All Clear

Just back from the Drama Camp, with a performance at Jurong Library to round it all off tomorrow. Amazed at the speed and efficiency with which the guys cleared everything up tonight. You hear a lot about young people being irresponsible these days. All I can say is, not the ones I know.

Strange Days

It's that strangest of days in the school calendar in these parts: Teachers' Day. I've been here some three decades (actually first stepping into a school on this island on the Teachers' Day of 1988) and it still feels odd - but in the nicest possible way. Even the deepest malcontent would be touched by the generosity of spirit that manifests itself on school corridors at this time of year. And it's followed by a holiday - hooray!

(Mind you, I'm spending my day off in attendance at our annual Camp for our Drama guys. But, all told, that's by no means a bad place to be.)

A Weak Foundation

Just back from the gym and, for reasons best known to themselves, both of my feet keep cramping up. This is ridiculous and painful in roughly equal measures. At one time I suppose I quite liked my feet, despite their strange shape, but I'm increasingly falling out with them, and other bits of my delinquent body.

Progress

When I started teaching taking the daily attendance for a class was quite straightforward: there was a register and you manually marked the attendance. That took about two to five minutes with an average class; a bit longer with more challenging ones. In fact, we took the attendance twice a day in the UK, once in the morning, and again after the break for lunch. There was also a fairly simple way to monitor fluctuations in attendance by class. At the end of the week the teacher would calculate the percentage overall attendance of the class and the Heads of Year (as I think they were called) would monitor those general numbers. (For my first year of teaching this meant I had to relearn how to do percentages. But then calculators were invented to my profound relief.) Also there were folks employed by the local authority who would look at individuals' attendance and follow up on obviously problematic cases (these folks being known as the school bobbies where I taught in South Yorkshire.) It was easy to check on whether a kid you were teaching on any given day was actually in school as the registers were kept centrally and easily available to all. It was a simple but effective system that had been in place for some years. Pretty much forever, I would think.

When I came to Singapore the picture was much the same, except that attendance was taken only once a day, there being no break for lunch when kids could leave the premises. The only significant difference was that, to my surprise, there was much less emphasis on the teacher completing the register and getting it back to a central location. The assumption seemed to be that generally students would be in school so there wasn't so much following-up on them. It was also harder to 'settle' the register since students could be busy doing any number of official things even as the day began. It struck me then that the system was dangerously open to abuse and, in time, I realised I was right.

Now, three decades on, taking the register is vastly more complicated. In my school it's all done through an app that is supposed to facilitate the work, and, of course, makes it much harder. It still makes sense to have a hard copy, of course, just to be able to see who has been ticked as present. But now all that information has to be sent into cyber-space and just getting into where you need to be to record it means remembering a number of passwords (and hoping they work) and hoping that the system doesn't hang or decide to go slow. On Friday I got all the data needed recorded correctly but it took 17 minutes for the system to acknowledge receipt of the data. Today I gave up after 20 minutes, but was later reassured that my data had been captured. But the thing is I've got to go back in and check for this.

Isn't progress wonderful? I do wish they'd stopped at calculators though.

A Little Learning

Finally making some real progress on Joseph Campbell's Oriental Mythology. The chapters on Indian belief systems were full of interesting material and I gained some fresh insights into both Hinduism in the broadest sense of that word and the development of Buddhist thought. It helped that I had some familiarity with both, but I was taken aback by some of the gaps in my understanding. For example, I really had no idea of the place occupied by the blue-black boy-savior Krishna (Campbell's description) in Hindu thought. Also I've enjoyed Campbell's lengthy re-telling of many of the key stories, the tales involving Krishna being a case in point.

Am now moving on to Campbell's consideration of Chinese mythology. This is an area in which I'm woefully informed, so I'm looking forward to some degree of enlightenment.

A Reminder

Wonder whether the death of Senator John McCain might serve to remind those Americans seemingly bent on supporting the current POTUS no matter what the cost, of what decency, integrity and honour actually look like? Somehow I doubt it. Something fundamental seems broken in the republic, and is unlikely to be repaired any time soon especially now that the senator is no longer around.

Not A Good Fit

I was asked to complete a survey the other day relating to the use of social media, and I made a genuine attempt to do so. However, in the end I had to leave it incomplete. The problem lay in one question which asked me which particular manifestation of social media I used and gave some six options - one being Facebook and I can't remember the others. Now the devisers of the survey had allowed a degree of flexibility with the answer in that you were allowed to put more than one; what they'd not allowed for was an entirely negative answer, and there was just no way for me to tell them that I didn't use any of the platforms they listed. 

I was caught in one of those endless loops in which I wasn't allowed to complete the survey unless I answered a question which didn't allow me to answer it. This struck me as richly absurd and a symptom of something, but I'm not entirely sure of what.

Undecided

Have reached the midpoint of the Collected Poems of James Merrill and contemplating whether to continue. It isn't that there aren't rewards in reading JM, but it's generally hard work and I'm missing reading other short collections. Can't remember finding The Changing Light at Sandover this tough, despite that being his epic narrative.
 
Mind you, every so often you get something so obviously brilliant that it seems churlish not to continue. Case in point: I've just reached Ideas from the 1985 collection Late Settings, and the technical mastery of the iambic pentameters and his favourite abba rhyme scheme is so complete that you just want more. Can't think of anyone else who'd have the chutzpah to rhyme psychedelic and Tillich. Having said that, I'm going to have to read it at least a couple of times more to get even close to a basic understanding (and this is from someone who actually gets the Tillich reference without having to resort to Google.)

Getting Radical

Just reacted with a splendid fury to an advert on the telly for a programme with the baking lady Mary Berry cooking up stuff in the stately homes of England. Gosh, how I despise the English aristocracy and all who end up 'serving' them. Must say, I quite like Ms Berry herself, and definitely wouldn't refuse a cake or two from her oven, but the thought of her kowtowing to various upper class twerps made me mildly nauseous.

Vive la revolution, say I!

Bad Signs

Eid al Adha 1439

After attending Prayers early this morning I found myself nodding off every time I wasn't marking a script, which was reasonably frequently. In the meantime, in stark contrast, Noi was working hard preparing the nosh for a visit from some of the family in the late afternoon (which proved predictably delicious). Somehow I managed to stay awake once I needed to, but I've been surprised at just how run-down I'm feeling, for no particular reason I can figure out.

I keep fantasising about taking to my bed for three or four days and just disappearing there. It's definitely a sign of aging when even your fantasies become a celebration of boredom.

Hardship

I exposed myself to a tiny bit of hardship today, by undertaking the voluntary fast on the Day of Arafat. To be honest, by 8.30 am I wished I hadn't and urgently needed a cup of tea; by 4.45 pm you would have found me back in the apartment crashed out on the floor; and now at 10.15 pm, almost fully recovered, I'm very glad I completed the fast, despite nursing a slight headache. By the by, Noi also fasted, and did so yesterday as well, without any of my rather pathetic drama.

Why do we do these things? I could give quite a list of reasons, but I'll just mention one, which is by no means the most important, but which I think is an interesting one. Through fasting we both invest the day, the time of year, with significance and are reminded of its inherent meaning and significance, which is so much greater than our individual contribution.

It's almost impossible to explain to those with a belief system that places at its centre the comfort of the individual that seeking to avoid hardship is, in the final analysis, counter-productive.

Shelter From The Storm

Since my conversion to Islam I've come to appreciate the sense in which the Haj is much more than simply an individual obligation. It is a collective exercise on the grandest scale - and I'm not just referring to the millions who perform the pilgrimage annually. Even those safely at home find themselves involved in terms of following the progress of the pilgrims, sometimes because they have family and friends in Makkah, more often because following proceedings is just what Muslims do. Indeed, ever since we were fortunate enough to have completed the Haj, Noi and I have paid keen attention to the proceedings, almost as a chance to relive the experience, in memory.

And this year, with Rohana & Ozman out there, our attention is at its keenest, and prayers at their most intense, considering Ozman's ill-health and the challenges posed as a result. So far, I'm pleased to say, the news has been good, and a picture of them both at Arafat today cheered me considerably. But we're also concerned at the news of the bad weather at Arafat for the pilgrims. I've seen bits of videos of the winds blowing there and it's worrying to think of how vulnerable many of those performing the Haj will be - especially poorer brothers & sisters with just makeshift tents.

It brought vividly to mind what we saw of so many poorer pilgrims making do in the open just outside Mina when we were last there. I don't like to think of such folk potentially being blown hither & thither in the storm. It's hugely humbling, by the way, to consider the real hardships they endured performing the pilgrimage in such stark contrast to our relative comfort.

The Weekend

Gosh, the weekend is very nearly over. I've had an excellent one. Though a fair amount of it was spent working, the rest was spent with the Missus, and that's more than good enough for me, thanks.

A Nightmare

I have many good memories of my first visit to Indonesia in 1989, but one that is not so positive. I was in Jakarta, looking around one of the central squares, one in which there's some kind of monument to the nation. It was all very grand, in a cold and bleak manner, all very military. I was reading an account (for tourists) of Suharto's takeover of the country in the 1960s and it just didn't add up in a logical manner. Indeed, it made little attempt to do so as if aware that coherence wasn't necessary when acceptance of the official version of history was guaranteed by the Powers that Be (or, rather, the powers that were, for the rule of Suharto is long over.) I knew with a sort of despairing certainty that whatever took place in those turbulent years, I wasn't reading anything close to a truthful account. It occurred to me at the time that I should really attempt to find out more about the period, but, sad to say, some thirty years later I haven't attempted to do so in any systematic way.

But I have found out more in a scatter-brained fashion over the years, reading here and there, enough to convince me that one of the worst but least-known mass killings of the twentieth century took place in that period and that echoes of it haunt the nation and South-East Asia to this day, and will continue to do so. Oh, and that my own nation was complicit in what took place.

And now I've decided I really must get down to some serious reading on the period, partly as a result of an excellent article in the print version of The New York Review of Books. Margaret Scott's The Truth About the Killing Fields, in the 28 June issue, points to several obviously illuminating books & articles, including one by a researcher at Singapore's own Nanyang Technological University. It's a desolating read in terms of pointing to the sheer horror of what took place, but sometimes History is a Nightmare from which we really can't afford to wake.

Enough

Home-made scones with butter. Ate two when I got back from work and finished off the evening with two more, after dinner. More than enough.

In Common

I reminded Noi the other day of the times we'd been to KL in the company of Mak and Mum. They'd actually shared a room and, amazingly, seemed able to cope with the experience. I express a measure of surprise at this simply because in most ways they seemed so entirely different in character and, of course, background. I'm guessing that each must have been deeply puzzled at the other, but I may be wrong in this. Perhaps they had more in common than I ever realised, or understood their differences with a wisdom I didn't recognise because I didn't and don't possess it.

I suppose there's much we all share, despite our differences. Like all that clichéd, but deeply true stuff, about a common humanity. We're all puzzling, all a bit crazy, more than a bit foolish. If we're lucky, we share a capacity to love and be loved; if we're really lucky we cross paths with those we seem destined to love.

Losing Count

Our dear Mak left this world to be gathered into Eternity yesterday afternoon. (It's the very early hours of Wednesday morning here in Malaysia.) In our sadness, deep as it is, we have much to be thankful for; above all a life well-lived. Mak left many children behind, enough to lose count, and so many grand-children you'd need a calculator to make the attempt to number them.

Keeping It Real

One Saturday afternoon, some three weeks ago, I needed to go across to my workplace to pick something up. It was a very hot afternoon. There were a few workmen around the precincts, cutting the grass. As I walked back from my desk into the hot afternoon the workers came by me in a row, presumably having completed their labours, at least in our location. Just walking out into the sun made me distinctly uncomfortable, already beginning to sweat, despite being lightly dressed and not doing anything at all strenuous.

I couldn't help but think how the grass-cutters might be feeling in their layers of protective clothing. Incredibly damp, clammy and uncomfortable I suppose - but they all contrived to look reasonably cheerful, though not one looked me in the eye. I'm guessing they felt themselves in some (awful) sense as being below me, somehow not worthy of notice. I also guessed then that these were incredibly tough guys - they'd need to be to cope with just an hour of their work.

I found myself thinking that the next time I felt unreasonably overworked I'd let them come back to mind. So I just have, and the effect is salutary, to put it mildly.

Getting Real

There's something uncompromisingly actual about physical exercise, something very definite indeed. When you put yourself in the position of having to do some, just by turning up, there's really no turning away. Reluctance is understandable, but supremely pointless when faced with the actuality of getting on with what you know you must do. You can spend a good deal of the time allotted to the exercise wishing you weren't engaged in it, but the necessity of the engagement overrides thought.

The pay-off is powerful. Not so much a feeling of well-being as happy acceptance of the certain knowledge that you've just done something simply and clearly right.

Not Entirely Happy

Finished The Natural History of Selbourne yesterday. A happy read. Now trying to give my full attention to Joseph Campbell's Oriental Mythology. Not so happy, though. The first section on Egyptian mythology featured quite a bit of the pointless human sacrifice that characterised the first volume in The Masks of God sequence. Tiresome seems an inappropriately trivial word to describe the content, but I'm afraid that's how I find it.

Also reread the opening section of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea today as preparation for teaching the novel. Painful, but pointedly so. What a deeply unhappy book this is, and how right that it should be so.

Things Changing

Found myself mildly thrown by a review of the Dylan concert in The Straits Times asserting that the stuff from Tempest sounded pretty much like the original recordings. Since I failed to recognise either Pay It In Blood (for a good thirty seconds or so) or Early Roman Kings (got it quicker, but it still sounded different) I wondered whether my powers of recall were severely failing me. Then I came across a review of the show in Perth (comprising an identical set-list), from a distinctly more savvy reviewer, that pointed to the differences, somewhat to my relief. However, the Perth reviewer threw me by asserting that Things Have Changed, the concert opener, could be found on Modern Times when I was pretty sure that wasn't the case. I was fairly certain I'd only ever heard this on-line as it's not on any album I own.

I had a highly enjoyable time checking. It only took a glance at the CD cover to establish it wasn't on Modern Times, but then I simply had to play the album, only to discover that what I personally rank bottom of the run of 'late-Dylan' albums, from Time Out Of Mind onwards, is chock-full of wonderful songs. I realised that if the great man (and his great band) had played any one of Spirit On The Water, When The Deal Goes Down, Workingman's Blues #2, Nettie Moore, Ain't Talkin', I would have gone into minor ecstasies. I suppose that's why Dylan in concert can't disappoint: it's all good and since he's bound not to play easily over a hundred songs you'd love to hear, there's just no point in disappointment.

Sending Off

We'd sort of half-planned to go up to KL over the National Day holiday, but decided that our visit could wait until September. One benefit of the delay is that we were able to attend a kenduri at Osman and Rohana's ahead of their departure for the Haj (on Monday.) His shoulder is giving Man considerable discomfort, despite the morphine patches he's been applying, and seems to be the main worry as to whether he'll be able to cope with the demands of the pilgrimage. But he'll have lots of people there to assist him at every stage so everyone's hoping the positives outweigh the negatives.

Certainly he'll have a heavy weight of prayers on his side. God willing, it will be enough.

Still There

Second and third thoughts on Monday's concert - that's how Dylan hits you; it takes time to process.

I'd been mildly worried ahead of the show that it'd be a reprise of 2011, with a lot of repeats. Of course, knowing how the Bobster likes to keep it new it was a very mild worry indeed, and in the event rightly so. We did get, It Ain't Me Babe, Honest With Me, Simple Twist of Fate, Highway 61, Love Sick, Tangled Up In Blue, Thunder on the Mountain and Ballad of a Thin Man again, but Tangled & Thunder were so different as to be unrecognisable (with something like a third of Tangled sounding like entirely new lyrics, or at least ones that I didn't recognise) and the sheer pleasure of hearing the others overrode any sense of dull familiarity. Actually Love Sick always sounds freshly spooky no matter what.

Everything from Tempest, and there was a lot, sounded instantly classic, and was enthusiastically received by an obviously intelligent audience. It's difficult to think of anyone else who manages so decisively not to be a nostalgia act. Even when you get the shivers-down-the-spine-I-can't-quite-take-in-I'm-actually-hearing-this-live stuff part of the fascination lies in the reinvention involved (as opposed to reproduction) and trying to figure why Desolation Row, When I Paint My Masterpiece, Blowin' in the Wind now mean something important again to him. Or why Tryin' To Get To Heaven needed to become jaw-droppingly new.

And then there are the sort of guilty pleasures. I enjoy Adele's version of Make You Feel My Love, and her version of it in tribute to Amy Winehouse in the Albert Hall concert lingers in my mind as something very special, but the warmth that Dylan (and that band!) brought to it on Monday was extraordinary. Sometimes it's the simplicity of the man that beguiles. (I've read more than one account of Time Out Of Mind that writes off the song as lightweight, by the way. But what did the critics ever know?) I was vaguely hoping for one of the songs from the Christian period as well, having been knocked every which way by the Trouble No More set of late, and sort of exploded with delight when we got a massive, pounding Gotta Serve Somebody.

It occurs to me that it's madness to be disappointed over Dylan not playing something since the list of stuff to be disappointed over is endless. All you can do is surrender to the perfection of the moment and be grateful you're there.

Forever Young

First semi-coherent thoughts on the Dylan concert after the initial Oh Wowing:

The great man's voice was in fine fettle, certainly sounding a lot stronger than when he last played these shores in 2011. I recall thinking then, as the concert at Marina Promenade began, that he might not make it through to the end of the evening without drying up. Last night he sounded like he could have gone on for hours. Sadly we didn't get any of the recent standards stuff to showcase just how good he can be, but he impressively held some tricky long notes in Love Sick just to show he can (and because the song demands it, of course.)

The band was loud, to these ears a lot louder than seven years back. I wonder if that might be explained by the fact that the earlier gig had been outdoors and last night we were in the fairly cavernous and, I'm guessing, somewhat echoey Star Centre. And they weren't just loud but distinctly raucous, even when summoning some deep grooves. Dylan played piano throughout in the percussive manner to which we're all accustomed and the piano was very distinct in the mix. In 2011 I don't think I could really pick out the keyboards at all. The result was something wonderfully akin to recordings of Dylan with the Band on the European tour of the mid-sixties. At moments teetering on the edge of teeth-rattling sonic chaos, but emerging clean and triumphant. At times the voice got lost in the mix, but, again, I liked the effort and danger of it all.

I couldn't help but think of stories of Dylan as a teenager getting thrown off the school stage for playing edgily unacceptable rock and roll. I wonder if he felt that young again. I wonder if that explains the constant touring: the need to be entirely alive and vital, the need to be new again.

Ill Prepared

It's been a day of almost constant low-intensity irritation, the kind that wears away at the edges. Not the best preparation for an evening spent in the company of the Greatest Living American and most controversial of all Nobel Laureates. But I'm hoping that after 8.30 pm all will fall into place and due proportion.

Not Exactly Connected

I'm finally getting the hang of reading Gilbert White's little classic The Natural History of Selborne (which, according to its respectable Penguin blurb is the fourth most published book in the English language.) On embarking on my reading I entertained the vague notion that there'd be some kind of continuity in the text, that it'd feature a series of anecdotes concerning the village and its wildlife and some kind of broad, linking reflections from the writer upon his observations. In fact, it's much more disjointed than that, often featuring entirely disconnected observations across a series of very individual paragraphs. 

When you're used to the linking of ideas and a certain flow in what you read this is surprisingly disconcerting. Initially I found it almost impossible to read the more fragmentary segments with any real attention since the markers that help focus attention were often non-existent. But then I found myself enjoying the enviable randomness of it all. This added to the already curious but considerable charm of the work as a whole. After all, what does maintaining the interest of the reader matter when the writer is so obviously engrossed in the minutiae of his subject matter that the reader can only feel that he or she is a kind of intruder upon the good parson's obsessions?

I can't help but quote a few of the most disconnected paragraphs (from Letter XL) to help convey the spirit of the thing, and just because I enjoy them so much:

The grasshopper-lark chirps all night in the height of summer.
Swans turn white the second year, and breed the third.
Weasels prey on moles, as appears by their being sometimes caught in mole-traps.
Sparrow-hawks sometimes breed in old crows' nests and the kestrel in churches and ruins.

I suppose it's all connected by the pleasure attendant upon handling each fragment of the jig-saw.

Nicely Busy

Am sort of rushing around, but in a social manner. Some nosh with chums yesterday evening, a birthday bash with a niece this afternoon, and a chance to view some colourful dancing this evening from our students, without the pressure of having to do anything except enjoy the proceedings. All highly satisfactory. This I could get used to.

A Bit Of Everything

I know repeat visitors to this Far Place are thinking that the old geezer in command only posts about dinosaur bands of the Dad Rock variety. Well, eat your hearts out as I offer proof that there's always something new out of Manchester. To this day, the place has everything you could reasonably wish for musically.

A Crimson Moment - 3

What better way to begin the month than with a bit of the only surviving footage of the five-piece Crimso who recorded Larks' Tongues in Aspic? Wonder what would have happened had the brilliant percussionist Jamie Muir stayed with them. Good as the four-piece were, as captured on The Great Deceiver box set, there was something magical about the band I had the immense good fortune to witness live at the Hard Rock Manchester prior to the loss of their genuinely wild man.

Just love what he does with the bird whistles below the David Cross violin solo that closes the footage. And just hate the fact that the tape runs out at that point.