Two great songs about the First World War

To round off our study of WWI poetry, I shared with my students today a couple of favourite songs about WWI by the folk singer Eric Bogle. I saw him play at the Anzac Club in Toronto in 1998, while I was working there as a lawyer (quite possibly on Anzac Day - pretty close to it, anyway). He told an amusing story about how the then UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had recently professed that one of Bogle's songs, The Green Fields of France, was his favourite 'poem' about the First World War, but had gone on to mention that its author, like so many of the War's great poets, had died in the fighting. This is a dumb mistake to make - a lazy error on the part of one of Blair's speech writers, no doubt - since the piece is pretty obviously written long after the War, from the perspective of someone visiting a war cemetery.

Bogle got further free publicity from the incident when one of his formidable Scottish aunties wrote to The Times newspaper to point out to the careless Prime Minister that the poet he admired was in fact very much alive and well... "and to prove it, here are his upcoming tour dates."

As we can see from the photo montage accompanying this recording, Bogle's song was inspired by an actual grave, that of a Pte. William McBride, who was killed in 1916, at the age of 21. (This is one of the best montages of this kind I've ever seen: the images, mostly contemporary photographs, are very appropriately matched to the lyrics.)

Bogle was born in Peebles in Scotland in 1944, but emigrated to Australia as a young man. This, And The Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda'..., perhaps his most famous song (certainly in Australia, where it has become hailed as a national treasure), was written in the early 1970s, shortly after he moved there. At this time, many veterans of the 1915 Gallipoli landings were still living, still able to turn out for annual Anzac Day parades, even though they would have been mostly in their 70s and 80s. You can hear Bogle himself sing this song here; but my favourite of the many cover versions that have been made of it is this one by Shane MacGowan and The Pogues (a crazy Irish punk-folk group who enjoyed major worldwide success during the 1980s). Again, there is an excellent photo montage accompanying the music.

As an extra little musical treat in my second class, I asked one of my students, Sophia Chan, an outstanding musician, to preface this by playing Waltzing Matilda for us on her violin. She had challenged me on Monday - in reference to my latest 'Thought for the week' on my desire to share enthusiasms in the classroom - to allow her a chance to share her enthusiasm for music with the English class occasionally, and I was delighted to agree.

Thought for the week

"I try to do as little 'teaching' as possible. I prefer to be a sharer of enthusiasms."

How language changes

A colleague tipped me off to this a week or two back - an amusing animated canter through 'The History of the English Language' from the UK's Open University. The narrator (also, I suspect, the author of the piece) isn't credited on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure it's Clive Anderson.

I think I might use this in the mini-class I have to do next week for a visiting group of Year 9 students from our parent school in Hong Kong.

Foley everywhere

I think I've been having even more fun with my Film classes' current study unit on 'Sound' than my students have. The craft of Foley - adding in sound effects in post-production, often by means of ingenious fakery - is endlessly fascinating, and easily grows into something of an obsession.

At the weekend, rattling knives and forks in a tray of cutlery in my kitchen, I discovered that I could make a pretty fair approximation of the clatter and tinkle of glass breaking this way - especially if I used a small glass bottle to rattle the knives, giving the right 'glassy' note for the initial impact. Finding a way for my students to create a breaking glass noise, without the mess and waste and danger of actually breaking glass, has been a preoccupation of the last week or two!

Yesterday I found on the floor a strip of plastic backing from the index stickers we use in the Library. I picked it up to put it in a bin, but when I heard the scrunch it made when I rubbed it gently between my fingers, I put it in my pocket instead, thinking, "This would be great for a crackling log fire noise!"

And tonight I was just passed by an old lady on a bicycle, one of our cleaners, I think. It was a battered and ancient bicycle, and it emitted a loud, rhythmic rusty wheeze as it trundled along - I swear it sounded just like the honking of a goose. I wanted to run after it with a microphone...

As I say, this is a dangerously obsessive topic!

Thought for the week

"You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed."

Getting things in the wrong order

Our hard-working headmaster has become fond (perhaps a little over-fond) in our first few months of operation of invoking the image of what we are seeking to accomplish here as "building a plane after it's taken off".

It may have become a rather over-used cliché this past decade or so, particularly in the business world (indeed, it appears to have first arisen in Silicon Valley), but.... it is an undeniably potent - and often all too painfully apposite - metaphor.

Given the very tight time schedule within which we have had to try to plan for, and build, and staff this school, to furnish and equip it, to frame its policies and devise a curriculum for it... well, it's no surprise that a lot of these essential preliminaries are still ongoing - even as we become consumed with the day-to-day responsibilities of looking after our students and trying to create valuable educational experiences for them.

It's not the way one would ever choose to do things, in an ideal world.... but it is oddly exhilarating!

I discover that one of the first - and certainly most striking - illustrations of the analogy appeared way back at the start of the Noughties, in this TV commercial for EDS (Electronic Data Systems, a business services subsidiary of Hewlett Packard).

Thought for the week

"Nothing that really matters can be measured; it can only be felt."

Dancing statues!

Last week I found myself with about 35 browser tabs open on different - tenuously interlinked - pages of BrainPickings. That darn site always seems to do that to me - drop in for five minutes, struggle to tear myself away hours later!

One of these most recent discoveries of mine on there was this, a charming little film from animator Nina Paley, constructed using ancient artifacts she photographed in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.