A Day Of Rest

I'm pretty good at being lazy but I've surpassed myself today. Whatever the doc gave me yesterday for my back didn't work particularly well so the only place I've been able to get any relief from pain is on the floor. Therefore I've spent a good part of the day there. Normally I'd have a book in hand down there, but because of the problems with my left arm (don't ask!) whilst a book has been available I've generally given it up after a few minutes and aimlessly dozed. This was quite enjoyable the first couple of times but it's possible to have too much sleep and that's what I've had today. (Difficult to believe I'm expressing such a sentiment, but there you are, eh?)

Now feeling extremely restless even though the pain is still fairly raw - but subsiding somewhat, I think. I wasn't too reluctant to get myself to the table to write this, which is a good sign. We were supposed to be moving on to Melaka today, but the journey's been shelved until the morrow, so I can't direct my energies in that direction.

Vaguely wondering about the results of today's General Election in Singapore. Might try and see what's happening later, unless I decide I'm too tired, which isn't likely.

Not So Patient

Feeling very sorry for myself after my back went into spasm in the early afternoon. The warning signs were there last night. I was a bit uncomfortable during dinner and struggled during prayers. But I suppose I was hoping for the best. However, the best was most definitely not to be.

I managed to get to the doctor's and I've had a jab of what I presume is muscle relaxant, but nothing feels particularly relaxed at this point in time, especially in the area around my left hip. Fortunately all the checks for a slipped disk proved welcomely negatively, so there is an upside to all this. However, the downside is that as I've had occasion to point out here before, I'm not terribly good at being ill so it's really in everyone's best interest (everyone being basically the Missus at this juncture) that things start to improve soon.

Getting It Wrong

I wonder just for how long you can stretch out listening to an opera and still qualify as having listened to it as a single piece. I started on Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio last week but only played the second CD of the 2 CD set from my box of the seven major operas under the baton of John Eliot Gardiner this afternoon. Thoroughly enjoyed the opera as a whole despite having to read the English translation of all the spoken dialogue at high speed between arias to get the flow of the story. (The Gardiner version features a smattering of the dialogue to give a taste of the scenes but cut most of it.)

Found myself fascinated by the treatment of Muslim culture in the opera. The stereotyping is understandably heavy-handed - I was going to type and of its time, but then realized that much of it sounds contemporary. But what came as a surprise was the treatment of Pasha Selim as an enlightened ruler. I suppose this came about simply to provide the necessary happy ending, but there are moments in the final dialogue when the suggestions that he represents a wisdom far deeper than any of the 'western' characters appear explicit and have a curious power - as if hinting that there's the possibility of viewing the action from a different perspective entirely and that Constanze, our heroine, may be making the wrong, blinkered choice in rejecting the monarch. 

I seem to remember that in the movie Amadeus the Abduction gets a patronizing nod as a tuneful bit of entertaining froth, but it struck me as a lot more interesting than that. But tuneful certainly. Boy, is this stuff easy on the ear!

The Unexpected

I can't think of any other major novel I've read that's as entirely unpredictable as The Idiot. I couldn't shake off the feeling as I read that Dostoevsky had very little idea where his story was going and just kept improvising one great sequence after another with a freshness stemming from the lack of any real direction. He creates characters that not only behave unpredictably, despite their being representative of certain 'types', but actually seem to be discovering the reasons for their choices even as they are making them - and this is true even of his obsessive types, of which, of course, there are more than a few.

Finishing the novel today I really have little sense of what it's 'about' as a coherent whole. Rather I remember the brilliant moments, invariably painful, that all seem to fit in somewhere. Just to give one example: General Ivolgin's stealing of Lebedev's money, followed by his lying account of his involvement with the Emperor Napoleon in 1812, is both excruciatingly embarrassing yet impossible to set aside. Did FD have War and Peace in mind as he wrote it? And was he smiling?

I doubt the smiling somehow. There are many references to smiles and laughter in The Idiot (just about as many as there are to tears) ,and at times it's an extraordinarily funny book, but in the end it furrows the brow and shines too dark a light to allow cheerfulness to break through. I find myself keen to reread the other classics (and Notes From the Underground which for some reason I can't fathom I've never got round to) but maybe not this year.

Here

Journeyed up to our house in the Malaysian capital yesterday. Enjoyed a fairly routine arrival, finding the place in good order, which the Missus turned into excellent order in little to no time, wielding a trusty mop to do so. (I joined in to do my bit, by the way, so no finger-pointing on the sexism front, please.) The minor fly in the proverbial ointment was a lack of access to the Internet since our service provider decided not to provide service. It seems a payment we made in late June to them somehow escaped their notice and since we didn't keep a receipt we are deemed at fault, even though I reckon we're not, according to the laws of natural justice. There's a lesson in all this somewhere, and I suspect we'll have to learn it, rather than our clueless service provider.

Mind you, the ease with which we managed to pay an electricity bill today to Tanaga Nasional has sort of restored my faith in human nature, in this case the human nature possessed of a nondescript security guard at their branch at Taman Melawati who guided us through the whole procedure of paying through an intimidating ATM-like kiosk which we'd never have attempted but for him. That saved us a further visit to the Post Office in order to hand over the shekels, enabling us to drive back to the hill for a welcome cup of tea and two surpassingly excellent curry puffs, a much more rewarding way of passing the time.

I'm about to play yet another Emmylou Harris album to soothe the furrowed brow, having fruitfully un-furrowed said brow with four others this morning. Yes, the holiday has officially begun.

In Conversation

An excellent day for conversations, including one about the forthcoming election in this Far Place that I found extremely informative. There's something about being an disinterested-interested on-looker that feels strangely privileged, and I seem to occupy that position in almost every aspect of my life.

At The Moment

Reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot (just starting Part 3) and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Listening to Mozart's Die Entuhrung aus dem Serail - The Abduction from the Seraglio for those, like me, with no German (about halfway - 1 CD from the 2 CD set.)

Eating homemade cheesecake (from the Missus, covered in bits of fruit) and goring pisang (ditto, but not the fruit).

Praying Maghrib, as soon as I finish this - the azan just sounded.

Thinking Life Is Good, in this little corner of the universe at least.

Watching, for clues.

A Sense Of Despair

Looking at the images related to the migrant crisis in and around Europe is more than uncomfortable. I'm reminded that I'm a bit of a migrant myself. A lucky one, with a happy story to tell. For some the story has ended almost as soon as it had begun.

It's difficult to see any good coming out of this. But that doesn't mean it can't.

A Sense Of Admiration

Was thinking about having a bit of a moan in a post about how difficult it was to get out of bed this morning and go to work following yesterday's unexpected holiday. Changed my mind after catching a little item on BBC World in the early evening about foreign workers here in Singapore - those from the Indian sub-continent for the most part - forming cricket teams and playing games on Sundays, the day off for most construction workers here, I'm guessing, in their own little league.

There were interviews with guys working 14 or 16 hour days (and I mean working), getting paid less than 1000 SGD a month, and sending most of that back to their families back home. None of them complained about low pay. In fact, they were more than happy, grateful indeed, to be able to earn what they did and work as hard as they were doing on a regular basis. The cricket was their way of escaping for a short while into what they really wanted to do, a way of feeling alive again.

I've never quite been able to figure out the modern cult of admiration for various worthies from the business world and the like - the sort of Donald Trump figures whom the self-help books seem to assume we all wish to be. I think there's a lot, lot more we could usefully learn from those we sometimes see as somehow beneath us. Listening to today's cricketers speak I felt small, I can tell you, but I also saw the possibility of becoming someone bigger.

A Liberal Education

Spent a fair amount of time today listening to Mozart's Idomeneo. Listening to the whole thing requires a few spare hours and, since I had them, I fruitfully used them for that purpose. The version was that conducted by John Eliot Gardiner with the English Baroque Soloists and I can't imagine hearing a better orchestra doing this stuff. They deliver total clarity and unbounded energy. The sound is fabulous.

I got hold of the cheapo cheapo box set of Gardiner doing the seven big Mozart operas a few months back and have played bits and pieces here and there. But unfortunately, though understandably, this bargain edition doesn't come with any of the librettos, though the pithy notes on each opera in the accompanying booklet are pretty informative. As a result I've not really settled to full length play-throughs of the full operas until now, having just acquired the seriously handsome tome: Seven Mozart Librettos - A Verse Translation by J.D. McClatchy. This means that my education in Mozartian opera is now officially underway.

I'm intending to listen to another three operas, in the order of composition, over the next two weeks and to say I'm looking forward to the experience would be an under-statement. In truth, I was a bit wary of Idomeneo being aware that as an opera seria this work represented a genre likely to prove difficult to access for my modern, under-educated musical sensibilities. I couldn't have been more wrong.