Blueprint for track that became 'Sandycove Milk'.

Inspired by wondrous music by Conin, whose track 'Kitty's Wake' reminded of the rich clay of Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake'. This track, about the opening pages of Joyce's Ulysses, borrows coffee spoons, forever those of T.S. Eliot, in an effort to add sweet milk...drawn from the milk-well of honeyed Sandycove.  The lyric speaker is, notionally, Stephen Daedalus. For practical purposes, the lyric speaker is James Joyce himself. His aim? To hit Haines for a guinea [a pre-decimal unit of currency] before heading to France on a ferry. Whilst Haines still feels guilty (sheepish) about having fired his pistol at an imaginary cat he thought he saw in the fireplace in the Martello tower in Sandycove (now the Joyce Museum....a sacred...magical place, whose attendant Joyce scholars told me about the Haines' imaginary cat episode....it is all true...yet also dovetails eerily with the first chapter of Ulysses).

The reference to Haines having consumed Absinthe is a narrative fiction, invented to offer an explanation for his dangerous behaviour. No peer reviewed evidence capable of demonstrating Absinthe has hallucinogenic properties, exists, to my knowledge.


Lyrics

[chorus]
Gotta learn me some Italian
Gonna get me a guitar
Gotta learn me some Italian
Gonna get me a guitar

Hellenise me now
She come and go
talking bout Michelangelo
there will be time
there will be time

do I dare to eat a quiche?
I shall wear enchanted trousers
and float upon the beach

I’m still dreamin
something happened last night

Haines downed a snot-green bottle of Absinthe
started shooting at his Schrödinger's cat
in the fireplace
looks real sheepish this morning
gonna hit him for a guinea [a pre-decimal unit of currency]
and get outta here
gliding on the Emerald sea
to Paris
with Haines’ guinea in my pocket
when I’m at sea

gonna go uptown now
hitting the top deck of this here Martello
gonna watch the mailboat
glide on an Emerald sea
gonna rest my shiny elbows
on the jagged granite
just leavin the harbour

and here comes stately Buck
bearing a bowl of lather
crossed razor and mirror as well
holding the bowl aloft
and intoning...intonin

Introibo ad altare Dei
sacred chalice
sacred cross
and now I’m lookin at the sea
Thallata...sweet mother
Hellenise me
mailboat clearin the harbour
rage of Caliban inside me
cos of Haines....[firing a gun inside the Martello tower when drunk the night before, at a giant cat he imagined was sitting near the fireplace]
sweet Thallata
buttercups on the quilt
powdered musk and gauds of amber beads
calm now like the sea
there will be time
there will be time

Martello

David Bohn (Melodica)
Studio-Aufnahme 2024

... I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I know nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.

(T.S. Eliot “The Waste Land”)

The Waste Land

January 31, 2025

It’s hard to believe we are only one month into 2025. With all of the “current events, and non-stop breaking news” it feels like we’re in the month of June, despite frigid temperatures sweeping through the U.S. this winter.

Remember that life changing goal you set for yourself at the start of the new year? 
It’s not happening is it? You told yourself this year would be different, but here you are, feeling stuck, maybe even a little disappointed in yourself.

First, let me say this: You are not alone. 
And second, I want you to take note of the following quote 
by T.S. Eliot: “Every moment is a fresh beginning.”

Not just at the top of a New Year or the first day of the month. Every moment. That means right now.
–
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THE STRENGTH OF STARTING OVER

Recorded July 2nd, 2025.

46th Annual Memorial Lecture
Barbarous Cuisine: T. S. Eliot in Ireland (1936 & 1940)
Fran Brearton - Queen’s University Belfast
Chaired by Patrick Query, T.S. Eilot Society President

Fran Brearton is Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast.
Her books include The Great War in Irish Poetry, Reading Michael Longley, and, as editor, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry and Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy. She is a former president of the Robert Graves Society and appears regularly on BBC R4’s ‘In Our Time’ to discuss modern poetry. She was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2018.

Learn more at www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub

46th T.S. Eliot Society Annual Memorial Lecture - Barbarous Cuisine: T.S. Eliot in Ireland 1936-1940

Opened in 2010, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute is dedicated to advancing Trinity College Dublin’s rich tradition of research excellence in the Arts and Humanities, on an individual, collaborative and inter-disciplinary basis.

Better Said Than Written is the podcast supplement to the multimedia blog ArtzOfCulturez.com, where the host, Tamika Cody, shares inspirational excerpts from books, essays, poems, and quotes that, when read aloud, sound better said than written.

New tracks tagged #T.S. Eliot