Random Dramatic People

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of years ago one of my drama guys who was shortly to leave the school looked at me astutely during the dinner of the drama camp Social Night and commented: You see this every year, don't you?

Yes, and it's always the same, and always different.

Lights Out

Now resident in Maison KL having driven up yesterday after the Drama Camp. I was doubtful about the journey given the fact that I was extremely tired by noon. But a bit of a nap in the early afternoon and a restorative cup of coffee with the Missus worked wonders and I drove with nary a yawn. In fact it was Noi who dozed along the way.

Today has seen Noi getting on with some serious cleaning - we're still in recovery from the renovation work, which is not quite complete - with myself joining in, dusting down the books in the ground floor bedroom. Not even three blackouts (I think they call them power outages these days) could stand in our way. According to the neighbours the taman was short of water the whole of last weekend for some reason, so things could have been a lot worse.

Random Dramatic Objects

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's no particular significance in any of the above. Unless we choose to make it so. A bit like life, really.

Not Exactly Normal

Our Drama Camp got off to an unusual opening with a visit to Next To Normal, a musical dealing with mental health issues. Put that way, it sounds like it shouldn't work, and I'm not convinced it does entirely, but it's an extremely worthy attempt. The levels of talent involved are frighteningly good, the production values first rate and the show itself is never less than engaging and often powerful. The thing I have doubts about is the strength of the story-line, but that seems to me inherent in the choice of subject matter. In a sense, a good story is, rightly, beside the point when people are simply hurting up there.

The excellent Adrian Pang ended the show with a little speech asking the audience to encourage their friends to buy tickets, and I have no hesitation passing on the message. When you have something this good on stage it's a bit of an obligation to go and see it.

As Ever, On-going

 

It's mildly distressing to report that I've slipped back into chronic promiscuity with regard to on-going reading. The plan to maintain some degree of faithfulness to a single text, or just a couple, has been well and truly shredded, like the wallpaper after a blistering Robert Fripp solo. I'm not entirely sure how this state of affairs came to be - but since it's not entirely unsatisfactory I can live with it for the duration.

Partly I blame Niall Ferguson and Economics, though not necessarily in that order. You see at the centre of my reading has been The Pity of War, but the early chapters are dense with economic data and I have struggled. At the same time the insights gained made the struggles worthwhile and once beyond the opening third of the book I found everything else much easier going. But whilst initially labouring I couldn't resist starting a number of other projects.

I mentioned already here, a few days back, the read-through I've embarked on of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is proving highly rewarding and since I'm very keen indeed to get to the prose which comprises the second part of the Oxford edition I'm using, I can't see this being abandoned. And then there's the Shakespeare sonnets project I embarked on last year, but which fizzled out when we had to look after Afnan for a month. You try a close reading of the Bard at his most dense when there's a nipper demanding your attention on the kitchen floor and you'll see what I mean.

Actually I lost count of where I was up to. I think I'd got to around Sonnet 32 (according to a blog entry made at the time) but since I honestly couldn't remember it seemed best to start all over again. The project, by the way, consists of reading a sonnet in the Penguin edition alongside John Kerrigan's excellent notes, then switching to Don Paterson's wonderfully un-academic commentary Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, and then back to a final reading. I'm now up to Sonnet 22 and this time won't be stopped.

But in addition to all this I've sort of accidentally found myself reading Jhumpa Lahiri's collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. We're adopting this as a text at work next year and a colleague unexpectedly gave me a copy making me feel obliged to do the necessary. I make this sound like an imposition, but delightfully, of course, it's not, one of the perks of this job being forced to read stuff you don't need to be forced to read. I finished the first couple of stories and enjoyed them - in fact, the first, about a couple divorcing, struck me as very powerful indeed within its limits.

And I'm afraid that's not all. A visit yesterday afternoon to the little second hand bookshop at Holland Village resulted in the acquisition of a good murder by Val McDermid. It's entitled The Distant Echo and I suppose might be regarded as a guilty pleasure would that I was capable of any kind of guilt regarding what I read. And when I tell you I also picked up the latest edition of Philosophy Now to place alongside an issue of The New York Review of Books (one-third read), an issue of The London Review of Books (even less read) and a facsimile issue of the first ever NYRB - which came free with the current one I haven't read yet - you'll understand my dilemma.

Oh, and I'm dying to start at least one of the poetry books I picked up the other day, and am holding back on The Swamp Thing until we get to KL where I traditionally let it all hang out in graphic mode. And I've just realised that this post is a celebration rather than a lament. So there.

For All I Know

I've been enjoying the annual Teachers' Day holiday in this Far Place more than somewhat today. Also looking forward to a week off between terms lying ahead of me. However, there's the little matter of our annual Drama Camp for my ACSIS guys, which we're running from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday morning, to take care of first. Not that I regard that as burdensome - when the point of one's work is obvious it really isn't work any more.

Talking about work, it occurred to me earlier in the day that I've been doing this job - teaching, that is - for exactly thirty-five years now, without a break - except for the very welcome vacations, like the one coming up. I started teaching in the first week of September 1978. That's a fair amount of time, I suppose, but the odd thing is that I really can't say I know that much more about how to do what I'm doing now than I did when I started. I'm fascinated by all these educational johnnies who seem to know so much about how it should be done. I'm doubtful about pretty much every thing except the blindingly obvious, but the blindingly obvious has served me pretty well. So all I'm going to say now I knew in 1978. The problem was, I couldn't do it then, not for a while anyway; but now I hope I can.

So here it is: what I know about teaching well. 1) Be as clear as you can. 2) Try to be fair to everyone. 3) Sugar the pill - most people don't like learning new things so try and be entertaining if possible. If not, at least be clear. 4) Mark work thoroughly and return it quickly. (This is a sub-set of being fair, but worth a line of its own.)

And that's it, really. No wonder I've never been able to write a book about it, or even an article. Anyway, it got me through thirty-five years reasonably in one piece.

A New Day

Everything good you've heard about Bowie's The Next Day is true. It's a fabulous album and has been in frequent rotation in this household. No filler at all, not even the three bonus tracks. It sounds as if Bowie realised he'd written enough great songs to require realising them in concrete terms and got the right people in do so - especially ace producer Tony Visconti. (Though I suppose in a perfect world Robert Fripp would have been coaxed on board. Mind you, David Torn cuts it up a bit on screaming rock guitar in places - at least, I assume it's him.)

In total, think the Berlin trilogy with the pop-rock sensibilities of Man Who Sold The World. And the voice sounds as youthful as ever, except when he chooses not to.

And on a completely different note, I discovered today that Elvis (the king, Costello) is releasing an album mid-September recorded with hip-hop luminaries The Roots - gasp. Can't wait.

Not Exactly Juvenile

Decided to read my Oxford edition of The Major Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins from cover to cover, instead of just dipping in as I've been doing since I acquired it a few years back. The verse is arranged in what the editors hope is chronological order which means I've been steadily moving through the early stuff. I suppose Wreck of the Deutschland is seen as Hopkins explosively finding his mature voice. But it's fascinating to realise just how good he was even in the early days - though there are clunkers in there. Having said that, there are fine lines and striking phrases even in the stuff that doesn't really work.

I mean, just listen to this: The hoarse leaves crawl on hissing ground / Because the sighing wind is low. Not bad, eh? In fact the whole poem, Winter with the Gulf Stream, is a gem - though the line, So like a berg of hyaline is a bit painful for these ears. Odd that he uses hyaline as a noun here - and odd to go for such a recherché term at all.

All in all, a great place for a young writer to steal from.

In Passing

Just watched a bit of the news about Seamus Heaney's funeral. His son's brief account of the poet's final 'words' - typed, not spoken - was deeply moving, and a reminder of just how much there was to love about the man, aside from his work.

There's a nice tribute already at the New York Review of Books website here and I'm sure we're in for more than a few eloquent ones in the days and weeks and months to come. I doubt if any will match Heaney's own wonderful poems addressed to his departed friends. The one about Joseph Brodsky in Electric Light, Audenesque, springs to mind - it captures so much about Brodsky and Heaney himself.

My tribute, for what it's worth, is very simple. There are few poets capable of overwhelming this reader in simple emotional terms, and Heaney is the one I immediately think of in this regard. I was thinking today of the haunting Limbo, which I believe first appeared in Wintering Out. The last time I tried to read it aloud to someone I almost didn't make it through the final lines. I won't even try today.

In Paradisum

An odd moment this morning - an unexpected confluence of ideas of the spooky variety.

There I was multi-tasking, listening to the Faure Requiem and reading September from Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar. Now I know you'll say that such a division of attention is not at all sensible, and you're right. But in my defence I'll plead that I know the Requiem really well, and had listened with close rapt attention just the previous night. I was going to devote maximum attention to the other goodies on the CD after just giving the Requiem a spin for the sheer beauty of its sounds, and as frequent visitors to this Far Place might be aware, it's a bit of a fetish for me to start a new month with a read from mad old Clare, so anything from his Calendar is extremely familiar.

Anyway, I'd got to the lovely lines about supper: Then comes the harvest supper night / Which rustics welcome with delight / When merry game and tiresome tale / And songs increasing with the ale / Their mingled roar interpose / To crown the harvests happy close / While rural mirth that there abides / Laughs till she almost cracks her sides - when it occurred to me that Clare's world is a kind of vanished paradise (not a terribly original thought, I know, not even for myself; it's basically in my mind on every reading of the poem.) This led me to a sudden consideration of the fact that on at least one occasion when I was a lad in Junior School I was asked to consider and describe what I would regard as 'heaven' - I think the teacherly follow-up was that no matter how wonderful my impressions of what heaven might be like, the real thing would be infinitely more felicitous. My impressions were profoundly simple and deeply felicitous: heaven would be endless summer evening games of attack against defence played in front of a pair of posts improvised from discarded jumpers.

And then just as I was considering these twin versions of paradise, in steps old Faure with the In Paradisum bit towards the end of his mass. Blimey! For a moment it was as if I'd actually got there. Not a bad way to pass a Sunday morning, I reckon.