#fixing a hole

[thestarsarecool]

“I was pretty lucky on the LSD front, in that it didn’t screw things up too badly. There was a scary element to it, of course. The really scary element was that when you wanted it to stop, it wouldn’t. You’d say, ‘Okay, that’s enough, party’s over,’ and it would say, ‘No it isn’t.’ So you would have to go to bed seeing things.

Around that time, when I closed my eyes, instead of there being blackness there was a little blue hole. It was as if something needed patching. I always had the feeling that if I could go up to it and look through, there would be an answer. Now, I could go on about how the wordplay in Bing Crosby’s song ‘Please’ – ‘Oh, Please / Lend your little ear to my pleas’ – might be informing the wordplay in ‘And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right / Where I belong’. The fact is that the most important influence here was not even the metaphysical idea of a hole, which I mentioned earlier, but this absolutely physical phenomenon – something that first appeared after I took acid. I still see it occasionally, and I know exactly what it is. I know exactly what size it is.”

— Paul McCartney on “Fixing a Hole”, The Lyrics

[tavolgisvist]

I'm fixing a hole

I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in And stops my mind from wandering Where it will go

(Fixing A Hole, 1967, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)

That’s the ‘what if’ syndrome and I don’t go there…

(Paul McCartney, Oct 2007, interview with Mark Ellen for Radio Times)

See, what we need is a serious program of work. An endeavour. Not an aimless rambling amongst the canyons of your mind. <…> To wander aimlessly is very unswinging. Unhip.

(Paul McCartney in Get Back, January 14th, 1969, Twickenham FIlm Studios)

A: I said, 'I just like making up a story.' A short story writer doesn't necessarily know the pit and the pendulum, he hasn't necessarily been to Dracula's castle. But he makes it up as an escape in a way. I think a lot of my songwriting always was, and still is, an escape. Q: From? A: From the harsh realities of the world. If I'm in a bad mood, I always find that a good time to write a song. Go off on your own and put the feelings in a song rather than in someone's face. The fact that it's a musical vehicle seems to defuse it a bit. Rather than just shouting at someone or wagging a finger, you can get those emotions out.

(Paul McCartney, 1995, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, and all the Other Princes Bill by Flanagan for Musician)

Q: It couldn’t have been that long after your mom died, but you look like a happy and a warm family there? A: Well, yeah, you know, that was half the story, it wasn’t all that, because you know, it was a huge blow to us losing our mother, me and Mike losing our mum, when we were like, 14, he’d be 13. So there was all of that, you know, and all the terrible bits of that kind of grief that you got to get through. I mean, you know, here’s the first time I’d ever heard my dad cry. And you heard him, he was in the next room, but he’s sobbing. And our whole lives, you’d never heard that. I don’t really think I ever heard it again. But it wasn’t all laughs, there was the tragedy that befall on us. She died of cancer. So but you had to get through it. And you did. And being from Liverpool, it’s a very sort of get-up-and-go attitude. And also they, my mum and dad, had to now get over the war. Because this was just post war, all this stuff. Q: And Liverpool have been very badly bombed. A: So you know, when people are moaning these days, I’d say, “imagine this, these bombs falling”. You know, now you get an idea of what they went through. Yeah, nobody had to be strong, and they had to be resilient. So you know, they use music, and jokes. And you know that’s how you got through it. So it was good. It was great to see that. It was a great lesson in life, to see how to deal with bad times.

(Paul McCartney, June 2023, interview with Martha Kearney, BBC Radio 4's Today programme)

[bonithica-art]

i have nothing to say except i hope you guys enjoy

Link to first part: Part 1

Link to last part: Part 6

Link to next part: Part 8

[repairingahole]

[dovetailjoints]

[jt1674]

[myimaginaryradio]

Fixing A Hole - The Beatles

[l3fool]

I love every single song on Sgt.Pepper but Fixing A Hole is just.. this fucking line just hits me over the head often

[joen-lenawley]

fixing a hole where the rain comes in because it keeps dripping on my head :(

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

hi i love love love this idea!! i just wanted to ask if you’d considered putting the poem itself in the body of the poll? i was thinking it could be helpful if people don’t recognize titles (and also i would love to read more poems) but i understand if you don’t want to/it’s not plausible for any reason <3

I put some thought into this, and I have a couple reasons for my choice not to post full poems:

Publishing Rights

Though plenty of the poems I've gotten submitted to me are in the public domain, plenty of them aren't. I don't have the rights to those, so posting a link to a poem (which I plan to update the posts with after the polls have closed) is preferable to me.

One of the goals of this account is actually to expose people (myself, chiefly) to great poems that aren't part of the beloved/beloathed Western Canon, which many public domain poems are from.

Sampling Bias

I, awfully, am a little bit of a stats nerd. Though these polls will have an inherent bias, considering they are only accessed by tumblr users who look at any number of specific tags, I'd like to remove as much bias as possible.

If I post the full poem (or a link to the full poem with the original poll), people may read the poem and change their potential answer from "no" or "I've never heard of this" to "yes."

The main problem...

Still, I understand what you are saying about a recognizability, which is definitely a factor in people's responses. To combat this, I've added two questions to the poll: the option to upload an image (ideally featuring less than a stanza of the poem's text) and the option to include a popular quote from the poem text (which I might end up making a required question).

The first 15 or so polls won't have these, but I might do a little digging to try and find some quotes. I work on a freelance basis, so my ability to do that will probably depend on my workload over the next couple of days.

— BG x

[blixtbaby]

[mineralmalachite]

im taking the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday

[junodoom]

wen ning 🥰🥰🥰 need i say more

[verashalurks]

what can he do with half a hole

[repairingahole]

you are so real for having fixing a hole as your favorite, it just scratches all the right parts of your brain

FR!!! it’s such a perfect song for me

it makes me feel sm better whenever i hear it

[joeylivesinspace]

damn it paul you were supposed to be fixing the hole where the rain gets in

So much water just came down from the ceiling of my room and The Beatles were involved somehow but I don’t remember how.