In the early Roman calendar, the new year began on the first of March—you can still see the traces of this system in several of the names of September, October, November and December (seventh to tenth months, respectively). I’m very happy to fly the rebel flag for this new-year date: it coincides with the start of (meteorological) Spring, and there is finally the sense of a corner being turned with the lengthening days. Winter has a long tail in Ireland, though, so I won’t be packing up the heavyweight duvet any time soon…
The writer Maura McHugh, in her most recent Splinister newsletter, mentions how much she loves Nina Simone’s cover version of George Harrison’s 'Here Comes the Sun' and this set up an association of ideas.
One of my favourite Nina Simone songs is also a cover version, this time of 'Feelin’ Good' (probably my absolute favourite is the angry live version of her own 'Mississippi Goddam'). 'Feelin’ Good' was written for a musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd which, like most musicals, I have not seen. The song was first performed in 1964 by Cy Grant, and it has been covered many times since. This song is unusual for me in that there are not one but two cover versions that I love: Nina Simone’s (on I Put a Spell on You, 1965) and Muse’s (on Origin of Symmetry, 2001).
The association of ideas continued, and I listened for the first time in years to Tori Amos’ remarkable cover of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' (the original being on Nirvana’s 1991 release, Nevermind, the cover on Amos’ 1992 Crucify album). Finally, after much racking of brains to recall the band’s name, I listened once more to Disturbed’s inspired cover of 'The Sound of Silence', first released in 1964 on Simon and Garfunkel’s debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m. Disturbed released their version in 2015.
"The word [sneachta] derives from the Indo-European root *snei̯gʷʰ- which means… [i]n most IE languages … 'to snow'… In Old Irish the verb snigid < *snigʷʰi̯eti refers to the motion characteristic of rain, rivers, blood, juice, sand etc. i.e. "to flow, pour, drip", as does its verbal noun snige. … If you want to say "it snows" in OIr., you have to say snigid snechtae 'snow flows'."
To find out why this might be the case, you have to read the entire thread by David Stifter on Bluesky or Twitter. Fascinating, as always.
I have a problem, which is by no means unique to me, but suffered by bibliophiles the world over: Ex Occidente/Mount Abraxas tastes inexplicably paired with a fire sale budget. I occasionally attain the giddy heights of giving or receiving a book from the excellent Swan River Press as a gift, but that’s as close as it gets. And not a few small presses are placed even further out of bounds because they are located in North America or post-Brexit Britain, so shipping and customs charges pile Pelion on Ossa.
A light in this gloom is shone by Tartarus Press, which—a rare instance—has a reasonable selection of its list available as e-books. In fact, some are available as reasonably priced paperbacks, a truly appealing option, but… Brexit. I have just finished The Collected Connoisseur by Mark Valentine and John Howard, which was a real pleasure: beautifully written, and atmospherically evoking certain strands of weird/decadent literature of an age that, while earlier, will never be bygone to its aficionados. Tartarus have just reprinted their hardback editions of Machen’s The Hills of Dreams and The House of Souls.
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| I can still press my nose up against the sweet-shop window... |
"There’s no way to pack the whole story of Voyager 1 into a single blog post. Here’s the TLDR: Voyager was the second spacecraft to fly past Jupiter, and the first to take close-up photos of Jupiter’s moons. It flew on past Saturn, and examined Saturn’s moon Titan, the only moon with an atmosphere. And then it flew onwards, on and on, for another forty years. It officially left the Solar System and entered interstellar space in 2012. It just kept going, further and further into the infinite emptiness."
I'm not given to emotional responses where human beings are concerned (unless that emotion is grumpiness), but thinking about Voyager has occasionally resulted in my specs misting up… must be a glitch in my OS.
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