At An Extreme

I wondered last weekend whether I might finish Yan Lianke's The Four Books before the working week began. It was proving a fascinating read. I wasn't at all sure I had a solid grasp on the allegorical elements of Yan's account of the years of the Great Leap Forward, but the broad outline seemed clear enough and the surreal power of the plights of the various characters stuck in the Re-Ed camp by the Yellow River was clear enough. The novel won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 and that was obviously a fitting award.

Up to the final seventy or so pages I'd found Yan's story easy enough to read in the sense of not being too overwhelming in its sense of outrage over the historical events involved. I suppose I'd been half-expecting something along the lines of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and was a touch relieved to avoid that level of intensity. But what started to slow my reading down last weekend was the advent of the famine resulting from the insane agricultural practices that the second half of the work turns its attention to; quite simply, I found it difficult to deal with pages evoking the grim reality of starvation on a grand scale.

So I've spent the week dipping into the ensuing horrors attendant upon people starving to death, finishing the novel today negotiating depictions of cannibalism made all the more horrendous due to the deliberate blandness of the descriptions thereof.

I've never read anything quite like this before. Brilliant stuff. But close to unbearable.

A Wonderful Secret

In my early teens the director Ken Russell was a big name in cinema, for the Brits at least. It's a lasting regret of mine that I've never seen his highly controversial movie The Devils since I loved Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon on which it was based. Thinking back, I was too young to get in the cinema to see it when it first came out and I don't think it ever made it to the goggle box. But Russell's wonderful films based on the lives of various composers were usually repeated on the Beeb and, in that sense, easily available.

Now, of course, the wonders of modern technology mean that we're just a couple of clicks away from being able to watch nearly every single music-themed offering from Russell on our personal devices (though The Devils remains, probably sensibly, out of reach.) And just today I discovered there are more such films than I realised when The Secret Life of Arnold Bax popped up in my YouTube feed.

For once the algorithm got it right. Glorious stuff.

One Of Those Moments

I'm writing this in the brief pause between two bowls of porridge. Consuming them, I mean. The Missus asked if I wanted more after I dispatched the first hot, supremely tasty, bowl and, nothing loath, I readily assented to seconds.

What's not to like, eh?!

A Bit Of A Risk

I'm glad I've never been placed in any position in which I've had to make genuinely momentous decisions. In general I think I get a lot of things right; but I'm keenly aware this leaves room for getting a fair number of things wrong.

I'm pretty sure that if I had things my way as dictator of the world I'd prohibit the ownership and possession of smartphones for anyone fourteen or under. An article relating to such a ban appeared in The Graun today, and confirmed me in this belief. Must say, even if I knew this was likely to turn out to be a wrong-headed decision, I reckon I'd still go ahead and make it. The glimpse afforded of a saner, safer world would be worth the opprobrium likely to descend on my old grey head.

Convinced

Zoomed through Ibrahim Abdul-Matin's Green Deen over the weekend. Not quite what I expected. I assumed I'd be getting a fairly systematic exposition of the case for a sort of environmentalist view of Islam and was given no such thing. The writer makes the assumption that there's no real case to make as the fundamentally 'green' outlook of Islam is obvious, a no-brainer, if you like. And he's right. 

What we get is a simple, deliberately, relentlessly repeated sequence of ideas revolving around the key terms: tawhid, ayat, khalifah, amanah, adl, mazin to hammer the obvious home. And this works brilliantly, such that the reader is more than happy to then read of the practical applications of real environmental action as seen in the writer's country, the USA, with a few supplementary examples from other nations.

So the book turns out to be a kind of inspirational yet practical manual of how to get green stuff done. For this reader that seems to be exactly what is needed in his life, in which he's well short of doing anything significant. So far he's just been paying lip service to an area of his life that demands far more.

A Very Minor Triumph

It is with some small astonishment that I herein record I have very nearly managed to do the necessary regarding the infamous VEP (Vehicle Entry Permit) for our journeys to Malaysia. We had dutifully got our VEP prior to the pandemic, but at that point never had to make use of it. When we were told around the middle of last year that the whole thing would have to be re-done in order for us to be allowed entry by November 2024 we suffered a mild panic, like most drivers here did, knowing that the process was likely to be difficult. In the event the process proved pretty much impossible for us since actually having recorded the data for our vehicle under the old system turned out to be a major obstacle for obtaining a ‘new’ VEP due to the software systems involved turning out to be spectacularly incompatible. But, happily, entry to Malaysia without the VEP has been easy since the Immigration there just seem to ignore it, so it’s been business as usual.

However, we are nothing if not persistent and when Noi suggested we ask Sanusi to have a go getting the VEP for us it struck me as a reasonable strategy. So last Saturday we were pleased to host not Sanusi himself but his son and daughter, Faris & Idora, and Idora’s husband. Amazingly they were able, after a couple of hours' work, to get us registered for the thing, though an important step involving something called a TouchNGo eWallet proved beyond their considerable powers. And then today, against all odds, I got the wallet thing to work.

We haven’t actually got the device to stick on our car that we need to acquire yet, but it’s close. So close.

Another Walk In The Park

Spent a highly agreeable morning at West Coast Park, followed by a rather jolly cuppa & prata at our favourite eatery on Clementi Road. Lots to appreciate in the park, including an unusual profusion of chickens & their chicks. And a fairly recent phenomenon: the fascination of watching folk who appear to be filming themselves for what I believe is known as 'social media'. One young lady, dressed to the nines, seemed to think she was performing on the catwalk of an expensive and expansive fashion show. Highly expressive.

Election Fever

We're sort of watching the coverage of the GE here on the goggle box as I write with a reasonable amount of interest. I don't think there are any big shocks but I don't know enough of the details to know what exactly might constitute a shock. When one considers the out and out idiocy of some recent results in supposedly politically sophisticated nations, it feels reassuring to be located in a Place that a sort of healthy if unexciting rationality holds sway.

Actually the best result of the day for me has been the numbers I posted at the gym when I visited just after mid-day. It seems I'm fitter at this grand old age than at any time in the last twenty or so years. A bit selfish of me to be more concerned with this than national affairs - but just keeping it real.

On The List

I've slimmed my list of current reading to just four tomes, and one of these is a long term project, this being Finnegans Wake. (I might finish Joyce's final masterpiece/folly in around five years based on current progress. I'm in no hurry.) I'm also resigned to sticking with Henry Vaughan: The Collected Poems, finding enough pleasure here & there in the early stuff to make it worthwhile, despite the temptations offered by John Clare (and others.)

And now I've got Sherlock Holmes out of the way I'm full on with The Four Books by Yan Lianke. I'd not heard of one of China's most acclaimed writers before which is deeply embarrassing. He's good! Very readable. But I still wanted to make room for some non-fiction running parallel to my main read and settled on Ibrahim Abdul-Matin's Green Deen which I picked up at Wardah Books the other day. Very clear and, again, eminently readable - and, deeply practical; possibly a necessary book for me at this stage in my life.

So lots to occupy me over the long weekend. And beyond.

Ups And Downs

What an odd concoction as a writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was. Genuinely gifted and splendidly clumsy. I'm not at all sure he had any real awareness of his considerable strengths and alarming weaknesses. In his brief Preface to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, his final and very mixed offering of tales concerning Holmes & Watson, he refers to his more serious literary work, as if convinced of his having some kind of genuine status in the world of letters beyond the brilliance of his creation of the mythic pair. (Astonishingly he chooses to write two of the tales in The Case Book with Holmes as the narrator, when even the most obtuse of readers would be able to tell the writer that's two too many.) Indeed, the poor man lists his works in history, poetry, historical novels, psychic research and the drama in the sad belief that his stuff would somehow survive the ravages of time. As a youngster I really enjoyed The Adventures of Gerard and, I suppose, thought the tales were as well established as those of the Great Detective, and much funnier, but even those are pretty much out of print these days.

Since I finished the beefy Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes today I thought it might be appropriate to say something of the writer at his best, and worst, with a single example of each. Actually I was a bit surprised at just how much I enjoyed the tales in the final collection considering what a poor reputation they have amongst the Holmesian cognoscenti. I've got a feeling that The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger isn't highly thought of, never having seen an adaptation on telly and being aware in reading it that as far as I can tell there's little actual mystery for Holmes to solve. But I loved the evocation of the circus milieu at the centre of the story and the mythic power (there I go again!) behind the characterisation of the titular heroine. I found myself watching my own cinematic adaptation in my mind and knowing the tale could be made to work on screen. Very jolly stuff, indeed!

In stark contrast I was taken aback by the virulence of Conan Doyle's racism in his portrayal of the negro boxer, Steve, in The Adventure of the Three Gables. I think it's a reasonable argument to note that the writer's racist essentialism is never exactly far from the surface in his writing, but the ghastliness of the descriptions of this entirely minor character took me aback, and I'm not claiming the moral high ground of twenty-first century political correctness cum wokeness here. I've never read anything close to just how bad this is in, say, Kipling or Conrad. The good doctor had a deep personal problem, I'm afraid, and it tarnishes his work.