A (Very) Minor Achievement

My resolution for 2011 was NOT TO PANIC. Broadly achieved, with some doubtful moments.

Now thinking of something suitable for the year in view, over the horizon - though there's always mileage in the above, of course.

My Back Pages

I'm about to complete my appointments diary for the year, with the new one for the year ahead also operational, as this week overlaps, being covered by both editions. Creature of habit that I am, I use the same type of diary (week to a view) each year, and have done so for thirty-something years.

Glancing through the contents for 2011 I am, as usual, faintly surprised by just how much got done. Looking at the generally blank pages for 2012 I am, as usual, mildly unnerved by the thought of just how full they're likely to become.

Rising Damp

In the car, on the way to the supermarket this afternoon, Noi suddenly brought to my attention the fact that my shoes were unsightly - to say the least. I wasn't able to look down at that moment, driving as I was, but at the supermarket I realised what she meant. Faint patches of whitish mould embellished the surface of each of the pair so that they looked for all the world like something a tramp might have picked up from a bin, thinking they might last a couple more months. A quick rub with one of the Missus's wonderful all-purpose damp cloth thingees solved the problem, showing that, appearances notwithstanding, the sort-of-mould didn't go very deep. But it was a reminder of the penetrating nature of the climate here.

You see the shoes were my back-up pair, left outside our place in Singapore, and left there clean I assure you, one month ago. That's all it took for the damp humidity to get to them - this being the rainy season - and how! In fact, on entering the apartment yesterday you didn't need a particularly strong nose to gain an immediate awareness of the fact it had not been lived in for almost a month and there had been a lot of rain. It smelt wet, a sort of woody wet. This is a smell I first encountered in the August of 1988, on arriving in Singapore. It permeated my room at the Garden Hotel, where I stayed for a couple of weeks, and that wasn't a particularly run-down room - but it had some old wooden furniture that was suffused with the odour. The sweet decay of the tropics.

Funnily enough Noi has been talking quite a bit in the last month about how much she misses the English winter, specifically, I think the cold clear frostiness you get at sub-zero temperatures. A couple of nights of that would certainly do something to our warm tropical damp, though I'm not quite sure what that something is. But I don't miss the winter at all. I sort of enjoy our warm damp.

Further Consideration

Was thinking of the nature of art the other day, partly prompted by my sudden realisation that I might have to lecture on this very topic for our Year 6 students quite early in the new year, but also due to two strands of my reading.

I completed Joyce's Portrait and was reminded of just how good that stretch of dialogue is in Chapter 5 between Stephen and Lynch - though dominated, of course, by Stephen - on art and beauty. I think Stephen's definition of beauty, through Aquinas, is the single most insightful set of ideas I've ever come across regarding aesthetic experience, and this is given even greater resonance by being given a semi-ironic placing and presentation in the novel.

And then later in the day, idly browsing some blogs related to philosophical concerns, I came across this post by Mike LaBossiere with its attendant comments. In truth this all seemed a bit second rate after the electricity of Joyce at his brilliant best, but it served as a reminder of some basic, not terribly well thought through, positions people tend to take in this area.

Whenever I give myself over to consideration of these matters I get a sense that I'm dealing with something of huge importance - possibly crucial to our lives - and something that everyone knows is important. And yet somehow this area of human experience and endeavour forever lies beyond our ability to adequately conceptualise it.

Something Lasting

The proggy music I bought the other day - Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull - still sounds fresh to me, but then a significant part of that self is still aged seventeen and loves this kind of thing. I imagine material like this is still getting issued due to the fact there are enough old geezers like myself around who've never quite grown up, prepared to shell out the readies in order to live again their misspent youths.

That seems to me true, but in a limited way. I also think the material genuinely lives because it is of worth. And I would guess that it's picking up listeners a good deal younger than myself, some a long way from being born when it was originally recorded. Just as I more than happily listen to, say, recordings by Duke Ellington and hear them as something new. In fact, a quick look at reviews of albums at amazon.com and the comments sections under various proggy items uploaded to youtube.com reveals the degree to which younger listeners are a distinct part of the audience with an ear out for these oldies.

So the question I'm asking myself is how long albums produced in the sixties and seventies, to pick out the two decades in which the recording process had become sophisticated enough to routinely ensure first rate recording of a diverse range of talent, are going to be made fairly easily available and have an audience ready to listen to them, and, of course, this goes beyond the rather narrow confines of what was once termed progressive rock. If the answer is forever, or as long as there is a forever, then this will constitute an important cultural shift. The past will always be close behind, nudging up to the present in consoling and depressing ways, telling us that nothing ever ever ever really changes. I suppose that's always been the case, but one never made with quite the kind of immediacy that can get imprinted on a CD.

(And it's just occurred to me - pardon my obtuseness in failing to see the obvious - that we now no longer even need the physical CDs for the music to be readily available. Can it ever go away? Will its lastingness confirm some kind of value being inherent within it?)

Playing Catch-up

I bought two issues of the New York Review of Books this year - from the magazine stall at Holland Village, the one on the corner near the MRT, where they sell a good deal cheaper than at Borders - and it's taken me until now to read them cover to cover. The younger me would have bought more and built up an impossible backlog, and ended up feeling guilty, so I've obviously learnt something over the years, though not very much all told. I thoroughly enjoyed reading both and hope to increase the number of issues I get to buy and read next year, but I'm not banking on doing so.

The problem is there's so much I'm keen to read in terms of actual books that reading articles feels like a bit of a cop out, a sort of undeserved holiday. And reading one book inevitably leads to just having to read something linked to it. Case in point: I'd no sooner put Dubliners down the other day than I just had to dive into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reading the first chapter in a couple of hours, even though I originally had no intention of doing so. At the same time I was also caught up in a fast read of Hamlet, the latest Arden edition which is based solely on the second quarto. At least reading the new Arden was not exactly a reread as it is a new edition. (I've also been dipping into my older edition, the one edited by Harold Jenkins, which I've always thought of as the single best Arden edition. In light of the newer edition it now seems a bit dated, inevitably.)

Oh, and I've been reacquainting myself with Whitman's Song of Myself as one of my students is doing her Extended Essay on old Walt and it occurred to me that it's been a heck of a time since I opened my Collected Whitman - I'd forgotten that I'd relocated it to the shelves at Maison KL and was pleased to see it again when we got there in early December.

The wonderful and intimidating thing about having an interest in books is that there's never any shortage of things to be read and no chance at all that you'll ever actually catch up on your reading.

A Green Christmas

Whatever the colour of your Christmas, may it be merry and bright.

Dancing Out

I have resisted buying any books at all in our time here, despite having spent some time in a fair few bookshops - except, that is, for the books bought for the kids. So in this respect I feel virtuous, which helps balance a slight degree of guilt over having somewhat impulsively purchased no fewer than four CDs. The impulse was provoked by my surprise at seeing quite a decent range of 1970's proggy type material in what was otherwise an entirely run of the mill DVD/CD store in the Mid Valley Megamall. I assume someone involved in running the store has some kind of special interest in the period, resulting in a tasty selection from the likes of Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Yes, Barclay James Harvest et al. (But with some odd lacunae - no Crimson, for instance.)

Anyway, duly tempted I walked out with Tull's Heavy Horses, Yes's Drama and Tormato, and Selling England By the Pound from the classic Genesis line-up. Of the four I'm familiar only with the Genesis, which I had on vinyl in the early seventies, so it was interesting exposing myself to material that I should know, have heard plenty about second hand, but have never in fact listened to.

The one with which I am familiar inevitably brought back memories of a time when I considered Messers Gabriel, Rutherford, Banks, Collins & Hackett as quite the coolest dudes on the planet - except nobody said dudes then. And then trawling the wilds of youtube I discovered this video of them doing what I think is the best track off the album live - which I think proves the point that they were (extremely cool) for any reader not around at the time. Click on Dancing With The Moonlit Night and enjoy a bit of a dance, do.

Relocation

We're now in Alor Gajah, Melaka having delivered our various erstwhile houseguests back to the loving arms of their parents. I always feel a mild sense of relief in returning them safely, considering all the things that can go wrong in the big, bad world. It's an oddly timorous attitude but I know that such timidity lurks in my character - which is why I strive to hide it and get on with life reasonably fearlessly.

Mind you, I would suggest that when driving in this land a reasonably fearful attitude is, well, reasonable.

Making A Connection

The stint of rereading some of the texts I'm teaching next year is having an odd effect on me. I got through The Great Gatsby feeling entirely detached from the characters, though relishing the precision of the writing. This was quite a different experience from my previous reading of the novel, I think around about a year ago, when I found myself deeply involved in the enigmatic Jimmy Gatz in a way I'd never managed before.

Then it was on to Dubliners, and a similar sense of detachment. I read story after story with an unpitying eye, though feeling deeply involved at the level of style. This may have had something to do with the fact I will have to teach the stories - whatever that means.

Then I arrived at The Dead and something happened. Joyce's polished looking glass somehow evoked that simple sense of compassionate fellowship with his deeply flawed, deeply human citizens of dear dirty Dublin that I think many academic critics miss. I suppose it's because something in me identifies with Gabriel Conroy in a way that is the opposite of reassuring, and yet affords access to some troubling truths. Gabriel is trying to be a good man and in some important ways succeeding. If you are dead to the fact his speech at dinner is genuinely touching it seems to me you don't stand a chance of grasping what Joyce is up to. Yet that speech is, at the same time, deeply self-serving. Not either/or: both. So we are invited to judge him, yet the complexity of what we must deal with resists easy judgement. Like life. And all along we are judging ourselves.

When I got to the reference to Aunt Julia probably dying in the year ahead that comes just before the end of the story I suddenly realised just how much of a tribute to the two rather foolish sisters at its centre the story is, once you shift your attention from Gabriel and his concerns. My own eyes momentarily filled with the kind of generous tears that Gabriel becomes prey to in the final sequence. But, of course, Joyce alerts us to our capacity for ultimately selfish sentimentalising so we can feel that we have somehow learnt something, moved forward through his art.

I think Joyce takes us as far as fiction can go in an awareness of its powers and its real limitations. If not here, then certainly in what follows.