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.