In The Flow

I've been so busy lately that getting any reading done, other than that directly related to work, has been difficult, but I'm pleased to say it's not been impossible and below follows some evidence thereof.

Yesterday I finished Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It came to me highly recommended but I wasn't extraordinarily impressed though it was certainly readable. What I found problematic was the feeling that there were really two separate books here combined uncomfortably into a single text. One book, the one I enjoyed, was a well-grounded well-referenced exposition/exploration of a reasonably convincing explanation/description of a psychological state with which, I suspect, we are all familiar and which is worth some consideration. The other book was a sort of grand theory-of-everything self-help manual, of the kind that's intended to sell well and change the lives of enough of the people who read such manuals to muster some sort of validity (and boost further sales.) This book featured lots of those irritating potted biographies of the lives of the great and good, and equally irritating similar pieces on folk you've never heard of but are led to believe are the bees' knees. The problem is that once you realise that any life, no matter how small, will be contradictorily slippery enough to defy any simplification it's impossible to take those things seriously.

In the meantime I've been plugging on slowly with Saul Bellow's Herzog, a novel I last read at university. Now this does involve a refreshingly slippery, utterly convincing life. I must confess, there's a bit of guilt involved in my reading. All those years ago I reached the conclusion that Bellow wasn't up to much compared to Mailer and Malamud, the two other writers on the course I was taking in the contemporary American novel (or something like that.) Even then I knew I was missing something and my verdict was way off the mark and it's chastening to be made aware of just how badly wrong I was with almost each paragraph. I'm going slowly because I want to because it's that good.

Other things to mention: my Complete Verse of Rudyard Kipling is my lucky dip at the moment - a bit of a cheat as you really can't lose so there's no real luck involved. And I bought Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled on a whim last week when I realised it was based around some exercises on writing verse. I've tried a couple and they're highly engaging. This is, of course, the kind of thing we should be doing in schools in English classrooms, but it's not and is never likely to be. As our American cousins would say: go figure.

Dionysian

We spent most of yesterday evening at school, enjoying the four plays that made up Centrestage, a sort of competition for drama run by the younger end of Drama Club. There was a lot of talent on stage, huge amounts of energy - sometimes anarchic, heaps of humour of the more obvious variety, and an abundance of joy in the act of creating something for the moment. The lords of misrule came to visit us for a short while and I think we are all the better for it.

We ignore Dionysus at our peril - as Euripedes showed us in The Bacchae. Some wise words therein: The best and safest way to live / Is to keep a balance, acknowledge / The great powers around us and in us. / I think that is what is meant by wisdom. Which puts me in mind of more ancient wisdom in that famous Greek motto - Nothing in excess - including the gods of rationality, law-making, regimentation.

Sunk

I've not been terribly impressed with what the History Channel, one of the more recent additions to what's available on cable here, has to offer, but I did enjoy a programme tonight about the sinking of Cunard's Lusitania. There was a sense of real objectivity involved and you got some understanding of why the Germans felt compelled to do something stupid enough to push the United States even closer to joining the war in Europe. Over a thousand souls went down with the great liner and, I suppose, one might almost attempt some analogy, but not one that really works, with the events of 11 September 2001.

The great ship has now been lost in history as well as the devouring ocean. I don't think anyone will ever consider doing a Titanic on it, though I think it's a better story in its way. Certainly a more troubling one. When I was a kid it already seemed several lifetimes away and now it's forever.

If anything survives of all it meant I suppose it might be Charles Ives's wonderful tone poem (I suppose that's what it is) From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose. It gets my vote as the most moving music written in the twentieth century.

The comfort in all this is that we too will be washed away one day and become as distant as Lusitania. If we're lucky we'll get our Ives.

Dylan In Mind

Bernard was asking me today, apropos something he's thinking about for a Theory of Knowledge, lecture, if I was familiar with Dylan's songs - namely one that went Analyse you, categorise you… I recognised the line as coming from All I Really Want To Do, but actually wasn't too sure it was, in fact, Dylan. I wondered if it was something by The Byrds and I think it was their version of the song that was running through my head (that is, if they covered it.) Back home I dutifully looked it up in my copy of Lyrics 1962 - 1985 to establish it came from Another Side of Bob Dylan. That explained my lack of familiarity as I've never owned the album. What was more startling was my realisation of just how well-crafted the lyric is, being full of seemingly effortless internal rhyme and gorgeous assonance,.when I had never noticed this at all, though having some degree of familiarity with the song. Moments like this remind me of just how extraordinarily talented some people are and how much there's still to really discover about singers and writers and artists in general whom I like but even now don't fully know. For some reason that made me feel very cheerful.

And I Quote

On a particularly bad day (don't ask!) I have a habit of reaching for my chunky William Blake: The Complete Poems for something healing. Today it's: If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. A soothing poultice round a seething brain.

Snowbound

Phoned Mum yesterday who reported a thick blanket of snow in Hyde for Easter. It didn't look particularly snowy at Old Trafford on tv yesterday, where Liverpool got buried by something else - partly their own stupidity. I mean, hands up, is there anyone out there who didn't know Mascherano was going to get himself booked a good fifteen seconds at least before he did so?

For lovers of good music: there's a gorgeous track on Donald Fagen's solo album Kamakiriad entitled Snowbound, a piece he wrote with Walter Becker and featuring Becker playing all over it (some sensational bass) which really makes it a Steely Dan song in all but name. I think it's better than anything on the two (great) Dan albums which came after, which is a measure of just how good it is.

Two Things

First: the sight, usually preceded by the sound, of little kids wearing squeaky shoes always makes me smile and occasionally even laugh out loud. It must drive their poor parents crazy though, the sound I mean.

Second: I heard the phrase (or compound word) time-starved on the World Service yesterday and fell in love with it. It came from the lips of the CEO of the company that make Pepsi, and, I think, means very busy (but with managerial knobs on.)

More Good Times

Enjoyed an all-too-brief confab in the early afternoon, at the Lagoon Hawker Centre, with two wise men - Brian (Ng) & Tony (Green.) We didn't have quite enough time to put the world to rights, but got some of the way there. The odd thing is that the solutions to the problems we were mulling over are quite obvious. That hoary cliché It's not rocket science inevitably suggests itself. Keeping up the clichés, said solution(s) simply require a paradigm shift but the problem is that the people who need to shift the paradigm are the ones who keep telling you that you need to be ready to shift paradigms. But the teh halia was excellent, as was the roti john (which needed to be at no less than nine dollars a shot!)

Good Times

A day spent at home with the missus, even one occupied by marking, is always good. This has been one of those days.

The (literal) highlight of the evening: a gorgeously full moon over the sea at East Coast Beach, casting a wide road of uneasy light upon the ocean. Wah, so beautiful, eh, the sea? said Noi. And she was not wrong.

A close second: a bowl of curry laksa, Still Mansion style. It just doesn't get any better.

Waste

Heard some bad news this evening, from a former colleague and great friend, concerning an ex-pupil of mine. The news involved the taking of a life and the price that will have to be paid for that. Teaching often involves the pleasure of knowing that what you have done for someone has, at least in a small way, had positive consequences. It also involves, inevitably, sadly, sometimes despairingly, your failures.