?  At 10, I dreamed of being General Custer. At 20, I wanted to be a war reporter. Now, aged 44, the only combat I’ll ever know is the bloody battle of the sexes. You could say I’m a casualty, wounded at the frontline. I am a bewildered, shell-shocked POW dreaming of tunnelling to freedom.

But there’s a silver lining, there always is. Now that I’ve stopped living, I can start writing. Words are loaded pistols. Sartre said that. My weapon of choice is the Bendle Blog. I said that.

With apologies to Philip Larkin