Sloganising

Spotted on a t-shirt today: Too busy to die. (Oddly enough the guy wearing it was on his way out of Friday Prayers.) Pithily mordant. Know how he feels.

A Full Life

On the anniversary of her death I've been thinking of Mum a bit more than usual today - and of some others who have gone ahead of me into the adventure of Eternity.

I was trying to remember some of the jobs she did in the course of her long life: mill girl; bus conductress; munitions worker; post-lady; barmaid; factory worker; school cleaner; sweet shop owner. Not bad for one little lady. And those are just the ones I can think of for the moment.

A Sense Of Order

I've been reading Pope's Essay on Man as the latest in my on-going scheme of tackling a few classic long or longish poems. Progress has been slow, and I'm only up to the second Epistle, but that's the whole point. It's so relaxing to mull over segments of twenty to thirty lines or thereabouts, grasping the flow of thought and attempting to enter into the world that engendered it. I can't think of any good reason to try and speed up.

I suppose Pope gets a bit of a bad press these days for being so entirely magisterial, so utterly sure of himself. But I find a stirring kind of nobility, almost heroism, in the sheer energy with which he imposes a sense of order and proportion on a world so demonstrably lacking those qualities. He can sound rigid and complacent in the Essay, but we're never too far away from a recognition of Man's essential foolishness. This is poetry that can bite you if you're not careful, especially in those moments when you recognise yourself dangling at the end of a satirical barb.

There's also much delight to be found in the inevitable sureness of the rhythms. It's like listening to Handel when he's in the mood for a bit of a dance. There's a lot to be said for elegance for its own sake, though nobody seems to want to say it in these fallen days.

Complete

Noi got back from Korea early this morning and by 4.00 in the afternoon we were enjoying tea and kaya toast together. And everything was well again.

Coming Together

I don't think I've ever felt quite as relaxed before a 'big' drama occasion as I did today, ahead of some of our younger students performing for the Singapore Youth Festival judging. I never really take the whole business of awards for drama too seriously, but my awareness that others, perhaps understandably, do tends to undercut my straightforward enjoyment of proceedings. But this year the only butterflies floating around in my stomach came early in the day, before we set off. Once we were on our way, with nothing forgotten, I had the oddest certainty that everything would go smoothly and a distinct suspicion that the kids were going to go up a few notches on the big day. And so it proved, from the very first moments of the show.

It was the relative youth of our thespians that instilled these feelings. Younger actors tend to 'hide' their final performances, entirely unconsciously, never quite firing on all cylinders in rehearsal, even at their most committed. It's as if they need the reality of public performance to finally bloom, and when this is happening to several of them at the same time something quite magical takes place. Somehow I knew it was going to happen, and it did. 

Something Lost

The Thin Man strikes me as a very fine novel, though a little plot-heavy towards the end, and a wholly remarkable conclusion to Dashiell Hammett's career as the best of the hard-boiled school of crime fiction. To invent something so different from anything he'd done in the brilliant sequence of the previous four novels that preceded this one suggests almost limitless powers of imagination. But, of course, they weren't limitless, as the more than thirty year silence that was to follow sadly indicates.

What happened? Despite never having read a full biography of Hammett, I think I know.

The opening pages are the best thing about the novel, and they create an enchanted world. No wonder Nick and Norah would enjoy a further career in the movies based around them. There's a real warmth about their relationship and a genuine glamour that is beguiling. Who wouldn't want to be as clever - and as well-off - as they are, exchanging witty one-liners as they drink their way through the night, looking forward to the next party or show to attend?

The trouble is that no one could possibly consume that much alcohol and remain in one piece for long. Certainly Hammett couldn't. Nick and Norah are a kind of dream, a form of denial. As good as the writing is, it's fundamentally dishonest and it's my guess that Hammett for all his gifts, and all his honesty, couldn't bear to go to the awful place he ended up in real life in his fiction. If he had done, I suppose we'd have had the equivalent of Long Day's Journey Into Night in the American novel. As it is we have to settle for five years or so of stunning accomplishment and then complete loss. Booze can be a terrible thing.

Fear And Trembling

Just back from the Esplanade having listened to the SSO in splendid form doing ample justice to Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. I'd prepared for the occasion by re-reading Alex Ross's chapters on the Russian Master in The Rest is Noise and being reminded of the extremity of the fear he lived with in the days of Stalin. Perhaps that's why all I could hear was cold hard bitter churning stress throughout the symphony, even in what the writer of the programme notes claimed was the exultant ending in glorious E-major. E-major it may have been; exultant it wasn't, except in the sense of a crazed sense of release at the death of the tyrant. I couldn't hear any relaxation in this music at all and my heart bled for the man who felt he had to write it.

There was also a pleasant half hour of Schumann as well, which made me a touch dozy. The Shostakovich woke me up though, I can tell you.

The Tyranny Of Numbers

I don't enjoy my thirty minute sessions on the pedal thingy in the gym at all, though I look forward to going and getting some exercise and feeling good afterwards. This is in stark contrast to the days when I could go out running. Forty of so minutes round the taman, or cruising the streets of Katong felt like forty minutes of, if not fun, then a pretty good time, most of which could be spent admiring my surroundings or letting my mind range over other matters.

A big part of the difference lies in the fact that setting the machine to its highest resistance means the thirty minutes feels like very hard work from the first couple of minutes onwards. I go for the highest resistance, not to punish myself but to slow my body down to a more fluid set of movements to avoid any more impact injuries. So far, so good. But there's a mental price to be paid. I can't really get away from thinking about the hard work I'm doing and I find myself focusing on all the numbers that flash in front of me giving me all sorts of data I don't really want on what's happening.

Do I really need to know that the session just used up three hundred and forty-eight calories, or that my heart rate has gone up to one hundred and fifty, whatever that means? (It seems that at my age you're not supposed to go above a hundred and forty, but I'm still breathing, so it doesn't seem to do too much harm.)

I suppose that in a time-starved life such as mine, the idea of getting the maximum out of one's thirty minutes of cardiovascular endeavour has its appeal, and the numbers help keep one on track (pun intended.) But I'm a bit worried that there's something unnecessarily obsessively intense about all this. I can sense my concern that I really should be using up three hundred and fifty calories a session rather than the pathetic three hundred and forty-eight I'm turning in at present. Funnily enough, though, I haven't really been thinking too hard about increasing the time spent on the machine. At least the hard slog has been useful in preventing me overdoing it, a temptation to which I'm temperamentally very prone.

Easily Pleased

It doesn't take much to make me feel that all is well. The prospect of lying in bed tomorrow morning until an unreasonably late hour evokes a quiet delight. All very shallow I'm afraid, but who needs depth when life is good?

Pity Noi isn't around to share the fun. Oh hum.

Worth A Read

I've never really thought much of literary criticism of the academic variety. Correction: I suppose I took it quite seriously as a teenager as representing something important because the academic world seemed to think so and who was I to question that world. By my early twenties I had a fair idea of who I was and had come to the conclusion that not only was such criticism not the only valid response to literary works but it was generally pretty daft as a response when there were much more obvious and healthy ways of responding. (Reading and enjoying springs to mind, for starters.)

However, despite my general scepticism there remain quite a number of academic types who I regard as honourable exceptions to my broad and enjoyably sweeping generalisations, and none is more honourable than Prof Stephen Greenblatt. I loved his book about the development of modern sceptical thought in relation to Lucretius, The Swerve, that Karen got me for my birthday a couple of years back, and his biography of the Bard, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, is one of the best of its kind, and the one I'd probably point the general reader towards.

He's now gone even further up in my already high estimation after reading a piece he's got in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. His essay on Shakespeare in Tehran is wonderful, so much so I felt I had to provide a link to the on-line version just for you, dear Reader. If we're going to build bridges between cultures this is how it will be done, not through empty platitudinous cliches but through intelligent and perceptive and honest analysis.

And I now have something new to strive for: to be honest, and of an open and free nature, like the great man himself. It's not going to be easy.