Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 3
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Letters from Radio Quotidia Last Things 3
Welcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 8. This week’s theme is Last Things, 12 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41 sixteen days after its twin, Voyager 2, for a stupendous mission to chart the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond- that continues to this day.
The golden record affixed to the spacecraft does not include details of human atrocities but instead images of the beauty and variety of life on earth as well as our cultural treasures. From the world of classical music, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and Blind Willie Johnston and Chuck Berry from the realm of popular music.
For some, the journeys and voyages have been both within and across the surface of the globe. Marco Polo, whose travels to China and back to Venice encompassing 24,000 kilometres and twenty-four years are remarkable and were influential in whetting the appetite of Europeans for exploration- but little is known of the interior changes wrought in the man who set out as a youth of seventeen years and returned as a middle-aged forty-one-year-old dignitary.
However, someone who travelled a comparable distance in time and space but who leaves an account which deals with what is within- from a time thirteen hundred years before Marco Polo set out on his journey- is the towering figure of St Paul. The song is about him- but not only him, because I mash him up with another outstanding character from world history, contemporaneous with the apostle of the Gentiles; St Peter- you know, the guy who denied his leader- how many times?
Was there ever such an inauspicious start for a world religion? St Paul: such an intrepid traveller; such an obstinate adversary; such an eloquent interlocutor; such a fine explicator of the nature of belief and love and, above all, he had the quality that my mother said all true men should have: the ability to endure, whatever comes. So intertwined are the stories of Peter and Paul that, in this song, I ascribe Peter’s Quo Vadis moment to Paul, as well. Heretic! I hear the guardians of holy text screech. But then, maybe none of them has ever been in the grip of furor poeticus where the madness of composition dictates form and content rather than any rigid adherence to orthodoxy. [insert song]
People can be unpleasant. Wasn’t it Satre who said- Hell is other people? Yeah, sometimes I feel like that- Give me a dog any day! To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace. Milan Kundera. Or: Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain.
Every dog will have his day, and my last pet, a miniature fox terrier, we named Maggs after the Peter Carey character who, in turn, was based on the Charles Dickens’ character Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations. For ten years Maggs kept the family company before succumbing to heart problems. But even at the end he would stick his nose under the gate and welcome me home in the evening. And this was particularly healing after a day enduring meetings with those whose joy in life was the sound of their own voices.
Our grief for the dog was real. On his final day, I recall sitting on the back step listening to his laboured breathing, watching the stars come out, stroking his bony head and recalling Gerard Manly Hopkin’s Spring and Fall: Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving/Now no matter child the name/Sorrow’s springs are the same/Ah as the heart grows older/It will come to such sights colder/It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for. [insert song]
Thankfully, I no longer have to suffer through any more meetings- surely, with emails, the biggest waste of time in the workplace. Next week, I present two songs about Australian workers.
Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.
View all episodes
By Quentin BegaWelcome to Radio Quotidia, episode 8. This week’s theme is Last Things, 12 minutes or so of music and musings. Quentin Bega here at the mic. I’m broadcasting from our studio located somewhere in the depths of Quotidia inside a digital onion. My aim to keep you entertained for a while. On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41 sixteen days after its twin, Voyager 2, for a stupendous mission to chart the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond- that continues to this day.
The golden record affixed to the spacecraft does not include details of human atrocities but instead images of the beauty and variety of life on earth as well as our cultural treasures. From the world of classical music, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and Blind Willie Johnston and Chuck Berry from the realm of popular music.
For some, the journeys and voyages have been both within and across the surface of the globe. Marco Polo, whose travels to China and back to Venice encompassing 24,000 kilometres and twenty-four years are remarkable and were influential in whetting the appetite of Europeans for exploration- but little is known of the interior changes wrought in the man who set out as a youth of seventeen years and returned as a middle-aged forty-one-year-old dignitary.
However, someone who travelled a comparable distance in time and space but who leaves an account which deals with what is within- from a time thirteen hundred years before Marco Polo set out on his journey- is the towering figure of St Paul. The song is about him- but not only him, because I mash him up with another outstanding character from world history, contemporaneous with the apostle of the Gentiles; St Peter- you know, the guy who denied his leader- how many times?
Was there ever such an inauspicious start for a world religion? St Paul: such an intrepid traveller; such an obstinate adversary; such an eloquent interlocutor; such a fine explicator of the nature of belief and love and, above all, he had the quality that my mother said all true men should have: the ability to endure, whatever comes. So intertwined are the stories of Peter and Paul that, in this song, I ascribe Peter’s Quo Vadis moment to Paul, as well. Heretic! I hear the guardians of holy text screech. But then, maybe none of them has ever been in the grip of furor poeticus where the madness of composition dictates form and content rather than any rigid adherence to orthodoxy. [insert song]
People can be unpleasant. Wasn’t it Satre who said- Hell is other people? Yeah, sometimes I feel like that- Give me a dog any day! To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace. Milan Kundera. Or: Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain.
Every dog will have his day, and my last pet, a miniature fox terrier, we named Maggs after the Peter Carey character who, in turn, was based on the Charles Dickens’ character Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations. For ten years Maggs kept the family company before succumbing to heart problems. But even at the end he would stick his nose under the gate and welcome me home in the evening. And this was particularly healing after a day enduring meetings with those whose joy in life was the sound of their own voices.
Our grief for the dog was real. On his final day, I recall sitting on the back step listening to his laboured breathing, watching the stars come out, stroking his bony head and recalling Gerard Manly Hopkin’s Spring and Fall: Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving/Now no matter child the name/Sorrow’s springs are the same/Ah as the heart grows older/It will come to such sights colder/It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for. [insert song]
Thankfully, I no longer have to suffer through any more meetings- surely, with emails, the biggest waste of time in the workplace. Next week, I present two songs about Australian workers.
Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.
Technical Stuff: Microphone- Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.