This seemed to amuse Noi a good deal. It didn't do the same for me, even though I walked away some four dollars or so richer.
I'm still trying to process this one. It was only yesterday that I was pretending to be eighteen to get served at the pub, surely!
Just in case you're wondering (as I would be) how someone who struggles to remember what went on yesterday has such fabulous recall of what he was reading on 29 September 2001, the trick was that I just looked it up in the journal I kept for the period. I spent much of the entry for the day moaning to myself about what the Taleban were getting up to in Afghanistan - their 'religious police' lashing out with sticks at women like cattle, according to a report (reputable) I'd read. Some things don't really change.
I suppose it's because each story is such a heady, powerful experience that I feel the need to get away for a while before becoming seduced by the next. After reading A Late Encounter With The Enemy the other day, and not quite knowing whether to laugh, cry or scream with horror, I really couldn't get started on the following Good Country People until I felt ready to take a fresh plunge into the dark waters of Miss O'Connor's imagination - in which I'm now drowning again.
Sometimes it's nice to stay in the shallows.
The real mystery about the poem is why it works at all. Those opening lines are incredibly clumsy: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made. I mean W.B. just keeps repeating himself, doesn't he? How many times exactly does he intend to go? And since we know he will build his dinky cabin why the seemingly redundant made just a few words later? But, of course, the sense of stasis is the whole point. Notice that syntactically the shed seems to get made by someone else. He hasn't gone anywhere, and he won't. And he won't build or make anything, anywhere, except in glorious vulnerable words. Though, I suppose he builds in song. Everything about those vowel sounds says sing me yearningly. (Just as a matter of interest I was quoting from memory initially when I wrote the lines above - I checked them a minute ago, then edited - and I wrote I must away incorrectly as the first three words. How much richer Yeats's phrase sounds than mine!)
It's odd, you know, to find yourself hearing a bee-loud glade in a lift in a busy school.
Mr Liew, it transpires, is local to this island, though you wouldn't think so given the depth and quirkiness of his imagination. (I suppose there should have been a Stereotyping Alert on that last sentence, but I'll let it stand in its sadly jaundiced original form.) He's a fabulous draughtsman and (possibly) a fine story-teller. I need to qualify the latter judgement as we don't get quite enough story (yet? - I hope there's more to come!) to be sure. I certainly found myself touched by his characters and troubled by his vision of our world, as it might be, if that's what he had in mind.
I bought the Churchscapes whilst in Paris a couple of years back, along with Equitorial Stars, Fripp's collaboration with Eno, and it's been the latter that has seen the more frequent exposure since then. I sort of assumed whilst in Paris that the Churchscapes set whilst very fine was sort of bland in comparison to Stars. What was I thinking? Rather, why wasn't I really listening? Once you get close to any of Mr Fripp's Soundscapes (Churchscapes being Soundscapes in church) you realise how utterly beguiling they are - but you need to be close, not letting them wash over you like the waves, as it were. There's a huge danger with sounds as soothing as these that you'll just treat them as background and that's such a mistake. You end up missing the point, simply not listening since the music doesn't in any way demand that you do so.
Played loud they still don't demand you listen, but you do get a sense of just how much is going on in there even when not much seems to be happening, and how compelling it all is.
Tonight we enjoyed plentiful portions with our final visitors for Syawal, and came warmly, wonderfully crashing down to earth. (Do not consume whilst wearing white, by the way.)
Anyway I was thinking thoughts along the above lines this morning whilst waiting to make life unpleasant for a number of students who'd failed to do the needful for one of their teachers, when it occurred to me that you really have to give it to trees. At that time I was contemplating a row of them opposite me, and I really could have contemplated them the rest of the morning; they were so, well, right somehow; so utterly themselves, doing no one any harm, and my eyes a great deal of good.
It must have been a temptation for the Almighty to have stopped the whole shebang of creation on arriving at trees. But I'm glad it all carried on since otherwise I'd never have had the chance to gaze at them.
So this is just to say, fear not a flood of logos, I remain untempted by all offers of filthy lucre.
Except anything in the region of 10,000 a month and above on a regular basis. For that I'd happily turn this Far Place over to whomever has the funds and is prepared to disperse them to my worthy cause. I should add that I reckon I'd be a dab hand at product placement - especially Coke Light (hint, hint) of which I have been known to imbibe immoderate amounts.
It's with this lesser but more immediate wisdom in mind that I celebrate here the Mighty Reds' recent triumphs and the treading of their erstwhile rivals into the dust. True Champions, eh!! Best start to a season in a gazillion years. North London quakes. Merseyside shivers. Tyneside trembles. (Not that they count anymore.) The noisy neighbours will soon get theirs - again.
The funny thing is that the guys I teach fall silent when I ask them who they support. Sheer embarrassment, I guess.
The idea that life has somehow improved for everyone over the last forty years strikes me as quite extraordinary. It's almost as ridiculous as the notion that schools have got better.
Of course, the 'pretty well' I'm talking about would seem like a pittance to us. We're looking at people on the verge of poverty here. Which is why they have to come over to work. The maid in question left her kids behind because she had to find work when her husband fell ill. And now she has to leave that work to face huge difficulties at the other end.
Other peoples' worlds can represent certain kinds of freedom, but they sometimes can sadly turn out sounding like the most dismal kinds of prison.
It's a way of escaping, if only for a brief period, the prison of the self.
The second was that the performances of Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Stewart were quite extraordinarily good. Oh, and the guy playing Data as well. Brent Spiner? All have a capacity for stillness, not doing very much of anything but doing it extremely well. It helps that the camera loves them, well the first two at least. Yet they're not good looking in any kind of conventional sense.
Drama type question: to what degree can you acquire presence? - or is it something you've just got to have?
But reassuring to consider that being empty represents an invitation to be filled.
Even the preface of Greatest Show came as a breath of fresh air as the writer tells us of collaborating with various bishops in the writing of sanely balanced letters supporting the teaching of evolution as a theory of great explanatory power, beyond simply a 'faith position'. Quite so. So if it's so easy to point out: The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the pope, why write a whole book implying, almost stating, that they do, and certainly giving the world the impression that every theist does?
But enough of this genuinely pointless irritation. It's back to the wonder of it all. And just a small point that I've been thinking about today. Dawkins illuminatingly points out how pernicious Plato's Doctrine of the Forms is in supporting an essentialist position regarding various forms of life. It stands in the way of seeing the forms of life as in a state of flux, subtly changing over time. It occurred to me that language itself in many ways is obviously essentialist in nature - a dog is after all precisely that - yet it's the very fluidity, the mutability of language that keeps it attuned to the flux.
Also finished the first of her short stories on offer: A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Like Steven King without the sentiment. Nasty. Creepy. Wunnerful.
Now considering reading something sane in tandem to keep a balance.
I've been delaying viewing the films partly because you need a spare six hours to do so, which I haven't had until now, and also because Noi wasn't around at the weekend, having gone up to Melaka for some Raya-ing whilst I was involved at the end of the week in the Drama Camp, and I was reluctant to force them on her which I'd inevitably be doing considering the running time. This is not to say that I was sure she wouldn't appreciate them - she's enjoyed BBC adaptations of Dickens in the past, like the Martin Chuzzlewit that David Lodge wrote the script for - but I remembered Edzard's movie(s) as making demanding, if rewarding, viewing and I wasn't at all sure she'd take to them. And if she didn't the poor girl would be likely to still keep watching for my sake and six hours of unappreciated viewing is not something I care to inflict on her. As it is I might see how she fares with the first half hour or so of Nobody's Fault when I fancy watching it again and then keep it running if she's up to it.
Actually I'd intended to wipe my recordings and purchase the movie(s) on DVD but it seems they're just not available in that format, only on videotape. So for the time being I'll keep the recordings as I'm pretty sure I'll hanker for at least one more viewing reasonably soon, such hankering being the result of that visionary quality I mentioned earlier. This Dorrit is something very special indeed.
And why is this? It's extremely difficult to explain this simply as there are so many levels on which it succeeds, and a number of these are not quite what you'd expect. I suppose I'm saying the movies take an original approach, but curiously in visual terms there's something old fashioned about the whole enterprise (the costumes are superb, by the way) and the acting is also in many ways of the old school, with quite a number of outstanding veterans: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood and Max Wall to name but three. No, the originality lies in other, quirky, directions. One small example: in many scenes in the open you hear snippets of conversation in the background behind the principal players. These half-heard conversations seem thematically linked, but also have an oddly inconsequential quality as if they might just be accidental.
And another tiny point, amongst many: Little Dorrit herself appears curiously expressionless at moments, but this isn't weak acting as the girl playing her is often powerfully expressive. She sometimes becomes a kind of blank for us to project ideas onto as she scurries along in her simple blue dress (worn always, except for when the family becomes unexpectedly rich). And she's always doing things, you realise, tidying up, making beds, cooking food, while those around her are generally inert. Her strange simplicity, directness becomes the moral centre not just of the film but of a whole world. She's like something out of Blake - a radical, remorseless, questioning, unbearable innocence.
I can't pin this down. Just as the novel escapes any kind of comfortable summary.
Evidence of this came to me abundantly last Friday, Teachers' Day, as it does annually for all teachers here. There's a generosity of spirit from students involved that's very touching. I'm sure their counterparts in the western world are capable of the same, but it can be sadly uncool for them to show any of this by a certain age, usually the third year of secondary school. In this part of the world no one has yet made the discovery that at this point adults and teenagers should be occupying opposite ends of an unbridgeable divide.
I once suggested at a rather silly workshop some years ago that the myth of adolescence is just that - a myth - and a pernicious one that, sadly, all too many youngsters in other places find it necessary to live up to.
The theme this year is 'horror' and late last night we watched my DVD version of Sweeney Todd, the one showing the original Broadway production, with Angela Lansbury. My drama guys applauded spontaneously at the end. Theatricality at its best (the show, not my guys, though they do come close on occasion.)
My mind has been running on monsters lately. Look for them and they're everywhere, as Mr T would no doubt verify.
