john davies |
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notes from a small vicar
from a parish in Liverpool, UK
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1 - On rogation beside the River Alt 2 - Bounded by green avenues 3 - Following mislaid tracks 4 - Bringing in the Bacon 5 - Tropical storms over Scarisbrick 6 - Leisure pursuits 7 - The shopping trolley trail 8 - Everyday English 9 - Dog & Gun rogation 10 - Boundary slippage
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Talks and articles:
Heaven in Ordinary
(Greenbelt 2007 talk) Heaven in Ordinary (Greenbelt 07 talk: cd/mp3) Heart of Cheltenham pilgrimage: notes Heaven in Ordinary (Greenbelt Leeds event talk) Reading the Everyday (Greenbelt 06 talk: cd/mp3) Reading the Everyday (Third Way article: pdf) Reading the Everyday (Greenbelt on Iona 2006) Stars of Norris Green (radio talks) Making of the Croxteth Landscape Healing Places retreat programme Towards an Urban Theology of Land Mapping an Urban Parish Order online from
Brainwashed Radio: Listen now! THE FIRE
THIS TIME: Deconstructing the Gulf War A permanent record
of the fate of Iraq 
Co-travellers: Pip Wilson Jonny Baker Emmoworld The Reluctant Ordinand For Beauty and the Humiliated Paul Cookson Pilgrim's Progress Reach Out and Touch the Screen Maggi Dawn Dot Gosling: Wildgoose Rachel Andrew A Mis-Guided Blog Walking Home to 50 Diamond Geezer Islingtongue / Leytonstongue Remapping High Wycombe National Psychogeographic Common Ground Strange Attractor: Further Kristin Hersh: Throwing Music Unofficial Fall website Official Fall website Bill Drummond: Penkiln Burn Julian Cope: Head Heritage Billy Bragg Rough Trade Second Layer Records Freak Emporium Probe Records Piccadilly News From Nowhere Abebooks The Wire Smoke: A London Peculiar London Review of Books Demos Greenhouse This Week... In my ears: 
The Fall: Imperial Wax Solvent Reading matter: 
Signal to Noise #49 (Diamanda Galas, Baby Dee) On screen: 
The Mighty Boosh: Complete BBC Series 1 & 2 A lasting companion: 
Common Ground: England in Particular - a celebration of the commonplace, the local, the vernacular and the distinctive Archives July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 |
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Book of Threes
Trinity Sunday coming up. Delighted to have found The Book of Threes...
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
On Terkel and Parker's Providence
Maybe Studs Terkel started it for me - without me realising what 'it' was, for a very long time. In the late twentieth century United States Terkel was a great master of reportage. What made his work great, for me, was that he reported from grassroots on the issues of the day, his mission was to capture the voice of the ordinary person and his books read as transcripts of what everyday Americans told him about the things which mattered to them. Hence titles such as Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992), and - the one which sits on my bookshelf, paperback spine cracked through repeated reading over twenty years - The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988). Terkel knew how to draw fascinating stories from all sorts of very different people, and to compile them into works of great analysis and insight. And he was most interested in giving voice to those usually most unheard. Terkel's work proved as powerful to me as the prose of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an unforgettable exploration of the daily lives of sharecroppers in the American South. But in that classic it's Agee's voice you hear, mostly. The genius of Terkel is in letting the people speak. Closer to home I've found other writers with this great gift of letting the ordinary person speak. Edward Platt's Leadville which showcases the voices of people living on the murderous A40 Western Avenue, stood out for me recently. And then yesterday I opened The People of Providence, in which Tony Parker limits his own voice to short descriptions of the people he interviews, on a South London housing estate in 1983. The rest is them: most of the time describing what some folks might dismiss as mundane. But it's thoroughly engaging, unputdownable. And it reminds me that if I do go ahead and start six years of research into life in Liverpool 11, I've got some great role models to follow. Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Get Carter
 I premiered a rough-edged version of my Get Carter talk today. Not so much a talk as a radio presenter-style session highlighting many of Sydney Carter's spoken word poems and pieces of music. What wealth we found there. I used the central verse of his poem Interview as the basis of the presentation:So what do you believe in? Nothing fixed or final,Our little group learned a great deal about Carter today: a writer with great empathy and compassion for others, a deep sense of mystery and a search for companionship on life's challenging journey. A persuasive, creative critic of the powers which crush the spirit and trample the poor, but no cynic. A jester without a court, dancing on the edge. Astonishing he's so neglected these days, he has so much to say and all in a wonderful life-affirming way. As Nicholas Williams noted in his Sydney Carter obituary, Carter's creed 'lay in the question mark, often of a Zen-like paradox'. In 1974, Sydney Carter wrote: Faith is more basic than language or theology. Faith is the response to something which is calling us from the timeless part of our reality. Faith may be encouraged by what has happened in the past, or what is thought to have happened in the past, but the only proof of it is in the future. Scriptures and creeds may come to seem incredible, but faith will still go dancing on. Even though (because it rejects a doctrine) it is now described as "doubt". This, I believe, is the kind of faith that Christ commended.My Get Carter talk notes / playlist here [PDF, 200KB] Music Sources Franciscus Henri: Nothing Fixed or Final, FHP Records 2005 Various artists: Lovely in the Dances: Songs of Sydney Carter, Osmosys 1998 Various artists: Sydney Carter's Lord of the Dance, Stainer and Bell 1998 Chris Wood, Trespasser, RUF Records 2007 Publications Sydney Carter: Green Print for Song, Galliard / Stainer and Bell 1974 Sydney Carter: Rock of Doubt, Continuum 1978 Sydney Carter: Sydney Carter's Lord of the Dance and other songs and poems, Stainer and Bell 2006 Sydney Carter: The Two-Way Clock, Poems, Stainer and Bell 2000 Photo: Stainer and Bell
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Champions
 Champions again... and well done Joleon, player of the year, scorer again today. (NB: in common with the rest of football, this table ignores the four bores). Saturday, May 10, 2008
Work can wait
 I can't adequately express the peace of mind brought to me each time I read the message on the inside of my favourite jeans. Thanks Howies. Friday, May 09, 2008
TRIP Programme
Excitement. The provisional programme is out for TRIP (Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives, a psychogeography festival in Manchester, 19th - 21st June) [pdf, 276k]. I'm on the Saturday morning. Better get writing that paper.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Stuff Theology
The world is increasingly full of “things” made by people, but many commonplace objects are effectively invisible - according to Stephen Pattison.In last year's Gifford Lecture series, Professor Pattison looked into the relationship between humanity and visual artefacts; and 'argue(d) for repositioning artefacts of all kinds at the centre of human perception, responsiveness and responsibility.' 'The movement of these lectures might be summed up as ‘from arrogant, distancing eye to loving appreciative gaze’, he said in his introduction. Looks fascinating. Seems close to what I keep calling reading the everyday, but I think elsewhere Pattison has called his research Stuff Theology... love it! The resultant book, Seeing Things: Deepening relations with visual artefacts, is out. But as a taster I'm printing off the lecture pdfs as we speak. Thanks Ian for directing me here
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Freedom to Roam?
 Refreshing, occasionally, to read an anarchist text. Particularly one so well researched and readable as Harold Sculthorpe's Freedom to Roam, which describes the mechanisms through which privileged individuals and institutions keep the rest of us off the land. Here he is with an eye-opening paragraph on the National Trust:Today the NT is run as an elitist club that has forgotten its plebeian past. It took the name suggested by Robert Hunter of the Commons Preservation Society (CPS), now the Open Spaces Society, when it was set up on 16th July 1894 by members of the CPS and Octavia Hill of the Kyrle Society (which had aims similar to the CPS) to take over land and to safeguard it in trust for everyone freely to use for recreation. Its loss of direction is well illustrated by what happened when it acquired the 16,000 acre Kingston Lacey estate in Dorset on the death of its last private owner in August 1981. Down came the PRIVATE notices. Up went the STRICTLY PRIVATE replacements. Monday, May 05, 2008
How you make is how you will be made
I've spent the day preparing a Sydney Carter retreat. Which being Sydney Carter, isn't so much a retreat as a very creative confrontation: with the stuff of life, death, doubt, radical protest and mystic faith. So I think the title of the day should be GET CARTER. Here Sydney expresses in poetry what we ought to do with the burden of inspiration. Poem from The Two-Way Clock (Stainer and Bell 2000)
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Oozing
Look at the way Kristin Hersh writes about her latest release on CASH Music... read the lyrics ... reflect on the title ... download the song (for free, if you like - but come on, pay the woman, she's a genius).
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Permutations
No Poets Dont Own WordsOne of Brion Gysin's provocative linguistic 'permutations', No Poets (1962). Amongst the very many riches to be mined on UbuWeb, where you can hear him read it too (MP3, 0:58). Friday, May 02, 2008
Compassion. Empathy. On election night
Those gigs you go to on election nights: you tend to remember them vividly. For me, Clwb Ifor Bach, 11 June 1987 stands out: the crushing pain of Thatcher's third consecutive victory salved by Clive Gregson and Christine Collister: wonderful, witty and very well-oiled (well, we all were) they turned our mourning into dancing. Good to share long nights like those with the folk singers, with their keen sense of radical politics, comradeship and determined celebration. Onstage in Liverpool tonight Billy Bragg recalled being in Belfast on 22 November 1990, celebrating with his audience the night Thatcher resigned. And he said he was glad to be out of London on this awful night (London, Londoners, what have you done?), and especially to be here in Liverpool, our political exceptionalism demonstrated once again in these local elections, as here we've made Labour gains. Billy Bragg was glad to be here tonight, he said, because of all British cities he knows that ours particularly understands the meaning of solidarity. It was our strong instinct for communal support which Boris Johnston fatuously described as 'sentimentality' in a nasty attack on a city grieving a death felt by all here four years ago. It's not the worst thing he's said about a particular group of people he dislikes: he reserves most bile for people of other races. But it's the measure of the man and his party. Perhaps the Labour movement will be energised by the revival of crass and bigoted conservatism shown in some parts of the country this week. Billy Bragg hopes so. 'I keep faith in you,' he sang, reinforcing his strong identification with the ordinary person, and keen sense of the power which the ordinary person holds. And 'When the world falls apart some things stay in place...' Compassion. Empathy. It was good to be again in the company of Billy at the Liverpool Phil tonight. Thursday, May 01, 2008
It's in the detail
 Since James sent me a postcard of a Stephen Walter artwork (a detail from one of his recent The Island - London Series) I've been poring over it with a magnifying glass, thrilling at the delightful discoveries to be found close up to his densely-packed hand drawn map, loving the merging of prehistory, urban slang, pop culture and touristic references which he mixes up all over the canvas [..... Most teenage pregnancy - LAMBETH - Huge Glass Palace Woz Ere 1856 - Don't shout Fire.....]. Stephen Walter's website is a further delight, and besides the many interesting mapping drawings there are gems like the one above. Fine stuff. Artwork: Stephen Walter, Shopping Trolleys, 2005
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Presence in absence - absence in presence
Presence in absence - absence in presence - a few thoughts on Ascension provoked in part by that great poet of absence/presence, R.S. Thomas.... here. [And thanks also, of course, to Rod for last Saturday]
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