Ebony and velvet

As part of my project to make lasting mark on humanity I have been brushing up on my literature again. Some of my knowledge and appreciation of English and American literature has grown quite rusty, and my memory of the great poets is a little more feeble than it has been in the past. To this end I have taken to reading poetry again, partly for the sheer pleasure of it, and partly because it's particularly irritating to others to recite at opportune moments.

This reciting at given moments, in some ways, it reminds me of listening to CTB singing, with gusto, and long before Walk the Line gave Johnny Cash popular, hip cred, Ring of Fire. The particular occasion was at the top of yet another lung-searing ascent of that painful bit of tarmac, Birdwood Road. I reached the top, as part of a ride with half a dozen others, bathed in sweat and gasping to hang on to the bunch. CTB, to then add salt to the lashing, launched into, in his fine baritone, Ring of Fire. Not just a few gasped lines from the chorus, no it was the whole damn thing. I, at that precise moment, hated him for it, just purely from sheer envy of the voice, the composure and the effortless nature, it was unalloyed magic.

With my renewed confidence in poety I have been attempting to instill/install a sense of literature and culture in my growing minion. He is now quite taken with a couple of Blake and Wordsworth poems, and has given over to reciting The Tyger on the walking bus and at school. It is a fine thing.

Well, here's a flashback for me. Somehow, when I was trawling Youtube for tasty clips on phoney health schemes, you know the sort, L. Ron Hubbard meets Brain Tamaki, I got distracted and the next thing I found this. The movie that this is the opening to, The Hunger, it made a deep, lasting impression on me, and this clip prompted a flurry of mental activity not seen in my cranium since the moment last year of the tanned girl on a vespa in a short skirt, the wind and the fortuitous glance.