Walls Come Tumbling Down

If someone had told me thirty years ago that the Berlin Wall would crumble in my lifetime, I would have thought them absurdly optimistic. The events of twenty years ago still seem possessed of an almost dream-like quality.

Just because things are, doesn't mean they should be, or that they will be. And that seems to me grounds for optimism. Unfortunately, it's equally grounds for pessimism.

Englished

I've been feeling disconcertingly English since the weekend, a state that was intensified, if anything, today by having to attend a workshop on National Education, Singapore style.

I suppose this, the state of feeling English, has had something to do with my current reading and recent listening. I'm moving steadily through Ackroyd's Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination which has exciting, original and pretty daft things on every page. And on the fiction front I followed The Handmaid's Tale (wonderful!) with Pat Barker's The Eye in the Door, the second in the Regeneration trilogy (equally wonderful! - an extraordinary demonstration of how to take material that may seem like it's been done to death and revivify it by coming at it slant-wise. And how completely she nails differences of social class and the differences they made, and continue to make.)

Also the weekend encompassed a pile of Vaughan Williams: Flos Campi, the 5th Symphony, Hodie, A Fantasia on Christmas Carols; plus a heap of Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, the 1st Symphony, and various incidental bits and marches.

And here's a line from Ackroyd that sort of sums up the Englishness to which I aspire, but which I sadly fail to live up to: …much of the English genius resides in quixotic or quirky individuals who insist upon the truth of their independent vision in the face of almost universal derision.

Breathing Space

We completed our viewing of Fanny and Alexander yesterday afternoon. Noi wants us to be on the look-out for more foreign movies when we go to England, having enjoyed this one so much. At the point when Uncle Isak was stealing the children from the bishop - a control man, she astutely pointed out - she was jumping up and down on the sofa shouting Quick, quick. I would have been doing the same had I not watched the film before.

Afterwards I mentioned the slow pace of the film to her (by the way, the version we watched is the full five hour version shown originally on Swedish television, not the three hour version released in cinemas) intending this as praise, but Noi didn't think it slow at all. And I realised how right she was. The story moves along at a considerable pace over the full arc of the movie. But Bergman allows time for the wonderful monologues and set pieces, like Carl's scenes with his poor wife - so painfully, hurtfully, funny. This is a movie that allows itself, and the viewer, to breathe.

I'm wondering if the reason I find most films today difficult to watch with sustained attention lies in the lack of such space. And I'm furthering wondering why so many features of our lives today seem to seek to deny us such space.

Acceptance

With our visit to the UK and environs looming I've finally been catching up on the DVDs we brought back with us last December. This has been a most enjoyable process, particularly since the Jeeves and Wooster series (Fry & Laurie) has featured prominently. I'm now on series three, the first three episodes of which are set in New York, and this is the stuff I've never seen before - very much worth waiting for, I must say.

And then on Friday we embarked on Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, which if I were forced to make one of those silly lists of my top ten favourite movies would be likely to feature at number one. We're now up to Act 4, with the children having just arrived at the bishop's house/palace and Noi was almost demanding to keep watching late last night as she desperately needed to know what happens to them. Great story-telling.

So what makes Fanny and Alexander so good? I can think of four obvious things. First off, it's gorgeous to look at. You could freeze almost any frame and have something you wouldn't mind hanging on a wall. Beautifully composed, yet it genuinely moves in filmic terms. Whilst this is more obviously the case for the first act of he Ekdahls' Christmas, it remains true of the later more austere scenes at the bishop's. Secondly, the acting is wonderful. So much is done with so little - extreme close-ups, sparingly yet dramatically employed, convey the puzzling depths of the characters. These people look authentically like they are living and thinking at the turn of the nineteenth century. Physically in terms of gesture, stance there isn't a note out of place. Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, the story in itself is so powerfully engaging. It has an archetypal force - the Hamlet subtext, the warmth of the Ekdahls set against the chill of the bishop - that it wears close to the surface but which never lacks in subtlety. Finally, the whole experience is encompassed within a sense of tolerance and humanity that is deeply touching.

Unlikely as it seems, I can see something in common between Wodehouse and Bergman, and it's this: an acceptance of human folly that rises to a kind of sublime charity.

Monkey Business

We've still not received any kind of notification from the Telecom in Malaysia that our KL phone line has been repaired. It was the lack of a proper connection that prevented me from getting on-line this time last week. Noi developed a plausible theory as to why we'd become disconnected involving monkeys, having spotted three of them tightrope walking, or rather scurrying, along the line outside Maison KL. She reckoned they'd played about with the connection box fixing our line to the main one and, I must say, when I caught sight of the blighters they looked distinctly guilty. They also looked distinctly self-contained, as if the human world could not impinge upon their monkeydom and, thus, was not worthy of examination. Up there on the line they gave me, at ground level, barely a second glance.

In the taman newsletter for October there was a reference to them as 'cute' - though the brief paragraph was advising the human residents to sensibly keep their distance. But 'cute' seems to me to be so entirely inappropriate as to suggest that whoever wrote it has not really been seeing our simian chums as they are. In their effortless domination of the telephone lines and the nonchalance with which they swing from these to the fragile branches of nearby trees, they are very much other, very much themselves - hard and crisp and graceful in a ferocious way.

I told Mum about seeing them when I phoned her on Monday, explaining that it had been their probable interference with the line which had meant I had been unable to phone her over the weekend. She was, as I guessed she would be, delighted to hear about them. In fact, the idea of them seemed to make her forget the pain from her shingles for a short while - she was actually laughing, as was I.

It's nice to be able to phone so easily from the Mansion here, but I miss the strangely real life of the other taman-dwellers.

The Raw And The Cooked

Making deliberately slow progress with Atwoood's The Handmaid's Tale - partly because I've been so busy at work, and at home doing work for work, and partly because I'm savouring every moment. Is this a feminist novel? The label is inadequate and reductive. This is simply a great novel: intense, emotional, yet sublimely controlled.

The problem I found reading the Danticat novel the other day lay, I think, in a sense of a lack of necessary distance in the relationship between the text and the writer. What was the reader supposed to make of the two major male characters? On one level they seem decent, understanding sorts, but it's difficult to shake off a suspicion that we're meant to see them as somehow inadequate in the face of the challenges of female pain - which is infinite, unfortunately.

At one moment Danticat outlines the awful degradation of the bodies of the two other women in the central character's therapy group. It's just two sentences, and we hardly hear of these women again. It's an awful thing to say, but I almost laughed at how over-the-top this was. What prevented me from laughing was the realisation that this kind of horror is real - but the writer has a duty, surely, to make it real for the reader. And somehow this writer, for all her talent, fails to do this too often.

Atwood never fails. Her fantasy world becomes realer than real.

Malaccan Magic

Some shots above from last Sunday, at Mak's house. A very creative place.

Back, Again

From last Tuesday I began to experience some quite intense discomfort rising to pain in my back, probably as a result of several continuous hours of consultations with students regarding their approaching exams. The pain peaked on Friday when I simply could not make it to Friday Prayers having been very much looking forward to going again to the new mosque near our house at the taman. But the odd thing was my awareness that these were not sciatic pains - in other words I didn't think they were directly connected to the trapped nerve in my back. In fact, when Noi and I went on Friday evening to KLCC I wandered around Kinokuniya there for a good forty minutes with no pain in my leg at all. If I'd have been asked to bend forward even slightly, though, I would not have been able to.

By Saturday evening I had a sense my back was on the mend - in this case judging from how comfortable I was when doing the prayers, which involve a lot of bending forward. When I went to my back doc on Monday afternoon mobility was almost completely restored. He put me back on the medication which I'd been off for about a week and a half but simply as a variety of better safe than sorry, I think.

On Tuesday I spent epic amounts of time on my feet invigilating without feeling the slightest twinge. (I was deliberately avoiding any kind of sitting simply to see how long I could last.) And today has remained pain free. I don't think this has anything to do with the pills as they've never had such a dramatic effect before. Actually the only obvious thing they do is to make my hands shake a little.

So now I'm seriously wondering if the nerve has somehow become untrapped. I'm not foolish enough to assume it has and my problems are over. These kinds of problems don't go away with age. But even a brief respite is a wonderful thing and I'm thoroughly enjoying mine.

Left Wondering

Just before we set off from Melaka yesterday I finished reading Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, her first novel and the first by her I've read. I'm now puzzling over what kind of experience it was reading the book. I try to avoid snap judgments on my reading - in fact, to some degree I try to avoid making absolute judgments, especially negative ones - avoiding the unavoidable, as it were. (I'm referring to the fact that our default setting in responding to any creative work seems to be to sit in judgment.) But I've found myself inclined to be dismissive about this novel.

It's not that my experience of reading the novel was entirely negative. I found much to admire. Although I took time to adjust to the narrative initially, a process not helped by my being super-busy when I embarked on my reading, eventually I came to appreciate the pace of the story-telling, in terms of its economy, and the sheer verve of the narrative. There was a spareness about the style I liked, especially as it was allied to an obvious fertility of expression.

But I could not cast off the feeling I was reading a 'woman's novel' in an awkwardly pejorative sense - a novel written for women with women's concerns in mind. Now this is where I enter difficult territory. I'm aware of a distinct weakness in myself in not being able to relate to these real concerns and I know I might well be being simply unfair. Yet I can't shake off the feeling that Danticat deals with her subject matter, or some aspects of it, in a cliched manner; I have this odd sense that she is limited by writing a novel for a partial audience - not exactly women, but women with a definite agenda. I get the same feeling, by the way, reading and teaching Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

By the way, just in case I'm accused of being narrowly sexist (which I might be, I can't quite figure this one out) I should say I've just started a repeat reading of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and I have none of the reservations above about that novel.

The Greatest

Watched a little bit of Once We Were Kings, the sort of documentary movie about the Ali-Foreman fight, on Cinemax, before we set off for Melaka yesterday evening. (It’s a lot easier to get on-line here than in KL, hence my late night posting of yesterday’s offering.) Rather ironic that the one time I really, really, really want to watch something on one of the movie channels we have to be in the middle of packing up and leaving so I end up missing most of it. I probably saw about twenty minutes only, but that was brilliant – starting with a bit of Mailer (whose book on the fight I have, but was somewhat underwhelmed with) talking about Ali being frightened of Foreman, and I think he was right. A clip of Ali before the fight claiming not to be intimidated by the young George looks suspiciously corroborative of Norman’s thesis. Clips of Foreman pulverizing Frazier and Norton explain why Ali might have been scared, comparable in their ferocity to the young Tyson destroying everybody in sight.

I was at university when this all took place, I think in my first year, still in a hall of residence certainly. I remember a late night discussion in the hall bar prior to the fight in which everyone but everyone thought Foreman was a racing certainty to win, though nobody wanted him to. It’s difficult to explain to youngsters now the adulation with which Ali was regarded, in England at least, but the depth of the desire that he should reclaim the championship and prove himself the greatest, after proving it time and again as champion, was profound.

Funnily enough I can’t recall whether we watched the fight live, but I doubt it. Although we thought we were living in a kind of golden age of communications we now know it was a dark time – as the past most often is. The reason I’m uncertain though is that somehow or other I must have watched the moment when Ali comes off the ropes to hammer poor George a thousand times. I suppose it just got endlessly replayed, rightly so, in the weeks that followed. The most astonishing minute of boxing there has ever been, except possibly for Ali’s first defeat of Liston.

Something else that is difficult to communicate to youngsters today, and I know this because I tried it and failed in a recent lesson, is just how much Ali’s greatness changed people’s perceptions of race. To be more specific, in England at least, the perception folk in Manchester had of black people. My Dad, for example, was a little bit of a racist, I suppose, but then everyone of his generation and class was. He was still using the word ‘darkie’ up to around 1965. But if anyone changed that it was Ali.

Dad had done a bit of boxing in the army and was, I’m told, more than a bit useful. He loved the sport, as I did up to the point the corruption took over, and his first big hero in that line was Joe Louis. But Louis was a gentleman, a sort of white man’s picture of what a fine black fighter should be. Ali wasn’t. Again, I’m not too sure of this, but I think the first time we became aware of Ali was through a Panorama programme around 1962, definitely before the first Liston fight. Panorama was the BBC’s flagship serious political hour so I suppose they were featuring Ali (then Clay) in a serious fashion (if I’m right about the programme and it wasn’t just some sports thing.) Dad was appalled. I was appalled. At Ali – boastful, talkative, ridiculous. Everything a boxer, and I suppose a man, shouldn’t be. I suppose the fact he was black didn’t help.

Then he defeated Liston and it all changed. Though not quite. When he became Ali he remained Clay in Manchester for Dad and me, and everyone else, until he was so obviously the greatest, and so obviously just to be admired, and listened to, and he became Ali: intelligent, funny, brave, incredibly skilful - and being handsome didn’t hurt.

Can’t wait to see When We Were Kings in its entirety. Dad would have loved it.