Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Thursday 31 May 2012

More Sputnik than Beatnik.

I used to think that the 1960s had passed me by
mainly because I have a visceral
dislike of pop-music, pubs, clubs,
football, fashion and tv.  In the late fifties
and sixties I was listening to blues
and folksongs, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky
on my record player.
I was reading Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck
and Shakespeare sonnets. I went to Bergman
movies. I even taught myself to paint.

But now I realise that I was
quite unknowingly a True Child of the Sixties,
drifting in and out of universities,
to and from a Danish island,
into the Air Force for six long weeks,
and living alone in rent-free cottages
ignorant of Stevie Wonder and Pink Floyd
(but not Sister Rosetta Tharpe
- the nearest I got to pop-music).
I never had a job, not then or since,
and still am drifting, still in commodious
free accommodation - a dissident sputnik
wobbling through the Great Catastrophe,
a dark moon of the Welfare State
adrift upon the strange side of existence.

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