Looking Back

6 Ramadhan 1435

I'm beginning to move beyond the initial period of weak listlessness the month usually involves, for me, that is. Noi seems to adapt effortlessly to the fast. My own adaptation is timely as I now have a heap of marking to deal with, so energy is in order.

It's quite a temptation just to lounge around, half-watching whatever is on the goggle-box, and fall asleep when listening to music. In fact, I nodded off in the late afternoon to the Stones' Sticky Fingers, quite an achievement when you consider that it's not exactly their most soothing album. (I was gone by Sway, track 2, in case you're interested.) But I'm fighting the temptation by ensuring I get some reading done, with Murakami's Norwegian Wood as the main course and Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age as dessert. I've got a particularly good edition of the Hazlitt, a so-called 'student edition' from the 1970's, of the kind they don't seem to do any more, with excellent notes. I brought it back from KL, where I sort of unintentionally started reading it having finished all the books I took with me.

It was back in KL that I finished all the Father Brown stories that I've accumulated over the years and also on the detective front read P.D. James's Death in Holy Orders - not her best, but even second-rate P.D. James makes a first- rate murder. And I also read, rather avidly to tell the truth, the fourth and fifth volumes in the collected Saga of the Swamp Thing. Perhaps too avidly - I think I over-dosed by following one volume immediately by another and felt a touched fatigued by the end of number five. The element of wild improvisation in the story-telling was starting to lose its appeal.

I also read a couple of plays by David Mamet, and you can now count me as a total fanboy. Glengarry Glen Ross and Romance were the two in question and I strongly recommend them, unless, that is, you take umbrage at gratuitous profanity, because there's gloriously lots of that in both. (I've always wondered how it is that schools get away with GGR as a set text, because several around the world do, as I've discovered from my IB marking.) Romance is possibly the least politically correct play I've read in years, and definitely the funniest. I'd love to see a production some time.

Oh, and I finally got up-to-date with my editions of Philosophy Now by finishing the 100th, dedicated to the philosophy of language. And that tied in nicely with reading P.H. Matthews's Linguistics - A Very Short Introduction, which is very short but packed with detail and deserving of a second reading.

And that's just about all for now, so I'm off for a coke lite before bed-time.