Kamala Dinosaur Meme

Pax et bonum

I Am Going Home (Song)

Earlier this year I attended a great concert by The Tannahill Weavers, a Scottish band I've long liked. I owned several of their albums before the concert, but, of course, they had some for sale at the venue. I bought a couple that I did not already own.

On one of the albums I found their cover of a song by Billy Connolly, "Oh No."

It has a lively tune as the Weavers played it, and I was enjoying it ... until I listened to the words.

Yikes.

It's another one of those songs about a man declaring he's leaving home and his woman. He tells her he doesn't care if her heart is grieving, she can have the home but he's going to hit to road. And he tells her again and again not to say "oh no."

The song annoyed me. I thought at first maybe I'd use the tune to write a song opposed to the message of this one. But I thought that might lead to copyright issues.

Then I thought I'd just write an original song in response. But as I mulled over what approach to take I suddenly remembered a song that I'd partly written years before called "I Am Going Home"

I had a basic tune, a refrain, and a couple of verses already. I revised them a little, and added a couple of new verses. This is the result:

I've been here before

I've been there before

I've been everywhere and more

and now I'm going home

I am going home, Lord

I am going home.

I am going home

'cause that's where I belong.

I've done a little of this.

I've done a little of that

I've done more than I should have done,

and now I'm going home.

I am going home, Lord

I am going home.

I am going home

'cause that's where I belong.

I've worked from dawn to dusk,

I've worked the whole nith through.

I have worked the live ong day,

and now I'm going home.

I am going home, Lord

I am going home.

I am going home

'cause that's where I belong.

I've seen some pretty women,

all around the world,

but none of them's as pretty

as the one that waits back home.

I am going home, Lord

I am going home.

I am going home

'cause that's where I belong.

I've sung this song before

you know I'll sing it again,

but let me say once more

that I am going home.  

I am going home, Lord

I am going home.

I am going home

'cause that's where I belong.

Pax et bonum

Culling and Collating

I have been in the process of downsizing by donating books to the library, to my former schools, and to the parish for its ongoing "Treasures" room (kind of a continual rummage sale to support the parish). Last year, for example, I donated 329 books. Since I started donating at the time of my retirement four years ago the total is about 1,000 books!

I'm now going through boxes of books I had in storage in the crawl space, and picking out books to donate. I found a lot of Thomas Merton books that I'll never read/reread,  for example, so they will soon be heading out the door.

As part of the process I'm also collecting related books scattered across multiple book cases or in boxes stored in closets or the crawl space. I now have one bookcase dedicated to G. K. Chesterton, C. S.  Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. That bookcase features works by them, biographies and autobiographies, and studies of them and their works.

Right now, the tally by author:

Chesterton - 72 

Lewis - 40 

Tolkien - 10 

Williams - 11

There was no more room in that bookcase for friends and followers, so I've dedicated a shelf to Hilaire Belloc (5 books), Joseph Pearce (17), and multiple titles by Dale Ahlquist. 

Next to my bed, meanwhile, are two small bookcases dedicated to Charles Dickens (13), Haiku poetry (30), and collections of favorite poets such as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, Dante, and Edward Lear (15).

The culling and collating continues.    

Pax et bonum

T. S. Eliot Clerihew

T. S. Eliot

was not appreciated by the proletariat.

"Those new-fangled poems kinda bore us.

He writes like he's sittin' with an open thesaurus."

Pax et bonum

Harris on Time

Pax et bonum

Reading Goals

One of the things I've been doing the last couple of years in terms of reading is setting goals for the number of books and the number of pages.

I'm finding that having such goals is getting a bit cumbersome.

I'm on my way to meeting this year's goals, but I find fewer and fewer books worth reading. The longer, richer, but often denser works that are worth reading slow me down, and I've even found myself deciding not to read a book at this time because it would make it harder to meet my goals!

Now goals about reading a particular author - even trying to finish all the books by that author - are fine. I'll keep doing those.

But total number of books and a set page count? I have to think about that.

Pax et bonum

The Path to Belloc

In his book Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know, Joseph Pearce provides a quick overview of what he considers great work of literature. He includes at the end of the book a list of 100 works "every Catholic should aspire to read."

For the most part, I agree with him. And I've used his list to help guide my effort to fill the gaps in my own reading history. Mind you, as a Literature major, a book lover, and as a Chestertonian, I had read many of the works he cites. 

Chesterton. Dickens. Dostoyevsky. Tolkien. Lewis. Shakespeare. Sophocles. 

Ah. Favorites whose works iIread and reread.

But there have been some works he mentions that I did not like. I tried Don Quixote, and got a hundred pages in before I gave up. I did read a few of Jane Austen's books that I had not previously read, but did not really enjoy them. Manners and romance are not my cup of tea. And I did read both of Flannery O'Connor's novels; too grotesque for my taste.

I decided to tackle Hilaire Belloc. I had only previously read Cautionary Tales for Children (which I had enjoyed) and Pearce's Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. I found the biography informative, but came away not really liking Belloc as a person!

Nevertheless, I thought it was time to tackle one of the Belloc books on Pearce's list: The Path to Rome. I started it a few months ago, but it did not hold my interest, so I drifted away to other works. Still, given his ties to Chesterton, and Pearce's championing of the book, I felt obligated to finish it. So I returned to it.

I did finish it the other day. But I have to admit I did so just to say I did. Indeed, the last third of the book I kept thinking, "Get to Rome already."

It could be that I'm not a fan of travel books or of long rambling works. But even more, his personality got in the way. I did not care about his struggles, and got tired of his commentary and judging. Oh, there were some descriptive passages that were quite fine, and I could appreciate them as examples of good writing. But that's about all I did enjoy.

I have his The Four Men on my bookshelf, and Pearce is even higher on that book than on The Path to Rome, but I hesitate to even attempt it. I also have a collection of his essays; those I might read as I do enjoy essays. Not yet, however.

Instead, I'll just end this with a clerihew I wrote about Belloc a number of years ago:

Hilaire Belloc
walked off the end of a dock,
but being in the midst of a debate
he was unaware of his fate.

As for my current reads, I'm juggling a book about haiku poet Santoka Taneda,  The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and Father Kevin McKenna's A Concise Guide to Catholic Social Teaching.

And enjoying them all.

Pax et bonum