The Year In View

There's an extremely powerful impulse to generalise about our experiences, a desire to find commonalities. This is not a bad thing; it helps bond a community. But it's important to be aware of the potential falseness of the generalising given the complexity of our highly individual experiences in a richly complex world. The unending stream at this point in time of reviews of the year can become tiresome in their underlying insistence that things were the same for everyone.

This is particularly true in relation to the idea that 2020 was an awful year because of the pandemic. Yes, it was, if you were one of those who suffered as a result. But I know quite a few people who positively enjoyed the lockdown here. One colleague told me he loved the whole thing as it allowed him to relax with a depth normally denied. I'd have to admit myself to generally enjoying the year, not the least for the break in routine. Work suddenly felt fresh because it was so different. Being denied the pleasures of going out added considerably to the enjoyment of those pleasures when things got back to something like normal.

In some ways I feel bad about feeling good about a year that for many has been so bad. But that's the way of things. I've seen one or two documentaries recently that have made out the years of Thatcher in the UK as being pretty awful for most folks where I lived and worked, and they were, and I detested the woman. But I look back on great times from a personal point of view. I suppose it's a bit like salvaging something from the wreckage.

Mixed Feelings

In the middle of my stint on the elliptical trainer just now I found myself having to text someone on my phone, and managed to do so without stopping the machine (and not really slowing down all that much.) Having done so I felt vaguely pleased with myself, on the grounds somehow I'd developed enough skill to do the deed. And then, a minute or so later, I took in the horror of it all, of me being so locked into the technology that it had penetrated the time I spent building up a sweat. If I'd seen somebody else doing the same thing I would have raised a knowingly cynical eyebrow, or two.

Odd the way we can turn into someone we never thought  we were.

In Heaven

I've been pretty busy the last couple of days preparing for work resuming next Monday. But I've tried to make time for a bit of listening and reading to break things up. I made a particularly good choice in opting to watch a DVD featuring the Richard Thompson Band Live at Celtic Connections. It features a great line-up with the great man with lots of material from Dream Attic (the album featuring the same band, with new songs but recorded live.) It took me a little while to get into the songs, but now I'd rate the album as one of my favourites from RT, which is really saying something.

But it was a stellar performance on the DVD of Al Bowlly's In Heaven that really knocked my socks off, creating a sense of something suspiciously close to transcendence, giving the day the balance needed when you're ploughing ahead with necessary stuff. I love the song anyway, a brilliant evocation of the world of a dosser who was formerly a soldier, remembering his moments of youthful glory on the dance floor with the jazz band playing, taking him for a few moments away from the horror of his life. But the band just took the song to another place, with each soloing to perfection in the outro.

Pete Zorn's work on saxophone on the song especially struck me as tactfully gorgeous. Which made me even more aware of how incredibly multi-talented he is - playing guitars, flute, mandolin, as well as sax, and providing the more complex vocal harmonies on key songs, like Wall of Death. Which made me more sadly aware that he's passed away since the concert was recorded. So strange since he's so alive on the disk.

I wonder how the guys in the band felt about creating the music they did. Did they know they were giving us a glimpse of heaven? I hope so.

Falling Apart

Had to go and see my back doc again today, but not about the usual bit of my back - the lower part of my spine - that's given me so much trouble over the years. Today he was focused on my neck. It turns out that the pain in my arm that's been troubling me for several months comes as a result of the degeneration of the bones in the upper part of my spine. Not exactly good news. But he thinks the pain can be relieved and gave me plenty of medication to deal with it. Which is good news as I'm a bit fed up dealing with the problem.

It's a funny thing dealing with problems that are a natural result of getting on in years. The realisation that basically you're never going to get 'better' in the real sense is a bit of a downer, to say the least. But the fact that you're still up and moving and can do something to deal with life's challenges helps in formulating a balanced perspective. Anyway, there's no real choice involved, except the choice of just getting on with it. Which is always a good one.

In Abundance

We came back from the wedding yesterday with a whole heap of chocolates and stuff, given as a gift. It's touching that people are so generous, but quite worrying to consider just how easy it is to come by food in these parts. For example, just last week we were the recipients of two very flavoursome swiss rolls and a bento box simply by virtue of living where we do.

In times when one reads of food poverty in developed nations it seems counter-intuitive that so many goodies can be come by so easily. I find myself having to watchful that I don't over-indulge simply because the materials for such indulgence just seem to appear, yet others struggle with real hunger. The odd lack of balance points to something very fundamental going wrong with the way the world is organised.

On Occasions

Attended a wedding and a wake today. Different ends of the spectrum, I suppose. Both events were somewhat constrained by the social distancing measures being abided by, but both retained their deep and very real meanings.

It's fascinating to see how people keep going, keep making meaning out of the flux, despite it all, despite everything.

Have A Good One

Says it all, really.

Lush Is The Word

We set off through some ferocious rain this morning hoping it would ease off enough to allow us to take a walk around Fort Canning Park. Fortunately it did, and we found ourselves making the acquaintance of bits of the park I'd not seen before, even though I've been there many times.

On one of the many helpful signboards in the park the vegetation was described as 'lush', and the word was used with considerable accuracy. I suppose all that rain helps. Good to see life thriving in such a beautifully ferocious manner.

The Basics

It was Noi who thought to ask the key question as we were looking yesterday at the pictures of the queues of lorries in the UK: what were the drivers going to do about going to the toilet? I had no idea, and judging from some of the reporting it wasn't clear that the authorities had any real answers either.

A salutary reminder of how much we depend on others for keeping the show on the road. Sometimes literally.

On Target

The picks in recent weeks for Carol Rumens's Poem of the Week have been excellent. And this week's is outstanding. For those of us old enough to associate Christmas with feelings of deep melancholy, on occasion at least, Andrew Greig's Towards the End of the Feast hits the spot and how.

It made me think of the last Christmases of several people I've known and loved. Sad, of course, but a rich, rewarding sadness that enhances.

Top Form

Very happily reading Tales from Ovid as I approach the end of the Hughes Collected. And what an ending to his career, with two great and yet completely different collections to confirm his brilliance at the end of the volume.

I know the Ovid material particularly well, being fortunate to get hold of readings of the translations by the writer himself just after publication. I can hear his voice as I read the tales which is very helpful in grasping the tone. There's an extraordinary sense of wonder involved in this gloriously accessible verse. For all its sophistication it reminds me of his work for children. The gods are both genuinely majestic, often terrifying, but we're never all that far from a kind of tongue in cheek humour.

It's as if working in translation freed Hughes from the obsessions which sometimes weighed down the poetry of his middle period. The mythology finally works.

Another World

Watched a lot of telly today, including several episodes of a Netflix documentary series about the Yorkshire Ripper. A glossy retelling of brutal events in a decidedly dour period of time. This happened to be the period in which I completed my stint at university, followed by the beginning of my career in teaching, in the same part of the world in which the serial killer operated - he was finally caught quite close to where I was living in 1981 - and there was some fascination for me in looking into that world again. Frankly, it struck me as being a pretty ugly place, but perhaps that perception was coloured as a result of the grisly narrative involved. I was struck by the amount of facial hair worn by the men back then, especially the police. (I was happily beardless, by the way.)

The series made much of the misogyny of the time, though I felt this was a bit overstated. The women's movement had been round long enough to draw attention, and rightfully so, to the stereotypes involved in the depiction of a number of the victims and I can recall real compassion in some of the reporting with regard to the fates of all the victims - not just the 'respectable' amongst them. I suppose a large degree of generalising is inevitable in this kind of undertaking, and perhaps is useful in its way. It was certainly good to see the attention paid to the actual victims in the series.

Not Fit For Purpose

I've managed to get to the gym reasonably regularly - three times a week being the broad target. I'm also back to setting the Elliptical Trainer to full resistance for my stints which suggests some mild improvement in my general level of fitness from early in the month. Happily, in terms of maintaining morale, I've completely forgotten the kind of numbers I was posting in the early part of last year, though I suspect they were considerably better than what I'm struggling to achieve these days, 'struggling' being the operative word for this afternoon's performance.

But the great thing about this kind of exercise, in fact, any kind of exercise, is that struggling is fundamentally positive. It feels bad, but it also feels like that's what you're there to do. And the bonus is, of course, that stopping feels so good.

Not Completely Disposable

Noi has been steaming cakes over the last couple of days, and happened to remark somewhat affectionately this evening on how long she's had the Kenwood mixer she was using. She reckoned it's been employed by her for nigh on twenty years. This reminded me of a talk we'd had with Jeanette roughly a year ago, regarding a similar mixer Mum gave John and herself as a wedding present. I was thinking then of whether objects could acquire a kind of virtue in connection with their longevity and am now convinced they can, even if it's only in the eyes of their happy owners. 

Ironically in a world in which mindless consumerism is so ruthlessly promoted I suppose there might be those who frown upon the usefulness and lack of unnecessary waste involved. Strange to think that taking care of things is a way of turning the world upside down.

Good Advice

Really glad I decided to reread Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. There's something illuminating on every page. One apparently simple idea struck me hard: How we see the world alters not just others, but who we are. We need to be careful what we spend our time attending to, and in what way. On the surface this might look like the cliched notion: Garbage in; garbage out - and I think there is a faint echo of that idea. But McGilchrist is concerned with something deeper than putting up a warning sign relating to our encounters with less-than-healthy materials. His reminder of how vulnerable we are in constructing our realities is salutary.

Business As Usual

We took a break from walking around parks today, instead traversing a little bit of the city just to remind ourselves it's there. We took a bus to Chinatown, where Noi bought something she needed for her sewing at People's Park, and sauntered up to Bras Basah, between the raindrops on a drizzly sort of day. This was the first time we've taken public transport since the pandemic began and it was good to see that everything appeared to be business as usual. It's only the ubiquitous masks, and having to clock-in with the Safe Entry on the phone going into specific shops and buildings, that remind you that things are not exactly normal. On the surface the city seems to be doing okay in terms of business being on-going, but I couldn't help but wonder about the stresses & strains that might lie beneath that seemingly unruffled surface. Hope I'm right in my assumption that most people here are getting by.

This uncertainty was a reminder of just how much I don't really know about this Far Place in terms of how it all works (though the same is true of any place I happen to find myself in.) Sometimes the basic economics of it all seem contradictory. I'm thinking particularly of the speed at which various shopping centres decide to transform themselves, which can't exactly be cheap, when there wasn't that much wrong with them in the first place. One obvious example is the Funan Centre, in which we spent a bit of time wandering around since we've never seen the latest version.

It's a pleasant enough place to be in aesthetically, managing to make me feel vaguely funky. But that's the way it was before the latest make-over. In fact, I can remember the earlier version I walked into in the late 1980s which was decidedly unfunky but did possess a laid-back charm and was home to a number of off-beat shops, including a Skoob second-hand bookshop. It must have cost a small fortune to have hollowed it out twice since then, but I suppose there's some logic to the apparent waste involved.

Happily the second-hand bookshops at Bras Basah seem to be surviving, at least the ones that were there last time I went. It would be possible to build up a nice cheap library based on the Penguin and Oxford Classics for sale. Not too sure that anyone's minded to do that these days.

Limitations

Just finished reading Emile Zola's Therese Raquin. Impressed with the brutal dreariness of the tale. Claustrophobic in the extreme, there isn't a single genuinely sympathetic or remotely likeable character in the novel, I suppose because there's no real depth to any of them, including the titular Therese. Zola keeps a magisterial distance from all his creations, as if viewing an experiment that has gone sadly awry.

Actually there isn't much in the way of real suspense, which is odd considering that this is the story of a murder. It's made very clear that Therese and Laurent will get away with the killing of her husband and the reader knows that they will be psychologically disabled and destroyed by the deed within pages of it taking place. And there's no real mystery about the characters. Their every feeling and response is spelled out for us.

So, given these limitations is this in any sense a good novel? It's precisely the limitations that make it work for me. I'd regard Therese Raquin as a brilliant horror story, but certainly not the work of realism that Zola pretends he's writing. The hapless Camille's ghost haunting the murderers is the best thing in it, followed by the sardonically observant cat, Francois.

The Real Thing

Watched the unedited version of an interview given by David Foster Wallace to German tv in 2003 today, the second time I've seen it. Mesmeric, fascinating. The writer is completely himself - his unaffected clumsiness a reminder of how unnaturally smooth most people manage to be when on the box. You can see him thinking, and it's sometimes painful to watch, but more often something close to exhilarating.

A Moment In Time

It's taken longer than I would have liked, but I completed my listen-through of Le Nozze di Figaro this morning followed by reading the requisite chapter in David Cairns's Mozart and his Operas. Focusing intensely on individual acts is definitely the way to go for me. I can sustain my attention reasonably easily for the length of time involved and this way of doing things gives me a strong sense of the dramatic architecture of each act and, surprisingly, doesn't seem to detract that much from my overall sense of the opera in question. In fact, having to keep in mind what has transpired in the earlier stages of the work helps add to my sense of the functioning of the whole. What I do lose sight of, I suppose, are musical connections and continuities, but I'm such an unsophisticated listener that I'm not sure I would really pick up on these if I tried to take in a full opera in one sitting. Cairns is excellent, by the way, for pointing out those aspects of the works.

I also like the way in which, despite his massive enthusiasm for Mozart, he's prepared to address what might be regarded as the weaknesses of the operas. His judgement calls on these are very convincing, I must say. His defence of the fourth act of Figaro against the charge that it fails to sustain the dramatic momentum of the first three, or even that it prolongs a work that is really over by then is spot-on. Yes, the drama needs to move from the Count's house to the garden, in the same way that we need to leave Shakespeare's interiors for the enchanted forests, and the crazy day of the action of the opera needs to conclude in the shadow world of the nocturnal - like The Merchant of Venice needs the enchanted romance of its fifth act to fill out its real shape and achieve balance.

Funnily enough, on my first exposure to Figaro I think I felt the final act was a bit of a let-down as it doesn't have the fireworks of the Act 2 finale. But I now see that that's the point. As we move to the various reconciliations, the somewhat more subdued atmosphere, even as the farcical elements still have their place, works perfectly. The other thing that really hit me today was the absolute perfection of what I'd previously thought of as a bit of a rushed final reconciliation after the Countess gives her forgiveness to her errant husband. Cairns notes that the denouement has been criticised as failing to ring true - I suppose because of the instant sense of generosity of spirit that falls on every character on stage. Yes, we know that the Count's sudden reformation isn't likely to last, but isn't this Mozart's great insight: the human understanding manifest in the glorious music by its very nature cannot last long - we are basically the fools we've been shown to be throughout the opera and we can only transcend our deep folly for transiently fragile moments. The magic lies in the fact we can transcend it at all.

We are wiser only for as long as the music lasts. But the wisdom is readily available since the possibility of an encounter with the opera is always there for us.

Looking And Walking

It was the first time for me today at Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, and, I think, for Noi. Won't be our last, God willing. Lots of paths to walk; lots to look at; what's not to like?

A Bit Too Quiet

I sort of skim-read Nicole Krauss's Man Walks into a Room back some four years ago when I was supervising an extended essay on the text by one of my students. I knew I'd read it with the minimum of genuine attention - just enough to give me a sense of what the writer was up to - and that I wasn't in any way close to doing it justice. So I mentally referenced the need to get back to the novel one day and see whether it was as impressive as it seemed on a very superficial reading.

I finished it yesterday having rendered it the engagement it deserves and can now answer that question with a splendidly equivocal: yes & no. Yes, because at the sentence by sentence level it impresses in terms of a readably balanced style fusing the poetic and prosaic, and the dialogue, of which there is plenty, works, achieving engaging believability and a sense of genuine individual voices. No, because somehow the narrative loses direction once the protagonist, who's entirely lost his adult memory as the novel begins, has someone else's memory implanted in him and sort of goes on the run. Except he isn't really on the run from the medical facility he's been in for the experiment as this isn't a bit of genre-fiction of the Stephen King school, but a literary novel in which nothing terribly dramatic is ever going to happen, despite what seems to me a wonderfully Kingian premise for the tale.

In my dotage it seems I want plot for the sake of plot. I'm losing my sense of the finer things in literature, I suppose because I've experienced so much of them. Yes, that's it. I can appreciate the idea of exploring the relationship between memory and identity in a quiet way, but prefer something louder to buck me up.

Usefully Subdued

In the supermarket earlier this evening I was suddenly struck by how subdued the whole Christmas thing seems to be this year. It was when I noticed the attendants working the checkouts were wearing those silly little Santa hats that the lack of overly intrusive Christmas muzak became happily apparent. In fact, I can't think of any shopping centre I've been in recently has done more than pay a sort of discreetly superficial attention to the season.

I'm not sure if this is related in some way to the pandemic, but if it is it's one of the more positive effects. I'm sympathetic, of course, to those all around the world whose sincere celebration of Christmas will be affected by all the necessary restrictions, but it seems to me that our various festive occasions become more meaningful in the light of the tribulations faced by so many. Somehow the sense of them being driven by essentially commercial interests is usefully dissipated. I forgot to mention the other day that one of the highlights of our visit to the Botanic Garden was the delightfully kitschy display of trees decorated for Christmas by various organisations who partner the Garden. How refreshing it was that nothing there was on sale.

I think it's time to give the Dylan Christmas album a spin.

A Question Of Quality

Had to battle to read the poems in the Wolfwatching section of Hughes's Collected Poems in recent days. This surprised me. I got hold of a second hand copy of the book some years back and thought the title poem quite brilliant - up there with the very best of the poet. But I didn't make much of the rest, except for The Black Rhino which seemed a powerful one-off, very effectively fulfilling its purpose of campaigning to save the animal in question from imminent extinction. Generally though I think I assumed that there was something lacking in me as a reader and that I would one day grasp more of what Hughes was doing in the collection, especially regarding the poems that seemed to relate to his family.

That feeling was reinforced by bits and pieces of commentary I read haphazardly over the years which suggested that the autobiographical poems were something of a breakthrough for the poet. So I thought that I would find myself achieving something of a breakthrough myself in my appreciation of the collection, especially having been so deeply soaked in Hughes's work for much of the year. But it wasn't to be.

The poems about his relatives seemed to me difficult to read, even when I had a greater inkling of context than I had when first encountering the collection. I found them a bit clumsy, a bit overly dramatic in a way that wasn't quite real. And the remainder of the poems I thought poor stuff, redeemed here and there by muscular lines, but weighed down by obsessive references to the usual obsessions, now becoming tiresome. Which leads me to ask whether it's reasonable to say there are quite a few downright bad poems in the sequence and a fatal lack of quality control.

I think it's a question worth asking and worth answering firmly in the negative. Part of this writer's strength lies in the pouring out of work of uneven quality. A real encounter with Hughes involves acceptance of the seemingly clumsy, a surrender to the fact that he needed to write, to get the poems out there, even when he had doubts about what he was doing. The amazing thing is that the fully achieved work can be found everywhere, even in the inconsistent sequences. And there may well be some lack in myself that a different reader might compensate for to make the poems live, for them at least.

Walking And Looking

Spent the afternoon doing not much else but walking and looking, and then looking and walking, in a most satisfactory manner since all these activities were undertaken in the Singapore Botanic Garden. It's the sort of place in which everything is worth an extended gaze, so you really can't go wrong.

On The Heights

I set about reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in the wrong way. I made an initial assumption that since the text was so obviously allegorical it needed to be read as such and I didn't take the surface level of realism too seriously. I suppose I failed to invest in the characters, feeling distanced even from Hans Castorp and not feeling any depth of human interest in anyone else at the sanatorium. For example, Castorp's cousin, although featuring heavily in the early chapters, remained just the cousin, a sort of contrast to the protagonist and little more.

It says much for the power of the text that I was still drawn into its world, especially in terms of an imaginative identification with the experience of being a patient and surrendering to the routines of the sanatorium. Indeed, that aspect of the novel seemed almost hyper-real to me, uncomfortably so at times. So I was never less than engaged in my reading, but in a way that seemed dream-like. Until I realised that the extraordinary detail provided by Mann had made me accept the reality this world and I was reading a novel in the realist tradition of Trollope or Dickens - especially Dickens, since Mann worked the same magic of delineating characters who were grotesques yet convincingly real social beings.

This became clear to me in reading the second part of the novel, after the Walpugis-Night episode involving the beguiling Frau Chauchat, a wonderful femme fatale, yet much more than that. I suppose it was when I realised just how moved I was by the death of Joachim, the cousin whom I had so foolishly disregarded, that the human depth of the text became obvious. And at that point I became aware of just how extraordinary Mann's achievement was: like Joyce (yet in a completely different manner) exploiting all the strengths of literary realism yet balancing these against - or, rather, manifesting through them - a formidable symbolic poetry.

In his essay on The Making of The Magic Mountain the writer invites the reader to read his novel twice to get a deeper enjoyment from the second reading. He ruefully terms this a very arrogant request, but it doesn't seem at all that way to me, especially since Mann places enjoyment front and centre. And it occurs to me that on concluding the novel that's what I was chiefly aware of - the sheer enjoyment of reading something so fascinating, a work that is never in any way predictable, that seems to follow no obvious form, yet in retrospect seems beautifully constructed. A novel that makes its own rules.

The Body In Question

Still struggling in an asymmetric manner. The muscles in my left leg/side feel suspiciously vulnerable, especially in the early morning, whilst those in my upper right arm continue to remind me forcefully of their presence in a most unfriendly fashion. I'm more bothered by the pain in my arm though, since this has got steadily worse over the last couple of months whilst my leg and back continue to improve. I need to go to the doc across the road for the annual medical required by my employers soon and I just might mention the arm to see what they make of it. They might offer pain-killers and I wouldn't mind giving them a go simply to make sleeping easier. As it is I tend to wake frequently, aware of the nasty ache provoked by lying on my arm.

I took myself off to the gym earlier, having suffered no ill effects from my recent foray. Still taking it very easy indeed, though. It's funny to be so deeply conscious of this old body at an age when you'd think I'd be more interested in the matters of the spirit, but I'm afraid it's all I've got.

Parklife

Spent the morning at Labrador Park. Good to see lots of the common people there, with whom Noi and myself blended in highly successfully, being more than a little common ourselves.

Taking Time

Progress on reading is very slow, and this despite me having quite a bit of time on my hands. I worked out some years back that I was inclined to the false belief that it was being busy at work that prevented me doing all the stuff I really wanted to do. The fact that I can so easily do so very little when I genuinely have the time points in other darker directions.

However, I have made some progress in The Magic Mountain. Today I found myself gripped by Hans Castorp's brush with mortality in the Snow chapter, which I found myself reading whilst we were out shopping. It's potent stuff, especially the weird dream sequence he surrenders to when taking shelter by the side of the hut in the snow storm. Must say, I found the Apollonian-Dionysiac symbolism pretty obvious, but that kind of added to the potency. It felt happily incongruous to be reading something this extreme in the crowd.

I'm wondering though whether the momentum I picked up on my reading today will be dissipated on the morrow. More than once I've found myself not really up to continuing the novel and putting it to one side for a day. Similarly I realised today that I haven't read any of the Hughes Collected for around a week. It's as if the intensity of these texts is such that I need to take a breather now and again, to escape them for a while. On the positive side, in some way it seems to keep them fresh because as soon as I resume I wonder what was keeping me away from the enjoyment of reading them.

Back Exercising

Finally the gym has been opened again for our use. I celebrated by going there this evening for a very gentle forty minutes on the elliptical trainer. Some trepidation as to whether I might cause further damage to the fragile muscles in my left side, but past experience suggests that getting the muscles moving does more good than harm. Hoping for the best.

It felt oddly natural, strangely right, to be back in action. Possibly a good sign. That's the best I can hope for as things stand.

A Bit Special

We've been intending to do some walking around the many parks on this island in my vacation, but the crankiness of my back has interfered with the grand plan so far. However, today being Noi's birthday we felt it had to be marked by a special outing and set our sights on West Coast Park as the destination of choice. Even then it looked like we might just abandon the attempt when the rain came down mid-morning, but we decided to make our move once the squall had ceased and it turned out to be a very good idea indeed. Evidence above.

Happy To Cooperate

Went to pick up another set of masks provided buckshee by the authorities this evening. Easy to do: just needed to walk across the road to the vending machines and key in our identification numbers. Now contemplating the pleasures of living in a place where things work and people understand the need to cooperate.

A Grim Fascination

My back still hasn't fully recovered from last week's strain and that's been my weak excuse for getting hardly anything worthwhile done today. In contrast, Noi was busy developing her skills in patchwork at Rohana's, so one of us was achieving something. For some reason I found myself fairly aimlessly watching various bits of debate and dialogue on YouTube in her absence and I'm afraid it was a less than profitable use of my time.

I suppose I did learn one thing though. I witnessed a good deal of outrage and outrage is a debilitating emotion, especially the variety unaccompanied by any sense of generosity, and there's a lot of it in cyberspace. Watching folks fuelled by outrage at each other is unrewarding in the extreme but unpleasantly fascinating. And I intend to stay away in future.

Thinking Aloud

The Magic Mountain is turning into a war of ideas between Settembrini and Naptha. The open philosophising of the two, with Hans Castorp and his cousin caught between them, seems an extremely clumsy way of exploring these concerns, but the ideas are so obviously alive for Mann that this reader just surrenders to the thrill of the debate. Part of the thrill is the sense that the writer is capable of investing himself in the full range of what is under view without necessarily surrendering to a single ideology. His world is complex, plural, idiosyncratic, as I hope mine is. Indeed, all our worlds.

A Question Of Limits

Over the last year or so I've found myself watching a number of videos featuring Jordan Peterson. I'd vaguely heard that he was controversial in his opinions which sort of sparked my curiosity to find out just how controversial he is. I'm pleased I did because his lectures are well worth watching. It's certainly true that some of what he says is not exactly mainstream, but there's nothing that struck me as even close to unpleasantly outrageous and a lot that showed insight into the workings of the human mind. He strikes me as a born teacher, investing his material with force and passion.

As with any good teacher there's a certain quirkiness about him and something of the obsessional, though in a generally healthy manner. But the one thing I found puzzling was his obvious animus against the universities and his charges that many departments are driven by a dangerous form of cultural Marxism. This all seemed a bit over-stated, a wee bit hysterical.

I'm beginning to change my mind though. The recent news  that staff working for his Canadian publisher protested against the publication of his new book struck me as something of an ironic validation of his concerns as to the desire of the 'woke' to extinguish academic freedoms. Maybe I'm over-stating that, but it's sadly getting easier to see where Prof Peterson's concerns come from. Thank goodness that Penguin intend to go ahead and publish.

Being There Again

Delighted to have managed to get to the masjid for Friday Prayers this afternoon. I'd booked my spot on Wednesday morning, an hour or so before wrenching the muscles in my back, and once the pain kicked in I was wondering whether I should cancel the booking to make sure I didn't waste a space someone else might have wanted to use. Up to setting off I was uncertain if I would be able to do the necessary, but decided that with the help of a chair it would be okay. After all, that's how I was managing prayers at home, and in that sense it didn't seem a big deal. I suppose it was the thought of driving there and following all the new procedures that intimidated me. That and the worry of suddenly feeling a debilitating pain and not being able to continue.

In the event, all went well and I experienced that feeling of somehow being exactly where I needed to be. Always a good place.

Floored, Again

Spent most of the day lying on the floor, easing a wrenching pain in my lower back. Not a very interesting place to be, I'm afraid, especially when it's so familiar from similar previous experiences. Hoping for recovery, but not taking it for granted.

Truly Alive

I'm listening to Mozart's El Nozze di Figaro in pieces - one act at a time. I suppose it's an odd way to take in an opera, but it seems to work for me. I'm at the halfway point and thoroughly enjoying the experience. It helps that the version I'm listening to, featuring the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, is so clear, vibrant and dynamic in every way. The details leap out at you.

So when the applause breaks out at the end of each act, it comes as a bit of a surprise. The sound has been so perfectly slick, so wonderfully balanced, that a novice listener like myself tends to assume it's a studio recording and the fact it isn't is a powerful reminder of the level of excellence these musicians are routinely capable of.

It's a privilege to listen.

Highly Deceptive

I'm rereading Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary very slowly indeed, to try and ensure I've grasped the nuances of his argument. Today I finished the third chapter, Language, Truth and Music and I've decided to reread it since the ideas relating to language as metaphor escaped me except in the broadest sense. Also he seems to be saying some extraordinary things about language in relation to communication; in effect, language might be better seen as an evolutionary element related more to the need for control - and possibly deception/concealment - though I'm not entirely sure McGilchrist thinks it's as simple as that.

But what an idea! It struck me that in many ways we've been seeing something related to this in action in the American presidency 2017 - 2020.

A Happy Morning

Plants make people happy! Wise words, spotted on the back of a guy's shirt this morning. Not much to argue with there. Especially when the wearer of the shirt was engaged in actually doing the necessary planting.

He was one of many workers busy making Jurong Lake Gardens a place worth spending a Monday morning in - or any day of any week, come to think of it. The Gardens were only recently opened to the public and there's still a good deal of development going on, but there's plenty to delight the eye - and other senses.

Challenges

Just spoke to John and, briefly, Maureen. They are staying safe. But John is feeling very restricted now he no longer gets out and Maureen's short term memory is as bad as Mum's was towards the end. According to John, he now thinks too much whereas in the past he rarely thought about anything but just got on with what needed to be done. At least they've got enough money coming in to keep the show on the road.

Worryingly, Cheryl's John has been made redundant, having been paid off with three months' salary. They've just moved into an expensive new house but I'm hoping they'll be able to cope given the fact they've done very well financially over the years. Thinking back to when we saw them last December, it's startling to consider the challenges they've faced this year; them and so many others.

Infected

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is one of those novels that has an almost physical effect upon the reader. I'm finding myself sharing something of the feverish feelings of its protagonist, Hans Castrop. Reading the sequence in which he experiences his first x-ray and gazes upon the bones in his arm was a reminder of how strange this new medical technology would have seemed in its day. The heightened sense Mann conveys of the sheer strangeness of our bodies is hypnotic in its way, but forbiddingly so. I'm finding myself being both happy to read about events in the other-worldly sanatorium but happy to get away from them. Probably that's why it's taking me forever to read.

Afterword: I was feverish enough after my last reading of Mann's novel that I managed to misspell the name of his central character above. Apologies to Herr Castorp.

Going Bananas

Confusion reigns on the diet front. I am something of a banana man, especially with regard to breakfast on days when I am working. And the same is true of Peter. So it came as something of a blow when he informed me that Mei Hoe from HR had told him that the banana was generally regarded as a forbidden fruit when it came to breakfast, and especially so on an empty stomach. Since my stomach is always empty of a weekday morning, save for the banana in question, this came as less than welcome news. He also told me that he himself had researched the matter following the words of warning and it all turned out to be true. It seemed that the high potassium content of the fruit was involved - reminding me of the time the doctors told Mum there were to be no more bananas for her since another could easily kill her due to her high potassium levels - all on account of the medication she'd been on. (But that's another story, though a pretty good one, in its way.)

I informed Noi of all this - except for the bit about Mum, which she already knew - on getting back from work today, and she was more than a little sceptical, immediately going online and finding nothing but praise for the fruit. At which point I too did a little research, and got not very far at all. There is at least one 'expert' in the field who strongly cautions against a banana breakfast, and he's got a lot of attention, but this isn't necessarily reflected across all quarters.

So, as is so often the case with regard to what is reckoned to be good for you to eat, the jury is out on this one. And since I must admit to enjoying a banana in the morning I think I'll continue to live dangerously.

Not All There

We went to the awkwardly named Fusionopolis for our afternoon cup of tea today. It's been quite some time since we've ventured there but little had changed, though there were more shop spaces vacated.

There are lots of eating & drinking places, but precious few customers. Noi conjectured that it's probably busy with office-workers during the day, and I hope it is since it's a bit depressing to think of all that space being so empty so much of the time.

Perhaps it isn't just the name that's clumsily futuristic. Maybe it's a sign of the emptiness to come. There's certainly a strong sense of the melancholic about it all, reinforced by the emptily cheerful décor. Like reaching out to someone who isn't there.

At Rest

It seems odd to be approaching the end of November and not needing to be making arrangements to be travelling somewhere in the vacation. In some ways disappointing; in another way deeply restful. Sometimes making the best of things is just a matter of enjoying whatever you've got - which is easy when you realise just how much there is of that.

Numbers

For the first time in quite a while Noi and I were looking today at the numbers of those infected with the coronavirus and the numbers of those who have died internationally. It's a strange list. I don't think anyone would have predicted such numbers back in January when the news first came out of Wuhan of people dying of a new version of the flu.

In some ways the list reflects success stories, and not just the obvious ones, like Taiwan, New Zealand and our own Far Place, but nations in Africa that at one time I feared for. But then there are the unexpected disaster areas - and the weird sense of a lack of caring that sometimes seems to accompany these.

Surely no one would have guessed at the nations topping the tables in simple, stark terms of loss of life. And none of us can grasp the enormity of suffering that accompanies those numbers.

A Disappointment

I've always thought of myself as something of a fan of the films of Stanley Kubrick. The only one that disappointed me on the big screen was The Shining, but watching it again recently has made me revise my opinion. I was too much of a fan of King's novel to surrender myself to Kubrick's radical take on the story back in the day, but distance has leant much enchantment, as I found when watching the movie on the Netflix small screen recently. Oh, and I also greatly enjoyed Full Metal Jacket which I've always thought of as an under-appreciated work.

So I thought I was going to be blown out of my seat viewing A Clockwork Orange again (on Netflix) having last seen on the big screen before Kubrick withdrew it from circulation in 1971. After all, I'd found it viscerally exciting as a teenager in a number of ways, a bit disturbingly so, to be honest.  And here's the odd thing: watching again in 2020 I found it dated and draggy beyond belief. I thought it would at least look good, but found it visually overblown - almost pantomimic. And that's the word I would apply to the acting. Other than the brilliant Malcolm McDowell, everyone else seems to be mugging in that strange style adopted for English sit-coms of the 60s/70s. I suppose this is where the 'dark humour' critics refer to is supposed to lie, but this time it just didn't work for me.

Though Wendy Carlos's brilliant synthesiser pieces remain exempt from criticism.

Good Fun

Hugely enjoyed listening to Mozart's Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail over the weekend. For some reason I found it a lot easier to follow the opera in terms of its libretto this time around. I think the first time I listened through I was taken aback by just how much of the spoken material had been cut in John Elliot Gardener's Archiv version, which meant I struggled to make sense of J.D. McClatchy's verse translation. This time it was easy to keep tabs on the story, making guesses as to what was likely to be cut by reading in advance and figuring out what had to be retained to make sense of the plot.

And what a silly plot it is, though enough to enable Mozart to write some lusciously engaging music, and, possibly more important, some genuinely funny stuff. All the music for Osmin is wonderful - and what a marvellous scoundrel he is. I suppose I should be expressing some concerns about the stereotyping involved, especially as it affects my own faith, but I just can't be bothered. A scoundrel is a scoundrel and if he happens to get great music like this it seems petty to complain. And anyway Mozart scores big time in the tolerance stakes through his depiction of the Pasha Selim.

I must say, much as I can appreciate just how good Idomeneo is, and the qualities Wolfgang Amadeus brought to the table in opera seria, I'm very glad he got to the comic stuff eventually (especially when I've got Le Nozze di Figaro coming up for my next listen-through.)

Testing Times

Just completed an on-line course on cyber security. Not exactly something I wanted to do, but being given no choice I buckled down to it and somehow passed the test at the end. Fortunately they allowed for unlimited repeats on the answers. So it seems I'm not quite a hopeless case regardless of how hopeless I actually am.

Keeping It To Oneself

I'm not sure I enjoyed reading the lacerating take-down of my nation's Prime Minister in the New Statesman. It's not that I like the guy - it's hard to understand how anyone could like such a transparently venal character - but I confess to having found him mildly entertaining in his appearances in Have I Got News For You a few years back, and it's difficult not to feel something for anyone who gets shredded in the press in this fashion. The very fact that his venality is on display for all to see is painful in its way: I certainly wouldn't like my own paraded in public.

And that's what lies for me at the heart of the mystery with regards to the odd way in which some people actively pursue fame and its trappings, as in the case of the unfortunate PM. Isn't it obvious that becoming the centre of attention entails that the full range of one's faults are going to be eventually revealed to all and sundry? I briefly entertained the thought of what a biography of myself might read like the other day, and the horror of contemplating any kind of account of myself as a teenager, or twenty-something, transfixed me with horror (and things went downhill after that!)

I suppose in our fantasies of fame we vaguely imagine we can exercise some control over our image rights, somehow cutting out all the compromising, clumsy, messy, ugly stuff. But the only way we'll ever hide all that is by staying resolutely beneath the radar.

Something Final

For various reasons I've been thinking lately about the ways in which music seems to embody meaning. And then, quite fortuitously, I played the final Ninth Symphony of Sir Malcolm Arnold this evening. I've been struggling with this work for a while now, being aware that it has its detractors and it's not difficult to see their point. For example, here's Edward Gregson on the piece, taken from an otherwise highly appreciative account of the symphonies as a whole: In Arnold's case I fear the mind was not in control of the material and the result is a fractured musical syntax, devoid of any real meaning or substance.

There is something very simple - too simple - about the music, in stark contrast to the accomplished fireworks of just about everything else he produced. Yet, I think I got the point this evening. I felt the exhaustion of the piece, especially that of the final fourth movement. The mind is in control of the material, but too weary to be concerned about doing much else than mourning its own defeated condition. This is the music of wreckage - but leading to that gentle, almost affirmatory final D major, an acceptance of the wreck of a life, the blame, and what somehow survived it.

Creating Something

I'm now deep in Ted Hughes's River poems and drowning in the wonder of them. Even in the one or two poems I've struggled to come to terms with, the language has been super-charged with fluid brilliance. Put simply, it's easy to pick out killer lines.

And when a poem works in its entirety the result is extraordinarily powerful, akin to the casting of a deep, dark spell. Case in point: Creation of Fishes. In some ways this is TH at his simplest - I checked just now if it had featured in one of the books for younger readers, but it hadn't. And to my surprise it didn't feature in the version of River contained in Three Books. So something that knocked me sideways was later omitted by the poet, presumably because he didn't think it was up to snuff. (Or perhaps he thought of it as a poem for kids and, therefore, out of place in this very adult collection.)

I'll just quote three lines as an illustration of what sends shivers down my spine. These lines are developing the storyline, detailing what the Sun does having been fooled by the Moon into drowning his intolerably beautiful children: The raving Sun fished up his loveliest daughter / To set her again beside him, in heaven, / But she spasmed and stiffened, in a torture of colours.

If I ever managed to write anything as good as that, especially the final phrase, I'd consider myself genuinely creative, even if I never wrote anything else.

A Matter Of Priorities

Nice to meet up with Yati & Nahar and Mei & Boon this evening - the first time we've all six been together since the lockdown. Sadly the occasion was the wake for Mei's mum who passed away yesterday; hence we were allowed to meet as up to thirty mourners are allowed at one time. A reminder, if I needed one, of what counts in this life.

Still Learning

I thought I knew a fair amount about the history of popular music, including jazz and the blues. Then three days ago I watched and listened to Sister Rosetta Tharpe for the first time. I'd vaguely heard of her but what a privilege it was to finally listen to someone this amazingly good. Now sitting at the back of the class, for the slow learners, but happily so knowing there's more of this to come: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOrhjgt-_Qc.

On The Mountain

I've got four books on the go at the moment and I'm happy to say I'm thoroughly enjoying all four. And I'm reading all at a very slow pace indeed, which I think is adding to the enjoyment. I suppose I'm savouring them all.

One of them is the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, which has been occupying me for some months now. I've just started on River, which at the time of publication struck me as a bit of a disappointment, I suppose because the original book, like Remains of Elmet, featured an interplay of text and image and the images didn't work for me at all. In the Collected there are no images, of course, and I think River gains by that. Having said that, I was struck by the mixed quality of the opening few poems. The Morning before Christmas struck me as Hughes on something close to concrete top form; Flesh of Light, I struggled with, not quite tuning in Hughes in mythopoeic mode (I think, I really didn't get it, I'm afraid).

Then there's Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary, regarding which the whole point was to reread at a pace that guaranteed I followed the fine detail of the argument. I'm happy to say it's working, such that material I thought was a bit tricky the first time round turns out to be obvious - and even more convincing. It's a bit like reading a murder mystery for the second time where the biggest puzzle is how you didn't figure out the killer right away the first time round.

The third tome under slow scrutiny is a handsome compendium from Thames and Hudson entitled The World of Islam. It's got lots of fascinating illustrations and features a number of essays from various experts - but of a fairly 'orientalist' persuasion, being edited by Bernard Lewis. It's been on my shelves for a few years and I've frequently dipped into its pages, but never tried to read more than a few pages of an essay at a time. I think I know why. The style resembles that of an encyclopaedia, never really seeking to excite the reader, but strong on basic information. In some ways this is the right time for me to carry out a sequential reading since I know enough to feel that I'm benefitting from the gaps in my understanding being filled in as opposed to learning about the world under view from scratch.

And, finally, the latest thing on the fiction front is a classic I've had in view for some years and never got round to: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm highly deficient in German lit and the only Mann I've read is Death in Venice (as a teenager) and Buddenbrooks. I thought both were brilliant, so it's a bit of a surprise I've never got beyond them. Also the status of The Magic Mountain as a modernist classic, with all that that implies in terms of its relation to the work of Joyce and Proust, adds to the puzzling aspect of the gap - though simple laziness probably suffices as an explanation. Anyway, I'm sixty pages or so into Castrop's arrival at Davos and completely bewildered as to where any of this is going, though relishing the detail of every paragraph. An excellent sign.

In The Detail

In a world so astonishingly various, so complex, so incorrigibly, contradictorily plural, how can we ever be sure of the simple truth of anything? It's useful to acknowledge that often, possibly always, we cannot.

But what we can do is attempt doing justice to all that detail, indeed, welcome engaging with it. Which is a pretty good way to evaluate what is likely to be misinformation. By definition fake news is lazy and recognising lazy thinking is not difficult at all.

Making History

The thing about the present is how quickly it becomes the past and how very unstable it is. I remember being vaguely concerned about the counting of votes in Florida in the Bush-Gore face-off, but not with any sense that fundamental democratic values were at stake. How far-off all that seems now, and how strangely innocent - even though politics never is, and never was.

Painful Symmetry

I've been struggling to deal with high levels of discomfort in my right arm - the upper portion - for quite a while now. Marking, both the on-line variety and the pen-in-hand version, isn't easy. But it can be done, which is a small mercy. And it doesn't seem to make things worse - though not assisting in any kind of recovery either. Unfortunately early today, around eleven o'clock, a muscle in my left side, situated around the hip, decided it was time to remind me of its existence by generating a level of discomfort equal, if not greater, than that in my right arm. I felt oddly balanced in terms of the aching diagonal my body seemed to be rotating around for the rest of the day.

The great temptation at times like this is to wallow in self-pity and look at life, the universe and everything in a thoroughly jaundiced way, and I've allowed myself a reasonably deep wallow or two in the course of the day. But the more sensible option, as we all know, is to just get on with things and seek to do what needs to be done, enjoying the small triumph of getting through it all. I'm trying to do that now. Not sure I'm completely succeeding, of course, but I think I'm avoiding accessing the worst of myself, at least for now.

Getting Off

I'm having one of those, Please stop the world, I'd rather like to get off now, days. I suppose having no option but to keep on going is helpful. In its bleak way.

In The Shallows

Surprised myself today when reading about the verdict on the Johnny Depp libel case and realising that somehow or other I know a bit about the background. Celebrity news is not my thing, but I suppose it was the fact this celebrity was suing the Sun sort of interested me since I presumed there was a fair chance the publication had misrepresented the celebrity in question, based on their past record.

In the event no one seems to have come out of this one with their reputation enhanced - though it's fair to say the newspaper in question must have had a reasonable case for running the story they did. Other than that, the emptiness and extravagant waste inherent in the lives of those involved is depressingly striking. I know that sounds judgemental and holier-than-thou, but it looks like straightforward fact to me. The notion that an intelligent and talented guy in his late fifties clings to the notion of the romantic outlaw in relation to imbibing various illicit substances boggles the mind. I mean, you think he might have figured it out by now.

In Depth

Finished the first item on my great Mozart Opera listen-through project for the end of the year today. I'm afraid it took me a full three weeks to carve out the time for genuinely close listening to Idomeneo, but somehow the opera cohered for me over that time. The second and third acts are wonderfully constructed such that even someone with my tin ears can appreciate the glorious, almost seamless, flow of sound from one item to another.

I've been reading the relevant chapter in David Cairns's Mozart and his Operas as I've been going along and today enjoyed his blow-by-blow of the musical delights on offer with which he concludes his account. However, I'm afraid my powers of recall of the actual music were not up to the detail he provides which has caused me to wonder whether to now give the whole thing another spin, this time with Cairns's account in hand rather than following the libretto. I've got a feeling that doing so would prove illuminating, but perhaps in the kind of strenuous fashion I might not quite be up to.

Part of the fascination of Mozart lies in the way that the delicious surface of the music, its obvious delight-in-itself-as-gorgeous-sound, turns out to be just an introduction to its deeper delights.

Hard Times

It's not difficult even at a distance of halfway round the world to get a sense of just how unwelcome the latest lockdown in the UK will prove to be. And if a lockdown doesn't get close to one hundred percent support it's difficult to see it having the desired effect. I can understand why the schools are being kept open, but that exception alone puts the whole thing in doubt. It must be strange to find yourself in a situation when something close to a new way of going about things is demanded but there's nothing in the way of a commonality of desire to achieve what needs to be done.

The degree to which people in this Far Place buy-in to the various measures taken to control the pandemic is striking, but that's been hugely helped by the success (so far) of those measures and the underlying logic of the approach. I don't like having to wear a mask all the time but I absolutely don't mind having to do so because the purpose of doing so is entirely clear. I notice little in the way of Covid-fatigue on these shores, despite the extreme challenges some are facing, possibly because of a feeling that we're winning.

That sense of success may ultimately prove to have been illusory, of course, but just still being in the game at this stage is a boost. It feels good to be able to think that one's efforts, minor as they are, to do the right thing are helping get results.

A New Experience

Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier was one of the novels I picked up in my recent foray to Kinokuniya, and I'm very glad I did. There's not much in the way of plot, though enough fragments of a coherent storyline do come together to satisfy, but there's no shortage of poetry on every page: smouldering, dark, funny, menacing; rhythmically compelling; viscerally evocative.

I have no acquaintance with the world of drug-running and addicted Irish gangsters, I'm happy to say, but Barry enabled me to vicariously experience something of that world in all its rich bleakness, fortunately at a distance, but close enough to feel for its denizens. And enjoy them. And learn from them.

Back In Time

We listened to a fair amount of jazz or jazz-influenced music in my time at university but I remembered today that most of all we listened to the Dave Brubeck Quartet, especially from the Time Out period. I suppose the sheer mellifluousness of it all represented a way in for young guys like us who knew next to nothing about the tradition. But once in we had a foundation to build on and, I'm embarrassed to admit, that some four or five years later I would have regarded Brubeck as just a little passe.

This all came back to me when I chanced on a video of the quartet at the height of their powers and popularity in the mid-sixties, playing the stuff we listened to over and over around a decade later. Listening today I was able to take in just how phenomenally good the DBQ were; I don't think I'd quite registered the drop-dead brilliance of the Morello-Wright rhythm section back then - but, my  goodness, I did today.

I'd suggest that listening to them live is a useful test of one's musical taste: if you aren't in love with the band after seven minutes there's no hope for you, I'm afraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfZruW3NI6c .

Pointless Moaning

I can think of four different subjects I wouldn't mind having a bit of a moan about this evening. In the great scheme of things none of the subjects counts for much at all. I'm not sure they even attain the status of being trivial. So it's odd and disconcerting that I'm so strongly drawn to moaning about them, almost as if I'm trying to mildly inflate them to the point they have some status. I suppose this is a way of avoiding confronting my own lack of substance. Ouch.

(One of the moans involved my thoughts on razor-blades and how I dislike all those now available on the market. Must say, I'm happy to have spared myself the trouble of writing about that.)

The Way It Was

Was talking to Noi just now about queuing to withdraw money from the bank every Friday (I think it was) when I was living at Firth Park in Sheffield. The invention of the ATM changed that particular routine.

I suppose I'm glad to say that, but for some reason the routine never felt all that inconvenient. In fact, I've got a feeling I regarded it as a sensible way to get some money in my pocket. It was just the way things were, and the memories don't feel like at all like unpleasant ones. Quite the opposite.

But it is difficult to connect with that version of my life. Like watching tv programmes from that period. Odd, yet completely familiar.

The Dominant Species

The birds occupying the garden area outside SAC were in good voice this afternoon. Such was their volume, I wondered if some avian dispute was taking place, but saw no signs of aggressive behaviour on the part of our feathered friends. In fact, part of the pleasure of listening to them was linked to the invisibility of the birds, at least in the early stages of tuning-in to their tuneful cacophony. I suppose something territorial was going-on, but they may have just felt like announcing their dominance of our little world.

And I mean dominance. Birdsong in a relatively confined space has a rich thickness about it that leaves no doubt as to who is in charge.

Celebratory

A bit of a burden was lifted from us on Friday when late in the day Noi received an email telling her she could pick up her renewed passport on the coming Monday. I've previously recorded, in early August and September, some of the obstacles we've faced relative to the renewal of said document, and the relief we felt on actually getting confirmation of something close to success was considerable. However, I resisted the temptation to really celebrate until today. Noi braved the queue this morning and is now officially passported - and I don't care that there isn't such a word because there is now.

All we need to do now is to get the pass she needs for her continued stay in this Far Place, and previous experience suggests this will be trouble-free since considerable effort has been put in over the years by the bureaucracy here to ensure this is the case. I can assure you though, we don't take the smooth working of that system for granted. Exposure to other ways of doing things ensures we recognise the privilege of being dealt with efficiently when we're lucky enough to encounter it.

In The Crowd

Went to the big Kinokuniya in town this afternoon and was taken aback at how crowded it was. Perhaps the nation has discovered a passion for books since the lockdown? Must say, I was pleased and relieved that there was nothing of the run-down quality I noted at the smaller branch of the bookstore in Jurong. The shelves looked well-stocked, though they still don't seem to me to match what's on offer at the store in KL. Case in point: I was on the lookout for Graham Swift's Last Orders, but they stocked only the recently published Here We Are (in some abundance, ironically.)

Oh, and there was no sign of anything by CJ Sisson anywhere. Unforgivable, almost.

In The Nature Of The Thing

Highlight of the day: listening to Steve Reich's Tehillim in the morning and getting caught up in the ecstasy of it all. This time I tried to follow the actual words from Psalms, and very beautiful they were. Struck by the thought that the expression of the Divine in music is quite natural when one considers the nature of music itself. Perhaps it's what music is for?

Getting Back To Normal

Managed to get a booking for Friday Prayers at Masjid Darussalam for the second time since mosques started opening up again. The number of worshippers allowed has doubled since last time (if my count is right) with some of us placed on the second level. I attended the third shift with the azan sounding at 2.50 pm, and I think I'm right in saying that the number of shifts has increased since last month. It remains an odd mixture of the novel and the familiar. Waiting to pray a good two hours beyond the normal timing was in itself a bit disconcerting and felt sort of wrong even though it was entirely right.

But it's a very positive kind of experience in every way. Apart from the fact that I could finally pray properly in congregation again, I found myself feeling proud of the way those running the mosque were scrupulously following all the sensible regulations helping all to feel safe. And I think everyone could see a logic in the gradual easing of the rules in a way that feels genuinely progressive as opposed to just abandoning all restraint.

Other parts of the world would do well to take a good hard look at what is being achieved in this Far Place. Of course, there's no guarantee the ride won't get a lot more bumpy, but it's that understanding that seems to be fuelling the good sense of the response.

Necessary Discomfort

Read a couple of Flannery O'Connor's early stories today, the ones she wrote as part of a thesis when she was at university. Beautifully crafted, both had race at the forefront, with black characters playing key roles. Both made for uncomfortable reading. It would be crass to say they reflected overt racism on the part of the writer, but I can't imagine a teacher wanting to take them into the classroom as exemplars of balance and insight, despite their virtues. I suppose it didn't help matters that I happened to read a James Baldwin essay this morning on the subject of the rage he felt as a result of the racism he was on the receiving end of.

Perhaps that's the best way to read white writers in the Southern Gothic tradition: cheek by jowl with those unlikely to have any deep sympathy with them. (Mind you, I'm completely ignorant as to what Baldwin thought of her as a writer, if he bothered at all. Must try and find out.)

Hours Of Pleasure

Discovered the link today to the archive of Bob Dylan's wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour. I've been vaguely aware of the existence of the site for some time now but somehow avoided going there. Why so? Well, there's a lot of hours involved and once I get there it'll be very difficult to get away. But some addictions are worth slipping into.

Now listening to Episode 1: Weather. (Slim wrote a bunch of songs with his wife, Lavelle... Boy, wish I had a wife like that to help me write songs.)

For the risk-takers amongst you here's the link: https://www.themetimeradio.com/.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

Serious Stuff

The other day I mentioned current uncertainties as to the fiction I intend to read in the next month or so. Those uncertainties partly relate to a sort of plan I have in mind with regard to what I regard as my serious reading. I've been thinking of rereading Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary for some time, and I've decided that now is that time, with the end of year break not far off. I'm talking about a very slow reading indeed to ensure I've picked up every nuance of McGilchrist's argument, such that I can defend or promote it in genuine fine detail. The first time round I bought into his ideas big time, and now he's become a bit of presence in terms of on-line talks it's been easy to re-visit those ideas in a broad iteration. I'm absolutely convinced now of their value - I'm certain he's got it right. And since I now think in the same terms I need to ensure those thoughts are clear at every level.

In a similar way, I need to seek similar clarification with regard to Ed Feser's highly persuasive arguments that Aquinas got it right with his proofs of the existence of God. Though a convinced theist myself, I've sort of taken it for granted that such philosophical arguments, whilst broadly persuasive, can't deliver a genuine certainty of proof. But the last time I was reading Feser's The Last Superstition I had one of those moments of thinking that he'd achieved (through Aristotle & Aquinas) precisely that and knew I had to get back to the metaphysics involved with more mental energy than I was prepared to put in at that point. I've since acquired Prof Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and that acquisition has made aware I need to rise to the occasion with some serious thought (and some urgency.)

I have enough self-knowledge to acknowledge a fundamental laziness of mind. I've done enough thinking to know how hard it is to think, even when someone has provided the thoughts to think about. But it feels like letting the side down if I fail to get my neurones moving. Actually, I know where these thoughts lead; I just need to get there in a genuinely rigorous fashion.