Since our on-line connection from KL is temperamental, to say the least, I'll post my resolution for the year ahead today, getting my retaliation in early, as it were. I've given considerable thought to this one, inspired by the late Douglas Adams, mindful of the big, friendly letters on the side of that most useful of all guides at the centre of his finest work.
I will be doing my best in 2011 NOT TO PANIC.
Surely there was more to Christmas past than Morecambe and Wise?
I don't think I need to strain to justify enjoying the music. It's obviously very, very, very good and that's an end to it. (Except for the need to expand my CD collection far enough to include all 3 Arcade Fire albums.)
But I do think I need to justify my reservations about James Cameron's popular epic, especially since people whose judgments I respect regard it very highly. (No, not film critics - just John, Jeanette and Sam.) I did enjoy the film visually. Even on the tiny screen on the seat in front of me it had quite an impact and it was possible to get a sense of how great it must look on the big, big screen. My problems lay with the storyline. In short, although the story is delivered neatly, it's extremely predictable and the final battle began to put me to sleep as I was confident in my assessment of what was going to happen. It felt as if a committee had written it, and this was a committee blind to their own enjoyment of destructive violence. I was uneasily aware they were having the time of their lives blowing the heroic world and People of Pandora to bits whilst pretending it was all deeply sad.
But we're back safely here in our far place, and that's plenty to be thankful for. But for now: incredibly tired.
Or do you have to? There's an odd pleasure in simply leaving the bigger question hanging and just arguing the toss over the merits or demerits of the something in question.
Art is necessary even though we don't know what it is.
One reminder of this came in the form of a bit of casual listening the other day when a presenter on Radio 2 was interviewing a young lady suffering from schizophrenia. The immediate occasion of the interview was a quite dreadful story from the previous day of a young man whose mother had been attacked by a schizophrenic man and who had killed the man in the course of defending her. Sadly his mother also died. The presenter far from playing up or on the tragic details of the case was interviewing the girl in order to attempt to give a balanced picture of schizophrenics and their suffering. Remarkably, partly as a result of the remarkable courage and character of the girl in question, he largely succeeded.
This girl, having been traumatised by some kind of abuse as a child, had managed to lead a fairly normal life despite being haunted by three voices taunting her almost continually, as I understood the situation. She sounded amazingly balanced and rational, I suppose because that's exactly what she was, even as the voices were talking to her as she was having the interview. The presenter throughout talked with knowledge, understanding and compassion. Any listener would have learnt one heck of a lot.
And this was a bit of routine, unheralded, daily radio that no one would have made any fuss over. Listening I was reminded of the virtues of allowing many voices, many viewpoints, on air. In a sense they provide their own balance.She complains of discomfort sometimes, and occasionally obvious pain, but by no means all the time. And sometimes she tells us how much she wishes everything was over, being so tired of it all. At the end of one visit last week you'd have thought she might not make it to Christmas. But when she's got a biscuit in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, and is sitting looking suspiciously contented, it's easy to believe she'll live to a hundred, even if she doesn't want to.
And for those who tell us the NHS is falling to pieces, I can only say the huge compassion and care of the nursing staff we've encountered emphatically gives that idea the lie. They have a display on one wall at the centre stressing the idea of giving dignity to the patients there. They succeed. That's quite some gift.
As usual I'm finding myself somewhat whelmed over by the sheer amount of stuff there is to read in the newspapers, magazines and various publications here. I've still not finished last Sunday's Observer. No wonder I generally find myself glad to get away from it all, nice as it is to experience once in a while.
Unfortunately Mum didn't look so great, a lot more frail than this time last year. But still here and at this point in time indomitably so. Everything changes but some some things don't.
Somehow I managed to finish the two books I've been reading this week so I can take a couple of fresh ones with me. It was a particular relief to complete Blood Meridian. Obviously a great, great novel - McCarthy seems to invent a completely new style, a rhetoric all of his own that evokes in astonishing detail an entirely fallen world - but one so grimly shocking that I'd honestly hesitate to recommend it to anyone of faint heart. As far as I can tell the violence is everything and the writer is saying that this is our true condition. And the problem is that as long as you are reading the novel you know it's true.
The novel was heavy-going in another, different way, just to make life that bit more difficult. It's so well written, with a kind of brilliant density, that I found myself on almost every page slowing down to savour just how good the writing was. Quite often I'd read the same paragraph two or three times as if checking if what I'd read was really so powerful, so right - and it was. But when you're keen to finish a book simply to meet artificial deadlines of your own, this quality was not quite what I was looking for.
Fortunately Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness proved to be well-written in quite a different way - in a style that seemed designed to enable easy, effortless, reading. Lots of good ideas, as usual, but not quite the same verve as his best stuff. A touch formulaic - but he invented the formula, and it's a good one, so forgivable.
And now it simply remains for me to choose one or two tomes to ease me through the cramped hours ahead. No more McCarthy for now though.
Then it was off to Sentosa, with the troops. Years ago the only way across was on a ferry (oh, and the cable car, which still runs, I think.) Now there's all sorts of ways on to the island, and we picked the speedy monorail, having decided to travel down by bus due to the lack of kid-room in the car. The island was unrecognisable, at least the bit we were on. We spent a fun-packed afternoon in the new Univeral Studios theme park (if that's what they call it.) Expensive but scoring high on the keeping-the-troops-occupied front.
Unfortunately Noi got ill on one of the rides with a nasty bout of motion sickness. (The Revenge of the Mummy, ironically.) Fortunately we were attended to by extremely helpful staff who gave every appearance of being genuinely concerned and ready to spend a lot of time making sure all was well.
This place sometimes gets a bit of flak for poor customer service. Not from me - well not yesterday, at least.
We kept the troops if not happy at least occupied on bicycles and in-line skates at East Coast Park this afternoon. I'd hoped to find some time to read, but there were too many distractions. At least it didn't rain.
Yesterday we took the younger ones among our company to Jurong Bird Park, this being before Sabrina and Aiman made it over from KL. The Bird Park remains a reliable sure fire winner. We managed a couple of the bird shows in the afternoon and got to feed some cheerfully belligerent lorys. (Is that the plural?) I'm more than a bit doubtful of the business of keeping animals in captivity and wheeling them out for our entertainment, but this is a place that looks like it's really trying to educate and the keepers give every appearance of deeply caring for their various charges. And I must admit that any reservations one might have about the park tend to evaporate when one of their superb birds of prey sees fit to swoop within centimetres of one's head: ferociously beautiful!
The missus replies, Lain padang, lain berlallang. (Which I translate as, Different field, different grasshopper.)
Now there's Inscrutable Malay wisdom for you.
Then it was off to the bedroom for me to shut myself off from the joyous noise of all and sundry. I intended to make progress in Blood Meridian (or Alain de Botton's book on architecture) but it didn't happen. It was only nine o'clock yet, as is so often the case when I'm in Mak's house, I just couldn't stay awake.
I settled on Blood Meridian since I'm finding myself completely gripped by the novel, even if under a degree of protest against its unsettling content. I lay down, ready to knock back a chapter or three, and read the brilliant paragraph I'd reached concerning the Comanchees attacking a crazy Yankee raiding party. Then I realised I was drowsing. So I read the paragraph again, with increased appreciation, and found myself yet again zonked out. Then another read, with the realisation that McCarthy is so good you really can read bits over and over without worrying about making progress. And that was it. Next thing I know it's gone midnight and I need to officially go to bed.
Wonderfully restful. Wish I could bottle it.
Yet none of this was disturbing in the way Raging Bull and Blood Meridian manage to be. (Though, now I really think of it, the bit with the chimps munching on bits of the dead youngster they'd manage to kill had a curious air of the morally transgressive about it. All too human.) The violence of animals can have about it a strange, terrible, beauty.
And I suppose there are echoes of this in human violence. We ignore our evolutionary heritage at our peril. Something the Greeks knew - in fact, all the great civilisations.
I'm not keen on violence, in real life or in art. But I'm no James Joyce in this regard. (The great man's detestation and fear of any manifestation of physical violence leaves its traces everywhere in his work, most notably the Cyclops episode in Ulysses.) I'm capable of a fair degree of aggression myself and can do a mean Robert De Niro impersonation. And an action-packed movie used to be able to set the old pulse racing. But basically I regard flight as superior to fight, and I close my eyes during the gory bits.
So why is it I can't stop myself from watching De Niro's Jake La Motta destroy everything around him and within him? And why does it seem so important to acknowledge his capacity to do so? And why is it somehow entertaining?
As I said, I find myself somewhat troubled, and that's about as far as I can get with this at the moment.
I find the ubiquitous journey metaphor rather tiresome. I am not, unfortunately, on a journey towards excellence, despite often being told I am.
But I am on another journey, and the great pilgrimage is the perfect metaphor for it. And one day I hope to give the metaphor substance. God willing.
At this point in the journey I am, like so many pilgrims, lost. And to be lost is hard. But sometimes necessary.
I'm not yet ready to make the great pilgrimage, but I couldn't be longing for that still centre any more at any time than I am at this moment.
Also heartening that the news was 'trending', whatever that means, on Singapore's version of the Yahoo main webpage. In contrast the lady didn't warrant any mention at all on the main page of the American version.
The first time I heard her was in the early eighties when I bought on spec an album entitled A Feather on the Breath of God, featuring the music of the visionary abbess Hildegard of Bingen. The group involved were the Gothic Voices of whom Miss Kirkby was one. One of her solo pieces features on the compilation I've been enjoying this afternoon and listening to that piece in particular was a reminder of the power of great music to take you to other places - notably heaven itself.
The sympathies of the writer are clearly, and rightly, with her splendid female protagonists Tambu and Nyasha, yet both have sometimes irritating limitations that can alienate the reader, at least at moments. We are not allowed anything in the way of a simplistic analysis of the feminine psyche in Africa - assuming there is such a thing. The brittleness of the wonderfully brave, rebellious Nyasha is particularly well done.
And the book has two or three fine monsters of masculinity, monsters because they are trapped in a way of thinking that demands monstrosity from them. Yet the most striking of these, Babamukuru, is also believably a decent sort who is trying very hard to be not just a good man but an outstanding individual. The scene when he first strikes Nyasha is red hot. Tambu's father Jeremiah though a minor character is also a brilliant picture of a thoroughly lazy good-for-nothing. But then all the minor characters are beautifully drawn, something that I'm just realising as I think back to my reading. This is a writer with real compassion for her creations.
The title, from a line in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, is in itself perfect. The sense of the unfairness of the demands made upon these people by the circumstances in which they must live pervades the novel, resulting in a nervousness that the reader is made to share, at second hand, at any rate.
And then today listening to Lennon in the exam hall between papers - Jealous Guy felt newly minted - fresh and painful, achingly sincere. That voice!
The reason the missus and I have been so merry over this, by the way, is that we've had a bit of fun thwarting the attempts of a would-be con artist to rip us off over the rental of an apartment in the UK in December. The whole attempt was so transparent as to be ludicrous. But just in case you come across something similar, avoid using Western Union money transfer (to the UK) if a third party strongly advises you to do so. Some sharks have obviously figured a way to ID themselves as the would-be recipients for the cash and I'm guessing some poor souls somewhere may have fallen for this. Fortunately we're too old and too wise (for once) to be taken in.
Beethoven always sounds to me a rich burgundy brown.
Whether it's a good thing to have Beethoven blaring away as you drive, with no real choice in the matter (and trust me those authentic period horns blare) I'm not entirely sure. But it's certainly a bracing experience.
The kind of composer you wouldn't want as a house guest, methinks.
Some progress has been made on the following of late: Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness, American Fantastic Tales - Poe to the Pulps, and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions. The last of these I borrowed from Sakhar quite a few weeks back and it's been lying on my desk. I suppose I'm reading it out of something of a sense of duty, but I'm genuinely getting into it.
But the one I'm really zooming along on now is Anthony Buckeridge's Jennings Goes To School, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. This marks a real return to the past for me, deliberately so - that's why I bought it - or, rather, it should do so. But it doesn't. You can never go back, not to what you were. As a young lad I thought there was nothing funnier than a Jennings book, or more deeply involving. I suspect that at some level I was genuinely at that prep school, the wonderfully cosy Linbury Court, alongside Jennings and his chums. Now I'm a long way distant.
This is not to say I haven't enjoyed reading about Jennings and Darbishire and Mr Carter and Old Wilkie et al. And I've also found them funny, but in a gently predictable way, not with the kind of helpless hilarity I experienced at ten years of age. At that age I thought Buckeridge a genius; I now see him as a very fine, formulaic kind of writer, who sometimes struggles a bit in technical terms. To be specific, the story wobbles more than a little as soon as he leaves the boys behind and focuses on the adult world. And there's a fair amount of this in the first of the Jennings series. In fact, almost an entire chapter is devoted to some trite comedy based on the exploits of the Dunhambury fire brigade, who get called out when Jennings shows a little too much initiative. It doesn't work at all - except, I suppose, for ten-year-olds who don't think too deeply about such matters.
But what does work wonderfully is the glorious wordplay as the boys muddle themselves and everyone around them - who wouldn't love incongruous triangles? - and the archetypal quality of so many of the characters - like the four I mentioned above.
I did think of ordering more of the series on my last amazonian foray, and now I'm glad I didn't. You can never really go back, but you can gain an added appreciation of what it felt like to be there
And before dinner today I'm off to a few gorgeously beautifully extreme Ice Worlds.
Which reminds me, for reasons I can't quite fathom, that over a cup of tea at the Paya Lebar Post Office Coffee Bean outlet we were entertained by the tune Frosty The Snowman sitting out in the sun on a warm and sultry Singapore late afternoon. Go figure, as they say.
It would be easy for all this to become overwhelming, but it won't be. I don't know why that is, but it's something I know for sure. I suppose it's linked to the fact that we're lucky to be able to do any of these things and have the wherewithal to do them with.
The sounds were suitably soothing - Songs of Love and Hate by Leonard Cohen; Think Tank by Blur - and I reckon I nodded off once or twice. After that Noi put the kettle on and we got the Polar puffs ready for consumption on the little table in front of the tele.
At this point I thought it would be rather a good wheeze to view one of the programmes from my Planet Earth DVDs and have a nice wallow in the beauties of nature. It's been a long time since the rhythms of my life have allowed me such an opportunity and I've been missing the experience. The problem came in choosing an episode. I've now run through all the main ones, but had not yet looked at anything on the final disk, Planet Earth - The Future, touted as a companion to the series, comprising three documentaries related to conservation issues. I was somewhat hesitant to do so since the depressing experience of watching a similar sort of programme from The Blue Planet DVDs whilst on a conservation boat in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam as part of a trip made with a class some three years ago. (It was so powerful I've not yet been able to watch it again despite now owning the series myself.)
Bravely, foolishly, I plunged in, and, as expected, was knocked sideways, left, right, every-which-way by the excellent first hour, Saving Species. The magnitude of just how badly we've screwed this planet is so monumentally, humungously, overly overwhelming I find myself drowned by it. Basically I've spent the rest of the day brooding over the mess, and it's been guilty brooding - this is something I'm aware I've taken too little care of.
But perhaps if I can get beyond brooding to doing something even slightly useful, which is all the use one is ever going to be able to achieve, my viewing experience might not have been all that mistaken after all.
Is nothing sacred? Well, no, of course not.
But let me start at the beginning. It was last Sunday evening and Noi and I were on the highway on our way back from KL, about ten minutes from Seremban. The light was beginning to go and a few cars had their headlights on. Then in the mirror I spied the lights from a number of motorbikes some way behind. Around about fifteen of them I would have guessed.
I didn't think too much of it. It's quite normal to find bikers packing together on the highway, especially at the weekend. I assumed they'd been out as a group somewhere and were on their way back. I almost commented on their appearance on the road to Noi, but didn't bother when I realised they weren't catching up with me. I further assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that they were unlikely to actually overtake. In fact, I'd decided that they were obviously quite careful riders maintaining a sensible speed.
Then the lights began getting perceptibly closer, and I told Noi that the group were catching up. I took it they had slowed down to group together and were now reunited, as it were. No, wrong again. They had slowed down to prepare the rather grand, crazy stunt that followed. It became clear that they were now going at quite a rate of knots. I was in the centre lane and the bikes had spread right across the three lanes of the highway in a kind of V formation. The first four overtook me going at quite a lick, two on either side, and we were more than a little surprised to see that the riders weren't sitting on their bikes. Each was lying on his belly, with the belly on the seat of the motorbike, in a position horizontal to the ground. Each had crossed his legs in a distinctly insouciant manner and was swerving his machine in between the cars around and ahead.
The remainder of the gang passed also at high speed, but conventionally seated - much to our relief. A few of these bikes had girls riding pillion on them. Part of me hoped that their mums and dads had some idea of what they were up to, and intended to put a stop to it, and another part that their parents knew nothing and so wouldn't be overly worried.
Looking back on all this I can say with some authority I never did anything close to as daft as this when I was a youngster. But, with somewhat less assurance, it did put me in mind of one or two less than estimable scrapes I got myself into. Fortunately I survived. I pray that these kids will.
The bit where Gatsby's (Gatz's) father shows up after he's killed and passes Nick the schedules for self-improvement his son drew up as a child was devastatingly powerful for me. I saw the charming, charmed, doomed boy as Fitzgerald saw him. I suppose living so long in a culture underpinned by precisely the same notions of self-help and self-improvement helped me grasp what before had escaped me at the level of feeling.
Fitzgerald is brilliant in this novel - but not so much in the others, curiously - at providing glimpses of his characters, such that they are illuminated, given to us, as it were, in fragments of hallucinatory clarity. He just doesn't put a foot wrong. Yet all the other novels are patently flawed, despite their moments, sometimes stretches, of genius. How did he get it so right this one time? I suppose it helped that he stayed sober whilst writing it.
We set out to try and sort out this mess and restore communications late this morning, none too hopeful of achieving very much. And then we found ourselves in several queues, being shunted from one attendant to another, as is often the way here. But astonishingly, it worked. By the time we reached home our phone lines were working and our internet connection restored. Mind you, the monkey droppings are still there. Still, two out of three's not bad at all.
This time I just had to buy a copy though since, as well as finishing the previous edition, I noticed from the online edition that there was an excellent article on Duke Ellington, and since he's one of my super-heroes I just had to have the hard copy to savour it. Somehow reading it the old-fashioned way makes it feel more real.
I suppose that's somewhat similar to the sense you have of listening to real music made by real men (and a lady or two) when savouring the Duke's actual recordings.
Our songster was, as were we all, a big fan of the Stones and he suddenly realised The Clash were doing what The Rolling Stones had done; in fact they were being the Stones, and there was nothing stopping anybody and everybody having a go too, if they were so inclined. Billy was (so inclined) and the rest is history, so to speak.
This was the essential lesson of punk, not the safety pins, the mohicans, the spitting and general cursing - as much fun as they were. Write the song yourself and play it yourself, preferably for an audience of more than one. And don't let anyone tell you you can't.
So to redress the balance I'm just going to mention four bright spots of my Tuesday, in no particular order of merit, as they say:
1. Enjoyed all the teaching that went on. Really pleasant students and I think one or two learnt a bit.
2. Saw a squirrel crossing the driveway at work. Fabulously bushy tail.
3. One colleague talked about recovering from a very bad illness. Another of his young daughter's recovery from something awfully similar. More than enough to keep any small troubles of my own in proportion.
4. Came home to play Elvis Costello's North. My fourth listen. Genius. Now at the point that I'm carrying around fragments of several of the songs all day long.
Now if you can come close to matching that list I reckon you're very, very lucky indeed.
But it's not all been Ibsenite gloom (or light, possibly) lately. The joys of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? have done much to remind me of just how flexible a medium for ideas the novel can be. At least one trick he pulls off, amongst many, is quite remarkable. I'm referring to the way he takes tissue thin characters - at times little more than ciphers for the real thing - and endows them, or evokes through them, powerful layers of emotion. The bit where Phil Resch, the android hunter that our 'hero' and chief android-hunter, Rick Deckard, encounters at the 'other' police department, is wondering whether he himself is also an android, and coolly assessing how he intends to do away with himself, had me both genuinely on the edge of my seat with suspense (I'd completely forgotten what happens next) and feeling a sense of potential real loss. It's as if you are made to endow the characters with the psychological depth Dick doesn't bother to give them - or cunningly implies. I suppose.
I've also been holidaying in the sunlit world of Anthony Buckeridge's characters Jennings and Darbishire having picked up one of the series in a recent amazonian foray. More of which anon, as I am now going to get ready to take our nieces for a bit of a nosh-up in honour of Fifi's birthday. There's more to life than just books, you know.
Worryingly I saw enough of myself in Torvald Helmer to instill at least a temporary sense of humility regarding the scandals of others.
Secondly I think Joyce saw, even just on the printed page since he wouldn't have witnessed any productions, the poetry that seems to lie behind the plays. The action of each seems to take place against a web of symbolic associations, signaled clearly in the titles of the two I'm talking about here. This poetry takes us beyond the immediate social applications of the dramas. It gives them that peculiarly Joycean sense of stasis, the integritas, consonantia, claritas of Aquinas that Joyce made his own, and ours.
It seems to me remarkable that the young Joyce knew immediately what hardly anyone else of his time recognised - that these are not in any sense 'message' plays.
The last time I met them was quite a number of years ago when I originally read a fair bit of Ibsen. They weren't quite as frightening then - but nothing is at that age.
I realised that the main reason I'm reading Ibsen again, other than teaching Hedda Gabler which we use as one of our World Lit texts in school, is as a result of my recent immersion in Joyce's Stephen Hero. I'd half-forgotten what a great fan of Ibsen Joyce (and hence Stephen) was. The young Jim Joyce after all wrote a fan letter to the elderly Ibsen, a rather touching one, in fact. Being reminded of this made me interested in what exactly it was that Joyce found so deeply impressive in the dramas. It's not as if they obviously correspond to the aesthetic theories expounded in A Portrait and Stephen Hero.
I think I found the answer - two answers indeed. And I might just say what they are if I can find the time tomorrow.
I think I'm right in saying that the last thing I read in terms of ghost stories that got under my skin was Stephen King's The Shining, and that was back when I was in my mid-twenties. I remember not being too happy at the book being in the house yet not being able to stop myself from picking it up. But much as I've enjoyed most of King's other work since then nothing else has been close to being as powerful as that was on a purely visceral level.
Sometimes, once or twice, when Noi has been away over the weekend I've found myself thinking I'm standing here in the dark and there's nobody else around - this should be spooky (this on going to bed) and it has been mildly disconcerting for all of a few seconds, then I just forget about it. Similarly alone in a deserted place - the Victoria Theatre comes to mind when I did a few shows there with a previous school and I was the first and only one in - I've felt a distinct discomfort at what might just decide to manifest itself but I soon get busy and just forget to bother.
Yes, something has been lost. Now I just get frightened by stuff that's all too real and doesn't go away so easily.
I also got thinking of writers who were notorious walkers. Three sprung to mind for whom I think you could make a fair case for their walking being integral to their work - Dickens, Wordsworth and Joyce. Not a bad triumvirate, eh? My recent reading of the Stephen Hero fragment reminded me of just how much wandering the young Joyce did around the streets of Dublin - unfortunately, from his mum and dad's point of view, when he should have been applying himself to his books. Makes you wonder about the value of education, doesn't it? Or what an education comprises.
Now to be honest I don't know much about all this and am not terribly concerned about the issue. But I was reminded of the first time I was made aware of the plan to build the centre that's causing all the fuss. It was when one of the main guys involved in the planning of the building came to Singapore (and, I think, he went on to Malaysia), basically to sing the praises of America to Muslims here for the tolerance and understanding being shown by what he clearly regarded as a nation embodying the best of what loosely be termed democratic values. I was a bit surprised myself on reading this in the paper - that the building of the proposed centre had been deemed acceptable - and heartened by what was going on - this being before the unpleasant stuff hit the fan. The surprise came from the fact that I'd become so used to distortions regarding almost anything relating to Islam in American culture and politics that such reasonable, civilised behaviour seemed to buck an unstoppable descent into ignorance and foolishness.
Sadly this has not proved to be the case. I wonder if the citizens of that once great nation realise the degree to which they've shot themselves in the foot over this one? There're a lot of Muslims out there watching all this who are not terribly impressed with what's being said about them and whose attitudes are inevitably going to be coloured by such nonsense. In addition there are lots of civilised, intelligent people of all faiths, and some of none, who are also going to read this as yet another example of a lurch towards the kind of petty, insidious fascism that would be funny if it weren't so frightening.
But, back to the beginning. The Fox News fellow, in the middle of a lot of other stuff, told the world that he was disturbed by 'moderate Muslims' not being opposed to, or not condemning those who pursue jihad, or words to that effect. Now this was a bit odd. I mean you'd really have to have locked yourself away in a very small cell in a very isolated spot not to be aware of the deadeningly consistent condemnations of violent terrorism from every corner of the Islamic world and every mainstream Islamic organisation, and particularly of the specific horror of what occurred in New York as the century began. The guy is a journalist, of sorts, and seemed to be well-up in this sort of thing, or so he claimed, so how could he not know this? I know it and, like I said, I can't honestly say I consciously pay that much attention to such matters.
The sort of scary thing is the idea that he does know this and is deliberately, consciously misleading his audience. I hope I'm wrong and he's just plain foolish. But, either way, it doesn't make one too hopeful for the future of the beacon of the free world.
I'd have paid easily a hundred dollars for it. Even two hundred. And that despite the fact that, as it's all of five metres across, I'd have nowhere to put it.
But the point I'm actually getting to is this - the dynamic duo looked distinctly elderly and even more distinctly the worse for wear. They could have done with a stint on one of those How To Look Ten Years Younger programmes there are so many of these days. Furthermore, they obviously didn't care. Probably too focused on creating wonderful music to bother. The nerve of it!
And now I'm stuck with an even longer wishlist of albums to buy, not so much because of their collaborative piece but as a result of realising I haven't got any of Danny's solo work and am now perplexed as to how this deficiency has come to be
Or rather, what works so well in the text, the sudden, abrupt, spooky shifts of planes of reality would just appear as cliched on the big screen.
As to why they work so well in words, I suppose that's related to Dick's own very real experiences of the awful hallucinatory power of certain illicit substances. That and the tremendous, unflagging pace of the narrative.
Pity about the title though. I almost skipped the novel - which I've not read previously - and jumped to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - which I've read before - simply on the grounds it sounds so thunderously pretentious. Now I come to think of it, though, the book itself is more than a little pretentious - but in a good way, like a fine Star Trek episode, written by a usefully mad man.
For some reason I'm now reading a bit of Ibsen. Yet another plane of reality.
In my case both were of far better quality than the ones I normally equip myself with. So after years of wielding my cheapo cheapo signature black biro I rather think I'm going to use the fine and rather funky pen they have provided for me. (Nick tells me refills are easily available so this model will be able to run and run, as it were.) Apart from anything else it made my scrawl look reasonably intelligible so I may be able to actually read my messages to myself.
Not so stuck in the mud after all, eh?
Oddly enough I'm told that there are a few old biddies in the hospital who manage to wheel themselves outside for a few drags now and then without getting into trouble, so we assume that Mum hasn't seen them at it as she certainly would be more than a little inclined to join them.
I don't think suddenly quitting like this is going to make much difference to her health, though. She's been at it for some seventy-eight years on my count and that's a lot to make up for in two weeks. But the improved diet she's on and carefully measured medication is very helpful from what we can gather. John reckons she's a lot better than she was with a distinct improvement in short-term memory, though she still looks frail. That's good to hear, but I'd rather hear it from her directly and that's not going to happen since the nurses, understandably, are not going to put me through to her to talk directly.
It's very strange after months of talking to her virtually every night not to have spoken directly for so long. There's a peculiar comfort in the sound of her voice, even when she's just complaining about everything and everybody.
So now I'm looking for something to fill the gap, as it were. A couple of the short stories from Ackroyd's The Collection went down predictably well before we set off for Singapore - and in between getting some actual work done. Now I'm thinking it's time for a big dose of Philip K Dick - I suppose a bit like those heroin substitutes they give hard-core addicts going cold turkey.
I also think that every right-thinking teenager should read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when they are too young to really grasp it, but old enough to be mesmerised. This is on the grounds that it will mess them up forever. This is not a long held belief of mine, being formulated only today, but it's one that might well last. It came to mind as I'm now well into a recently acquired edition of Joyce's Stephen Hero, which is not really a novel at all, being the fragment that survived of the original very long manuscript of the work that he threw into the fire that eventually 'became' A Portrait. Oddly I read Stephen Hero as a youngster before A Portrait simply because Denton Library had a copy of it (which is quite peculiar considering how out of the mainstream it is) and I mistook one for the other. I think I was around thirteen at the time so the mistake is forgivable. I'm not at all sure then that I knew what it was all about but it certainly did something to me from which I've been benefiting or, perhaps, recovering ever since.
I'm not carrying too many books up to Melaka today since we're coming back tomorrow and one of the books being carried is the aforementioned Stephen Hero. I'm enjoying it so much that everything else I'm reading pales into insignificance.
But another bit of me, the seventeen-year-old devil-may-care enthusiast-for-anything-and-everything, has recently exploded into life (he's always lurking just below the surface) as a result of a visit to the Yellow Room. Said room is the blog of one Sidney Smith, a place I drop into pretty regularly. (I exhibit a caution similar to that regarding expanding my capacity for being able to access more stuff to listen to regarding blogs & webpages I drop in on. I have a limited, and, I'm happy to say, eclectic range of a few favourites - less than ten - and that's it.) Now Sid has been posting some very tasty looking podcasts, featuring the kind of sounds I enjoy more than somewhat, for quite a while. But I've never been able to open them (is that how you say it?) to get to listen.
And then last week I was idly browsing one of Sid's posts about his latest podcast when, blow me, the thing started to play of its own accord - and it was as good, if not better, as I'd imagined it to be. I suppose somewhere along the line my computer has mysteriously downloaded whatever it needs to get these things to work. After that I found I could get to play most of the previous ones I accessed as well. I'm luxuriating in Episode 16 at this very moment, the funkily mellifluous sounds of Nik Bartsch. Thus, it now occurs to me that if it's this easy to get to listen to such wonderful stuff I really should be doing it more often.
So that's my dilemma for the evening, delightfully unresolved.
There's a quote from some reviewer in the blurb saying that as soon as you finish you immediately want to re-read Martel's Booker winner, but it isn't so for me. I found it fun but can't honestly say it struck me as having huge depth. I've noticed that a lot of students seem to like it, and I think that's appropriate somehow. A really well-crafted introduction to the world of fictive games, but that's about it for me. (Mind you, that in itself is quite a lot. And I don't mean the comment about students to sound patronising. I just think that certain books, many very fine ones, seem particularly well-tuned to that readership.)
Oh, and I should add I had a rare old time with an old, huge favourite, prior to embarking on Pi's voyage. I finally found the Library of America edition comprising four of Philip K. Dick's novels of the sixties and fell in love again with the alternative history of The Man in the High Castle. Nobody has ever done it better. And Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is in there too! Yowza!
Now I'm reasonably familiar with the poem. I remember years ago, probably in my teenage years, reading it and trying to 'get' Milton. I sort of enjoyed it, but definitely didn't get it. Too artificial, overblown, rhetorical. But in the car I fell in love with those very qualities. The sheer musicality of the piece washed into and through me, sort of (if music can wash, that is.)
And then came Lycidas. Of course it's always been obvious to me that this is a great poem - or, at least, I've understood why others have regarded it as great. (And quite a few, as not so. Again, overdone, overwrought, not connecting.) But this time I connected with it big time.
Just one example. The wonderfully monosyllabic (almost), And wipe the tears forever from his eyes, pinned me to the seat. The power lay not only in the limpid clarity of the line, that impossible, sad yearning for a consolation that can never be, no matter how lovely the music, the singing (it's singing that does the wiping, strangely, but the line itself, of course, sings. But hang on, it could be the angels moving as they sing that wipe.) But the power also related to the context, the general simplicity of the section, approaching the end of the poem, after the fireworks of so much of what we've had so far.
Milton wiped away almost all my tears in that moment. Almost.
Then I realised just how embarrassingly childish and petty I was being. Fortunately this realisation counted for nothing and I continued having a fine old time of it.
In the meantime, as I write, and keep well out of the way since I'm more than usually useless at this point in time, something's (in fact lots of things) stirring (and baking and the like) in our tiny Mansion kitchen. Yes, we're throwing the doors open today from 2.00 onwards for family, friends and neighbours of all ilks. Let's hope they've got good appetites.
At the time I walked by them it was very warm, well hot really, in the way that Friday afternoons in the tropics have of being gloriously debilitating when you get the chance to walk out in them. I wasn't going to be too long in the mid-day sun myself, and the workers clearly knew the best place to be, and what to be doing, at that time.
There was a touching vulnerability and trust about them as they slept. And an odd strength. You need to be tough to grab some zzzzz's on the old concrete. I suppose they considered themselves to be invisible, as blokes who do this kind of work here seem to be, in social terms.
By the time I made my way back from prayers they'd managed to disappear.
It also takes a bit of pressure off my sister and brother-in-law who've been holding things together heroically. John had managed to get Social Services in with various helpers over the last few days, but it's not really been systematic enough for the intervention to be all that effective. Remarkably, the number of times I've phoned and Mum's managed to sound if not exactly cheerful at least almost normal has been in the majority.
I'm just hoping she realises this is the best thing to do - though I can't imagine she'll be best pleased not being allowed to have her cigarettes.
