[[For the two of you who regularly peruse this spot...I’m signing off ’til sometime next week to spend some time with my folks. As my holiday gift, I leave you with one of my favorite bits of writing—“A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Dylan Thomas’ reading of it is truly one of my favorite things. I’ve always wanted to turn inviting people over for a listening party into a holiday tradition—maybe next year. He whose parting words supposedly were, “After 39 years, this is all I've done.” The caption for the picture I’m posting said “Thomas as a young man”—my God, dying at 39 he never had a chance to be anything BUT a young man! Maybe that’s all a matter of perspective, but I’m just sayin’...]]go here for complete MP3s:
http://archive.salon.com/audio/fiction/2000/12/22/dylan_thomas/index
A favorite bit: “Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: ‘It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.’”
