On The Box

Hey Fithri, it's Aunty Tina on the TV! I found myself shouting in the late afternoon. And so it was: Noi's younger sister Rozanah expounding on her techniques for producing high quality ceramics in the factory across the road from Mak's house, on the site where Nenek's old house used to be. So there were the three of us, Noi herself rushing in from our bedroom, admiring the poise of Rozanah as interlocuter and just how nice all her bowls and stuff looked.

And all this quite by accident. We've been without our Mio tv for a few months, the previous box having given up the ghost late last year. Finally we went to the trouble of picking up a new one, or, rather, Rozita did that for us, and even more finally Fifi and I rigged it up this afternoon to link it to Hakim's super-size telly currently occupying our living room. So now we've got rather more than 57 channels (and nothing on, as The Boss had it back in the 90s when I didn't actually really understand his mordant criticism of modern culture.)

Nice to see someone familiar on the box, but hope this doesn't happen too regularly. It takes all the magic out of the silver screen somehow. Not that it's silver now, or ever was, of course.

Alive

Finished Suze Rotolo's memoir of Greenwich Village in the early 60's, A Freewheelin' Time, and was very impressed by every aspect of it. I suppose as a Dylan fanboy of the worst order the main draw for me was the portrait of the Great Man, but the great thing about Ms Rotolo's take on him is that he isn't yet the legendary Dylan, just an extraordinarily gifted very young man, often somewhat gauche, but impressively himself, as she makes abundantly clear. She seems to me to be extremely fair and perspicacious in her judgements upon him. As she is on her younger self, and that's the remarkable thing: she, and Dylan, are so young in the period she covers. It's quite something that she remembers so much (and something similar can be said about the Bobster's own powers of recall in Chronicles, Volume 1. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that both were so intelligent and observant, filled with a hungry curiosity about everything.)

But the great thing about her book is that it encompasses so much more than just a recap of their doomed relationship. She evokes an entire era, and is by no means limited to New York as a location. There are segments dealing with her experiences in London (briefly) and Italy, especially Perugia (at some length) and Cuba (surprisingly) that help the reader grasp the reach of individual consciousness at a time of rapid development.

She's also insightfully intelligent on the place of women in that world in the pre-feminist era. Indeed, her evocation of her own creativity and that of many of the young women she encountered in the period covered by the memoir foreshadow the happy changing of the times.

All in all a great read and I'd really like to learn more about Ms Rotolo's later life. I suspect it has proved a rich and rewarding one.

On The Buses

I'm doing my man of the people thing again, now resorting regularly to public transport since Noi is busy with the car. Last night I took the bus to a Boyos' Nite get-together at the bottom of Clementi Road and came back the same way. And today I bussed it to Masjid Darussalam for Friday Prayers, after which I walked up to Clementi Mall to put some money on my ez link card.

The Mall was fairly crowded, it being the eve of the Chinese New Year, and I was surprised to find the vast majority of shops there open. I grabbed a kopi susu at the Kopitiam place just outside to maintain my working class credentials - and actually felt quite pleased to meditate on just how much cheaper the drink was compared to its equivalent in the Starbucks near-by whilst watching the holiday crowd rushing around for their last minute purchases.

There's a lot to be said for playing the populist card.

Reason Enough

Not sure why I enjoy cleaning my bookshelves so much, but I do, which was reason enough to see me vacuuming those in the front room once I got back from work today. 

It helps that just rediscovering what's easily at hand here reinforces a happy desire for rereading. Case in point: the other day I was extolling the virtues of John Carey as a critic to one of my classes, citing his book on William Makepeace Thackery as being illuminating in the extreme on a writer who now seems almost entirely out of fashion. This, in turn, put it into my mind that I really should reread his book on John Donne (who, surely, can never go out of fashion) which I think is the better book. And just now I realised the tome in question is in this very room when I thought I'd have to wait for a trip up north to get hold of it.

Just remembered, by the by, that I bought John Donne: Life, Mind and Art from the upmarket Hatchards bookshop in London back in the early 1980s, the only book I ever got from there. I wonder if the shop is still around?

Most Appealing

Got completely hooked by Robert Galbraith's murder mystery The Cuckoo Calling. Unputdownable - except when I had no choice. It seems it's the first in a series featuring the sleuth Cormoran Strike (great name) and his assistant Robin Ellacut, with whom he teams up in the opening pages. It's very derivative and formulaic in the best possible sense: a writer who knows how to tell a story and create characters that you can't help but root for (the good guys) or thoroughly detest (most everybody else.)

By the way, Galbraith is a pseudonym for the entirely wonderful J.K. Rowling. I was never an out and out Harry Potter fan, but I was a great admirer of the craft of the first three novels in the saga (which I read) and only gave up at number four (which I didn't) because of its length and my understanding that I wasn't the intended audience. But the Strike series is intended to appeal to me, or, rather, the side of me that loves a good story, especially a good murder.

(And also by the way, the word sleuth originally meant a track or trail, deriving from an Old Norse word. It then found itself transformed from its use in the term sleuth-hound, meaning a bloodhound that could track fugitives on a trail, into a term for a detective by our Yankee cousins.)

On The Surface

I've sometimes lamented here in the past over the boring nature of my dreams. It all seems a bit odd for a sort of imaginative chap like me. Case in point: After doing the dawn prayer on Saturday I went back to sleep and managed to have a mild nightmare about losing some kind of travel ticket. One minute it was in my hands, then I placed it into a bag I was holding, a sort of briefcase, and then it just vanished. Basically the dream involved me looking everywhere for the ticket, with increasing panic, and then I woke up, mildly relieved. Not exactly deep, eh? I'm not sure that even Freud on a good day would have made much of it all (though I suspect he would have come up with some embarrassing stuff about the bag.)

And here's another odd thing. Since my Delirium back in 2022 I haven't had a single genuinely disturbing dream. They've all been happily mediocre. Yet when I was in Fantasyland everything was extreme, with the violent stuff approaching levels of yuckiness that I still find a bit startling. So if all that was in my head back then, where exactly did it go? (Not that I want any of it to come back, of course.)

In a way it's sort of interesting to be a mystery to oneself - but it would be nice to be given some sort of solution.

Nearing The End Of History

Sorry to sound unnecessarily apocalyptic in the heading above, but I'm actually referring to Robert Lowell's collection of sonnets niftily entitled History which I've been ploughing through in my great read-through of the Collected Poems. To be honest, my reading has been less than great since, as regular visitors to this Far Place will have most likely noticed, I've struggled to get through the sequence and it's been quite an effort to keep going. Basically a lot of the sonnets have gone way over my head. Partly I blame Lowell for being so darn learned, patrician and generally high & mighty; but largely I blame myself for lacking the necessary. I mean, I'm supposed to be reasonably good at this culture thing so it's a bit of a downer to discover I'm not. Especially in relation to a writer whose considerable best I greatly admire.

It's a bit like not being able to listen to late-period John Coltrane.

But here's the good news. I've started to enjoy whole sonnets now I've reached the 60s. Perhaps it's just a matter of my reasonably close familiarity with the context, but the stuff written about the events of the later years of the decade seems to work for me. This came home strongly when I came upon a sequence of four poems across two pages all of which I felt I 'got' in a way I didn't in relation to any of the early stuff. For those interested, the four poems in question were: Monkeys, Churchill 1970 Retrospective, De Gaulle's Chienlit, and De Gaulle est Mort. Mind you, I needed the notes at the back of the edition to explain chienlit which my incredibly poor French didn't stretch to.

I'm now keen to check in my Faber Robert Lowell's Poems, A Selection, edited (I think) by Jonathan Raban, as to which of the poems were picked for the selection. I can't say I recognise more than three or four from memory. But since it's on the shelves at Maison KL I'll just have to hold on.

On A Roll

Received a couple of books as gifts early in the year, and they've gone down a treat. Read Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor a week or so ago and greatly enjoyed it. Never thought a novel firmly centred on Mathematics (and Japanese baseball) would engage me, but this one did. And it was genuinely moving in its conclusion. Now reading a very fine murder by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling in drag) and it's a blast. Hoping to finish it soon to find out whodunnit, but don't want to rush.

And, not exactly a gift but free from the library, I dipped into the opening pages of Bob Dylan's Greenwich Village girlfriend Suze Rotolo's memoir A Freewheelin' Time and found myself fascinated by her life pre-Dylan, as it were. Obviously a strong character in her own right/write.

 And now it's back to Galbraith's engaging sleuth and a few more pages before hitting the pillow.

Left Undone

Two jobs left undone from today's to-do list. Displaced by a visit to the gym and a visit from family in the form of Rozita, Fuad, Fafa, Idham & adik, plus Fifi back from her duties. Rather pleased than otherwise at my prioritising. At one time leaving stuff unfinished sort of bothered me; now it sort of doesn't. Progress, I suppose. 

Just Getting Started

Must say, E.S. piles it on a bit at the outset of Februarie in The Shepheardes Calendar. How about this from the Argvment?: 

It specially conteyneth a discourse of old age, in the persone of Thenot an olde Shepheard, who for his crookednesse and vnlustiness is scorned of Cuddie an vnhappy Heardmans boye. The matter very well accordeth with the season of the moneth, the year now drouping, and as it were, drawing his last age. For as in this time of yeare, so then in our bodies there is a dry and withering cold, which congealeth the crudled blood, and frieseth the wetherbeaten flesh, with stormes of Fortune, and hoare frosts of Care. 

I get the point about the storms and care and the freezing flesh, especially having encountered some pretty fierce air-conditioning today, but happily my year doesn't seem to be drooping at all. Just revving up to full steam ahead, especially with a break for Chinese New Year lurking just around the corner.