Crossing The Line

The line between a sensitively judged exploration of emotion and self-indulgent wallowing can be very fine indeed. It's a useful exercise to try and place writers, or any kinds of creative artist, in relation to the line. The only great writer I can think of who regularly (and sometimes disastrously) crosses our hypothetical boundary is Dickens. But the odd thing is that somehow the sentimentality is part of his genius.

And, apropos of nothing, it's interesting how often I find myself having to explain in classrooms in this Far Place that the word sentimental in standard usage has strongly pejorative overtones.

No News, Good News

So much that's been fascinating in the news lately. To name just three on-going stories: the crisis in Ukraine; the mssing Malaysian Airlines jet; the Oscar Pistorius trial. So much anxiety. So much pain. It's hard not to feel like a voyeur, but, for me at least, impossible to turn my eyes from the human condition.

None The Wiser

An odd sort of coincidence. I happened to be looking back at journal entries from ten years ago (as is my wont) and came across something relating to a workshop I'd just been attending in the first week of March 2004:

After yesterday's workshop I found myself thinking a good deal about the nature of intelligence, its relationship to our ability to think in innovative ways and how we can develop intelligence, or if we do so at all, in the classroom. After teaching for so many years I actually know very little, if anything, about such matters. Isn't that strange?

Now the coincidence lies in the fact that I'll be attending full-day workshops tomorrow and the day after whilst the students occupy themselves at home with what is now termed E-learning. I have the nagging suspicion I'll emerge from the two days as clueless as I sound above with regard to whatever it is we will get up to. Just as a matter of interest, ten years on and reasonably well-read with regard to the central notion of intelligence, I can't say I feel any the wiser.

And at a tangent from all this, if my old mate Tony is reading this I'm sure he'll be chortling at the idea that I think of myself as being in a workshop. A workshop to him is a place with a lot of machinery in which real work gets done. What a strange notion, eh?

Quite Well Versed

I may be limping along with the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and the good Sancho Panza in Cervantes's epic, but my progress in reading poetic tomes is positively glacial. I moved on a while back from Don Paterson's Nil Nil to my first ever collection by the highly rated Charles Simic, whose essays in the NYRB I've often enjoyed. A Wedding in Hell turned out to be one of those mildly puzzling books that creates its own oddly askew world, of which the reader gradually learns some of the rules, chief amongst which seemed to be: expect the unexpected. Surreal, but gently so, engagingly so. Simic seems to saying important things - it's just that you can't be sure you hear him clearly. The best way to read the poems, I found, was steadily but unhurriedly moving forward, grasping the connections, taking time to reread each poem before leaving it.

And I'm finding something similar with Wislawa Szymborska's Poems New and Collected. I'd heard so many good things about the Nobel laureate and how good the translations were that it hasn't been surprising to find immediately ample evidence of her powers. But I was taken a little by surprise at just how tough to crack some of the early poems are. She's by no means transparent, and shares Simic's curious sense of disconnectedness in some poems - the feeling that very different thought worlds are being jammed together to create an entirely new kind of music. Lots to enjoy, but no point in rushing.

Both collections were among the items I bought last August or September, with the vouchers from the talk I gave for the Lit Seminar. I said then it would probably take me a year to get through the whole lot, and it doesn't look like I was wrong.

Feeling The Strain

For some reason I'm surprised at the degree to which this old frame of mine has been feeling the strain these last few days. There really shouldn't be any sensation of novelty at all about this since I've been here before, with reasonable frequency. Yet somehow the mind within the body manages to forget just how battered that body can feel on occasion. Goodness knows what it would be like if I had any kind of genuinely demanding physical work to do, but somehow walking from classroom to classroom, climbing a few stairs and carrying one or two books leaves me as tired as going eight rounds in the ring with a particularly handy sparring partner.

Yesterday morning I was hit by a back twinge of fairly substantial proportions before the day even got started and it took a good hour of moving in slow motion (and sitting down) before systems returned to anything like normal.

Age isn't just catching up anymore; it long since overtook me and left me trailing behind, like one of those runners who gets lapped time and again but keeps circling because there's no way of exiting the track unobtrusively. I know this all sounds ridiculously self-pitying, but you'll have to forgive me because I've been reading Lear for much of the week and if you can't be a self-pitying old geezer after that, then when can you?

Messing Around

Worked hard today at imposing order on the mess of things. As always, failed. Inevitably.

Any sense of achievement lies in embracing that inevitability.

In For The Long Haul

I've just passed the half-way mark in Don Quixote. Since I distinctly remember thinking, many years ago on my first reading, that the second part was greatly superior to its forerunner, and since this is undoubtedly the critical consensus, there's a lot to look forward to. In truth, Part 1 made heavy going on occasion, essentially due to the not-necessarily-gripping interpolated tales, and I'm a touch pleased with myself for persevering thus far.

One thing I'm finding myself very conscious of on this reading that I don't think registered quite as intensely the first time round, is Cervantes's obvious enjoyment of the knockabout violence of a good deal of the action. I suppose I thought of this a long time ago as a kind of cartoon violence, not to be taken with any degree of literal seriousness. Now I'm not so sure. I have this uneasy sense that battering a person to the point of insensibility may genuinely have been seen as a rather jolly jape way back when. It all makes the theatre of cruelty look a bit soft around the edges.

Why Worry?

Conversational highlight of the day, a confab with my colleague and namesake, historian Brian John, with regard to the unfolding events in Ukraine. Lots of agreement on a number of matters, but two in particular: this is all a lot more complicated than Fox News would have us believe (but then that's true of almost news story you care to mention); and we all should be not just worried but very worried indeed. (Oh, and it was blindingly obvious to us both that there are no goodies and baddies this time around, but surely any sensible person knows that?)

Brian had a number of illuminating things to say about gas and pipelines and I reckon that any analysis of what's going on and what the various players are up to needs to take account of the generation and supply of this commodity. And we both did a reasonable job of taking matters in the region back to the earlier part of the twentieth century, though we were both well aware there was an awful lot we weren't at all sure of that we knew to be important.

Actually BBC World and Sky News have been doing a pretty good job now and for quite some time in attempting to unfold some of the complexities involved. A very pithy and pertinent summary of the divisions within Ukraine a couple of weeks ago by the one of the Sky team was followed by a wonderfully laconic and honest reminder that he was making the situation all a lot more simple than it actually was to enable viewers to get some kind of handle on events. A reminder that there are some very good journalists and some very bad journalists out there - and it's helpful to recognise the difference between the two.

Out Of Interest

I was sitting in a religious class this morning, learning about procedures for completing the pilgrimage to Makah, when the following question framed itself in my mind: Why do models of the world based on the notion that behaviour borne of simple self-interest must be a kind of determinant of our specie make less and less sense as one grows older? I now offer it to the world as evidence of a wandering yet engaged mind.

By the way, there's a lot of humour involved in our Sunday morning class, courtesy of Ustad Haron, and much consideration of the merits of various foodstuffs. The dividing line between the sacred and profane melts, and rightly so, in the wonder of it all.

Peak Experiences

A couple of days ago I promised a list of the ten best concerts I've attended over the decades. So after considerable cogitation and mild agonising here it is, in no particular order of merit:

Dylan in Singapore very recently, was it 2012?, I'm losing track; Paul Simon at the Singapore Indoor Stadium, the Rhythm of the Saints tour - I think around 1990?; King Crimson at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 1971; King Crimson at Hard Rock, Manchester, 1972 (I think, or 1973 - the five-piece with Jamie Muir); Pink Floyd at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, the Meddle tour, 1972?; Martin Carthy at Sheffield University Folk Club, 1975; the Stan Tracey Quartet, at one of the Sheffield University halls of residence, 1976?; the Singapore Symphony Orchestra doing Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, the Victoria Concert Hall, 1994?; Genesis doing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, in Manchester, can't remember the exact venue, 1974; Springsteen and the E Street Band, Bramall Lane, Sheffield, the Tunnel of Love tour, 1987?

Gosh, I've had some good times.