Badged

My class gave me a badge today, customised to my needs I gathered, on which appear the words: I am surrounded by mindless fools. I asked if it was something I'd said at some point. No, but it was something they could imagine me saying. Interesting.

This was just one of several generous gifts on this annual day of almost boundless generosity from students to their teachers in this Far Place. As always, more than a little humbling.

Ownership

One of the things that struck me working in a factory in the early seventies was how keen the management was to own you completely in the hours for which they were paying you. Seriously, the one thing everyone on the factory floor knew was that under no circumstances could you be seen not to be doing anything if a manager walked by - even if there was nothing worth doing. This need to turn the individual into a kind of commodity is very deep rooted, and I see nothing in the notions of the 'free market' that affords any real protection from it. Indeed, it seems to me integral to that world.

Dickens knew this. He'd been there.

Telling Stories

Finished Full Dark, No Stars. Relished the sheer verve of King's story-telling. Couldn't wait to finish each of the four and loved the sense of variation among the first three. The final story, A Good Marriage, is in broad terms along the same lines as Big Driver though, but since I loved the second tale that was no bad thing.

Spent some time considering just how King manages to grip each and every time, but came up with no answers - except, possibly, his own obvious complete immersion in all four stories. As someone who has major problems putting together even a simple storyline I can only admire from a distance.

Now embarking on Val McDermid's A Place Of Execution. I need to become a real reader again.

True Royalty

Kick-started my campaign to get some proper reading done by buying a few popular titles cheaply at the little second hand bookshop at Holland Village to provide the necessary roughage. Wanted to be reminded of the power of stories just as stories, so started with Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, (great title!) the most recent of his quartets of long short stories. Am now most of the way through story number two, a humdinger entitled Big Driver, and can hardly wait to find out what happens next. (Story number one, entitled 1922, was fairly predictable stuff in Kingian terms, and fairly predictable was perfectly fine by me.)

Lit critic Harold Bloom loathes our Stevie. I've never been able to figure out why.

Obligations

Spent much of the day visiting for Raya. As usual, this was curiously tiring considering we were simply eating and drinking at a series of highly hospitable venues. As usual felt pleased to have fulfilled our obligations, obligations for once worth fulfilling.

After one of the recent terrible multiple shootings in the U.S. one commentator suggested the best protection against such dreadful occurrences is a sense of community. There's a deep truth in that.

Not So Entrepreneurial

Found myself lecturing today in a spot known as The Entrepreneurial Room. Thought this was very funny as I am possibly the least entrepreneurial person I know and I was lecturing, in very broad terms, about poetry one of the few things I know that pretty much defies commodification. To put that a little more simply, as I did to my young audience, you're not going to make a lot of money out of it.

(It would be quite illuminating, I think, to draw up a league table of poets based on their earnings.)

Quite enjoyed giving my lecture, but for me the highlight of the day was listening to the three student presentations I sat in for as a 'literary critic'. There's something about what happens when you see youngsters getting really engaged in what they've read that is quite magical. (I wonder if a school will one day name a room The Magical Room? Mind you, it's a hard billing to live up to.)

Reading, Again

I've not been terribly pleased with myself lately regarding what I've been reading. I'd planned to read Pickthall's translation of The Holy Qur'an in Ramadhan but only managed about a third of the text. And similarly I read only the first half of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's essays on Islamic Life and Thought. This was not, I hasten to explain, due to any lack of enthusiasm. I simply enjoyed the slow pace of repetitive ruminative reading - almost a kind of meditation at times.

This reading had cut across my on-going ordinary reading, but, to be honest, I wasn't really seriously getting on with much of anything when fasting month began. As the month ended I found myself having a poetical good time, as I explained the other day, and have only read one substantial thing else, which was a re-read which left me feeling almost as if it didn't count.

That book, by the way, was Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or The Murder at Road Hill House, and I have to tell you that good as it was the first time around it actually gets better on a second reading. When you know the ending, Ms Summerscale's utterly convincing solution, everything is seen, or rather read, in a new and illuminating light. The final chapters, dealing with the fates of various of the people involved one way and another in the murder, become powerfully moving in terms of the kind of redemption they seem to illustrate. So a good one to read on days when forgiveness was paramount.

But now it's time to make a list.

Getting Poetic

I've been sort of preparing a lecture for a Literature Seminar that's coming up this Saturday. I say 'sort of' as to the unpractised eye I reckon I could be mistaken as doing not too much of anything, except to open the odd book now and again and generally look dreamily distracted. But appearances deceive. I think pretty much the whole thing is now in my head as I've been running through a few ideas, and thoughts of poems to use to illustrate them, quite intensely - and, importantly, enjoyably - over the last two weeks.

Unfortunately I now have to prepare a few slides; it isn't that I really want them or need them, but everyone seems to expect this sort of thing nowadays. And they'll sort of help me to keep on track, I guess.

Anyway, to get to the real point of all this, I found myself dipping into Alfian Sa'at's A History Of Amnesia and my Oxford Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, in recent days just to check whether the poems I had in mind to pass comment on were appropriate for my purposes - which they were - and then just getting lost in the delights in both books. The little sequence of Mr Chia poems in Amnesia struck me as possessing a quite remarkable power, something I'd unaccountably failed to register when I first encountered the collection, and I found myself discovering delights afresh in Hopkins tucked away in poems I've somehow come to disregard over the years. The Bugler's First Communion springs to mind.

I honestly can't quite grasp the fact that generally people are not turned on to poetry in the way I am. Not that I mind that. If it isn't your cup of tea find something you can enjoy, say I. But something in me suspects you're missing out big time.

Beyond Words

I read an article a few weeks ago bemoaning the use of the Internet for the uploading of badly taken photographs. Talk about Canute ordering the tide to go back. I'm happy to be just another of the mob beating at the gates of civilisation on this one. (Apologies for the mixed metaphors and the iffy pictures - but Fifi also bears responsibility for a number of these.)

Just Visiting

We spent yesterday evening paying visits to an epic number of houses. And when I say 'we' I'm talking of a small crowd, almost a tribe in itself. I took along a copy of Alfian Sa'at's A History of Amnesia since this fitted neatly into one of my pockets, and perusing the odd poem here and there can be valuably illuminating in the gaps that tend to open up on these expeditions. Indeed, I re-discovered what a very fine collection it is, as well as re-discovering the pleasures of visiting our (hugely) extended family in Melaka.

I'll post some pictorial evidence of the day once we're back in our Far Place, which shouldn't be too long from now. We're intending to get on our way in the late afternoon. No standing still for us!