Real Horror

On a night on which we might pretend to engage with the dark side, I find myself avoiding reading too much news of the real world and its abiding horrors. There are, as usual, lots to choose from. Too many to take in.

Coming Back

Finished Susannah Cahalan's Brain On Fire a couple of days ago and have been thinking about her experience of a mental breakdown in relation to my own quite a bit since. I'm sure that the causes of our breakdowns were different, hers being firmly identified as Anti-NMDAR Encephalitis and mine being firmly not anything definite. (Well, I'm labelled epileptic, but the doc who attached the label was quite clear that the label was the best he could do but it wasn't exactly firmly stuck on.)

I can see why Stacey who leant me the book thought that the diagnosis therein might be meaningful in my case, especially given what she'd heard me recount of my experience, but I was struck by the huge dissimilarities - most of all by how limited my particular ordeal had been compared to that of Ms Cahalan. I suffered no protracted onset of psychosis and my recovery was almost instant compared to hers. She took months to recover her sense of identity - mine came to me within two or three days, I think, from when I fully came round in ICU and there was a distinct sense of everything clicking back into place when I became me again. I vividly recall the conversation with the nurse that precipitated my re-arrival and the accompanying assurance that I wasn't going to go off anywhere again soon.

The question of what constitutes identity is, as far as I'm concerned, the most thought-provoking of the memoir and it's a strange feeling applying it to myself, something it had never really occurred to me to do until now. But I'm now aware that it's a real question in my case. If I found myself on coming out of the Delirium and knew with such certainty I was back, then who was I when I was lost? To whom did that anxiety-ridden, baffled consciousness belong? Obviously another version of myself, but where has he gone?

Oh, and something else I now realise. Since my recovery was so real, so definite, so complete I came to take it for granted that it was somehow guaranteed, part of the nature of things, like casting off a cold. But perhaps it wasn't. Was I just lucky? Did the doctors work a version of accidental magic? (I say this not in a critical spirit but simply because they all seemed so surprised at my sudden sanity.)

Out To Lunch

Ate well, but not exactly wisely, at a buffet lunch today for Fifi's birthday. Paced myself reasonably, but that meant I managed more than I expected over the two hours allotted for filling our faces. Fortunately I managed to get myself to the gym after the Maghrib Prayer to offset the guilt.

There's much to be said for having access to seemingly endless amounts of lovely grub, and even more to be said for generally denying oneself that access. 

Hearing Secret Harmonies

Read another book from the same cupboard from which I retrieved Understanding Comics. I can't honestly say I found Joseph Vogel's study of Prince, This Thing Called Life, quite as illuminating as McCloud on his beloved comics, though Vogel clearly loves Prince just as much, since I knew most of the stuff in it through a sort of cultural osmosis, I suppose. But one thing really hit home with regard to the production of Prince's albums, especially those of the early 80's. Vogel argues, rightly as I now realise, that what made Prince's sound so distinct, apart from his innate genius, was that he was pushing material out at a phenomenal rate and not over-thinking the production. The result was a sort of rawness, despite the essential glossiness of the product.

I listened to Sign o' the Times at a reasonable volume this afternoon whilst the Missus was out and, my goodness, my ears immediately got Vogel's point. Despite the brilliance and apparent 'finish' of the songs there's a sense in which these are drafts. It hit me most when playing Slow Love which I've always thought of as sweet soul music in the deepest sense, something perfectly made. Yes, but it's making itself up as it goes along. It's akin to grasping the underlying sense of improvisation in Mozart's most achieved works. The voice of something beyond delivered through frail human vessels.

Hey, I know that sounds more than a little over-inflated. But we're talking about Prince & Mozart here.

Not Really Complete

Busy day - so busy I just couldn't make it to the mosque for Friday Prayers. Felt the gap keenly. And felt frazzled by the evening, though thankful to be home. Played some righteous RVW to relax and felt English for a short time. But the gap remains, somehow.

Getting It

Came across a copy of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics in a cupboard at work. It's in pristine condition and I assume I'm its first reader. Cannot understand whoever bought it originally not wanting to read it. A brilliant exposition of how comics work by a brilliant maker of comics. What's not to like?

(Small extra point: If you're feeling a bit low it pays to turn to the work of someone who's really talented and happily sharing that talent with the world. It just brightens things up somehow, even if you're jealous of the lucky soul with all the talent you haven't got.)

Not Getting It

Have just read Sayaka Murata's novel Convenience Store Woman. It isn't the kind of book I would have picked up for myself, but a colleague kindly gave it me as a Teachers' Day gift and I was happy enough to give it a go. The thing is, though, that I just couldn't grasp what it is about the text that turned it into an International Bestseller, as announced on the front cover in lurid yellow type and won it at least one fairly major-sounding literary prize in Japan. Possibly it lost something in translation?

Actually the idea of having a protagonist who works in a small convenience store and grows a sense of identity based on the routines of her work strikes me as a good one. But I just couldn't see how the flat narrative brought this to genuine life. I didn't smile at all in the course of my reading, though at least one reviewer quoted on the back cover reckons the book is hilarious.

Maybe it's just me. But I suspect it's not.

Getting It Done

There's something unproblematically objective about getting to the gym and achieving one's targets. I'm now up to 55 minutes on the elliptical trainer at full resistance and I don't enjoy it at all. But it's good to finish and great to write about it later. Something has been achieved even if it didn't feel like it at the time.

Ending Well

Must say, I thought Ken Follett's narrative power was somewhat deserting him as I moved into the final stretch of World Without End. After the red hot central segment of the novel with the wars in France and the Black Death reaching Kingsbridge, the stuff about the children of Merthin & Caris & Gwenda & Ralph & Wulfric & Philippa etc etc began to seem a bit tepid and more than a bit soap-opera-ish. It didn't help that I was wondering whether we were going to get something of the magic of the ending of Pillars when everything brilliantly connects to mainstream history and the murder in the cathedral and, I suppose, the gunpowder plot ending to A Column of Fire, though I don't think that was quite as hypnotically convincing as the ending of the first of the Kingsbridge trilogy.

But I was wrong. Despite the lack of historical fireworks the subdued ending of World Without End proved highly satisfying in its final chapters. Continuing the story into a second generation made sense once the idea of the legacy left by those characters we come to admire worked itself out. Most of all it was Gwenda's story that worked for me. In a sense she achieves little other than simple survival, giving herself and her husband and children a life in the most difficult of circumstances. But it's her resilience and tough-mindedness that, in some ways, give the novel its essential character. And her bloody killing of Ralph had me cheering.

I think Follett is consciously celebrating a certain kind of Englishness in these novels and I'm happy to join in, especially since it's distinctly dark and contrary in its nature.

In Parallel

I got hold of Brain On Fire, a memoir concerning a sort of psychotic episode affecting Susannah Cahalan, a journalist at the New York Post, a few days back. It was passed to me by Stacey, a colleague in Boarding School from ACS (International), who has had some experience in counselling kids, after I'd given a bit of a summary of my own breakdown to some of the staff here. One or two of the things I'd said reminded her of details given by Ms Cahalan in her account of what her subtitle calls her Month of Madness and so she kindly passed it on, wondering if it might afford me some insight into my own basically undiagnosed condition. Initially I thought I'd put the memoir to one side for a while, but I have found it quite an easy read and gripping in its way.

However, I don't think I've found it quite as remarkable and shocking and memorable as the reviews quoted on the back cover, simply because I've gone through something reasonably similar. Rather I've been noticing the marked differences in our experiences. For example, the opening section of the memoir focuses on the writer's gradual descent into her madness, over a period of weeks. Mine was very abrupt, taking rather less than twenty-four hours, after which I don't remember anything of what went on after being warded or, indeed, actually being taken to hospital.

So as I move into the second half of the account I'm not expecting stunning insights, though I remain very interested indeed in what happened to Ms Cahalan. One thing's for sure though - I have no intention of subjecting anyone anywhere to a full-length account of what happened to me. She has genuine talent in this direction; I, happily, haven't, and I don't think I'm quite so self-absorbed. (I know that sounds a little bit unkind, but I don't mean it as such. I'm just keeping it real, as they say.)

On The Table

One of our household found themselves a bit busy today, and I'm happy to say it wasn't my half. Noi spent the morning at a cooking class out at Serangoon learning the fine art of frying various snacks, including two varieties of muruku and three involving nuts of all shapes & sizes. The upshot of all this is that our table looks like Hari Raya, as the lady in charge of home affairs succinctly and accurately summed up the state of things in the afternoon (when we started munching.)

It's hard to think of a more productive or happier state of affairs on the home front.

Rising Damp

These days I'm entirely dependent on The Missus for getting ferried around. I wasn't allowed to renew my driving license back in September due to my current status as an epileptic. It feels a bit restrictive to be driven everywhere but has its compensations. For example, getting a ride to Friday Prayers today meant I was able to avoid the long walk across the HDB carpark as I was dropped outside the back entrance to the masjid and, despite the fact the heavens had decided to open up just at that time, I didn't get absolutely soaked in the thirty seconds or so needed to negotiate the path. But I did get wet, despite having an umbrella with me.

It's odd to pray feeling distinctly damp in one's lower regions. Actually it's by no means unpleasant in the sense that it reinforces the notion of some kind of accomplishment being involved and that, somehow, it's been a struggle to get there but being there is the only really important thing and worth abandoning all sense of comfort for. Mind you, if I'd been as wet as some of the other guys were around me, the ones who'd sprinted across the carpark with no umbrellas at all to protect them, I'm not sure that I would have been quite as complacent about the experience.

At The End Of The Day

Tired. In a good way. Not weary. Happily tired after a busy day doing things that were pretty much uniformly worthwhile. The kind of tired that brings with it the certainty of sleeping well, sleeping tight. And not letting the bedbugs bite.

Bad Signs

As I've had occasion to note in this Far Place, I get an odd sort of pleasure from cleaning stuff - like my bookshelves. It occurred to me just now that I might also confess to a distinct frisson when deleting documents from my desktop or various folders that are no longer useful. I'm not sure what this says about my character but I suspect it would not be at all flattering.

I'm not sure as to how much genuine self-knowledge I've attained over the decades, but the little bits I do know are quite enough to be going on with for now.

Paying Attention

When I posted last week about music seeming so much more valuable when you really had to pay for it I already knew the answer to the apparent puzzle, though I was genuinely puzzled in that moment. The value of any artistic experience lies in the quality of attention we bring to the experience. Read a poem badly and it will be a bad poem, for that bad reader. Watch a movie without really watching, listen to music without really listening, and the results will be, as they say, less than optimal.

A full response requires absorption, requires work. And I'm not implying that what I say applies only to what we might think of as 'great' art. Any work of the imagination offered to us will work at deeper levels when we offer it our depths.

But we're in a world that is busily being shallow.

Marching On

Moving along nicely now through my chunky Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Finished Life Studies over the weekend, when I could myself drag away from work and reading Ken Follett, and embarked on Imitations from 1961. I'm very familiar with the translations having got hold of the Faber paperback many years ago, but it's interesting how fresh they seem when reading them in the light of all Lowell's poetry. The Villon pieces early in the book seem far more authentically Lowell-ish than actual translations to this reader.

Another particular example of how fresh even the most familiar material can become when read in this context was how startling I found the end of Skunk Hour, which is, of course, the final poem in Life Studies. This has been a favourite poem of mine for many years and I've always loved the ending with its wonderfully affirmatory procession of the skunks into the town, and Lowell's consciousness. But reading it again, directly following the preceding poems, it hit me just how unexpectedly the mother skunk and her column of kittens march into the text itself after we've encountered all those privileged Lowells and their acquaintances and the less privileged inhabitants of the mental wards that Lowell himself had to escape. The animals are so essentially themselves, so other than human, so sane.

I also got a jolt at the stunning confessional line, My mind's not right. I knew it was coming, but it's the first time I've read it in the context of knowing that my own mind wasn't right for a whole slab of 2022. It's a terrible and frightening thing to know, I'm afraid, but my experience of that extreme was relatively short-lived and, I'm hoping, won't be repeated. Poor Cal. He faced that state over and over. And somehow managed to write some of the greatest poems of the last century. Like the skunk who will not scare - quietly astonishing. 

Gripped

Making reasonably steady progress on Ken Follett's World Without End, now approaching the two-thirds of the way through mark. I reckon it's as good as its predecessor, The Pillars of the Earth, which is high praise indeed. 

One chapter around the halfway mark actually made me genuinely nervous as to the potential fate of the sort of heroine, Caris, when she was suddenly accused of witchcraft. Follett is brilliant at plot twists that illustrate the pervasive fragility of life, anyone's really, in the England of six and a half centuries ago. And the sequence following the English army's invasion of France under Edward III was both gripping and illuminating in terms of the horrendous brutality involved.

I've just been reading about Merthin going back to Kingsbridge (a good thing) after almost a decade in civilised Florence. Unfortunately he gets back just at the time of the arrival there of la moria grande - the Black Death (not a good thing.) Now wondering what the death toll is likely to be in the next few chapters and, honestly, can't wait to find out even though dreading it all more than a little.

Not Going Gently

Just got back from a Sweet Charity concert. Loud & proud old school mat rockers, for those of you who may not know them. Talk about heavy duty! Talk about rocking out! Talk about not going gently - especially given the fact that the central trio have clocked up five decades professionally.

Early in the concert I was reminded of watching Deep Purple live at Belle Vue, back in Manchester, around the time of Deep Purple in Rock. It was the sheer weight of the sound that took me back, especially the sort of hammond organ vibe and deep bass underpinning the shredding guitar work. No wonder back then we used to say 'heavy man' as a sort of supreme compliment. (Embarrassing, yes, but true.) But later in the show there was lots of sonic variation on that theme, including bits of unison lead guitar with a distinct Thin Lizzy, Wishbone Ash, Allman Brothers feel, a spot of Floydian spacing out (though neither of the two excellent guitarists had quite the restraint of peak Gilmour), and one very Led Zep-like piece which gave their Kashmir a run for its money in terms of apocalyptic power. Oh, and some great sort of percussively-led middle eastern type stuff in the middle.

And above all the phenomenal vocal power of Ramli Sarip, whose voice has got, astonishingly, stronger and more expressive with time. It struck me early in the concert that every one of the other bands I've referenced would have sounded better with him at the helm.

Out And About

Got to see Peter & Chris & Lea this evening over a tasty dinner. Good to catch up, but odd to have to recount a few of the events of the last six months or so. Lots of stuff happening without much really changing. The story of my life - and happily so. 

Spotified

I'm now on Spotify and I'm conflicted. To be honest I'm not at all sure if one should talk of being 'on' the 'app', but the thing suddenly popped up out of nowhere on the bar-thing at the bottom of my laptop for work and I decided to listen to something on it - the app, that is, not the bar. At first I was a bit worried it might end up costing me money, but there didn't appear to be any charges involved and I seemed to remember Fifi telling me a while back that you could get the thing for free, so I recklessly plunged in.

Must say, I was also a bit concerned about the fact that I'm aware that a lot of folk I admire regard pretty much all the streaming services for music, and especially Spotify, as a wholly reprehensible business model in terms of the lack of cash going in the direction of the music-makers themselves. But my integrity rapidly crumbled when I realised I had instant access to stuff I'd never been able to get hold of as a youngster but had always wanted to listen to up close. So I went ahead and have listened to the following over the last few days: The Kinks' Preservation, Act 1; Peter Hammill's Over; and Anthony Phillips's The Geese and the Ghost, which is now playing.

All very nice indeed, but, for reasons I can't quite pin down, listening to them through streaming isn't as deeply satisfying as actually 'possessing' these albums on CD (or vinyl, if I still had a turntable.) This reinforces something obvious but puzzling I've been wrestling with for some time: The music I paid what felt like big money for when I was younger seems so much more valuable, somehow, than the music that is now so freely available that I feel a tad overwhelmed by it all.

This is stupid of me, but real. And I sense I need to do something to square the circle on this one.

On Teaching

At some level I'm a natural teacher. Just saying.

Not sure that's necessarily a good thing though.

More Re-Joycing

The problem, or possibly the joy, of committing oneself to being a Joycean is that there are just no ends to the highways and byways of reading and research involved in living up to the label. Case in point: a captivating review by John Banville, himself a spectacularly talented Joycean, of what sounds like a very fine novel about the life, or, rather, alternative life, of Norah Barnacle, entitled Penelope Unbound by Mary Morrissy. The first three paragraphs of Mr Banville's review give the best potted history of the story of Jim and his Nora (he took away the 'h' it seems) I've ever read.

So now I've got to get hold of a copy of the novel, but it doesn't stop there. I've decided it's time for a reread of Ellmann's 'masterly biography' of the great writer (which will be my third reading) and also of Brenda Maddox's wonderful evocation of the great Nora's life (only the second time through.) Fortunately both tomes reside happily on my shelves so that won't involve shelling out for them.

I first read Ellmann in my teens and, strangely, I just knew then that Joyce wouldn't have been Joyce without Nora(h) even though the consensus is that Ellmann underrates her. Thank goodness Jim didn't.

Aiming High

The first project I have in mind to mark the beginning of my retirement, should that day ever arrive, is officially confirmed as a complete read-through of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. I can't lay claim to the title of a true Joycean unless I can achieve this. And there's now so much help to be had reading Joyce's web of words on the World Wide Web itself (see what I did there) that there's simply no excuse for not giving it a go.

Yesterday I happened upon the best version of  The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly I've ever heard courtesy of my YouTube feed. Evidence that the algorithm sometimes happily gets it right.

Something Shocking

A week or so ago I discovered the original video for Bowie's single off his brilliant 1 Outside album of the 1990s Hearts Filthy Lesson. It just goes to show how astonishingly out of touch I can be even with the work of musicians I deeply admire that I had no idea a video existed. In my own defence I suppose I could argue that it's the music that really speaks to me and I've never had much of a visual imagination, so I've never been terribly bothered about looking up this sort of material. But since Bowie has always been deeply interested himself in visual art, and conscious of the importance of the visually theatrical in his work, that defence wouldn't hold up in a courtroom, especially the Supreme Court of Aesthetics.

And here's the thing, in relation to standing in judgement on Art (always, of course, a perilous thing to do.) The video really, really bothers me. It's wonderfully made, visually stunning, entirely simpatico to the music and spirit of the song and, indeed, the whole album. But it's upsetting in its obvious and disturbing implications of the pleasures and pains of sado-masochism. Googling around for a bit of background I discovered it got banned on MTV and, I've got to say that seems pretty reasonable to me. The idea of chancing upon it in some gallery or other and choosing to watch it with some sense of the context from which it springs seems altogether reasonable; but youngish kids watching it as part of some general promotion of music as consumer culture just doesn't seem right.

Now I've always been on the side of disturbance as an artistic strategy, but I've found myself thinking very hard as to how some aspects of the video might reasonably be defended and I'm not sure I have any easy answers. I do have some hard ones though - amongst which is a sense that we need to accept 'outsider art' to achieve an understanding of the totality of ourselves. Must say though, I don't think anyone, no matter how deeply conservative in their tastes, could fail to grasp that Bowie performing the song live is the real deal, and then some.

In Circles

Each day a chance to start again. And repeat the same mistakes.

Pretty bleak, eh?

Some Body

Woke in the early hours - around 1.00 am - suffering from a ferocious cramping of my left leg, the lower bit. Fortunately it eased in the mysterious way that cramp does and I managed a good night's sleep thereafter. Actually I'd completely forgotten about this until just now when I was doing the Isha' Prayer and needed to struggle on with cramp in my left foot. Mind you, I was half expecting something of the sort since I'd only just got back from the gym and mild cramping of the feet whilst praying is apt to follow a work-out.

Funny thing, the body, especially mine. Just lately I've been particularly cautious in relation to my back. Originally I'd intended to get to the gym yesterday evening and decided not to due to a slight but distinct ache right in the centre of my lower back which manifested late yesterday afternoon for no reason I was aware of. All this following a very awkward Sunday morning last weekend when I was moving with all the grace and finesse of your average centenarian on account of a disconcerting pain running down my upper thigh (upper left.)

These days I celebrate being able to get the gym with reasonable regularity, knowing that there's no guarantee that this will continue. That certainly helps when I've been on the elliptical trainer for ten minutes or so and start to wonder why exactly I'm torturing myself on the thing.

A Solid Foundation

Highlight of the day: getting my hands on the kind of week to a view diary that will be the foundation of my functioning at work in 2024, and doing so at my first attempt to find one. Last year it took me until a good deal later in the month to do the necessary, and I wasn't quite so keen on the edition, especially at what seemed a ridiculously inflated price. This year the edition looks like my preferred version over many years (though it's not the same publisher) and the price is a lot more reasonable, though some three dollars more expensive than the 2022 version.

I'm not all that sure why this makes me as happy as it does. But I've learned not to ask too many questions about being happy: I just get on being it.

Highly Rated

Not sure why, but I've never rated Longfellow. Not that I'd ever read much, but I'd vaguely got the impression, from a distance, that he represented the commonplace in terms of mid-nineteenth century verse - and I mean 'verse' rather than 'poetry'. Vaguely pleasant but essentially dealing in romantic clichés after the fire of Romanticism had died away. Nothing to write home about, to throw another cliché on the fire or, rather, the embers of that splendid but sort-lived movement.

So when I read his poem Snow-Flakes over at Carol Rumens's surpassingly excellent Poem of the Week page at the Graun it came as a bit of a shock to realise how wrong I'd been. It's a brilliant piece. I immediately wanted to commit it to memory. Just gorgeously sad and superbly crafted and meant. And, as is often the case when Ms Rumens's picks a belter, the comments BTL are themselves responsively excellent.

I recall having to completely rethink my attitude to Tennyson when I had to teach him for 'A' level back in the 90's. Looks like there's more of the same to come with Henry Wadsworth as soon as I can get my hands on a juicy Selected.

Under Repair

It's been a year and a day since I got out of hospital. Somehow I got repaired. Even my broken thoughts. There are still dark places - how could there not be? - and I may get dragged back to them one day. But for now I'm in the light, and that's enough. More than enough. 

A Very Bright Spot

Another day spent marking, for the most part. But I did make time to listen to a fair amount of sweet sounds provided by Ella Fitzgerald, Richard Thompson and David Bowie. Not a bad little list, eh?

And before you start thinking that my weekend's been a pretty sad one all in all, let me tell you that I got to accompany some students to one of the best productions of Romeo & Juliet I've ever seen (and, trust me, I've been to a fair few.) The company performing are from the UK and known as Action To The Word, and it's on at the Victoria Theatre - one of my old stomping grounds - up to 7 October. We were at an afternoon matinee performance yesterday and it was a blast: very youthful company, ultra-talented, with just 9 performers on stage; everyone seemed to be able to sing well and play at least one instrument and there was lots of music interpolated into the show - not exactly Shakespeare, I know, but Shakespeare never is exactly Shakespeare is he?, and the music was great fun; lots of nicely choreographed highly theatrical stage combat as part of a generally highly theatrical experience; Mercutio played by a young lady, which was completely unexpected, but worked surprisingly well, subverting all the usual Mercutio clichés; the verse spoken really well - oozing clarity and balance and genuine rhythm - oh, and the prose as well, including a Nurse who sounded pure Merseyside, to my delight.

My only criticism is a niggling one, but I'll mention it. I don't think they quite managed the mood in the final sequence, but it's incredibly difficult to pull off. Romeo expired a touch too noisily and evoked some inappropriate giggles (but what can you expect from a young matinee crowd?) And, not a criticism, but everyone looked too young to plug into the Bard's archetypes of youth and age that so dominate the play. Friar Lawrence particularly was entertaining but too young for my liking, and a bit too funny at the end.