Tidying Up

We’re in the process of putting the house in order before driving down to Melaka where we’ll stay until Tuesday. Over the last few days we’ve had some workmen around repairing some of our fencing and painting the woodwork, along with a few other jobs. The house is looking good – we’ve finally got the welcome sign up next to the door - and it’s a pity we can’t stay longer to enjoy it even more. Also pictured above are the flowers Fa Fa & Ayu picked for Mak Ndak on a jaunt we made around the taman earlier this week. Sweet memories.

Yesterday we got back late having spent the evening at Hamza’s place in Shah Alam, celebrating his birthday and that of Sabrina. Good food and good conversation. It’s quite a drive over there, especially when you’re not entirely sure where you are going, though. We seemed to chosen a particularly long way to come back, following the signs for Kuantan. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Earlier in the day we managed to get to the Islamic Arts Museum with no trouble at all, one of our rare triumphs in navigating KL. The museum was well worth a visit; in fact, we didn’t have time to do it justice. Even the girls were keen to return in December, when we assume we will next be in KL with them. One exhibition, of monochrome photographs of various dignitaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had possibly the most informative and interesting signage I’ve ever seen in a gallery or museum. The seemingly stiff and forbidding subjects of the portraiture came startlingly to life and you became aware how important it might be for them to have been wearing a suitably stiff collar or striking necklace at that moment of their lives. The pictures were originally meant to impress, to assert status, if not grandeur. Now their struggle is tinged with an odd sadness as their world has somehow dissolved in time. As ours will.

I finished V For Vendetta and feel bad about saying it was by Alan Moore when he makes it abundantly clear that the artist David Lloyd was equally responsible for the storyline, and everything that makes up the text. I consistently underestimate the importance of illustrators in this genre and I don’t know why this should be, considering how much pleasure I get from the visual aspects of comic books. I also finished John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? and found myself in agreement with almost everything he had to say. Most of all it was the emphasis on art as something that one should be doing rather than evaluating that seemed to me common sense. It was good to see him acknowledge the value of gardening as an art. I would add cookery, which I don’t recall him mentioning. I’m not entirely sure I share Carey’s confidence that literature represents a superior form of art, but I enjoyed his enthusiasm in attempting to make the case. What I found interesting here was some avoidance of consideration of the study of Literature as an academic subject, which I take to be what the writer is professionally involved in on a day to day basis. Does such study mean we are involved in literature as art?

On Friday night Noi and I watched Later with Jools Holland on the BBC Entertainment channel now available on cable here. It was a salutary reminder of how much excellent music is routinely being created by all sorts of musicians. I can’t go along with the idea that popular music isn’t what it used to be. There’s so much out there that’s so good, the problem, if problem it is, is simply one of choice - there's so much that's worth listening to, you can't do it all justice. I just hope all these guys manage to earn a decent living doing what they do so well