Martin Meenagh blog

Immigrant Songs

Courtesy of a link to be found at Bob from Brockley's site, I thought that I'd put up this link to a collection of emigrant songs. I can't forget my own family's emigration, nor those of the people I grew up with in Corby. I'm not so sure of some of the songs; my favourite version of deportee, for instance, is below, and the one at the link is very 'country n westernish'. Still, have a look, if you have the time and inclination....

The accompanying image is Roy Lichtenstein's Painting with the Statue of Liberty.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Tough Times in the Irish Republic I keep hearing wrenching human stories about just how tough things have got in Ireland. The Republic is the one country hit even worse than Britain by the latest world crash, in part because it held the poisoned causes of the troubles closer to itself even than England did. I went frequently to Dublin in that time. One look at the landscape of euro-city, and you knew you were at the Dodge county line, or maybe Vegas. Unlike Vegas, however, it was obvious that what happened in Dublin wasn't staying there. For instance, one legacy of the Irish revolution all those years ago, aided in the west by the tendency of communities to cause real trouble to people who tried to interfere, was that when owned, land seemed yours . In England, all sorts of restrictions could be applied to it; in the booming Ireland to which the children of emigrants were returning ten years ago, one could build whatever one liked, paint it whatever colour, and sell it to just abou...

In Another Country The image is a late Rothko. When I first saw it at the Tate, I thought immediately of moonscapes, and the Wehrmacht, and that it was a tad depressing. Those cheerfully mad and middlebrow snap judgments are the sort of thing that Rothkos seem initially to bring forth in everyone. If you wait, something else happens. They bring out deeper feelings and images of the sort that layer our deeper memories, as though they somehow seep through the strata of a mind and pull things upwards. Tonight, it makes me think of the fields by the Welland valley, which in summer are blue, yellow and red, in the snatched light of a night before Spring in the lent of 2010. London is functionally a separate State from England, as far as I have ever been able to tell. I love my city state, but I'm outside of it tonight because I've come up to a very dark part of the Leicestershire-Northamptonshire border to see my Mum for Mother's day. I don't know whether it is because it is...

Abiotic--abiogenic--oil The Devil's Kitchen is a great libertarian site. The standard warning about swearing, if you do not like that sort of thing applies, but it is a refreshing, open place sometimes. The Devil Has recently turned to considering the 'peak oil' idea. I would not be pretentious enough--at least in this instant--to say that I recognised the pathology of realising, as someone who does not in any way consider themselves green, that oil at viable prices and flow is running out. One of the things that is done first is a tour of the wider, 'non traditional' science on the net. Inevitably, as the devil has done, one then comes across the old Soviet idea that oil is not a fossil fuel, which Stalin procured from his scientists practically at gunpoint. This idea, the so-called 'abiotic' or 'abiogenic' idea, is that oil is created by chemical processes independent of fossil detritus deep within the earth and replenished thereby. Here is a li...