In-coming

Had a couple of conversations today related to social media and the Internet and various developments therein. The tone of both was downbeat, in that it's terribly easy to recognise various problems attendant upon the development of the new technology. It seems to me that at the heart of many of the problems now being recognised lies the difficulty of dealing with the surfeit of pretty much everything that the new technology provides us with.

We've got all we ever wished for - and it's overwhelming us.

Days Like This

We celebrated Teachers' Day at my place of work today. The concept relies on the seemingly naïve assumption of a genuine warmth in the relationships of students and teachers. Astonishingly it works. It's difficult to be cynical when faced with an overflowing generosity of spirit.

A Mixed Bag

Nodded off earlier in the evening listening to Seconds Out, the live Genesis album from 1977. This was not the fault of Messers Collins, Banks, Rutherford, Hackett and Thompson (with a bit of Bill Bruford in there somewhere) I hasten to add. Their playing was impeccable and I didn't miss Peter Gabriel too much - except perhaps on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway where Phil doesn't seem entirely at home with the torrent of lyrical reference. No, I was just plain tired and would have probably kipped to Crimson at their most ferocious.

But having said that it's interesting to ask whether Genesis aren't simply too good at producing something live that sounds as smooth as a studio performance. I remember old chum Hew inveighing against the later live albums of the early 90s for precisely this reason, comparing them unfavourably with the glorious incandescent mess of Dylan on Live Rain. So what should we go for: wonderfully precise musicianship on a par with classically trained players, or rocking out inspirationally on a wing and a prayer, and, just possibly, a surfeit of illegal substances?

I think the world is big enough for both. Well, mine is.

By the way, Seconds Out was one of my Tuesday purchases, and, I hasten to add, the only one that went back to 70's prog. The other stuff was (almost) current, though it could be argued that Bowie's The Next Day is redolent of past glories. Blur, Fleet Foxes and The Civil Wars comprised the other contemporary performers, whilst I also got hold of a version of Faure's Requiem, which I've not owned since the days of vinyl, and the two early Beethoven piano concertos - ditto.

A bit of a rattle bag, all told, and I'm rather pleased about that.

On A Spree

Spent yesterday afternoon downtown. My resistance has finally crumbled; I just had to buy some books and CDs. Though it's fair to say I didn't exactly buy the books - the tokens I got from doing my bit at the Lit Seminar provided the purchasing power and, despite off-loading the majority of these to three of my nieces, this was enough to create a bit of a headache for me in that there is no shelf space left either in the Hall or at Maison KL to house the new arrivals.

Actually, to try and reduce the damage in terms of the room to be occupied my policy this year, as last, was to go for slim volumes of poetry. This also seemed appropriate since I acquired the loot for the most part by extolling the virtues of particularly short poems. So I picked up collections by Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Charles Simic (a couple in his case), and Wislawa Symborska. Unfortunately there wasn't that much of this kind of thing available and I ended up maxing out the tokens with a couple of volumes closer to criticism than the real thing: Auden's The Dyer's Hand (which for some reason I've never possessed and suddenly decided I desperately needed to, on the grounds that this is great, mad, inspired, creative criticism) and Erica Wagner's book about Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters - Ariel's Gift - which I just had to own as a Ted & Sylvia junkie. I also need to confess that I had to cough up cash for one purchase that sent me over the limit, this being the first volume of Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing, which former student Rohan warmly recommended to me the other day when we were discussing the merits of various works designated graphic novels. 

I can confidently predict it'll take me until this time next year to work my way through this little lot.

Funnily enough I don't feel quite as guilty about the CDs, for which I paid hard cash, probably because we've still got room to store these.

On The Beach

I expected to enjoy McEwan's novella, and I did. A sad and disturbing little book - disturbing, that is, if you pick up on the hints of the sexual abuse of Florence by her father. Sad in the way McEwan reminds us of the vulnerability of human beings, that brittleness that everyone hides, even from themselves. And also their toughness, I suppose. There's more than a suggestion that Florence translates her trauma into art, through her music.

McEwan is good, as always, on the comedy, and tragedy, of how clumsily we inhabit these bodies. In fact, it's difficult to think of anyone else who's written about sexual inadequacy so directly yet without the slightest hint of prurience. Despite getting carried along by the narrative I found myself putting the book down several times and not really wanting to go on, it was all so obviously going to end in tears. Mind you, I finished it in a day - a sign of its readability.

Real Work

Painting's been on my mind of late. Not your Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse, Damien Hirst variety but good old house-painting as was once falsely associated with old, or, rather, young, Adolf Hitler. (Funnily enough I was never able to convince Mum that der Fuhrer had genuinely been an art student, such was the power of British wartime propaganda.)

Both our house in KL and our Hall in this Far Place have been painted inside and out in recent months and the painters have done a very good job of both, I reckon, at minimum inconvenience to the residents of either. Watching them at work reminded me of a time when I seemed to do a lot of similar work. It was just before going to university that I found myself having to paint many of the interior walls of our house in Denton and it wasn't a lot of fun. At the same time I happened to be working weekends in a cleaning job mainly centred on Ciba-Geigy at Trafford Park and I remember watching a couple of guys painting a canteen ceiling there, a massive one. I knew that if I were to find myself doing the same job I'd have been exhausted in under an hour, but these chaps just kept going relentlessly. The secret was, they explained, to never, ever rush. The calm, unhurried smoothness with which they applied the paint had something of the quality of a exercise in meditation. 

Something of the same quality applied to the painters who've done such a good job for us more recently. These guys have been 'foreign workers' as I understand things. The ones in the Hall were from Myanmar, and I don't think they earn fantastic wages. Yet it seems to me they do necessary and difficult work extraordinarily well - as do so many so-called manual workers.

How it is we've come to somehow look down on such workers and their work I have no idea. What I do know is that we're wrong to do so.

Busy Bees

It's been a busy two days, but by no means in an entirely negative manner. I'm reminded of the ubiquitous nineteenth century image of the busy bee, intended to sound so positive in its overtones. Who didn't love the fruitful industry of the old bumble-bee? You hardly hear of them now.

Anyway, we're just back from a series of Raya visits - full of goodies, rather too tired for our own good, but essentially smiling. And yesterday we ourselves hosted around forty folks all told from the late afternoon onwards, and very jolly it all was. That followed hard upon the heels of my involvement in the annual Lit seminar, which I always look forward to.

The only fly in the ointment, the dreary housefly amongst the bees, has been the need to find time to mark scripts, check files and the like. Some (unfortunate) things never change.

A Simple Truth

Some years ago I reached the conclusion that people are strange. Subsequent investigations suggest this truth may be in need of a degree of amendment. People are very, very strange indeed.

Reading On And On

Just finished The Duke's Children. Highly satisfactory ending - a little rain in all the sunshine. Poor Lady Mabel. And that's me done with Trollope for a while. I'm in danger of turning into a bit of an uncritical fan when there are other fish to fry.

Two such fish being McEwan's On Chesil Beach which I picked up at the library yesterday. And Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War 1914 - 1918, ditto. I need something fresh to lead me on.

When you're too busy to read, make sure you read, says this reader.

Shedding Light

There's a programme on BBC World entitled Impact, featuring Mishal Husain interviewing various luminaries on pressing issues of the moment. Tonight it opened with ten minutes or so of Ms Husain asking some nicely pointed questions of Prof Tariq Ramadan regarding current events in Egypt, with a particular emphasis on the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood there - Prof Ramadan's granddad having been amongst its founding members, of course. The good prof gave some nicely pointed answers and I felt I was genuinely beginning to grasp something about what might be taking place on the streets of Cairo and other fabled places. I was grateful to BBC World for the ten minutes - which I wasn't likely to get anywhere else - but part of me wondered why we couldn't have a couple of hours, or more. The other part knew the answer - one which doesn't reflect too well on our species and its powers of concentration.

One small point I really, really wanted to hear more about, and would have welcomed other informed voices commenting on. Ms Husain rightly raised accusations of members of the Brotherhood setting fire to Coptic churches in recent days. Prof Ramadan was very dubious as to whether any of this had been the work of the Islamists. It seems that the Muslim Brotherhood historically has had very good, even close, relations with the Coptic Church. It didn't add up, he noted, and conjectured that the army may have been setting the fires.

I'd like to know who's responsible, but I suspect I'm not going to find out with any degree of certainty until the flames have long died down, and possibly not even then. The problem is that there are a lot of people who are sure they know when they don't.