Reaping Dreams or making connections

Sountrack - June Tabor - On Air

You think of John Peel as broadcasting all Punk and New Wave but this is one of the things he was playing during the 70s. Two of the tracks are produced by Tony Wilson which I assume is Anthony H. Wilson of Joy Division etc. I used to work in a small electronics shop in the early eighties and the owner used to play a lot of electronic folk and what he termed "rebel songs". I think he thought it was daring to play songs which might just be republican marching songs. I think he probably confused the Provos with the other lot. Anyway, the stuff that actually filtered through to me was The Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention etc. I used to stand in the window at quiet times listening to the records and trying to play along to them on the Moog synthesizer they had in the shop. (My brother actually bought the moog and I don't know where it is now. In pieces I suspect. I know he is one of the few people who read this so maybe he would like to email me at RDeWeyden@hotmail.com with the answer.)

Too much to write about. There are pictures all around me and they all create sounds in my head without giving me anything definite to record.

I am currently reading Dreamcatcher - a memoir by Margaret A. Salinger (Yes - his daughter). It is almost as if the author (Peggy Salinger) is trying to catch the dreams which link her and her own real family to the lives of the characters in her father's books. (The Glass and Caulfield Families). I don't remember it in any of the stories I have read up to now, but she mentions a story (maybe only published in a magazine) where Holden Caulfield's brother hears that Holden is missing in action. You read the end of Catcher in the Rye and there is a feeling of optimism - then you hear this and Whats the point? Is Holden JD Salinger's brother or Salinger himself? Salinger was in some horrific places during the war and never refers to them except maybe by a pointed refusal to write about them (The hiatus in the middle or For Esme with love and Squalor when he jumps from the civilization of the tea shop in Southern England to the squalor of immediately post-war Europe). Peggy Salinger writes flowingly about both her Father's real life and the stories so if you are not careful you miss whether she is refrerring to reality or fiction. Maybe it doesn't actually matter. Fiction and Reality are just one thing with different cause and effect.
Whatever the situation, the book is well written and as one reviewer said, maybe there is a Gene for writing.

You always believe you are clever. You look back and think you always knew everything you know now. We all think we were Seymour Glass, Reading everything we read now before we were seven. I was please to see that Ellen McArthur's favourite book is not some biography of one of her heroes but Swallows and Amazons. It is much easier to be inspired by a children's book but very hard to then admit it. Gifted we ain't. Pretentious we are - all of us. Read and mark well.

Book taste linked to dreams. This seems rather appropriate bearing in mind the story first appeared today.