sovay | But give us another pint of beer and we'll all of us go away

So last night I was emotionally miserable and my lower back seized up for no obvious reason and my room was a swamp of heat and humidity and I slept through nightmares for about three hours in the mid-morning and this afternoon I finished my first poem in two months. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony? Have some things I've been meaning to post.

1. Dean sent me this one: archaeologists have uncovered the shipbuilding harbors of the Persian Wars. Now I want to re-read Jill Paton Walsh's Farewell, Great King (1972).

2. I am delighted that a former poet laureate of the UK wants to widen the definition of war poetry to include the anonymous soldiers' song "I Don't Want to Join the Army." I have an unreasonable affection for this jaunty, sweary bit of the folk tradition. I learned it about ten years ago—a side effect of trying to trace a racy jingle from The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), I believe—even before I heard its parent "A Conscientious Objector" and it tends to come into my head while I'm washing dishes.

3. In case you have not yet seen, the full source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer has been published online and it is full of programmers being clever at one another. I had not realized that Margaret Hamilton the software engineer was still alive. I am really happy to know she's still in the world and still doing things with it.

4. Capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been using stone tools for seven hundred years without needing humans to show them how. This is probably the best news I've heard all week.

5. These are the songs that have been in my head for the last forty-eight hours. I suspect them of trying to organize themselves into a mixtape. It's more instrumental than my usual internal soundtrack, at least.

Anna & Elizabeth, "Lovin' Babe"

Sweetest pleasure in all my roaming
Just a kiss from a pretty strange woman, babe

Bellowhead, "A-Begging I Will Go"

There's a bed for me in every town and I've no rent to pay
There's many a right and willing lass I've bedded in the hay

Bellowhead, "New York Girls"

So sailor lads, take warning when you land on New York's shore
You'll have to get up early to be smarter than a whore

Bill Spence with Fennig's All-Star String Band, "Smash the Windows, Coleraine, Haste to the Wedding"

Bill Spence with Fennig's All-Star String Band, "The Three Sea Captains, Old Man Dillon, Charlie the Prayermaster"

Brendan Mulvihill & Donna Long, "Shandon Bells/Boys of the Town/Rakes of Clonmel/Girls of the Town"

Brian Peters, "Gentlemen-Rankers"

If the home we never write to and the oaths we never keep
And all we know most distant and most dear

Dave Swarbrick & Friends, "The Rights of Man/The Shan Van Vocht/Harvest Home"

The Klezmatics, "Mipney Ma"

מפּני מה מפּני מה ירדה הנשׁמה
מאיגרא רמא לבירא עמיקתּא
הירידה צרך עליה היא

Máire Breatnach, "Breatnaigh Abu"

I am now caught up on work for the week. I suppose that explains where it all went.

But give us another pint of beer and we'll all of us go away

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