A Sense Of Completion

Completed a rereading of Maya Angelou's I Know how the Caged Bird Sings today, ahead of teaching the memoir next term. Read it with much enjoyment at quite a lick to try and get a sense of the architecture of the work. As I've vaguely felt previously, it seems to me to divide into two segments which don't necessarily hang together: the childhood in Stamps, the teenage years in San Francisco. Both are fascinating but the years in Stamps have a mythic power quite lacking in the later chapters. Indeed, I really can't quite get hold of the odd later chapter in which Maya becomes a sort of member of a teenage gang for a month or so. I suppose it was simply something that happened and needed recording, as in any accidentally constructed life.

Was the book written as part of a larger autobiographical project - successfully delivered over the years - or is it meant to stand alone, coherent in itself? Either way, it's good stuff. 

Strong Medicine

Am continuing to work my way through the cache of Shakespeare-related DVDs acquired earlier this year. Today was the turn of The Winter's Tale, the RSC's 1998 version recorded at the Barbican and it didn't disappoint. Antony Sher is a scintillating Leontes, the best I've ever seen, but he's matched by the ladies in his life: Emily Bruni lovely as Perdita (and Mamillius!), Estelle Kohler a wonderfully fierce Paulina, and Alexandra Gilbreath a heart-breaking Hermione.

It was all very theatrical in the best sense of the word, as The Winter's Tale has to be, and if I'd seen it in the theatre I would have been embarrassed by my tears.

Strong Stuff

Yesterday turned out to be something of a landmark day for me in terms of my experience of reading poetry. It's not unusual for me to encounter moments of remarkable intensity in reading poems, points at which poems seem to blaze and dazzle, points at which the entirety of a poem seems to lock together in an overwhelming unity that transcends its individual moments - such that the experience is greater than a 'point' but appears to condense into one. This doesn't happen every day, which is a relief as, whilst it's highly enjoyable in its way, it's also in some ways disturbing - as if opening a door onto a world that's just a bit too intense in which to reside for any length of time.
 
Yesterday this happened to me three times, twice in the classroom, and then at home in the late evening.
 
In retrospect these intensities had been presaged by some of my reading on Monday evening. That was when I suddenly realised what William Carlos Williams was up to his longish early poem The Wanderer. This concludes Al Que Quiere!, but there's a somewhat earlier version of the poem (I think from 1914) that he revised for the later collection of 1917. Since I'm reading through the Collected sequentially, I'd read the 1914 version some days previous, but with little in the way of insight. Then I found myself re-reading the poem, now comparing the two versions which are similar but with some interesting revisions. I suppose this closer reading helped result in my realisation that the poem is essentially one of initiation, with WCW finding his real subject, the America he intimately knew through his wanderings as a doctor, the old woman he encounters in the poem being his muse (and grandmother). It's so obvious, and I'd missed it completely. And I also realised the extent to which it's the voice of Whitman in the background of the poem and that Whitman is in many ways the dominating influence on early Williams - rather than Pound. Anyway, the poem came satisfyingly alive for me, as if I'd been initiated into something.

Then in two quite separate lessons in the course of Tuesday, poems that I know well, one very well indeed, sprung to visceral life for me in readings aloud, one in a completely unintended almost accidental manner. This left me by the late afternoon in some small way reflecting upon the nature of poetry, which, in turn, led me in the evening to look up the Poem of the Week page in the Guardian-on-line. Carol Rumens makes great choices and provides wonderfully insightful commentaries, and the accompanying Comments are nearly always as readable as what's above the line, so I was looking forward to a good read as usual, and in my somewhat 'enhanced' state of mind I suppose I was even more receptive to having a good time than on a typical visit.

As it was, the poem featured, Barry MacSweeney's Daft Patter, took the top of my head off, just when I would have preferred a bit of gentle calm. Apart from being an obviously wonderful poem its concerns spoke so directly to me that it was uncanny. As Mum would have said, it all felt a bit much. 

I've avoided reading any poetry at all today.

Uncertainties

One of the fascinatingly unsettling aspects of living through a major health scare, such as the current one related to the spread of the coronavirus, is observing how we deal with a situation in which we simply don't know enough to predict outcomes of a very serious nature. It's a brutally useful reminder of a truth we generally blind ourselves to: we may think we know a lot but we are deceiving ourselves. Indeed, one of the most crucial things we don't know is the extent of our self-deception.

Mind you, the current on-going possible emergency is also useful as a reminder of the value of those with real knowledge and expertise, however limited that may be in the great sum of things, and how much we need what little we do know when the going gets tough.

Certain Matters

Not entirely certain how it must feel for those living by the rivers in England now bursting their banks, though I think it a reasonable guess that it must feel dreadful to the point of despair. The coverage remains as surreal as it seemed in years previous - February 2014 being just one example - and I'm pretty sure this will all continue into a future of what are now familiarly known as 'extreme weather events'. We've not proved good custodians of the planet, have we? And somehow or other we continue to fail to learn the obvious lessons.

Out Of Time

It's almost two months to the day since Noi and I were in Tameside General Hospital seeking attention for the nasty rash on her back that turned out to be shingles. Not the best way to spend Christmas Eve, but an absolutely necessary one that turned out for the very best since we dealt with the problem in its early stages. And a powerful reminder of the fact that matters of health come first, second and third in terms of sensible priorities.

For some reason I've been thinking a lot lately of matters of diet - not so much going on a diet, which is happily quite unnecessary at the moment, but adjusting our diet to allow for even more of the healthy stuff than we already take in (and we don't do too badly at all, I think.) I'm thinking particularly of the kind of nutrients which are believed to stave off dementia and promote the well-being of the brain.

That's the useful thing about getting old. Finally you have little choice but to get going on all the plans for self-improvement-cum-self-preservation that you've been thinking of for ages, but managing to put off. If not now, when? A sobering thought indeed.

Spoilt For Choice

We've just acquired Netflix, quite unexpectedly. Now watching an episode of the excellent Doc Martin from one of the later series that we've never managed to catch previously. This is, I suppose, a good thing - I'm just not sure it's entirely a good thing. I mean, we suffered no shortage of things to watch earlier. And now we have a veritable plenitude.

Stay tuned for further developments, as they say.

Stormy Weather

I acquired a few DVDs early in the year, nearly all Shakespeare-related, and I'm now trying to get round to viewing them. Today I watched the second half of Julie Taymor's screen version of The Tempest starring Helen Mirren and featuring a very strong cast, having watched the first half a few days back. Of course, that's not exactly the best way to watch any movie and I felt I hadn't done real justice to this one, although overall I enjoyed it. I found myself taking the special effects a bit for granted, which wasn't very fair as it's, as you might expect coming from Ms Taymor, a visual delight.

I thought the scenes featuring Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano were excellent, even enjoying Russell Brand's performance as the jester. But on first viewing I couldn't get my head around the idea of a female Prospero, even though Helen Mirren was predictably excellent. That's unusual for me as I'm no purist when it comes to the Bard on stage or screen, but for some reason the concept didn't work for me - perhaps because I'm sort of playing the role myself in my head as I watch and can't surrender my expectations.

I've got a feeling, however, that on a second viewing I'm going to be able to enter into the spirit of the production, partly as a result of viewing the accompanying documentary on the making of the film. It's a funny thing with me but whenever I'm exposed to explicit authorial intent I find myself able to defer to what was intended.

Above All

Now listening to Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux, Book 2: Le Traquet Stapazin (The Black-eared Wheatear) and massively glad to be doing so. Peter Hill is delivering the bird's music, alternately knocking hell out of his piano and then laying down lines of crystalline beauty - with lots of scrawls and squiggles in between. One chord sequence reminds me of the Turangalila, specifically Jardin du sommeil d’amour (Garden of Love’s Sleep). Yes, it's that good. Transcendent. Healing. Should be made available at all pharmacies.

(The link above is to Yvonne Loriod's version, by the way. Just as good as Hill's - as, of course, you'd expect from Mrs Messiaen.)

What Ignorance And Racism Does

The reliably excellent and informative On An Overgrown Path recently featured a blistering post on the injustice done to Rudolph Dunbar, a black conductor of the mid-twentieth century of whom you and I have never heard. The post explains why this is so and the injustice involved is such as to depress and enrage in equal measures. Not exactly a pleasurable read - but a necessary one.

Good Cheer

As a rule of thumb I think we'd all agree to treat anything entitled How To Be Happy with radical scepticism, especially if you need to pay for the advice therein. But there's an exception to every rule and in this case the invariable wisdom of the First Dog in the Moon triumphantly proves such. The best guide (being both cheery and helpful to boot) I've ever read on the subject, essentially telling us all we need to know.

Highly Suspect

On my way back from work a colleague stopped me to show me a picture she had just taken of the sun going down behind the buildings opposite. It was worth stopping to take a look at. Perfectly ordinary and perfectly beautiful.

Strange, isn't it? In a world so often discordant and ugly, beauty is so easy to find. Sort of suspicious in its way, if you're someone who likes looking for clues.

The Heart Of Things

Decided to read Conrad's Heart of Darkness again, ahead of teaching it next term. I thought I knew it backwards, sideways, every which way, but it still astonishes and depresses. I know JC gets a lot of flak from some quarters for being excessively adjectival in terms of the mysteriously unspeakable and all that, but I think the words work. At its finest, and HoD is as good as it gets, his work reminds us of the unfathomability of just being here.

I've been intending to reread The Secret Agent for the longest time. That's now become a matter of urgency.

Taken By Surprise

Finished Such Is Life today. Fascinating novel in every way. No plot to speak of, yet was held by a kind of narrative momentum. The high facetiousness of the narrative voice should have grated - as it occasionally does, even in Dickens - yet it turned out to be strangely sympathetic - I suppose because it was very much a part of how the protagonist deals with an unsympathetic, often harsh, world. The extremities of the dialogue in terms of rendering accents and dialects, making it almost, though never completely, unreadable, yet sort of exciting and amusing to make sense of; and, counter-intuitively, expressing a deeply democratic attitude to the use of language.

Strangest of all for me was being taken completely by surprise when moments of real sadness surfaced, especially in the second half of the novel. The chapter dealing with the stories of three children being lost - one found alive, one dead, and one never found at all, was stunning, partly because of its entire lack of any kind of sentimentality. Behind the wonderful comedy of the novel - I laughed out loud more than once - lay a deep sense of human (and animal) suffering.

The Chosen One

It was the William Carlos Williams Collected Poems that got my vote the other day for my next major read-through and I'm now up to Al Que Quiere, originally published in 1917, by which point his authentic voice is emerging from the shadows of Ezra Pound. It's a funny thing though, even when he sounds most like EP in the very early poems, I still find him more affable somehow.

Must say, I've had the two volumes of the Collected for a while now, and done a lot of dipping in, but I'd never quite registered how good the accompanying notes are. WCW's comments on the early stuff, 1909 - 1913, actually make the poems, weak as some are, worth reading.

On The Peaks

Lowest point of the day: struggling earlier in the evening in the gym on the elliptical trainer. But it wasn't much of a low since I was very happy to be able to get to the gym, and knew I was likely to struggle, this being my third workout in six days and I sensed I wasn't entirely recovered from the previous two.
 
So it's been a great day with multiple highs. Friday Prayers provided, as always, a relaxed space for reflection and connection, but I reckon was surpassed by no fewer than three peaks. First, the exchange of suitably slushy cards in the early morning; second, romantic tea and kueh in the afternoon; third, Noi's famous oxtail soup just now, with bread to dip in.

Not bad, eh? (I keep reading about people presenting faked overly perfect versions of their lives on social media and creating unnaturally high expectations as a result. I apologise for having enjoyed a pretty much perfect day, Gentle Reader, and will endeavour to get back to meaningless struggles with the imperfections of this world as soon as possible.)

To Digress

I've not faced any of the problems over choice of text regarding my 'usual' reading in the way I mentioned yesterday concerning my poetic diet. The novel Such Is Life, which I'd never heard of before, was happily forced on me by an enthusiast, and, having read the first two chapters and being about a quarter of the way in, I've become an enthusiast myself after a bit of a slow start.

It seems the novel is regarded as something of an Australian classic (first published around 1900) and it's a very odd kind of novel in all sorts of ways - hence, my slow start, as it took some getting used to, and hence my enthusiasm, because I'm drawn to the unconventional. It would take a bit of a while to enumerate its various oddnesses, so I won't try and do that now, but I'll just mention one quality that I love about the book. Tom Collins, its writer - but that's a pen name, so don't be taken in, and it's also the name of the narrator himself - is extraordinarily digressive in true Tristram Shandy style. This sort of thing is frowned on in the English language novel - cf Dr Sam Johnson on the aforementioned Shandy - but it seems to me quite a reasonable technique to adopt in the structuring of a novel. After all, it's difficult to think of anything quite as digressive as life and, if you're trying to capture a sense of lived experience, jumping around all over the place seems a good idea to me. Anyway, I reckon it works in Such Is Life, at least in what I've read so far, and I'm hoping for more in the way of lurches into irrelevance and even less plot, of which there seems to have been not much so far, as I happily read on.

Not Entirely Rational

Now trying to choose whether to embark on a reading of the Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (in 2 volumes) or the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes. Of course, I can't lose either way, but I will face the irritation of not reading the other (for quite a while) if you see what I mean. Tried to settle this last night by starting on the early stuff from WCW, knowing that I've never found it all that appealing and thinking that if I found it problematic to keep going I'd switch to the Hughes. But it didn't work. I still found it unappealing, but forgivably so, and am quite happy to keep going - but every time I look at the lovely, chunky Collected from TH I find it difficult to resist.

And in case you're thinking I should read both at the same time, I'm very tempted to agree, but feel I wouldn't be doing justice to either somehow. Completely irrational, I know, but whoever claimed that any poetry-lover was motivated in any way by mere rationality?

Unfrozen

I've been thinking about Beauty a lot lately. Not very deep thinking. Nothing of the furrowed brow about it. Just pleasantly superficial, noting how much Beauty there is within easy reach, and what fools we are to ignore it. Case in point: I had a close encounter with Steve Reich's Variations for Winds, Strings & Keyboards this afternoon, in SAC of all places. And it took me to another, better place (which is pretty remarkable considering what a fine place SAC is.)

Funnily enough, some people haven't learned how to listen to Reich, et al. I'd advise approaching the Variations as if you're hearing frozen sound unfreezing. Sounds dumb, I know, but, hey, it works for me.

Stupidity

Managed to get home early enough to allow myself an uninterrupted listen to Beethoven's Symphony 9 before having to get on with other stuff. Fell asleep about two minutes into the first movement, waking only when things got really noisy in the final movement. There are times I'm less than impressed with myself and, trust me, this was one.

In Addition

Still trying to get on top of my journal-reading and very much enjoying the October-November 2019 issue of Philosophy Now in the process. The featured philosopher is Schopenhauer and I'm embarrassed to say that I knew next to nothing in terms of detail about him before reading the first few articles. This is especially embarrassing since I've seen so many references to his work and ideas in the work of thinkers I generally admire that I feel I've let the side down somehow by being so ignorant.

What took me a little by surprise was the extent to which a number of ideas which I have explored in recent years and developed a distinct sympathy for feature in Schop's The World as Will and Representation. I had been wondering whether I should put WWR on my reading list at some point - and now that point has definitely arrived. (Mind you, the list is so long I'm not sure I need to get round to buying a good edition for at least a couple of years.)

A Blessing

Look at the moon! So bright!! said Noi. And it was.

And I felt blessed.

Other Voices

The ones in our heads, if they're the only ones, are not enough. We need other voices to free ourselves from the prisons of ourselves. The voices we hear through art are intensely valuable in this respect - but if the art to which we expose ourselves only reflects ourselves the freedom granted is limited. The voices we hear through listening to the views of others are, again, intensely valuable, but, again, limited if we only hear what we already think echoed back at us. Perhaps the voices allowing us the greatest freedom are those which represent ways of thinking that are fundamentally different to our own, and ideas that make us uncomfortable.

I've found much truth in this seeming paradox and tried to learn to listen attentively and sympathetically. That doesn't mean I believe all those voices say (or even any of it), but there's a powerful sense of freedom in understanding exactly why I might disagree.

Things You Forget

Was looking back in my journals again today, this time to the year 2003. But this wasn't the usual idle browsing to find out what the young me was up to 20, 15, 10 years back. This time my reading was prompted by a conversation with Peter over a cuppa in SAC. He was telling me that Su had mentioned to him the shutting down of schools here in the SARS scare and wondering if I remembered this since he couldn't. It turned out that my memory was worse than Pete's since I had the impression the SARS thing had happened after we'd both started teaching at our current place but he somehow knew that was the H1 N1 thing (I think that was what the virus was called) and that came later. He also knew that the SARS scare took place in 2003, which was actually two schools back for me. Disconcertingly I had no memory whatsoever of a school closure, but I mentioned I kept journals covering the period and I would look them up.

So I did. But I needed to google for info on the month(s) involved, duly discovering that, yes, the schools did close late in March, opening again in early April. Checking on what I actually wrote in the period, I found that I did reference the closure and expressed some awareness of the SARS situation, but not all that much. My concerns were largely elsewhere (of course, I and my family and friends were lucky not to be effected by the virus in any way) with the only reference evoking a distinct fragment of memory being one about Mum expressing concern over the whole situation in a phone call and needing to be reassured.

The days in question were filled with my usual references to music listened to and books read and the like, but there was one aspect of current affairs that clearly got my full attention - that being the war in Iraq (which I referred to then, quite rightly I think, as the 'illegal invasion'). And those references brought back a flood of memories. Funny how one's mind works.

Some Things Never Change

I was glancing back to some journal entries from February 2001 - to see what was on my mind around the turn of the century - and I came across one talking about enjoying a drama session, especially the laughter. A different school then, but some things never really change. Had an equally good, if not better, time this afternoon with my current round of drama guys.

Isn't it great to have a job that features at least one thing that's pretty much pure enjoyment?

Quite Ordinary

Happened to catch some of a late night drama on Noi's Suria Channel from a series entitled Bingit. The series deals with various aspects of mental illness or problems, each episode featuring a particular condition. The programme being screened dealt with a woman with a compulsion to hoard and it made for uncomfortable yet compassionate viewing, with several powerful moments. I was struck, as I so often am, as to how the material produced by the channel is nearly always at its best when dealing with the common stuff of life, since our ordinary problems are so compelling.

It was a reminder also of the quietly undemonstrative heroism of so many ordinary people negotiating their way through this vale of tears.

A Question Of Faith

Felt mildly disappointed with Alice Oswald's first collection The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile. Everything else I've read by her has been so obviously the real poetic thing that it seemed odd to find myself not quite getting most of the shorter poems in the volume, though funnily enough I thought the opening piece, Pruning in Frost, was perfect in its way. I particularly struggled with the sonnets in the collection, though recognising the obvious command of form. Of course, there was enough of quality in every poem for me to realise the problem was me not living up to what was on offer rather than any inherent deficit in the poems themselves.

Having said all that, the final extended piece, The Three Wise Men of Gotham Who Set Out to Catch the Moon in a Net was so obviously wonderful that my faith in Ms Oswald as my favourite living poet (probably, provisionally) was restored.

Making Cuts

Spent a good part of the day excising lines from As You Like It, preparing an acting script for a production of Shakespeare's comedy we're planning for July. To be honest, I've had the job of finalising the carved-up version of the script for quite some time, it being on my to-do list since last November, but it's an odd sort of job requiring lots of preparatory thought and extended private time in a space where you can run lines over and over (to yourself) to test that the cuts aren't doing any active damage and are genuinely helping shape the show the way it's intended to go.

And what is the 'vision' behind this version? Pure entertainment, I'm afraid: a good time guaranteed for all kind of thing. With a bit of magic here and there, we hope. Not too much of a stretch I reckon with WS often at his daftest and having a good time deconstructing the Pastoral Romance every which way.

The interesting thing about carving Shakespeare up is how easily the drama survives the operation and how much you get to learn in the process about the nuts and bolts of how it works.