In The Moment

Today marked the end of our first term, and it was a long day to get through. A busy morning, followed by Prayers, followed by a hot afternoon spent at the track watching various sports events. So I wasn't exactly keen to go out this evening to watch various young people performing their music and dance and the like. But I'm very glad I did.

There's something gently exhilarating about watching talented kids deliver. They'll soon move beyond our small world, but I hope those moments of complete absorption in the act of creating something that speaks to others stay with them.

Tank Empty

Got to the gym this evening and managed 40 minutes on the elliptical trainer but fell well short of the numbers posted on my previous visits. The fact that the last thing I felt like doing this evening was going to the gym no doubt accounted for the lack of oomph in my performance. In fact, I rarely in any real sense enjoy the exercise, in stark contrast to the days I used to go running when I invariably took real pleasure in pounding the streets. I don't think that age accounts for the difference, though it may be a contributory factor. I think the lack of fun is down to the sheer intensity of the exercise. In some ways I gain through maximising the benefit of the time spent in the gym; in other ways I lose, though, fortunately, not to the point of not wanting to go at all. Not yet, anyway.

Something Found

Writing yesterday's post about getting back to some serious reading of poetry put me in mind of how easy it is these days to come across excellent contemporary stuff in English, such that it's almost impossible to get a handle on the breadth of talent and achievement out there. Simple example: a few days back I took a bit of a breather and picked out, almost at random, a poem from Ruth Padel's tasty little tome 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, basically just to pass the time. The piece in question was Fred D'Aguiar's Mama Dot Warns Against An Easter Rising.

I'd vaguely glanced at it before, read a line or two and somewhat patronizingly put it to one side thinking it looked like a worthy attempt at injecting a bit of lively patois into the old standard language, creating a distinctly Caribbean voice, but not too much more than that. This time round, reading it with reasonable attention, it was obvious that, yes, the voice was the superficially dominating feature but the poem had so much more to offer than a skilful kind of ventriloquism, transcending my casual placing of it. It helped that Ms Padel's sympathetic commentary served to alert me to a broader context that I'd only been able to vaguely guess at in just glancing at the poem. For a magical fifteen minutes or so I was able to surrender to the spell cast by the writer.

But the thing is this. Now I know just how good Mr D'Aguiar is, and a quick search online tells me there's a fair bit more of where this comes from. So do I put him on my impossibly long 'must read' list? Of course I do. And long for a couple more lifetimes in which to clear said list. And in the meantime I'm just off to read the poem in question again.

What I've Been Missing

There hasn't been enough poetry in my life lately. Of course, I'm lucky in that poems of various kinds are never too far from me, owing to the nature of my work. In moments of minor crisis I'll grab something from the shelves, or something proposed for a test and read whatever has popped up along with a nice cup of tea down in SAC. But, satisfying and strangely stabilising as that might be, it's not quite the same as the experience of reading a particular poet full on, no holds barred, as it were.

I suppose the fact that my recent reading has revolved around one or two big, demanding novels accounts for why I've not been steadily moving through some kind of individual collection, or major longish piece. I lost sight of my chunky Tennyson edition when we were moving apartment, which meant a sequenced reading of In Memoriam I had undertaken was interrupted. And after starting on Joshua Ip's entertaining Making Love With Scrabble Tiles before the big move I similarly allowed the volume to drop out of consciousness.

This evening I decided to right this wrong and got moving again on both from the beginning. The contemporary poems seem even more enjoyable a second time round, as you might expect. And In Memoriam seems more contemporary than ever. Can't think how I came to neglect them both.

Much To Learn

Over this weekend and the last I've been listening to Mozart's Don Giovanni, from my boxed set of the seven big operas. It's not such an easy listen as The Marriage of Figaro simply on the level that there's so much going on in terms of variations of tone, it leaves the inexperienced listener (this one especially) wondering if he's getting the point(s). Having said that, I had no problems entering into the ferocious finale in which the Don gets wonderfully, awfully dragged down to perdition; and I think I got the point of the scene that follows in which the various survivors descant upon his fate. From what I can gather this scene has struck a number of critics as supernumerary, but I thought its function both obvious and necessary. So maybe I am growing in understanding of the conventions of opera buffa. Where I'm lacking is in my grasp of the musical conventions involved. Most of it sounds simply lovely to me and I'm not sure it's meant to.

The funny thing here is that you learn how to listen by listening a lot. A bit like learning how to read particular writers by reading and reading and reading them. I've got a lot of listening to do then - which can only be a good thing.

An Embarrassment

Watched bits of the latest Republican Party debate between those fighting to get the nomination as the GOP's presidential candidate feeling bemused, amused and plain horrified. Someone on a news channel (who and which will remain anonymous) described it as a good debate (seriously!) It wasn't. It was shocking in its lack of civility, lack of substance, lack of intelligence. I don't believe that anyone, even just twenty years ago, could have predicted that political discussion in the States would have deteriorated to this level so rapidly.

In recent years I've come to take the notion of climates - ethical, social, political - very seriously and now believe that we all have something to contribute to how these manifest themselves. I'm glad I don't have to live in a nation in which I might feel even vaguely responsible for that debate and its attendant hoo-haa.

Mixed Feelings

At the end of a week which might fairly be described as tough, I am about to undergo the ministrations of Kak Sabariah, aka Noi's massage lady. I am facing this prospect with roughly equal amounts of happy anticipation and dread. It isn't easy to find words to describe the experience of a traditional Malay-style massage, as administered by a ruthless master of the art, so I won't try. But I will say that my life is about to get unusually intense for the next couple of hours.

Wish me luck!

Something Old, Something New

Heard RVW's Oboe Concerto for the first time ever today. Don't know how it escaped me previously. Astonishingly beautiful. Amazing to think there's so much wonderful music out there I've never exposed myself to. It would be nice to have sufficient life-times to enjoy it all, but I'll happily settle for cramming as much of it as I possibly can into the one I've got.

A Bit Of Brooding

Lovely word, brooding. It's one of those words that seems to enact itself in its very sound.

Odd to think of the connection between the relatively neutral notion of a brood as a group - a brood of hens - and the negative connotations of referring to your chum's family as a brood. Does the sarcasm of the latter derive from the sense of morbidity of thought when you find yourself brooding over something?

It appears to stretch back to an Indo-European base related to burning or heating - hence the incubation of eggs, and according to one authority, John Ayto in The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, the sense of worrying associated with brooding only developed in the eighteenth century. But that doesn't sound right to me. It's easy to see how the link to becoming over-heated in thought was likely to have been there from the very beginning.

I reckon it's a very late-nineteenth century sort of word. All those Romantic, fin de siècle types seem to have been brooding all the time. Yeats's line(s), and brood / Upon love's bitter mystery, has been stuck in my brooding mind all afternoon (via Ulysses, I think, in which Stephen D. quotes Yeats's great song and does some substantial brooding himself. But Bloom doesn't really brood, does he, and neither does Molly. Gosh, wasn't Joyce amazingly good at capturing the textures of different modes of thought?) Oh, and I've just realised apropos Yeats's poem that he uses the word twice, in adjacent lines, no less!

Of course, healthy minded folks like myself get beyond brooding, becoming sensibly reflective. Or so we like to imagine.

A Question Of Adjustment

The leap year brought with it a minor crisis in my life with regard to the management of my trusty Casio timepieces. Why can't they take account of the extra day? I found myself asking, in an irritated little panic. Then my less than trusty, indeed rusty memory dredged up this post from A Far Place, exactly four years ago. And the problem was solved again, probably to lie in wait for the next leap year.