Easy Listening

Since getting a new stereo player in the car I've been able to enjoy cassette tapes while driving as well as CDs in rotation - the thing comes with a CD changer. (I passed on an MP3 player the dealer offered as I've got no idea how to work one.) This is good news for the long drives to & from KL, and the journey from work. (For the journey to work I tend to stick to the BBC World Service.)

My trusty tape of Joyce's Ulysses enlivened and enlightened our journey home on Sunday and was continuing to do good service today. I'm now on to the later sections - Oxen of the Sun, the Nighttown phantasmagoria, the Cyclops episode and Nausicaa (is that the correct spelling?) - featured on Sunday, whilst today it was time for Eumaeus and a bit of Ithaca. I've been particularly struck by the utterly convincing characterisation that Joyce achieved, especially with regard to Bloom & Stephen. Is there a more decent (& paradoxically indecent) character in literature than old Poldy? In this reading he emerges, rightly, as the greatest of all anti-heroes and his fleeting connection with young Dedalus is extraordinarily moving. I remember one lecturer wallah at university telling us that language was the real hero of the novel. Nonsense - though what one might expect from the lit-crit brigade. This is a great novel because it's about great characters, and characters who are supremely ordinary.

CDs currently on rotation: Rufus Wainwright's Want 2; Tull's Songs From the Wood; Springsteen's The Rising; Elvis Costello's Painted from Memory (the one with Burt Bacharach); Stevie Wonder's Innervisions; and a compilation of Arab songs entitled Cairo Road. I also took a 3 CD Otis Redding set to KL along with Sufjan Stevens's Seven Swans and John McLaughlin's Thieves and Poets. Not a bad little list, but a touch nostalgic I suppose.