Drowning In Browning

I think I've figured out how to read Browning. Let me make that a bit more specific: a way for me to read Browning's The Ring and the Book that brings the magic that is undoubtedly in the poem into the lazy mind of this reader.

The poem presents problems of scale and density of detail for me, and I've never been much good at following complex plots. But I've discovered that reading each book with the sort of synopsis of the particular speaker of that book that Browning gives in Book 1 directly in mind, in other words re-reading as you go, is surprisingly helpful. You get pointed to the essence of what's going on. Now I'm only in Book 2, Half-Rome, which I've read before but I'm confident doing this will pay dividends for all the other books.

Secondly, I'm finding that deliberately stopping and re-reading substantial sections, hard on the heels of the first reading, I'm talking here of roughly 400 line blocks, lends an intensity to the second reading that makes me feel I'm genuinely responding to, rather than simply coping with the poem. It's as if the first reading is needed simply to get the drift, sort out the surface puzzles of meaning and attune oneself to what Browning is after. For me it's a cold reading. Mysteriously the reading that follows coheres in a way that leaves me wondering quite what the problem was in the first place. Passages seem to become almost transparent.

Bearing in mind that actually I have covered the first 5 books before, I'm conscious of the fact that the going is likely to get tougher as I hit genuinely virgin territory, but it's nice to feel I'm getting somewhere. Of course all this implies a hoary old message - you only get out of something what you're prepared to put into it. Oh, and if a thing's worth reading, it's worth reading slowly.

Touch Down

Got back from the moon this morning, with the help of that most fascinating guide to all things magical, Mr Norman Mailer, but feeling I'd spent quite long enough in his company, thank you. I felt the best part of Fire on the Moon, his account, or rather meditation upon the Apollo 11 moon landing, was the segment about the astronauts on the moon itself and the coda following, of Mailer and yet another marriage in a mess at the end of a decade that felt to him like the actual end of the century. (That's something that chimed oddly with my own sense of the period.)

There's a passage about how the lunarscape visually and possibly mentally affected Armstrong and Aldrin that, in itself, is worth the price of the book - though since I only paid 25 pence for it second hand back in the dear old cheap days, that's not saying enough: let's say the passage is worth the advance old Norman got paid for his ultra high-class journalism. Reading it put me in mind of the odd little fuss created this week about Nasa wiping its own tapes of their two heroes (or are they? - read Mailer - but I think yes) trotting around on the moon for the first time and having to ask for replacement footage from elsewhere. The claim that historically valuable material had been lost struck me as silly - there's plenty of extant film. But more than that, and surely more importantly, there're all the words to tell us more than the eye could ever see or read into some grainy film stock, which was never very interesting anyway. Mailer's words are a good place to start for anyone interested in the mission - rich, thought-provoking and surprisingly informative.

But I'm off back now to the late-eighteenth century with that old anarchist William Godwin and his lost soul Caleb Williams. It's good to get away sometimes

Otherness

In a ferociously busy week, including a full day of rehearsals today, I've actually found time somehow to watch a couple of episodes of Life on Earth from my DVDs. To do so was therapeutic in the extreme, though I'm not exactly sure why. But I can say with utter certainty that the shots of the storks nesting in the small Bavarian town before setting off on their long trek to Africa (in the episode on birds) did me a whole lot of good.

I suppose their natural beauty and grace had a lot to do with it. (I'm fascinated, by the way, at the whole notion of the beautiful, suspecting that our ability to recognise it is one of our more important gifts. Possibly the only one worth having.) But I think there's something else important here. It's being confronted by the glorious knowledge that there's something not remotely us out there which makes us look pretty mundane, pretty much earthbound.

It's all a bit Wordsworthian really, but old William, and, more particularly, young William knew more than a thing or two.

Remembering

The problem of working on a show when you are in pain is that the work is so intense you forget about the pain. Until the rehearsal is over. Then you remember.

Ow!

Blast Off

Only realised this evening, with the help of the World Service on the way back from work, that today marks the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The fact that I'm reading Mailer's book about the mission, and had picked it up back in KL with no awareness whatsoever of the impending anniversary, seems a touch spooky. The irony is that it's taking me a lot longer to complete the book that it did for Armstrong & co to go there, have a bit of a trot on the lunar surface, and get back again.

There was a chap on the radio talking about how exciting and inspiring the whole mission was to a young adolescent - the guy having gone on to work for NASA - and he's right, it was. I can remember walking around Crown Point, Denton on the Sunday evening of the actual landing thinking that this really was the future and things just couldn't get more modern. Of course they could, they always can, but now I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Sadly, once we got passed the drama of Apollo 13 it all got rather dull. One of the penalties of modernity, I suppose, the ridiculously short attention span we've developed.

A Hard Time

Pleased to see signs that President Obama is getting a rougher ride in the press and the honeymoon is over. The recent criticism of White House attempts to plant friendly questions at so-called town hall meetings and questions about the success of the first round of economic stimulus - about which Paul Krugman has written in an excellently pointed manner - will do more to help promote good governance than simply rolling over and letting what looks to be a fine administration in so many respects have its own way.

It seems to me that Obama is so obviously competent that his greatest enemy is his impressiveness. It doesn't do any of us any good, once out of adolescence, to be told regularly how right we are, even if we are right. We need the critical perspective and we need it uncontrolled by whatever influence we might have over it. And if we're in a position of any power we need it all the more.

I think the gentle ride given to Blair and New Labour in the early days can be seen as sowing many of the seeds that grew the weeds that have blighted the current Labour government in the UK. It seemed to result in a determination to spin everything the way the government wanted it instead of promoting a determination to be aware of deficiencies, mistakes, folly and address those all-too-human characteristics.

We have the opportunity to be at our best when facing criticism, and it doesn't necessarily have to be sincere and honest - just difficult and, therefore, worth listening to and answering.

Bodily Functions

Paid a heartening visit yesterday afternoon to Boon, heart attack survivor extraordinaire. It turns out that he acquired something of the status of a minor celebrity at the hospital which saved his life as he drove himself there whilst under-going said attack. He looked so fit, though only having been discharged yesterday morning, that I envied him. Still, it's one heck of a lot of trouble to go to just to get a nice extended MC.

Oddly enough Noi and I attended our own health screening at East Shore Hospital just the day before. This was completely unrelated to Boon's bad news as we had booked the appointment in early June. It coincided with my latest visit to my back doctor which has seen me all medicated up again. We are now awaiting the results of the check-up with the mild trepidation anyone over fifty (this bit just applies to me, so maybe I'm the trepidatious one) is likely to feel.

I've already been advised to go to the optician's, advice which I will resolutely ignore. The nurse seemed startled that I couldn't see the screen at all once my right eye was blanked out, but since I've known this since I was ten-years-old I'm not intending to let it bother me.

Virtues And Vices

Yet another good piece in today's Sunday Times by Janadas Devan on the virtues of the vice of reading. He tells of how he frequently takes more books with him on vacation than he has any reasonable chance of paying due attention to. In fact, he's a lot worse than me in this respect so that I felt quite virtuous reading the article. I particularly liked the ending in which he notes how guilt - at not reading something - can function as an excellent motivator for getting the job done. That I can completely identify with.

It's certainly refreshing to have something in the newspaper that implies that it's a reasonable, in fact normal, thing for folk to read the likes of Tolstoy, Kant, Heidegger, Dante and Huxley for pleasure. It's an Huxley essay from the 1920's on tourists and what they take along to read that underpins Mr Devan's piece, in fact. A nice bit of cross-referencing. Unfortunately it's less refreshing to note that the review page devoted to reading this Sunday has got itself reduced to just half a page which deals only with the buying of books on line. Reading nation, here we come!

Feeling Driven

Having written the post for yesterday I realised I'd concentrated on all the music I am now longing to purchase. I also realised I'd completely understated the sheer amount involved. If I tell you that the names Yusof Islam, Paul Weller, Hank Williams, Levon Helms (and The Band, but as separate categories) and The Last Shadow Puppets comprise simply the beginning of the list you'll appreciate the extent of the problem. On the other hand, I think there's a reasonable case for arguing that all the work of these gentlemen should be part of the collection of any right thinking muso. Or is that simply self-deception? (Of course it is, but it works beautifully.) But my real point is that I realised I'd said nothing about books.

This, saying nothing I mean, is due to the fact that at this point in time I genuinely don't want to buy any more. This will only last to the point that I've completed my MUST READ list, but I'm reasonably confident it will last until then. (Of course, there's quite a list of texts I will immediately be shelling out on when the list, I mean the first list, not the second list - for some reason I find myself concocting all sorts of lists lately, something I rarely did in my youth - is put to rest. However, it's not so much that I want to buy these books as it's simply in the natural order of things that I must do so.)

Which leads to me to a quick run-down of my latest reading. I'm still making progress - slow, but distinct - on Mailer's A Fire on the Moon. I know he wrote this for money (but then, what writer doesn't/didn't, unless it's Joyce? - but I'm talking here about quick money and a lot of it from the magazine that commissioned him) because he says so right up front. And sometimes I can't help but wonder if all the technical data is just filler, but then I realise it's reasonably inspired filler, creating a kind of poetry of the machine. It's just that there's so much of it, and also that the ideas are essentially those of his great journalism of the sixties and, being more than a little aware of them, (I was a major fan at one time) I'm beginning to find the repetition a trifle wearing. Oddly enough, I've never read The Executioner's Song, which seems to be accepted generally as Mailer's most accomplished work. I didn't read it as I'd sort of fallen out of love with his work when it was published, assuming it would be more of the same. I get the impression from a distance that that's what it is, but better. Of course, this is now on the list, the second one.

The other thing I've got on the go (now in Book One) is Browning's The Ring and the Book, my third attempt to read the poem from cover to cover in the last two or three years. I suppose as with Mailer it's the sheer detail I'm finding difficult, but Browning can also be infuriatingly obscure even in the middle of his finest bits. It's embarrassing to admit that I still haven't done justice to this one, but also quite motivating in terms of doing the right thing. The only other text I can think of on which I have stalled more is Proust's mighty blockbuster, and I cracked that eventually. (Goodness me, this is beginning to sound as testosterone-driven as a Transformers movie.)

I Do Want What I Have Not Got

About a month ago I was feeling particularly virtuous regarding the fact that I was going into bookshops and record stores (do they still call them that?) and not buying anything. This was particularly true of our time in KL. It all boiled down to the fact that I had committed myself to a reading list of books that I owned but had either never read, or miserably failed to complete, and was even more embarrassingly aware than usual that I've got an awful lot of CDs that deserve better listening than I've ever given them. The result: I was popping into shops that would normally provoke a certain amount (actually a lot) of acquisitory salivation and genuinely wanting nothing.

Sadly that state of grace has not lasted and I blame Elvis Costello. The reason is simple, in a convoluted sort of way. Late last week I found out that the true King Elvis is due to play a solo concert in our little corner of the world. Now obviously it was imperative to buy tickets, even though it's a bad day - Monday night, ugh - but it also seemed relevant to weigh up which albums I've not got. Now I own quite a few but Elvis has a substantial catalogue which, as befits a genius, is growing all the time. I haven't got the last two albums, for example.

My research for this took place on amazon.com and, of course, there are lots of useful links to all sorts of associated music. Browsing what's available from Allen Toussaint (Elvis fans will know how I got there), resulted in me wanting everything on his page, badly, really badly. And I progressed from there like a happy drunk falling from an especially high wagon.

The good news is, I'm too tight-fisted and guilt-ridden to have done anything about these desires yet. But the operative word is 'yet'. There's an inevitability about my wanting stuff that does not augur well for a frugal future.