1 Apr 2008
Trying to be Mansfield’s very own Steve Malkmus
Lark Descending is the second – consecutive – song on the Editor’s Recommendation EP which has a Hardy reference, but the only one namechecking Steve Malkmus. Still, I learned something there, I’d never heard of him, ignorant git that I am. I guessed what the J was in Buckley though.
See lyrics to Lark Descending
9 Letters Sent:
Craig
Sorry to be pedantic but it’s ‘The pay’s better and I’d know some hard blokes’. It’s just if he knew them now the job on the bins wouldn’t have held so much promise. Good work, though!
Apr 22nd, 2008
chris
Pedantic is good!
Apr 22nd, 2008
John
is it worth mentioning that the title comes from a famous piece of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams called The Lark Ascending? – which I think is also the most requested piece of classical music on Desert Island Discs (mainly by politicians as it is a very english, pastoral piece of music which their advisors must think sends out the right signals vis a vis patriotism and love of the country etc).
VW’s other really famous piece is the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”, and it and “Lark” often appear together on the same LP / CD – I wonder if Nigel has a copy.
Feb 22nd, 2009
Dave F.
@John
Are you sure NB wasn’t inspired by George Meredith’s poem?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lark_Ascending
Feb 22nd, 2009
Charles Exford
Whilst working on a forthcoming “Lists of Things in HMHB songs” contribution this morning, I realised you have “vagrancy” where I’ve always heard “vacancy” and still do. What do t’others think ?
BTW I’ve always thought that line might be a literary quotation about a sort of come-down experience but can’t find it anywhere.
Oct 24th, 2010
Vendor of Quack Nostrums
It’s vacancy for me too.
Although I realise that with an HMHB song, an appeal to sense and logic is not always a sensible or logical approach, if a fire burning inside of oneself sinks it will undoubtedly lead to some form of chill. If the sinking actually leads to the fire being extinguished it is more likely to result in the metaphorical fireplace becoming vacant than the subject necessarily losing all and becoming a vagrant. Or something.
I should have just got a job on the bins.
Oct 24th, 2010
Ricardo
I’ve hunted for this a few times, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be vacancy, until Mr E’s suggestion above. Armed with this new information…
It’s not a quote by Thomas Hardy this time, but from the biography of him in Last Essays by G.M. Young (the passage has been much-quoted by subsequent biographers of Hardy, so NB may have happened across it elsewhere.)
“His profession took him to Saint Juliot. And what happened there was what has happened and will happen from one generation to another. He fell in love with a girl with whom he was not intellectually in key. There was no open catastrophe; only the fire sank rapidly into vacancy and chill. But by some mysterious power Hardy was able to preserve, encysted as it were, this early passion in all its primal intensity; and so it came about that some of the most poignant love-poems in our language were written by an old man out of his memories of forty years before.”
Hopefully this may provide some redemption for me thinking I was being clever by posting Hardy/Shakespeare references on the On Passing Lilac Urine page last year, before realising Gez’s page also lists references for EPs.
Oct 24th, 2010
Vendor of Quack Nostrums
@ Ricardo
Cap well and truly doffed!
Oct 24th, 2010
Charles Exford
Chapeau M. Ricardo, Maillot Jaune.
“That indfineable bond, akin to love, which gradually but definitely comes to exist between strangers-turned-friends who share a certain commonality of purpose on interweb fora may soon turn to bitter hatred when one of them realises that the other possesses infinitely more powerful search mechanisms”.
Legin Wahs, Deapartment of Social Media, University of North Wirral, 2010.
Oct 25th, 2010
Add Your Bit: