Bashing Away

 

Highlight of a day which featured a fair amount of hard labour on the marking front in the morning and early afternoon was a well-deserved Birthday Bash for brother-in-law and general good guy Mr Fuad. This took place in a rather funky halal Italian eatery over at Tanjong Katong, where a good time, I think it can be safely said, was enjoyed by all. In fact, too good a time: I now have to deal with a distinctly expanded waistline.

The Quiet Moments

It would take a long time to list the various elements that make The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time great popular theatre. It would be a very long list indeed.

But it was the quiet moments that proved this was theatre of the highest order. It takes supreme confidence to allow very little to be happening on a stage, knowing it's necessary to allow this to tell the story to its fullest. Two stood out for me: Christopher and his father standing side-by-side watching the rain for no particular reason; his dad painstakingly slowly removing his son's vomit-stained top after Christopher has had a fit.

Almost nothing was happening and it was riveting.

Incidentally

18.10
We're off tonight to the theatre to see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A busy end to a blisteringly impossibly busy day (yes, yet another) and most welcomely so.

23.55
Walking out of the theatre I heard one young lady say to another, very loudly and very enthusiastically: EVERYONE should see this.

She was right.

Not Quite Wonderful

Suddenly found myself in the realm of the impossibly, super-duper busy in the last four days. Not an unfamiliar place. But not a comfortable place either. Experience tells me, this too shall pass. Just hope that's some time soon. Like tomorrow.

Quite Wonderful

Just back from watching my first cinema movie of the year. The film in question was Wonder, an adaptation of the novel which I was given as prescribed reading a couple of years ago for a workshop on empathy. I'd sort of enjoyed the novel, but also recognised its very obvious manipulativeness and some of the ways in which it fell short of being a genuinely fulfilling read. So I went to watch the film version, in a kind of outing along with the students from our Hall, with some trepidation, in case it turned out to feature the worst kind of emotional blackmail, Hollywood style. In the event it represented the best side of Hollywood manipulativeness, the kind that comes with some degree of genuine heart.

Two ways in which I think the movie proved superior to the book. First of all in its economy. The book tended to milk the potential sentimentality of every scene to the maximum. The film, by virtue of its tighter time-frame I suppose, was on the whole generally restrained, sometimes conveying characters' feelings with real subtlety, and this worked much more powerfully. Secondly, the excellent performances of everyone in the film conveyed a sense of real collaboration. Somehow this served to validate the emotional content. Julia Roberts was sensationally good, but so was everybody else - the kids uniformly so - and the teenage daughter of the central family particularly.

Highly recommended. But the soft-hearted will need to take a box of tissues along.

The World Turned Upside Down

Think back sixty years. Imagine a situation in which the word of the President of the United States of America was set against that of an 'adult entertainer' of the period. I think we can reasonably assume that pretty much the whole world, even its most cynical souls, would be likely to assume with some certainty that credibility lay with the then POTUS.

Flash forward to the present. Let's face it, pretty much everyone knows with absolute certainty whose version of events in the disputed area between the two individuals answering to the descriptors above is the more credible.

How did we get to this place? And, more importantly, how can we get away?

People's Lives

Happily the majority of the tales recounted by Bernard yesterday, concerning mutual acquaintances and their various families and fortunes, were positive ones. There was a strong sense of sons and daughters doing well, some spectacularly so, as their lives extend into the trials of adulthood. Hope this continues. For some, for most I suspect, it will - but inevitably for a few it won't; in which case I hope they've developed the survival mechanisms they'll need to call upon when the skies darken.

I also got a sense of the majority of those of our generation we discussed having led fulfilled lives, and it was good to hear of one or two who'd bounced back in circumstances that were sometimes less than optimal. But, inevitably I suppose, contemplating the final darkness embraced by, or having embraced some friends was, to say the least, piquant.

Bernard confirmed that David Hay had died - he still knows Charlie Hay quite well, as I thought might be the case so he was very familiar with the background to the sad tale. I'd vaguely heard something about David's death a couple of years ago, but hadn't been a hundred per cent sure of the info. Now I am, and it doesn't feel terribly good. In some ways David was a bit of a target for humour in the old days, and took that in his usual easy, curiously innocent manner. He always seemed a little bit baffled about life and its demands, dealing with them in a lovably gauche manner. I'm glad I knew him.

I happened upon a very old picture this morning with myself, David & Tony sitting together, looking engrossed in whatever it was we were doing, which was probably something entirely frivolous. What larks, eh? What days we had.

Catching Up

11.09
Just off out to pick up my old chum Bernard from his hotel. He and his partner Sarah have been doing some medical conferencing in this Far Place ahead of heading over to China for further instalments. We had a grand old confab on Wednesday evening and the day ahead is likely to involve a lot more catching up with many narratives to complete. We go back a long, long, long way and it's been a long, long time since we last met.

23.45
As I suspected, I heard many stories today, most happy, a few sad. Much to think about. Other people's lives, eh? Each a universe in itself.

Also got to see kids on stage having a fine old time. Great and memorable day.

Possibilities

Spent a highly enjoyable couple of hours this afternoon considering the casting of our next production. We're reviving Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy, but this version is going to go in several new directions from its last manifestation on our premises. It's also likely to feature almost two separate casts given the abundance of talent we have on our hands. The bouncing around of ideas resulted in us bouncing with the excitement of it all.

I love the inception stage of a show, the seemingly endless possibilities. Of course, they're not really endless. And turning them into concrete realities is no cakewalk. But then you've got the excitement of the realities as well as the attendant, necessary headaches.

Yesterday

Yesterday found myself looking at a lot of old photos, several dating back to university days. They looked old and faded, but evoked memories that seemed so fresh they could have been taken yesterday.

Understatement

Desolately bewildered comment from a colleague in the course of the day: This job has become a lot more complex. Some truths don't bear too much thinking about.

The Shape Of Heroism

I read Max Hasting's excellent and powerfully detailed review of Howard Jones's book on the My Lai massacre when it first appeared on the London Review of Books website. Then for reasons I'm not sure of - possibly the fact it's so good that I felt impelled to re-experience it - I read it again late last week.

Then came one of those spooky coincidences that are just, well, very spooky. Yesterday I switched on the telly and there was Hugh Thompson, cited in the review rightly as one of a tiny handful of those involved who behaved honourably and courageously, talking to Tim Sebastian in a rerun of a Hardtalk episode from 2004. I instantly knew who he was, realising I'd seen the interview when it was originally aired and sort of forgot it, but also stored it somewhere in memory. Suddenly everything I knew about My Lai seemed to come together in an almost visceral fashion.

It's astonishingly powerful tv, by the way. The deeply impressive Thompson is visibly shattered over having to recall what took place and made desolate by his treatment following the events. This should be required viewing for anyone who buys into the heroic mythology of warfare. It teaches us what real heroism is like.

The Entirely Unpredictable

One aspect of my life that is irritatingly unpredictable relates to the impossibility of figuring out in advance how long a journey by car from Melaka to Singapore is likely to be, especially when that journey takes place at the end of a school vacation. Yesterday Noi was notably sanguine regarding the chances of our journey south being an easy one, and I can understand why. She rightly pointed that a lot of families were likely to have travelled back to blighty on the Saturday, or very early on Sunday, precisely because they'd have been concerned about getting stuck in a jam late at night before a working day. In fact, she could have cited recent previous experience to support this view. In 2015, for example, I recorded in this very Far Place that the whole journey took us less than three hours.

The problem is though, as I mentioned to her yesterday, that the evidence on the ease or otherwise of said journey at this time of year has been very mixed. Just last year, as again recorded in another bit of this Far Place we encountered an implausibly long jam on the bridge to Tuas.

So how was it yesterday? you may wonder, as I wondered myself how it was going to be in the couple of hours before setting off. Not great, I'm afraid. No mega-jam anywhere, but it was slow-moving through both sets of Immigration, and the traffic was very slow moving along the central section of the highway. It took a lot longer than three hours to go from door to door, but, fortunately, not double that time.

And here's the curious thing. It was impossible to figure out why the traffic suddenly slowed in the middle of our journey and then went back to normal speed. And why a jam formed this year on the Malaysian side at Immigration was a mystery in itself, though I suppose that helped to prevent a huge jam further along the bridge. And why these problems in 2018 when 2015 (and 2016, by the way) offered no obstacles to a smooth journey at all? One of life's mysteries, I guess, and, frankly, not a terribly interesting one unless you're stuck in a jam when it becomes all-consuming.

One good thing though. In contrast to our journey down we saw no fatalities. And as long as everyone got to arrive wherever they were bound in a single, healthy piece then: excellent!

A Discovery

I thought I'd read all of the obvious anthology pieces from John Clare. His work featured quite heavily, and rightly so, in various collections created with a school-going audience in mind in the 70s and 80s. So I was a little taken back, and gratefully so, to discover yesterday that I'd never read his poem Autumn, which features so heavily on-line as to be one of his 'obvious' poems.

To add to my good fortune I made my discovery at Carol Rumens's Poem of the Week page (it featured way back in 2012) which meant I could add the pleasure of a particularly sympathetic analysis by Ms Rumens to my own response to a wonderful poem. I suppose I could trouble myself at some length wondering how the poem escaped me all these years, but I won't. I'll just enjoy reading it again. And again.

Less Than Selfish

Finished my reading of the Autobiographical Writings of John Clare today with the final, haunting Journey out of Essex. How strange that final fragment is. The brief reference in an early paragraph to his troops following him is the only obvious indicator in the early paragraphs of the poor man's madness, but the feeling that there is no real personality, just a suffering body, behind the bare details of his escape from the asylum and subsequent wandering north is a kind of madness, I suppose. It certainly ties in with the general sense that Clare is never quite to be trusted regarding the selves with whom he presents the reader throughout his prose versions of his life and experiences.

Yet behind the majority of the poems, particularly those descriptive of village life and the various beings that comprise that life, it seems to me we know there to be a fully integrated creator, at one with his creation - as implied participant and observer. The mystery is how someone so simple can be so disturbingly complex.

Did he find himself as a Poet and lose himself in all other ways?

Spooked

Clare seems to have been an extraordinarily superstitious man, if the evidence in Autobiographical Writings is anything to go by. Credulous to the point of absurdity he's capable of spooking himself so intensely with regard to particular locations and the stories surrounding them as to spend any night hours passed nearby in a state of something like real terror. At first I attributed this to the times in which he lived and his rural background. Now, approaching the end of Eric Robinson's edition of the Writings, I'm not so sure.

Having become familiar with a number of the guises in which our Peasant Poet could present himself, I'm beginning to wonder about the degree of performance of a role in his prose. He writes with wonderful freshness and sincerity of the fear of the unknown, so much so as to remind even the most jaded reader of what it was like to be a child genuinely frightened of the dark and all it implied, but I reckon he puts it on a bit.

I might be mistaken, I might be seeing things, but I wonder if there's another Clare standing behind the ghost self he serves up for his public.

A Bit Of A Rest

To say that I've been having a lazy time of it here at Maison KL would be an understatement, and then some. The funny thing is that I didn't feel especially tired at the end of our first term. Maybe my body's just aware of how tired I'm likely to get over the next couple of months and is compensating in advance.

A Matter Of Routine

We drove up to KL yesterday. Generally the roads were clear and the driving easy. There were only two short hold-ups on the way, but the awful thing is that one definitely involved a fatality and I wouldn't be surprised if someone had been killed in the other.

The first hold-up came just before the rest place at Kulai, a tail-back from an accident just beyond the resting area. A motor-bike seemed to have been hit by a lorry. There were no emergency services around, but a blanket was covering something humped in the road. We assumed it was the body of the bike's rider. Then a lot further on, a few kilometres after we had stopped at the ARAB café for a much needed cuppa, we passed the scene of what looked like an accident that had just occurred. A lorry seemed to have toppled over and shunted around, blocking the fast lane. In retrospect I wonder if the driver was okay - the lorry looked strangely deserted, but possibly the door had jammed shut. Further on down the road we found ourselves worrying as to whether any speeding traffic in the outside lane might collide with the lorry. I suppose the right thing to do would have been to get out and investigate, but you just don't think of that when you're making your way, tending to assume that someone must be dealing with the situation.

It's intensely selfish, but it couldn't be otherwise. It's difficult to imagine anything more mundane than driving as a matter of routine along the North-South Highway, yet for some that journey becomes one involving the most significant and terrible extremes of all.

Something Glorious

Now reading a collection of the poet John Clare's Autobiographical Writings as edited by Eric Robinson. I felt I needed to immerse myself in something that offered instant, rich gratification, and Clare is the man to escape to for simple wonder. There's a segment early in the Autobiographical Fragments section Robinson tentatively entitles Leisure that explodes with a sense of delight over Clare's landscape that should be offered as therapy for the depressed. One particular sentence just seems to go wonderfully, deliriously out of control:

I marked the varied colors in flat spreading fields checkerd with closes of different tinted grain like the colors in a map the copper tinted colors of clover in blossom the sun tand green of the ripening hay the lighter hues of wheat and barley intermixd with the sunny glare of the yellow c[h]arlock and the sunset imitation of the scarlet head aches with the blue corn bottles crowding thier splendid colors in large sheets over the lands  and 'troubling the corn fields' with destroying beauty the different greens of the woodland trees the dark oak the paler ash the mellow Lime the white poplar peeping above the rest like leafy steeples the grey willow shining chilly in the sun as if the morning mist still lingerd in its cool green[.]

Gosh - isn't that fine!

Reading (and rereading) that and its accompanying sentences put any and all troubles I have into massive perspective.

Of No Importance

Of all the ways in which one might establish one's utter and total and complete unimportance in the great scheme of things, I warmly recommend trying to get through to a 'customer service officer' at Singtel to discuss the possibility of an appointment to install a connection to what they call their Fibre Network. Once the recorded voice has told you for the 1000th time your call is important to them you couldn't possibly be under any illusion that your call mattered to them in the slightest.

Trapped

It's a few years since I bought the four volumes that make up Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God, his magisterial work on various manifestations of myth in our collective history. Since then I've dipped into the four, but never set about a sustained reading. I decided to put that right a few weeks back having determined that I needed to do justice to all the tomes on my shelves before shelling out for more. So I began at the beginning with Primitive Mythology, his Volume 1, which I finished today.

I'm glad I decided to read it cover to cover, despite the fact that some of it was heavy-going, since a sustained reading gives a far greater sense of Campbell sustaining a thesis, as opposed to an awareness of his brilliant insights fostered by simply dipping in. I'm not sure how many of his assumptions about the spread of our species around the globe have been superseded by research undertaken subsequent to his writing - quite a number I would guess - but it's the poetry of his account that convinces.

I must say though, I closed the book with a feeling of relief at living at a time when one is not subject to the traditions and myths of one's tribe in an absolute manner. Several of the pages evoked a distinct sense of claustrophobia, a feeling of needing to escape from the confining thought-worlds under analysis. I wonder how many of the living sacrifices described within the pages of the volume felt the same way as their dreadful destinies became clear to them?

Checked

I've reached an age when my employers require me to undergo an annual check-up before they hire me for the year ahead. I can see their point: some sort of assurance that an old chap like myself won't suddenly come to a juddering halt in the middle of all the insane busyness they require makes sense. And I really don't mind being given some sort of medical seal of approval on occasion, though I take these with a reasonable pinch of salt.

So today I was nothing loath, as they say, to show up at the medical centre to do the necessary. And I'm pleased to say my blood pressure impressed the doc, though that was about all that actually was checked in any meaningful way. It remains for me to get my chest x-rayed and the rather light-weight process will be over. To be honest, I think I'd prefer something rather more thorough, which I suppose I'll provide for myself later in the year at some point.

Loss

My standard answer to the question, Who was the greatest female vocalist of the twentieth century? is simple, clear and unarguably true: Ella Fitzgerald. Beyond dispute, as I'm sure you'll agree. But my goodness me, Sandy Denny wasn't far behind, as I reminded myself this evening after stumbling upon a video of her with Fotheringay, live at the Beat Club in long ago 1970.

But here's the thing. Listening to Ella invariably makes me happy. Sheer uncompromised joy. Listening to Sandy evokes nothing but sadness and loss. Who could have known where the time would go, eh?

A Bit Of Conflict

Found myself thinking today, rather unexpectedly actually, about the notion of 'Character Strengths' as related to the field of what has come to be termed 'Positive Psychology'. In some ways the concept appeals to me, especially in its relation to Virtue Ethics, the mode of ethical reasoning I find myself embracing in my dotage, insofar as I consciously embrace any such mode; in some ways I find myself almost instinctively distrusting what, in some of its incarnations, looks suspiciously susceptible to metamorphosing into a monster of pop psychology.

I am conflicted. In fact, I've been thinking about some of the fundamental issues involved herein hard enough to give myself a mild headache. So I'll let this go for the moment, but I know I'm bound to return to these issues and I know I need to do a lot more reading and observing before I reach not so much an answer, as a truce.

Strange Days

Watched some chap who had some sort of association with POTUS on the campaign trail seemingly having some kind of protracted meltdown on various interviews on various news programmes in the course of the day. Sort of entertaining. Kind of disturbing. Not quite real somehow, even though it is.

I thought things got a bit odd in the later stages of Watergate. But nothing then came close to this.

Feeling Uncomfortable

Caught the last two thirds of a gripping episode of Hardtalk on BBC World today. The interview featured an elderly lady called Elizabeth Eckford who was one of the Little Rock Nine - a group of black children who attended what was then an all-white school in Arkansas under impossibly difficult circumstances. Her experience was part of the heroic civil rights movement of the period, and it was possible to watch the interview feeling good about that extraordinary culture-shifting heroism.

But the programme involved something far less comfortable and just as real: an overwhelming sense of the pain of those young victims of appalling racism, and the dreadful damage it did to them as individuals. Ms Eckford did not seek to hide that pain. At times the raw reality of it, even if in her old age, was very clear. The sheer honesty of it all made me feel privileged to be able to watch, and sort of helpless; but not hopeless.

Feeling Comfortable

What could be more comfortable on a Sunday night than a good murder? For the first time in yonks Noi and I enjoyed a Midsomer Murder this evening, with a decent body count of three. The first killing was excellently nasty, featuring someone being run over by a tank, and coming ahead of the credits for the programme, as the first murder always should. We didn't get even close to guessing the killer, which is as it should be when you're as tired as we felt. All highly predictable and highly satisfactory.

On The Alert

I don't think I've ever been quite as alert in a concert hall for an evening of orchestral music as I was last night. For starters, two of the pieces performed were intensely theatrical, involving the soprano as virtually an actress. The pieces bookended the evening, in a nicely patterned manner, with Diana Soh's A is for Aiyah opening the proceedings and Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre, played by a chamber orchestra version of the SSO bringing matters to a highly satisfactory conclusion. The luminous Elise Chauvin was extraordinary in both, particularly excelling as a robot (yes, really!) in Mysteries, which to me was the more successful of the two, if only because the libretto was printed in the programme, giving it more coherence. Anyway, it was all tremendously avant garde stuff with little in the way of conventional melody but lots in the way of wonderful noise and a terrific sense of fun - despite the darker elements of the Ligeti.
 
As a bit of a confession I must admit that when I first saw the concert advertised in the SSO's nifty little booklet for the 2017 - 2018 season I sort of confused Ligeti with Varese (I suppose because Kubrick drew on both for the soundtrack of 2001) and was initially expecting something dissonantly celestial. In the event, I prepped for the concert by reading the segment on the composer in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, which I found fascinating. I don't know if this helped me with the music but I sort of 'got' it right away. I've got a feeling that I might just be starting a bit of a love affair with his work, of which there's a healthy abundance on Youtube.
 
I thought I was fairly familiar with another two of the works performed last night, Webern's Passacaglia, Op 1, and Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, since I've got versions of both on CD which I've listened to a few times. In the event they sounded utterly fresh and alien live and loud. For some reason I'd thought of the Passacaglia as a gentle work, but last night it sounded manically neurotic. Not sure I liked it, but my goodness it held one's attention. Jason Lai, the conductor for the evening, laid a lot of stress on the connection of Stravinsky's Symphony with the war in one of his engaging comments, in this case covering the reconstitution of the players as the chamber orchestra for the last piece of the evening after the full SSO had bashed their way through the Stravinsky. It was a convincing connection to make and helped me reorient myself towards the work. I'm looking forward to playing the Karajan version on CD again and seeing what happens to my listening.

I suppose Mahler's Ruckert-Lieder was the most conventional thing we got all evening. But even with this Ms Chauvin threw herself so physically expressively into each of the five songs that it just didn't seem like your average bit of Mahler. Just watching her spoke volumes about the music. Glorious.

A Bit Edgy

17.32

We're off to the Victoria Concert Hall later this evening to listen to the SSO doing their thing. That thing for tonight includes pieces by Webern, Stravinsky and Ligeti, plus the world premier of A is for Aiyah by a youngish Singaporean composer, Diana Soh. Blimey! The national orchestra is really getting it on tonight, eh?! More anon.

23.11

Found out that I've been pronouncing Ligeti's name wrong for years. Fascinating evening. Not a dull moment and I'm completely stoked regarding the semi-pronounceable Mr Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre and the wonderful soprano Elise Chauvin. I mean, Blimey! Definitely even more anon, when I've wrapped my head around it all.

Uncooked

Most of us live insulated from the natural world, and it's jolly comfortable to do so. But occasionally I think we all feel that longing to get in touch with the world as it is. I'm not at all sure that reading about such experiences is any kind of replacement for the real thing, but sometimes reading John Clare can seem to get you very close indeed. Today I treated myself to March from The Shepherd's Calendar and was very glad I did so.

The early lines about the sounds of the floods embody the energy of a landscape that's alive in every detail: ...while often at his cottage door / The shepherd stands to hear the distant roar / Loosd from the rushing mills and river locks / Wi thundering sound and over powering shocks / And headlong hurry thro the meadow brigs / Brushing the leaning sallows fingering twigs / In feathery foam and eddy hissing chase / Rolling a storm overtaken travellers pace / From bank to bank along the meadow leas / Spreading and shining like to little seas 

As so often in Clare, the lack of conventional punctuation frees the verse in a way that seems to both echo the freedom of the natural world and suggest its challenges. This is not a pleasantly cultivated controlled landscape; this is nature in the roar raw.