Reading On

Not sure why I found the Brink Road segment of Volume 2 of Ammons's The Complete Poems so unrewarding. I enjoyed a few of the shorter poems, those towards the end of the collection, and the final long poem, Summer Place, was a pleasure to read. But the vast majority of the poems left me unengaged. Perhaps it was a mistake to keep working through Volume 2 after completing the lengthy first volume? Could it be I need a break from Ammons?

The thing is though that I'm now thoroughly engaged by the epic Glare and the kind of difficulty I found in reading most of Brink Road has simply faded away. I suppose I should make an attempt to understand my differing responses but I'm too busy enjoying myself again to make the effort.

Good Company

I thought of Ted Hughes as quite an intimidating figure before reading Christopher Reid's excellent selection of his letters. Not someone you'd mess around with, or intrude upon. Now he strikes me as the quintessential good bloke, someone you'd be happy to spend time with. Likable in an uncomplicated way.

I'm most likely wrong, of course, but the impression is a very real one. And I'm sure he doesn't in any way strive to create it given how unforced and immediate the vast majority of the letters are.

Back To Life

Found ourselves at Changi Airport this evening, having gone there after dinner with Fuad, Rozita & Hakim. Impressively busy - not easy to find parking at Terminal 1. Good to see the place bustling after the quiet of the height of the pandemic. The percentage of the crowd wearing masks appeared lower than you see in the average mall - surprisingly so. Perhaps related to a desire to assert that things are back to something like normal?

Hope that desire isn't misplaced.

Unacceptable

The stories from the UK about the Deputy Prime Minister having a track record of bullying his civil servants over his ministerial career puzzle me. It's not the fact he's a bully - it's easy to see how he would fit the role given his public persona. No, what I don't get is that a substantial number of grown-ups in serious jobs were prepared to let themselves be bullied (to the extent that some were physically ill before meetings, according to the reports.) In my experience, if you make it abundantly clear you're not going to accept any kind of professional bullying then it won't happen. It helps to be able to show you have a viciously bad temper, or the capacity for one, as soon as someone crosses the line. Trust me, they quickly cross back as soon as they realise they've picked the wrong person. 

Obsessional

Now approaching the end of Letters of Ted Hughes, having reached the final decade of the poet's life. Struck by just how much of an obsession his ideas about the tragic equation he saw as underlying Shakespeare's work, as outlined in considerable detail in his extraordinary work Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, became in the letters over the years. And what strange but compelling ideas they are.

To be honest, I have never managed a 'linear' reading of the Goddess book, finding Hughes's detailed outline of his thesis somewhat overwhelming, though I've found it a great text to dip into. But following the development of the ideas in the letters is quite different. You get a powerful sense of the growth and expansion of the thesis as if TH is working things out as the various letters are written in something akin to real time. It's obvious that this is something that has to be explored and worked through for the writer, and that doing so releases a creative energy.

Hughes is not writing a version of literary criticism in the letters concerning Shakespeare, or in his finished work. He's writing something deeply imaginative and personal and necessary to himself, the value of which lies in the reader's readiness to surrender to the force of his imaginative engagement to expand their own range of response. 

Furthering My Education

The nice thing about being less than expert even with regard to composers I regard as great favourites is that there's always something new to discover. This afternoon a live performance of Messiaen's Trois petites Liturgies de la Presence Devine popped up in my YouTube feed and it struck me that it might well be a good idea to listen to a piece I'd heard good things of but had never actually sat down and listened to. The fact I had a bit of time to spare helped.

It turned out to be a very good idea indeed. As is so often the case with Messiaen, watching expert musicians play the music added considerably to my understanding of what I was listening to.

Delayed

Noi got back from Melaka this morning, arriving home around 9.30. Since she thought she'd get back in the middle of the night, having upped sticks at 11.30 pm, this has to count as very late. The main problem: major jams at Tuas. She reckons it took some three hours to cross. Much as I would have liked to have journeyed with her I must say I'm pleased to have avoided the sheer waste of time involved in crossing between nations. 

Can't imagine what might account for so much traffic being on the road at that time of night. Or why the authorities on both sides can't ensure a reasonably speedy crossing even if things get a bit busier than usual.

Lost And Found

Spent part of the day revisiting the cuts I made quite some time back to Shakespeare's As You Like It when we were considering the play for performance by our drama guys. We're now looking at a July performance, so I thought I'd better start looking at a practical working script in detail. Fortunately the excisions still made sense to me, though I'm now looking to make even more in the interests of pace and not overwhelming the cast with stuff to memorise.

Wielding the blue pencil makes you realise the degree to which the Bard can't resist being dragged by his linguistic inventiveness to add layer upon layer to his dialogue. It's partly decorative, but also an exploration of all the possibilities afforded by the suggestiveness of key images and ideas. I'm aware of much that is being lost, but what's left is so strong that it easily survives the process. 

I feel as if I'm uncovering something fundamental, seeing into the heart of the drama somehow.

Remembrance

The anniversary of dad's death has become for me a day of striving to remember. I don't mean trying to remember things about him - that's easy. Rather I'm talking about remembering the details of the world he has come to represent for me. His sense of decency, for example. Yes, this was an innate part of his character, I guess, but there's a sense in which he was consciously reflecting an aspect of being what was generally considered a 'real gentleman'. A good fit for him, I suspect.

I'm not sure that dad's idea of what constituted the proper way to behave would have any traction in the Manchester of today. The past is quite definitely a different country and achingly far away.

Left Behind

Noi is bustling around making preparations to set off to Melaka. She's travelling up with Rozita & Hakim. I've elected to stay behind given various work-related tasks that need to be attended to. Must say, I'll miss her, but it's only for a day or so, so I'll survive.

Can't say I'll miss making the crossing and its attendant traffic jams, the thought of which weighed something in my decision to stay at home.

Cleaning Up

Got down to cleaning some of my books & stuff for the first time since I was hospitalised today. Somehow I lacked the necessary pizzazz to attend to this earlier and was feeling a kind of low level guilt over my neglect. Enjoyed feeling virtuous again. Mind you, there's quite a bit left to do the necessary to so I'm hoping my enthusiasm doesn't wane over the break for Chinese New Year.

In Public

I've recently got myself back on track with regard to my on-going reading of Letters of Ted Hughes and the second volume of The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons. For some reason I neglected both texts towards the end of last year (I don't think I read anything of substance in December) and it needed quite some effort to get going again. 

To be honest, I'm finding Ammons's 1996 collection Brink Road hard work. Somehow I'm not connecting with any of the poems. It's the level of abstraction involved, I think. But Hughes's letters are wonderfully accessible and sympathetic at every level - and so varied in their concerns, such that I'm finding them an easy read and often powerfully compelling.

That certainly applies to the letter addressed to Al Alvarez from November 1971 complaining about the chapters devoted to Sylvia Plath's suicide in The Savage God. I read the letter with quite a degree of guilt having found those chapters thoroughly engrossing, and was especially stung by Hughes's question to Alvarez: What makes you think you can use our lives like the text of a novel - something on the syllabus - for facile interpretations to keep your audience of schoolteachers up on the latest culture? Yes, that was how I'd read the account as if just a particularly striking text at the level of superior fiction.

The letter as a whole served as a reminder of the costs paid by all those who find their private struggles becoming public property - and of how far journalistic accounts fall short of the complexity of lived experience.

Worth The Interference

Chanced upon a video of VdGG live in Trieste earlier today, doing the business on Interference Patterns. Cheered me up considerably. Role models for growing old noisily and disgracefully.

The Big Chill

Not sure why the air-conditioning in so many areas of my workplace is set at temperatures that seem designed to chill both body and soul. It surely can't be cheap and it doesn't feel at all healthy. Unfortunately the staffroom in which my desk is located is one such spot. A good way, I suppose, of ensuring we don't get too relaxed in there.

Strange that something designed to make life easier results in something akin to an ordeal. 

Piling On

I don't take much interest in the doings of the royal family and I have no intention of reading Prince Harry's memoir Spare. But I've picked up enough about it in various articles and bits of commentary about it online to appreciate just how confused and contradictory it seems to be. I don't find that particularly surprising coming from someone with such a strangely distorted over-privileged upbringing. Indeed, it seems pretty much par for the course to me.

What has come as a small surprise is the sheer virulence of the reaction to this rather sad tome and just how repetitively obsessive that reaction is in some quarters. Most of the talking heads creating the fuss appear to see themselves as supporters of the monarchy and it's more than a little disturbing to see them turning on a guy they appear to have held in some respect a few years previously.

The obvious point that the episode illuminates exactly why the notion of 'royalty' is so deeply flawed has got lost in all the point-scoring. I wonder whether the depth of loathing now being expressed for Harry is related to a kind of panic as to what we might all learn from the mess he and his family have made of things if we viewed them with simple good sense. 

Still Gripped

I mentioned in passing my sense of anticipation regarding the City game back in early January. So I'm not entirely surprised by the fact that United delivered on the day, but I am very much delighted. Interesting that ten Hag has immediately played down any talk of a challenge for the title and focused instead on references to further improvements needed in the team. He remains quietly impressive, and quietly commanding.

Coming back from a goal down was, in its way, the most significant aspect of the performance. Somehow it looked likely to happen.

Out Of The Storm

Big downpour as I was on the way to Friday Prayers earlier today. Somehow I got to the mosque reasonably dry and enjoyed its protection as the rain hammered down outside. It all added to the sense of being in the right place at the right time. Something to be grateful for.

A Bit Too Bright

We've now got a total of eight bright white spooky spots on our television screen and they are very distracting. It didn't occur to me to google as to the cause of the spots until this evening and I've just found out that said spots are a thing with Samsung television sets like ours. I wish I'd known this before purchasing the set, but one lives and learns.

The question now is whether to try and repair the screen or just give up and buy a new one. I see all sorts of irritating fuss ahead if we do attempt a repair, but it seems such a waste to just throw away the set. For the moment we're just going to put up with the wonky picture - which has a weird sort of charm of its own, especially when it looks as if a number of oddly regimented suns are arising in programmes featuring shots of landscapes.

I know we should be thankful about modern technology, but why does it have to go wrong so frequently?

Coming To Life

One of my earliest purchases involving 'serious' music was a vinyl LP of Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. Can't remember the orchestra or conductor, but I played it to death. It struck me back then as the kind of accessible piece that constituted a point of entry into orchestral music that would have wide and instant appeal. Great tunes, lovely textures, tied to a rhythmic thrust that ensured a sort of gently toe-tapping attention. 

I revisited the piece today as performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and was, again, deeply entranced - possibly even more so than when I was in my twenties. This version struck me as close to flawless - I picked up details I can't remember tuning into before - always a good sign.

It all sounds so fresh and immediate, as if written yesterday. Yet Ravel was writing what was intended as a kind of monument - to Couperin and other composers of the Baroque, and to friends who'd died in WW1. I hear an underlying sadness, but kept at a distance. This music celebrates life and is abundantly alive.

Something New

Listened to the first track released, Panopticom, from the new Peter Gabriel album today. It's a been a long time coming, but sounds worth it. Made me feel something like young again. Almost.

Remembered seeing Genesis for the first time an eternity ago, third on the bill to Lindisfarne and Van der Graaf. Two loud guys sitting near me, complaining that the young PG wanted to be Mick Jagger. Odd comparison. Even back then he struck me as someone who wanted to be himself.

Reputations

I was mildly taken aback to come across a review of a biography of Norman Mailer in the Graun today having referenced the author last Saturday for the first time in yonks. Bit of a coincidence. And I was even more taken aback to find out that the biographer believes Mailer to be not much of a writer, to say the least: unreadable, ludicrous, incomprehensible, atrocious and hilariously terrible. Now I'd be the first to admit that there are obvious variations of quality in Mailer's work, not least because he wrote so much and so ambitiously, but such a dismissal just doesn't seem fair. Interesting to note that the reviewer of the bio doesn't agree, by the way.

All this got me set me thinking about the fluctuations in writers' (and other artists') reputations after their deaths. I suppose that at one time a damning put-down by an important critic might have meant that a writer would be generally dismissed. But it seems to me that things have changed and mightily so with the development of the web and all its on-going commentary in cyberspace. I sense a democratization of critical assessment. If enough readers like what they read and communicate enthusiasm for it, then a writer's reputation can survive the slings and arrows of higher criticism. 

Indeed, I wonder if this might apply to Mailer himself. I've noticed a heck of a lot of enthusiasm for his work in those review sections frequented by 'ordinary' readers and I've got a feeling folks are going to be reading his best stuff (the non-fiction, I reckon) well into the twenty-first century.

A Happy Mistake

I was listening in arbitrary fashion to a programme about archaeology on the BBC World Service this afternoon whilst driving to Clementi Mall. An archaeologist with a strong German accent was being interviewed and his enthusiasm for his field was delightfully infectious. As I started to focus on the interview he was talking of the beautiness of one of the objects he'd recently rescued from the earth and I was taken by the force of the term, despite its surface lack of correctness. He'd paused when saying the word, as if struggling with the language, and that added to its peculiar charm.

But as the interview went on I couldn't help but notice just how fluent a speaker of English he was. True he uttered occasional mildly clumsy phrases but nothing so obviously wrong as the above. I began to suspect he had known perfectly well that beautiness wasn't actually a word and had decided to make it one in his own surreptitious manner. 

I must say, I'm glad he did. The term conveys something more than the object he was describing as being merely beautiful. It suggests the object functioning as a deliberate manifestation of the quality of beauty in a transcendent manner, as if attaining a significance beyond more than its limited physical self. Writing that I'm aware of how ponderously long-winded and pretentious my last sentence sounds, which is why I like the term beautiness so much since the clumsy mistake of a word does its work by accident.

On The Edge

It's a curious thing that I've never tried to watch anything that the writer Norman Mailer appeared in on telly in the 1960s/1970s despite the fact there's a fair amount archived on YouTube. I'd say that Mailer had the greatest impact on me of any American writer when I studied Lit at university and I've never quite lost my admiration for him, though I've not read much in recent years. Anyway, I thought I'd take a look at a chat show he appeared in with Gore Vidal which popped up on my YouTube feed today and I'm rather glad I did.

It was an episode of the Dick Cavett Show and entirely refreshing in its lack of resemblance to anything you'd get to watch today. Mailer just doesn't care about appealing to the studio audience or the viewer at all and is incredibly unpredictable and edgy, generating the feeling that just about anything might happen on screen and it might not make for pleasant viewing. But he also is determined to talk about what he regards as serious matters using serious language. He comes across as thoroughly unpleasant and unlikable but fascinatingly so.

I was reminded of what made him such a powerful writer. Possibly a dangerous one. I'm not sure he was all that good for the younger me.

Somewhat Loud

I've just been watching The Masked Singer Malaysia with Noi. In truth, I haven't a clue as to what it's all about, other than the fact than various semi-famous folk are singing wearing masks. It's all very bright and brash and definitely loud. By that, I don't mean the singing is particularly strident. Rather everyone commenting on or introducing the singing seems determined to shout - at each other, at the studio audience and at the viewer at home, in this case me.

It's all curiously surreal, possessed of an intensity far exceeding anything its content might reasonably deserve. I can't say I'm a fan, but I can just about understand the conspiratorial appeal of the show.

Paying Up

Spent a fair chunk of the day settling an invoice that landed on my desk. This involved quite a bit of running round for various signatures and photocopying further documentation needed to accompany the pre-existing documentation (thus doubling up on some already bulky documentation.) I suppose all this had a purpose in terms of the financial system employed, but I've long passed the point of being concerned about purpose. I just do what I'm told and am happy to get it all done once I've arrived at that happy conclusion. Fortunately the finance people I work with know what they are doing, so I just follow instructions.

The odd thing is though that I don't remember my work involving much of anything like this for the first two thirds or so of my career, and in the last ten years or so there seems to have been a lot more of it. Times change. Unfortunately.

A Treat

Bit of a delay in posting the above. But it serves as a reminder of the culinary skills of the Missus - in this case as they operated over the New Year weekend to get 2023 off to the best possible start. I thought of saying that it's in simple things that we find the deepest satisfaction, but there's nothing simple about a bowl of oxtail soup once you pay it due attention. And, believe me, I paid this bowl the fullest attention possible.

Gripped

I must admit I'm finding myself enthralled by current developments in the EPL. Who'd have thought that the Arsenal would be seriously looking at a 10-point lead in January? And who'd have predicted they could achieve that by beating Newcastle who'd be in third place when they faced off against each other?

And of course I'm happy at the progress made by the Mighty Reds (the real ones) under ETH. More and more he strikes me as the real deal in management terms. The disciplinary action against Marcus Rashford for the Wolves game looked so absolutely right - and produced the appropriately just outcome.

Having said that, I can well imagine things going awry against Bournemouth in our next game. It's been that kind of season, but that seems to be true for pretty much everyone, which is part of the fascination of it all.

Postscript: And since things by no means went awry against Bournemouth, leaving us level pegging with Newcastle, I find myself gripped even tighter. Now waiting for the City game with some anticipation... 

A Bit Of A Tickle

At the point of testing positive for Covid around mid-December I was pretty much asymptomatic, other than dealing with a bit of a runny nose. So it's been both baffling and irritating that post-Covid I've been dealing with a ticklish cough, prone to bother me in the early hours of the night when I'm lying down. When we were in Melaka and KL it proved fabulously troublesome, keeping me awake, loudly so in terms of my response, for what felt like hours at a time. Indeed, I wondered whether I was suffering from some form of what's known as long-Covid, such was the negative impact of the coughing upon me.

I'm very pleased to say that I appear to have got over the problem, though I still feel the need to clear my throat at fairly regular intervals. I haven't felt the dreaded tickling sensation in the early hours for the last two nights which is a considerable relief, believe me. Strange how something seemingly insignificant, a misplaced tickling, not even painful in itself, can wreak havoc with one's sense of well-being.

Must say, I hope I'm not tempting fate by assuming the problem is over before it can be really confirmed as such. But I suppose I'm at that stage generally where I'm resigned to whatever else might be in store for me.

Somewhat Circular

Managed to get quite a lot of work-related stuff done today. This chimed in with my resolution for the year ahead, to which I gave considerable thought. Not that it was difficult to figure out the nature of the resolution. No, the problem was finding appropriate words for stating the obvious. 

When they eventually came it was their quality of blindingly obvious simplicity which convinced me I'd found the right ones: In 2023 I'm resolved to be resolute. Elegantly circular, I reckon. Or possibly clumsily so. But they do the necessary.