Abundance

I've just been listening to the fourth CD from Springsteen's box set Tracks, drinking in its mellowness and thinking: Good grief! This is stuff that didn't even make it onto the official albums. There's a whole significant career in rock music in this material alone. And then I thought: And this doesn't include all the extra stuff that was on the two CD set The Promise comprising the out-takes from the Darkness sessions. And then I thought: How does one guy get to be blessed with so much talent?

Must say, I'm glad he was.

Now off back to CD 3.

No Escape

Somewhat mysteriously I didn't get an invitation to today's royal wedding shindig. Not that this was a bad thing as I would have turned it down. Indeed I thought I might just escape from the whole affair being away in this Far Place.

Alas, this was not to be. In the mornings I now watch Sky News (since moving to the Hall) as BBC World only offers the rather tedious World Business Report at the time I'm preparing to leave, and it's very oriented towards news of events back in the UK. Normally this is palatable, if parochial (though the sports news is very good) but this week it's been wall-to-wall royal tedium. And then arriving home this afternoon, what do I find? The missus actually watching the whole thing on the goggle box. Fortunately I got her out into the real world for a cuppa - but I was forced to record the bit she missed. And now she's back in front of the screen drinking the whole sorry occasion in.

Fortunately I've been able to vent a bit by evincing violently republican sentiments in front of several bemused classes this week, and that's been fun. But otherwise what can I say, other than: the horror, the horror!?

Moving

Concluded The Corrections the other night to move on to Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. Looking forward to a change of continent, a change of period. But this is not to say I tired of Mr Franzen's fine novel.

In fact, if anything I think it got better towards the end. This surprised me as I half-expected the high energy narrative to run out of steam (a feature of a number of recent novels, I feel, especially American ones.) But the more I found myself understanding the Lambert family and their dysfunctionality, the more I felt emotionally engaged in their story. And father Alfred's deterioration over the final third of the novel was wonderfully, tenderly done.

Still Sitting Still

Last week at Friday prayers at the mosque on the Hill I found myself sandwiched between two little lads for the congregational prayer. Now something non-Muslims may not realise (I didn't when I was one) is how physical the prayers are when praying alongside others. I mean praying shoulder to shoulder means you get really close and personal, especially in the sort-of-seated positions. You don't have space to yourself and, of course, this is an important part of the greater meaning of the whole experience. You're definitely not alone and that's an inescapable fact.

Anyway, praying alongside the boys was a powerful reminder of how fidgety kids are. Both of them were doing their best to maintain the necessary stillness when standing, bending, kneeling and the like, but were failing quite spectacularly. I found myself envying them their inability to contain the abundance of life they each contained and was reminded of the admonition I regularly heard as a youngster, part question, part accusation: Why can't you keep still?!

Now I can keep still, but something has been lost, and I was glad those kids still had that something.

Sitting Still

On a day of frantic movement it's oddly disconcerting to stop and sit still. It's also very difficult. But rewarding.

Out Of The Way

Got quite a bit done over the long weekend, including a thorough cleaning of all the books at Maison KL (whilst the missus cleaned pretty much everyting else.) But I didn't get to finish Jonathan Franzen's highly enjoyable, highly charged The Corrections, or make too many in-roads into Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare, or Don Paterson's rather nifty collection of poems entitled Rain or last year's 3 December edition of the TLS (which I brought back from Manchester at the end of that month.)

So, as usual, I am behind with my reading. And, as usual, I'm finding it very difficult to be bothered by that fact. It's not a competition, you know! (Though I wouldn't be at all surprised if, one day, someone, somewhere, turns it into one.)

Don't Be My Guest

The stretch of highway from Shah Alam to Alor Gajah is especially bleak and monotonous when driven late on a Saturday evening. Concocting silly lists is the only way to deal with the boredom. So here's mine for Ten Writers You Really Wouldn't Want To Invite For Dinner (not in any order of merit): D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Count Leo Tolstoy (after he decided he was a bit of a prophet), Jean Paul Sartre (especially in the company of the De Beauvoir woman), Lord Byron, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, the Marquis de Sade and Ernest Hemingway. Yes, I know that's eleven, but how could anyone possibly leave out Hemingway? Honourable mentions, by the way, for William Wordsworth and Fay Weldon.

True Nobility

Drove up to the Malaysian capital after work yesterday, arriving around midnight. For once didn't agonise over what CDs to bring up here, settling for most of the Ellington material in my collection (with one Mingus thrown in, with a cover of Mood Indigo on it.) Now wondering why I don't own a lot more of the great man's recordings and how I can do reasonable justice to the ones I've already got. The output from the early recordings of the thirties to the seventies must surely be one of the greatest bodies of work in the twentieth century in any art form.

High Places

I dreamt a couple of nights ago of standing on some strange Roger-Deanish pinnacles of rock, of enormous height, and leaping from one to another as they gave way beneath me. I woke, heart racing, very frightened.

There are places in the mind that are not too much fun to visit.

Excess

Nobody does it quite as well as the Americans, and Jonathan Franzen is in the front rank of those doing it superbly. Now over the halfway mark in The Corrections and finding myself regularly carried away by the addictive verve of the central characters. Wonderfully vertiginous downward spirals keep opening up and dragging me down. I keep recalling how alternatively thrilling and awful it used to be to be drunk. How happy I am those days are long gone.