Other Worlds

The great VW Symphonic play-through continued early this morning, very early, in fact. I stayed up after the swubuh prayer and took the rare opportunity of silence downstairs, or anywhere in the house for that matter, to give the Sinfonia Antartica a spin. (On the packaging this is given as Sinfonia antartica, and I think I’ve seen this form before, but I don’t know why the capital letter gets dropped.) It turned out that the silence, though golden in its way, was not exactly silence. I had the windows open downstairs and a fair proportion of the local bird population seemed to take it upon themselves to sing a good deal louder than usual (fans of VW?) so the symphony took its course against that natural backdrop. It also turned out to be quite a hot morning, or a morning clearly promising midday heat, and that in itself posed a challenge of sorts to the icy serenity of the music. And, finally, two little girls made their way downstairs during the third movement, desirous of engaging me in yet another round of Happy Families. I successfully put them off until I completed the symphony (and then lost, yet again.)

Despite all the above, the seventh worked its considerable magic on me and I found myself transported to a very different landscape for most of its length. Where was I exactly? In a place of endeavour, chilled endurance, doomed aspiration. (Why did Scott’s story dominate the British imagination for most of the last century in a way that Shackleton’s failed to? I can only think that it was that sense of in-built, inevitable failure that haunts the whole enterprise that gave it a resonance beyond the merely heroic. The fact that Scott was a fool, and a supremely British one, is extremely helpful in this regard.) A place not made for our species, in which we are not welcome, but where we inevitably find ourselves, despite ourselves, because of what we are.

This is strange music. Recognisably Vaughn Williams, but something else. The lushness has gone. Textures are spare and hard. It’s obviously programmatic – see the penguins, feel the wind, the rolling sea, touch the ice – but there’s something going on much deeper than scene-painting. (But isn’t it wonderful that a ‘serious’ composer in the second half of the twentieth century could be writing stuff that’s so accessible. I mean, you really could put this in a movie!) I think the secret lies in the third movement, Landscape. This takes us to the heart of something that isn’t the ‘icy serenity’ of the glib phrase I tossed off earlier. There is a kind of calm, but it’s a calm founded on an extreme otherness, against which we can only haplessly struggle. We go marching into nowhere.

And this is the music of an old man! With another two symphonies to write!

Amusing the Troops

Keeping four kids occupied is stretching my meagre resources (of imagination rather than cash.) So far we’ve been jogging around the taman, played football on the little field, been swimming at Kelab Ukay and played Happy Families (I lost.) Keeping them fed falls exclusively to my wife whose work on that front approaches the heroic. Since she also essentially takes the lead in entertaining them, it’s easy to figure out who deserves all the awards in this household.

Keeping myself occupied is a whole lot easier, although it was difficult deciding what books to cart here from Singapore as choosing necessarily involved leaving behind stuff for which I might just develop a sudden craving. This is especially the case with some poetry that I really must get to grips with. I finally decided to devote a small part of the holiday to Browning, particularly as manifested in The Ring and the Book. I’ve made two abortive attempts at it this year and am still no further than the second book of twelve. I’ve cunningly supplemented this with his collection Men and Women which is an old friend, guaranteed to repay repeated readings. I also happen to have an old Penguin paperback selection of Browning’s Verse from the days when they still published such collections as wonderful introductions to poets.

Dish of the Day

We’re now resident in Maison KL after a smooth journey north yesterday. The 'we' in question comprise Noi, myself, Fi Fi, Fa Fa, Ayu, Ayiem and Rozaidah. The two girls came over to Still Road on Sunday and helped us post a pile of Christmas cards at the big post office building in Geylang on Tuesday morning before we set off on the bigger journey. We stopped at Abba & Mak’s in Melaka for a couple of hours, transferring the luggage to a larger vehicle and picking up the other kids. Auntie Idah was already here in KL as she’s been staying at our place whilst on some kind of English course with the British Council.

The highlight of our brief sojourn in Melaka had to be Mak’s famous Roti Telur Ikan Bilis, which loosely translates as egg bread with little fish. Mere words, however, fail to do justice to this most sublime of unhealthy snacks. Basically it’s white bread fried in a sort of egg-based confection, spiced to perfection, topped off by those fishy bits. Consumed with hot sweet tea, several pieces can arm you against any journey up the highway with a van full of noisy kids and some singer called Ashley Tinsdale(?) – out of High School Musical, I’m told – on the sound system.

Since our arrival it’s been largely a case of letting Mak Ndak keep some kind of discipline while I relax by completing my reading of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, which I must say I found to be a relaxing read. I suppose I found some fascination in seeing how Gaarder deals with each period of philosophy or particular philosopher he takes upon himself to explain to what I presume is meant to be a teenage audience. I’m not sure that he’s equally successful with each area; generally I felt he’s better on the early Greek stuff, but it’s certainly quite something to see an attempt to bottle the whole Romantic movement in terms that might be intelligible to a bright teenager. The problem is that I don’t think it can be genuinely made to work even for very bright young readers. There are quite a few examples of risibly clunky exchanges of ideas between Sophie and Alberto, which I suppose might be put down to an unsympathetic translation, though I doubt it’s as simple as that. It just looks like there are times when stuff intended for a reference book is making it into the novel because the form (an introduction to pretty much all major western philosophical ideas) dictates that it must be there.

I suspect the real audience for the book has been an adult one of people hungry for some kind of easy way into ideas that, by definition, are not easy.

About halfway through the book Gaarder starts with some mildly entertaining postmodern fictive games relating to the reality of Sophie and her world, extending, in their turn, to the characters of the frame story. I was interested to see how all this eventually panned out, but generally I don’t find this kind of thing terribly fulfilling. Once you’ve seen it (or read it) done (the first time for me being in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and I don’t think anyone has ever done it better) it becomes, paradoxically, a touch predictable.

Carpeting

I needed to go into work for a few hours today and found myself in the middle of the re-carpeting of the yellow level staffroom, an exercise for which I'd packed most of the stuff on my desk away to allow the workmen an uncluttered run at things. I think the workmen had only started today but by the time I walked in, around 10.00 am, they'd already pretty much finished around my desk, although they still had lots to do generally. I felt quite bad getting in the way, but they took the presence of teachers in their stride. By the time I left, in the middle of the afternoon, the job was well on its way to completion.

The unhurried but purposeful way the guys took the whole thing on, and how they worked around all obstacles, human and otherwise, was a reminder of work with a different set of rhythms than those to which I have become accustomed. I found myself thinking back to work in the factory, before I went to university, and the industrial cleaning jobs I did in my teens at weekends & holidays. The industrial cleaning particularly required that talent of getting things done without getting in the way of the 'real' workers you were serving, and always being ready to accept the mess that work required you to live with, yet uncreate. Not that I developed anything like the deft skills of the team laying the carpet today. That was also a reminder of how much I hated having to lay carpet in the house in those days when we couldn't afford to get proper workmen in.

In the way I understood work when I was eighteen, and the way Dad would have understood it, I haven't worked hard for years.

Marketing

We popped out to the market at Geylang Serai in the late afternoon for a tea & curry puffs and to buy some rice to take to Melaka next week (apparently there's more variety available in Singapore). There we ran into Ashraf, who used to run a prata shop in Katong and whom we came to know quite well a few years back. We hadn't seen him for quite a time since that shop ceased operation. It seems he now runs a weekend stall at the market (selling drinks) as well as another on one of the ITE campuses during the week. He introduced us to his wife of three years, who came over from India. Slight embarrassment ensued from the fact that we regularly buy tea from another stall nearby and, again, have got to know the stall holder there well, so we ended up, happily, drinking two cups, one from each - having to convince Ashraf not to serve us for free. When we first got to know Ashraf he struggled to communicate in Malay - I don't think he'd been very long in Singapore then - and now he happily converses in both Malay and English.

This is the Singapore I love, of the slightly run-down markets, which create a common space for a commerce of something that goes a bit further than mere commodities. It's this version of trade through which, I suspect, civilisation grew. I'm reminded of the fact that outside the first mosque in Medina a market grew up, and was seen as something of a natural extension of the communal space. Islam has never attempted too rigid a distinction between the different worlds we necessarily occupy. Rightly. A commerce, of sorts, of the invisible with the visible.

Nobility

Vaughn Williams's 6th Symphony is very odd. The first movement contains one of the great melodies, and after that it all falls away, deliberately so. The final movement is all wispy epilogue, reminiscent of the final passage of the 2nd Symphony in terms of mood, but now constituting an entire movement. It's almost as if the whole thing is a comment on the impossibility of that great, noble tune at the beginning - well. not quite at the beginning, actually towards the end of the movement - but the whole movement seems to consist of an attempt, sometimes stuttering, to get to the tune.

And what is going on in the final movement? There's too much real tension, regardless of the fact that it's all pianissimo, to hear this as serene acceptance. In fact, in the recording I was listening to this morning (as part of my VW symphonic play through) you get an extra recording of Vaughn Williams commending the orchestra for just how well they pull off the pianissimo, and he refers to the tension with which they imbue the music. (I must say, I did have a bit of problem with the recording on this one. It dates from the 1950's and there's just too much hum on the final movement to listen in complete comfort over headphones, as I was doing. I'd love to hear this in a concert hall - which I've never had the chance to do.) (The great man's accent, by the way, is quite extraordinary. He has one of those voices from early radio, with a sort of oddly pinched, contained quality, as if enunciating with great care. People really did have voices then.)

I hear the piece as the old man's understanding of a fallen post-war world. The dream of nobility, personal or national was over. As it is for ourselves. Isn't 'noble' a strangely old-fashioned word? And when was the last time we saw nobility in defeat?

I finished Vess and Gaiman's Stardust today. I deliberately strung out the reading over a few days, interspersing protracted bouts of putting together stuff for work next year with relaxed forays into the world of faerie. And it was that quality of relaxation that took me by surprise about the work. It lacks, at least to this reader, that disconcerting oddness, otherness, that Gaiman excels in. I suppose I was expecting something a bit more along the lines of Coraline. Stardust struck me as far more of a crowd pleaser - not that there's much wrong with that, and it certainly pleased me to read it. I felt that way about Vess's work as well: lovely to look at, as always, but perhaps open to the accusation of a touch of tweeness at times - almost too lovely. Still, if you must have a fault, that's one worth aiming for.

Rhymes

The girls are back in Woodlands until we pick them up again on Sunday, possibly, or Monday, to take them with us to KL on Tuesday. The following emerged from their short stay: Lice / Are Nice / With spice / But not / With rice. And: Fruit / Makes you cute. Pertinent stuff, I'd say. And we've got quite a few new art works on the refrigerator door.

Out

Euro 2008: Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground. Ouch. Well at least I didn't stay up to watch it live.

We went out with Fi Fi & Fa Fa this morning to a performance of Scrooge by the Little Company, the sort of children's branch of the Singapore Repertory Theatre. Aimed at six-year-olds the musical was resolutely un-Dickensian - the set looked like something from Sesame Street, as did a number of the puppets (cleverly) employed as spirits & the like - yet the basic story survived. The great stories are like containers into which we pour ourselves.

Dickens is so familiar you tend to forget how strange he is. Is Scrooge in any sense believable? The question is irrelevant. In him we recognise ourselves, and that's enough.

Planning

One of the curious features of modern times is the notion of a life lived around, or rather directed by, goals. It seems these are necessary in order to be effective. This rather begs the question of the point of this effectiveness. I suppose that effective individuals might be seen as somehow improving the quality of life for those around them, but in my experience this is rarely the case.

There is much to be said for ineffectiveness. I always feel sad when I'm told I'm efficient, sort of damned with faint praise. Fortunately this (the accusation of efficiency) is an increasingly rare occurrence. As far as I can, I write down as much as possible at work so I don't forget things. This is sometimes mistaken for efficiency. Actually it's survival, which is, I suppose, the full extent of what I might be said to plan for.

And now I plan to get some sleep.

Celebrity

This time last year Noi and I were engaged in preparations for a visit to England, and a rather jolly time we had there. This year we'll be travelling only as far as Malaysia. However, I have to admit to feeling some small relief at escaping being deluged for a month by the so-called 'celebrity culture' which in recent years has swamped the land of my birth. I was reminded of this the other day by a couple of items in the paper about famous young ladies (famous to others, I'd hardly heard of them) who it seems are messing up their lives by ingesting a number of substances that wiser heads might recommend flushing down the toilet, and being involved with gentlemen who would be better positioned at the end of an extremely long barge-pole. I'm afraid media coverage of this kind of thing is pretty much wall to wall in the UK to the point of inescapability. It's difficult to understand why anyone might find it interesting, except for the sad realisation that rubbernecking wrecks on the highway is obviously something of a primal instinct.

I suppose the most disturbing feature of all this is the almost complete absence of compassion towards the foolish but unfortunate young people who find their miserable lives gleefully dissected and rubbished here, there and pretty much everywhere. Yet despite all this I'm told that a lot of people actually aspire to lives of celebrity. Why? It surely can't be for the readies. You can make your fortune without it becoming a matter of public interest.

My guess is that for many people the idea of living in public is tied in with a notion that such a life is somehow more valid, more vital, more real, than the inadequacy of ordinary being. At one time I suppose we got by on the idea that God was watching us. Now we need an audience of millions.