To be strictly accurate, Peter and I got it right about Southgate's sense of caution. The starting line-up was what we predicted and, sort of, dreaded. But on the night it was the right way to go.
Lovely to see Sterling get on the scoresheet yet again. Wonder how those tabloid journalists who have given him such a hard time in the past feel about this? Doubt that they've got the self-awareness to bother about what they feel (or why they feel it.)
Sort of regretting not having access to the Euro 2020 games after last night's two free-scoring games. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd be up to the stress of watching England vs Germany live tonight.
Nattering over the possible outcomes over a cuppa in the SAC Peter and I agreed that on paper we should go through. But we also had a feeling that Southgate would opt for two defensive midfielders and a surfeit of caution. Not sure that will work against the Germans. We're just hoping that we'll be proved very, very wrong.
Got back to the old routine today and generally the day went well, but around about 10.00 in the morning I experienced one of those moments when my little world seemed particularly shaky. Fortunately it was just a moment but it was a striking reminder of my fragility.
What happened was this. I'd just completed a round of examination invigilation and was on my way back to the staffroom with a colleague with whom I needed to discuss something. The discussion itself was fine, but I became aware in its course of my voice becoming increasingly croaky. By the time we wound things up I was barely able to speak, but needed a quick word with someone else, who commented on just how sore my throat sounded. The really worrying thing was that some twenty or so years back I completely lost my voice several times when teaching for periods of a couple of days and I had a strong sense that the same thing was about to happen again. I was trying to figure out a way to cope with the week's work if this were to happen as I went to my desk and it was very difficult indeed to reach any workable conclusions.
My next task was checking the numerous emails I'd received whilst invigilating. One or two took a bit of sorting out, as expected, but the last one managed to intensely worry me as I completely misread it. There was a perfectly innocent reference in it to an administrative procedure which needed to be done but for some reason I thought it was talking about a similar procedure I should have carried out earlier in the year but had somehow completely forgotten about. Again I found my brain racing trying to figure out what to do about this with a very distinct sense of panic.
Some fifteen minutes later I figured out that I had carried out the procedure in question, back in early April, but in my dotage had completely forgotten all the details. The email was actually referring, quite sensibly, to something that needed to be done as a follow-up to an exam tomorrow, which was easy to arrange. And then, coincidentally, I managed a conversation some five minutes later and found a stronger version of my voice under all the croaking.
So that was it: two-pronged panic over and all was well. It's not much of a story, is it? All a bit pathetic. But the relief was very real and very welcome and I'm happy to think about it. Some colleagues seem to think of me as a reasonably calm sort of chap. If only they knew...
Got to the gym in the early afternoon for the first time in a couple of months. Struggled. Started to feel more tired than usual after 25 minutes and by 35 minutes was seriously considering stopping. I assume I had badly misjudged my pace in the initial stages when things didn't feel so bad and had gone far too quickly in the excitement, I suppose, of being back on the machine. I'm further guessing that I set the resistance I was peddling against too high - although nowhere near the highest possible.
For the final 25 minutes it was a matter of slowing down so I didn't feel sweatily like throwing up and somehow keeping peddling, which I managed to do to get the full hour in. I was mildly pleased with myself for completing what I'd intended but also mildly annoyed at being so out of condition and misjudging my efforts so badly. I suppose the fact that I've recently managed some longish walks without difficulty lulled me into a false sense of security.
Oddly enough, psychologically it helped that Noi and I had been out for an excellent dinner the previous evening. This was a delayed birthday treat - and treat it was at a very nice place called Royz et Vous out at Telok Ayer Street, opposite the Chinese temple there. I mention the name as the place was very quiet for a Saturday night, I suppose business not having picked up since the recent closure, and they deserve plentiful custom given the quality of food and service provided. Anyway, thoughts of just how good the mushroom soup and roast duck had been spurred me on, convincing me that I would have the energy to finish my stint on the machine.
Am now feeling tired, but quite nicely so, which is a good sign, I suppose. In fact, we've just come back from doing some weekend shopping - which is an indication that I did have something left in the old batteries despite what my body was telling me around quarter past two.
I've been watching a bit more telly than I'm normally used to this last week or so. Noi was keen to view a few more of the good murders offered by the BBC, after we finished the White House Farm episodes, and so we gobbled up The Pembrokeshire Murders over a couple of evenings and then went on to the first series of Killing Eve. We'd watched the first episode a few weeks ago and been impressed but hadn't found the time to follow up. Now we're five episodes in and completely gripped.
Of course, it's utter tosh (unlike the real life murders watched earlier which had impressive weight) but it's excellent tosh and has had the Missus screaming in excitement a couple of times already. Must be a good thing!
Found myself gob-struck and ferociously excited late last night when I realised that that nice Mr Fripp has arranged for the whole of King Crimson Live in Mexico City, July 2017 to be accessible from YouTube. I mean, Blimey!
Now listening to a stunning Fracture, so no time to write.
We took the car this afternoon to a Vicom Centre for one of those statutory checks ahead of renewing the road tax and getting it insured for another year. Happily it passed the test in a suitably straightforward manner and we were soon off to the Aiman Café some way down the road to enjoy some of our favourite comestibles. (They do a little sardine puff which really does the business, and then some.) Sitting there, basking in the late-afternoon sun, with a potential problem having proved supremely unproblematic, it struck me that I felt as far from melancholy as a man can reasonably get.
But I was also half-aware that it was only this morning I came across this plangent reminder in Robert Burton's magnum opus on those prone to melancholy: Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayest be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, etc.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art. Now RB may be a miserable soul, but he's right, of course.
But in a way an awareness of our weakness and silliness adds to the piquant delight of those moments when everything seems so well, no?
Now I come to think about it, having re-shelved his novel, the most memorable aspect of Stoker's writing in Dracula for this reader was the amount of non-standard dialect he attempts to render. This begins with the thick Yorkshire dialect of an old man in Whitby, but we get something similar from lower-class characters in London as well. It's intensely patronising in its way, but also seems to reflect a genuine enjoyment of the vigour of their language. It struck me as theatrical, as though Stoker is thinking of these characters entertaining us on stage, and I couldn't help but think of Stoker's own experience of the theatre in relation to this.
In fact, there's something very theatrical about much of the novel and this explains, I think, one of its obvious technical flaws. The various personal narratives that make up the text in something close to epistolary fashion work well in terms of providing different perspectives on the action but never convince for one moment in terms of suggesting genuinely differentiated voices, and the idea that the writers somehow manage to capture verbatim the extended speeches of other characters, like the old chap in Whitby, is risible. But if we read the novel as something close to a theatrical script with the speeches as enjoyable set pieces then there's a kind of logic to which we are prepared to surrender just to enter the world of the novel.
The extended speech of the maniac Renfield, when he attempts to convince the others of his regained sanity, is the best example of this. It manages to be sinister, pathetic and funny all at the same time, and it's easy to imagine a fine actor (like Irving, whom Stoker served as dresser) making this work wonderfully on stage. Similarly, imagining Van Helsing as a theatrical performance rather than a character makes him a good deal easier to put up with.
I wonder if this the fundamental reason that Dracula has served so well as an ur-text for so much vampire fiction. Film-makers particularly seem to have drawn from all that is stage-worthy in the novel, but the dark power of the Un-Dead is just a thrilling add-on, not central to the work in any sincerely disturbing manner. It's all surface, highly entertaining in its way, but nothing to keep one awake or colour one's dreams.
Finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula this morning. I realised the other week that I've had a copy of it tucked away on my shelves for a long time - in a Pelican paperback, intended for younger readers, though unabridged. I'm not someone who can readily be accused of what the Japanese term tsundoku, the hoarding of unread books, since pretty much every book I own has been read cover to cover, or very heavily perused, assuming it isn't something intended for reference purposes. But there are one or two exceptions that feature on a list I've been steadily reducing in number over the last four years or so. Strangely the copy of Dracula didn't get to feature on the list, and I'm not sure why. Possibly I regarded it as somehow beneath my dignity to include something intended for kids, but this makes little sense since the novel itself isn't children's literature and almost qualifies as a 'classic'.
Anyway, I've now read Stoker's novel and I don't think it can be meaningfully seen as a work of distinct importance regardless of how vampire stories have come to comprise a thriving genre of their own. That isn't to say it's a poor novel - it has enough craft about it to be seen as a sturdy, workmanlike piece. But it lacks the mythic power of Frankenstein, which is a surprise given the inherent power of the vampire archetype. Yes, it exploits that power to some effect, but it's easy to imagine this being done better. That explains, I think, why movies with their roots in Stoker's novel invariably make major structural alterations to the storyline.
The thing that irritated throughout my reading was the wearisome insistence of each narrator on the virtues of their various friends and loved ones. I suppose this can be related in potentially interesting ways to the transgressive aspects of the text: I'm thinking here of the undercurrent of sexuality in the direct encounters of Jonathan, Mina and Lucy with the Un-Dead. These are extremely brief in terms of actual descriptive text devoted to them (essentially one or two paragraphs for each) but the implications in terms of the moral schema of the novel are fascinating. I sense the anxieties generated are reflected in the growing and vaguely off-putting religiosity of the text. Unfortunately, though, Stoker fails to handle those anxieties with any subtlety and the relentlessly drab equivalent of current day virtue-signalling gets more than a bit much.
Noi and I spent the morning happily wandering around the Botanic Gardens. After a few days of rain we had perfect weather for meandering without purpose and took full advantage. If you check on the website for the location it seems there a number of things you can do there, but we successfully avoided doing anything and did it very well.
And we managed to get the cuppa we were looking forward to in the afternoon at our favourite branch of Ya Kun. Sadly the girl we're used to seeing there, an expert at handling the queues that have featured since the seating was cut down due to the regulations relating to the pandemic, has gone back to Myanmar according to the owner. Noi was chatting with him as she was being served and it seems the authorities weren't prepared to renew the young lady's work pass (this after six years here, as an obviously excellent worker) since the concern is with ensuring jobs are available for locals in these trying times. We're guessing she would have been unhappy to leave. Coming across an article relating to the covid outbreak in her nation as we were sitting slurping added to our helpless sense of concern.
It's salutary to be reminded that we're very much the exceptions in remaining relatively untroubled by the events of the last year or so. When we were chatting to our guests on Saturday I mentioned that I couldn't immediately think of anyone personally who'd been badly hit over the last few months and wondered if it were the same for them. It wasn't. They were able to supply a disconcertingly long list of those they knew in deep trouble.
Looking forward to getting out for a cup of tea tomorrow when the regulations lighten up a bit. That isn't to say we haven't managed to have a good time with things as they are. Yesterday we enjoyed the company of Nahar & Yati and Boon & Mei as we noshed down on Noi's patented sup tulang and some goodies provided by our guests. We've spent today relaxing after yesterday's socialising and intend to settle down to another murder on the telly in a little while.
There's a lot to be said for the quiet joy of a very comfortable life, and here I am saying it.
Still perplexed by Red Sorghum which I finished the other day. It's Mo Yan's depiction of violence that bothers me. In the early stages of the novel I just took this as an appropriate rendering of a sadly brutal world, but the increasingly cartoon-like quality of the violence became alienating. It sounded like the writer was enjoying himself at times.
This, in turn, provoked doubts about aspects of the writing which seemed unusually naïve: the sometimes random quality of the non-linearity of the text; the lack of depth of characterisation in relation to the central characters; the extreme clumsiness of shifts of point of view. Yes, I can see a way of justifying all of these in relation to the folkloric quality of the story-telling, but I'm not sure I find this convincing. I suppose I should try and read beyond this novel into the writer's oeuvre to try and figure out just how deliberate all this is.
Funnily enough, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Red Sorghum despite my doubts.
Mo Yan's Red Sorghum in summary: sex and death. Actually not all that much sex, but lots and lots of death. Most of it spectacular.
I'm reminded of the fact that I sometimes tell classes that Literature is essentially just sex and death. But is Red Sorghum Literature (with a capital 'L')? Still trying to make up my mind.
Bloomsday
As with last year I was thinking of listening to a slab of the greatest novel of the twentieth century to celebrate the day in question, since my copy of Ulysses remains on the shelves in KL and, therefore, not exactly readable. But somehow I felt this was a bit of a stale way to pay tribute and that I needed to think of something fresh. For her Poem of the Week feature Carol Rumens selected a poem of considerable relevance in Mary O'Donnell's touching and true My Mother says No on Bloomsday but I read this on Monday and it's not actually Joyce is it?
So I felt at something of a loose end until I chanced upon the perfection in every possible way of a setting of Pomes Penyeach by some ultra-talented Irish musicians. Apart from the fact I loved the performance, it served as a reminder of the intensely emotional lyricism that underlies Joyce's art. I found myself reading the poems - which I thought I knew well - with a new intensity and appreciation of how strange and radical they are despite their surface conventionality.
In fact, I'm going to listen to them all over again, if you really want to know.
I must confess to a bit of a blunder in yesterday's post. I referred to Flannery O'Connor's earliest publication as being the stories collected in The Geranium - but whilst this was definitely her first collection of stories, it was not published as such. Remarkably the stories comprised the thesis for her Master of Fine Arts degree. Although four of the stories were published in various magazines around about the time of composition, two saw the light of day only posthumously, one of these being The Crop which she thought of as unpublishable.
That's particularly ironic considering that the central character of the tale is a lady who aspires to be a writer of fiction. In truth, though, the gap between the talentless, foolish Miss Willerton and her abundantly talented creator could hardly be wider. And it's a mark of O'Connor's gifts that she keeps a cold, forensic distance from the pathetic 'Willie' - as her protagonist sees herself when she is taken entirely into the odd fantasy-fiction that emerges from her attempts to write her story about sharecroppers - whilst managing to make her both a genuinely moving figure and a richly comic one.
There's something both wonderful and a little chilling about the distance between Ms O'Connor and the ordinary writer (whatever that means - which I suppose is partly what The Crop is about.) That's why I have so little concern about the idea posited in some quarters that she'll be somehow 'cancelled' as a writer. That won't happen as long as she remains in print. There will continue to be readers who'll happily surrender to her magic.
There were a few stories in the wonderful Library of America volume on Flannery O'Connor that I had yet to finish, most of these being from her earliest publication, The Geranium. I found the time today to read these, finding plenty to admire along the way. In fact, the three from the 1947 collection struck me as being equal to what came later: The Crop, The Turkey and The Train seemed fully achieved and beautifully controlled and I didn't think the re-written 1964 version of The Turkey - entitled An Afternoon in the Woods - which I went onto after completing The Geranium, was in any obvious way superior.
I finished things off with The Partridge Festival which had been a contender for inclusion in the brilliant collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. It was difficult to see what it was that O'Connor had against her own story which it seems she didn't rate so highly.
In the course of reading the stories I took a break, going on-line to read some of the commentary generated by the recent controversy concerning the writer's various expressions of racism in her correspondence. It made for an odd experience. Set against the cold brilliance of her work it all seemed a bit pointless. It's a bit like the whole thing with Larkin, though there's nothing as egregious as Larkin at his worse in O'Connor's casual racism. I mean, nothing has changed about my reading of and regard for Larkin's poems, even though the poet himself was a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work in some respects. In contrast, there are pretty obvious things to admire about O'Connor as a person - her heroic battle against debilitating illness for one - but what I find to admire makes no difference at all to my reading of the work, just as what is obviously deeply unpleasant doesn't either.
Her treatment of the racism in the American South as she knew it is strikingly insightful and extremely uncomfortable. Not a bad combination.
I've always thought I preferred Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold to his epic One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both are brilliant but I got completely lost in the latter, enjoyably so, but lost all the same. In contrast the novella guides the reader through its mazes in friendly fashion for all its complications. (I'm thinking of the sheer number of characters bursting from its pages.)
Today I think I settled the matter. I read Chronicle in the middle of the day relishing the way in which it manages the impossible, being ridiculously lush and extremely taut at one and the same time. Every detail works. Couldn't put it down.
Funnily enough, I don't think I've noticed before just how extreme the violence is - and how convincing in its strange normality.
I watched the opening half-an-hour or so of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman when we were last in the UK, back in December 2019. At the time we were staying in an apartment in Liverpool that happened to have Netflix. I grabbed the opportunity to watch a fair amount of his film of Dylan's The Rolling Thunder Review but rather less of his gangster epic. I enjoyed the early scenes but thought the pacing a bit ponderous and, since time was not on our side, knew as I was watching I wouldn't get to see all that much and would need to put my viewing on hold.
I can't quite explain why I didn't catch up with the film when we got access to Netflix here. I suppose it relates to my general lack of ability to watch anything on the telly that is time-consuming. But I decided I should do something about my neglect today and, somewhat to my surprise, ended up watching The Irishman all the way through. To be absolutely honest, I didn't really focus completely on the movie in its early stages, but I was completely gripped by the last couple of hours and entered 'just can't stop watching' mode, a very rare experience indeed these days.
It just got better and better. The final sequences, with De Niro's character as a very fragile old man, struck me as perfect, doing something rare in cinema - providing an ending that didn't just conclude the story in a way that felt right but added meaning to what had come before. The dialogue with the priest as Frank repents but honestly cannot feel remorse told us things about him which we already knew but got to experience almost from the inside.
I've now read Ed Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God from cover to cover, but I'm not sure that genuinely qualifies as really reading the book. As I noted back in Ramadhan, I was pushed to my very obvious mental limits at more than one point in attempting to grasp the details of the various arguments on offer and indulged in a fair bit of lazy coasting after doing pretty well on the first chapter. I can't see I've got much choice but to go back to the text, probably over an extended period of time, in a deliberately slow and, well, deliberate reading.
I suppose this is true of all genuine reading of philosophical works? If the brain is not entirely in gear you're not really doing, or, rather, encountering, philosophising.
Mind you, as with Prof Feser's other stuff, I found his critique of scientism compellingly clear and convincing. I suppose when you 'get' something it seems obvious.
Played John Luther Adams's become ocean in the early afternoon and his become desert later in the day. Wondered if it were possible to decide which I prefer and decided the choice was impossible but worth considering if it meant I was going to keep playing the pieces. I suppose more 'happens' in become ocean since the music ebbs and flows in distinct segments, but then realised I don't even know how many segments there are despite having listened many times. Counting just seems pointless, like trying to count the oceans.
For some reason the elegiac nature of the music seemed more obvious to me today than ever before. I suppose the way the pieces transcend the individual means you can miss the melancholy involved. This is mourning for the planet making personal sadness seem small, irrelevant even.
I saw something the other day in a School of Life video about not being overly concerned about what gets in the news as it's unduly depressing to have that frame of mind. I can see the logic involved, but the outlook does appear a bit 'head in the sand'. Having said that I must say there are times when the litany of deeply bad news as to what our species gets up to is more than a little depressing, and I've felt a bit that way over recent days. So it was with some relief I found myself enjoying the big headline story in this morning's Straits Times. This was about a proposed rise in wages for cleaners in the nation. Very timely and more than well-deserved. To be honest, the amounts involved didn't look much on paper, but I've got a feeling they'll make a genuine difference in terms of quality of life for a whole load of people here.
For reasons I don't understand, I've spent some time over the last two or three days reading quite a bit of below the line commentary on YouTube and a couple of the sites I regularly visit. This is self-contradictory to say the least as I've made more than one vow in the past not to indulge this habit. As usual it proved to be a less than edifying way to spend my time.
I suppose that on some level I feel I'm making a connection with my fellow man, and, indeed, woman. The problem is that I end up feeling very happy in remaining fundamentally unconnected.
There's enough going on at the level of story to keep me reading Cixin Liu's science fiction even when I don't have much of a clue as to the details of what's actually happening. I finished reading The Dark Forest in a couple of days, and I suppose I'm glad I persevered since at least I have some grasp of why there's a fuss about the writer and the trilogy of his novels that begins with The Three Body Problem. But I have to say that at the level of characterisation I cannot connect with his work.
I get the feeling I'm expected to feel something for characters that barely register as two dimensional and that's a lot to ask for. On the other hand, when the writer is busy wiping out lots of folk in suitably apocalyptic fashion there's a genuine melancholy generated. It's a question of scale I suppose.
I've now arrived at Tape for the Turn of the Year in my read-through of Volume 1 of The Collected Poems of A.R. Ammons. It's Ammons's first foray into a lengthy piece and I was reminded of the many virtues of Garbage and Glare, the two later long poems of his I'm familiar with. Above all it's the humanely relaxed humour that is so engaging and grounds these poems despite their sometimes abstruse philosophical meanderings.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, encountering Archie Ammons's early poetry involved a strange sense of familiarity, and that has been very much reinforced as I have moved on to his work of the 1960s. Yet if I were asked to critically analyse anything by him I'm not at all sure I could say anything worthwhile or even mildly illuminating.
Noi is caught up at the moment watching a series of MasterChef: The Professionals that they're running on one of the BBC channels we get on cable. It's being shown one episode per night, so it makes for quite intensive viewing. I've gone to bed by the time they screen it, so I've been listening to her updates day by day. Today I caught up with a full episode as a repeat was screened during the afternoon and I can well understand why she finds it so fascinating. Apart from anything else the participants are extraordinarily skilful and there's something deeply compelling watching experts not just at work but totally caught up in that work.
The plates of food they deliver sort of transcend simply being food. You start to look at them as something akin to works of art. Oddly enough for all I enjoy watching I never feel hungry. I suppose I'm too busy being impressed to acknowledge base appetites.
It's that time of year when I set about cleaning the books, magazines and CDs I've accumulated in this location in this Far Place. In doing so today I couldn't help but notice a spectacular falling-off in terms of the number of magazines I read this year and last from the numbers in previous years. So far I've managed a single New York Review of Books for 2021 and haven't even thought about trying to get hold of any recent edition of Philosophy Now, these publications constituting the core of my reading of such publications.
The reason for the decline is clear. I read just as much as I used to, but it's stuff on the phone that's getting my attention these days - and, I suspect, the level of attention is thinner than what I used to bring to the somehow more actual, more real, pages of periodicals.
I tried to do something about this by forcing myself to read half of the October-November 2020 issue of Philosophy Now that's been sitting in our living room for months. This was hard work since the philosopher of choice for several articles was Hegel and I'm not simpatico in any way, shape or form. I feel vaguely virtuous for making progress, I suppose, and I'm hoping this is in some sense a good thing. Not entirely sure how, though.
Phoned John earlier this evening. He told me he had good news and bad news, and there was certainly quite a bit to take in. It all revolved around Maureen being taken to a rest home and John, understandably, missing her but also, I think, feeling relieved that she's off his hands for the moment. The future sounded uncertain, to say the least. I think the situation is temporary but that's just a guess.
As always we look on from an impossible distance, though I doubt we could make much of a difference were we any closer.
A few weeks back I borrowed three novels from Zahira. She got them back in 2019, I think it was, using some book tokens I gave her. They comprise a trilogy generally known as The Three-Body Problem, which is the title of the first one. It struck me then as a bit of an odd choice, but a very interesting one: hard sci-fi, originating from China, the writer being one Cixin Liu (or Liu Cixin, more appropriately, I guess.)
I'm not sure how far Zahira got with the trilogy, but I don't think it was too far. I know she found it difficult to follow the narrative just at the level of the sheer number of characters involved and how tricky it was to remember their names. So I asked to borrow the novels since they were lying fallow, as it were.
I've just finished the first one and found it tough going in the initial stages, but rewarding when I got the hang of how it worked. The characterisation is wafer-thin, but that doesn't matter. It's the ideas that count and these are wild and wonderful. I'm guessing they'll keep me going through the next two volumes, and I'll need that help since I'm just thirty or so pages into The Dark Forest and very much lost.
