On A Plate

Noi has popped up to Melaka with Rozita just for the one night to see Mak who had a nasty fall recently. She's in quite a bit of discomfort as a result and we're hoping the two ladies can help cheer her up and sort out things around the homestead that may need attention. I'd have liked to have accompanied them but have rather too much on my plate at present - so it's set to be a working weekend. Fortunately there's also a fabulous shepherd's pie on my plate courtesy of the Missus and that's going to be receiving my full and fervent attention soon.

We all need something to look forward to, eh?

List, oh list!

Was entertaining myself in a free moment today by considering a list of the best concerts I've ever attended. What is it about drawing up lists that's so compulsive for chaps like me? Just thinking of the number of great writers who are or were compulsive list-makers makes me feel I'm in the best of company. To name but one, possibly the most compulsive of all: Robert Burton, he of the Anatomy fame. In a sense the whole of his magnum opus is a kind of uber-list, spiralling impossibly, gloriously out of control.

Fortunately I think I've managed to keep my list to a reasonable ten, based on the following: any concert making the cut had to have been: 1) so memorable I can still recall whole stretches; 2) without any draggy moments whatsoever; 3) utterly transcendent for at least ten minutes (and I'm talking about touching eternity here.)

Unfortunately I find myself unable to share my findings at the moment due to a nagging suspicion that ten is too round a number and I'm forgetting something magical. But, rest assured, I'll put an end to the suspense soon.

Charms That Soothe The Savage Breast

Spent a fair part of the evening listening to various students singing in auditions for a competition. When work involves something as delightfully enjoyable as this then the term 'work' seems a misnomer. Memorable in all the right ways.

Being Positive

When the genes for being angry about stuff were handed out I obviously received a fair few. Fortunately over time I've learnt to control those feelings with a reasonable degree of success, but I've always been thankful for having the capacity for such feelings, and I'm rather concerned about the development of a general social mind-set that might seek to deny them or regard being angry in an entirely negative light. I'm with Blake on this (as usual): Damn braces (and he wasn't talking about the things that hold your trousers up or put your teeth straight) and sometimes you need to be braced if you intend to effect change.

I'm very distinctly angry about something at the moment, and have been since Friday morning. (This has nothing to do with my students or loved ones, by the way, so don't panic if you're reading this and come under those categories and think I'm on the warpath.) What I'm angry about is small potatoes in the great sum of things and I've been very successfully not obsessing about it. But I have been coolly calculating the situation with an end in mind. I intend to do a small amount of good within my tiny corner of the universe rather than pretending that everything is okay.

I'm also keenly aware that it's no use being angry with the players involved in the situation, so I'm not, at least not in any conscious manner. But I'm quite prepared to reveal a degree of my anger to them as a means to an end. What I'm wary about is the distorting glass of righteous indignation - always a danger for someone of my kidney, but I'm not seeing too much of that around. And another thing I've learnt over time is not to allow a reasonable degree of reflection to turn into agonising. Once you know you have to act, then do so. And I will.

Everyday People

I've been meaning to say something further about Declan Kiberd's book on the greatest novel of the twentieth century (well, at least until I reread Proust and change my mind again) Ulysses and Us - The Art of Everyday Living, since finishing it a couple of weeks back, so now I will, partly prompted by Don Paterson's thoughts on the need for criticism based on the sheer human joy of lit. Kiberd's tome comes close, and to judge by some of the quotations from reviewers plastered over the paperback edition, and the garish yellow and orange cover featuring the hot blond reading Joyce's masterpiece, you'd think he'd pulled it off. But not quite, I'm afraid. There's too much here that gets bogged down in the usual critical apparatus. Not that that isn't worth reading for its insights. There are plenty of those in the traditional sense and as a sort of Joyce scholar myself I enjoyed them. But as an ordinary bloke I wish the prof had been a tad braver and really gone for the common man approach big time.

His thesis is pretty simple: Joyce had the wisdom to come to understand that the ordinary, everyday muddling-through that we all have to put up with, because it's all we've got, is a source of great joy and sanity that should be celebrated. His novel should be read for its capacity to help us endure rather than as great art as it recognises there's more than a little that's iffy about the whole notion of great art. The humour of the novel, and its tears, (and how often do these come almost as a single unit?) are not happy accidents but central to why we need to read Ulysses.

Out of the great mess of life we get this great mess of a novel. Rejoyce. (This last bit isn't Kiberd, it's me getting suitably carried away.)

Diversions

Cervantes's masterpiece is at the centre of my reading at present. It's going at a slow pace though. I'm just over a quarter of the way in and beginning to warm up to the Quixote - Sancho Panza relationship and all the playing around with meta-fictionality. It's nice to be reminded of how much more charming all this post-modern stuff was before we discovered it was post-modern.
 
I suppose things are going slowly precisely because I'm just warming up to it all and discovering how to read the novel in terms of pacing and focus. The digressions into other stories don't help, but I can't see much point in reading the novel at all if you don't try to grasp why Cervantes felt he needed to do this. Actually I've just passed the Cardenio story and quite enjoyed it. It helps to imagine what Shakespeare may have done with it, assuming he, in collaboration with Fletcher, probably did write a play using the tale, when reading Cervantes's take on it.
 
Also I've found myself having to branch off into other things, partly related to work. Back in KL at Chinese New Year I re-read Maya Angelou's Caged Bird since I'll be teaching it soon. It was not exactly a burden to find myself re-experiencing a book I rushed through when I first read it a decade or so ago, and if anything the impact of Ms Angelou's vigorous portrayal of black experience in the States, and its attendant miseries, and joys, was greater than the first time round, but it wasn't exactly something I would have read out of choice.
 
And that goes double for R.J. Palacio's Wonder, a sort of novel for teenagers revolving around a ten-year-old dealing with his facial deformity. This was my set reading for the 'training' I mentioned yesterday that I'm so much looking forward to. Anyway, I duly read it yesterday and this morning and, fortunately, basically enjoyed doing so. It's well written with some outstanding moments. Unfortunately, however, it might also be fairly described as manipulative with regard to its calculated tugging on the heart-strings. Not that I mind this too much - after all, in most respects its heart is in the right place, like a good episode of Oprah - but there's always the nagging worry with this kind of material that it's somehow not entirely doing justice to its extraordinarily difficult concerns.
 
Must say, I'm amused at the idea that someone, somewhere thinks they need to tell me what I must read.

What's In A Name?

It appears I have been nominated to attend something known as Empathy Training. Unlimited comic potential, methinks. Well, well - the event.

Happy Thoughts

Some time around noon the following thought popped into my head: Well at least I can say I never let school stand in the way of my education. It was such a happy claim that I found myself wondering whether I could genuinely offer it to the world and, on balance decided I could.

Of course, a couple of hours later I realised I was unconsciously quoting good old Sam Clemens - slightly misquoting, actually, as he has it as schooling, American fashion. So, some disappointment on the originality front, but it's reassuring to feel I'm at least to a small degree following in the footsteps of the great humorist (in whose honor I adopt the American English spelling herein.)

A Blunderful World

Should have guessed that yesterday I was merely warming up in my incompetence to something truly spectacular. I delivered my piece de resistance after acting as an assessor for an assessment when I managed to mislay a file entirely necessary to my well-being and sanity. Having finally realised the file was not where I expected it be I spent a full forty minutes roving around my place of work, retracing my steps to find the blighter. Readers, believe me when I tell you that today was a hot day and it wasn't wise to be careering around in largely vain search when I could have been getting on with all the work that had piled up for me in the course of the morning.

The one bright spot in all this was that I hardly felt any of the sensations of panic I really should have been feeling as I was possessed of the certainty that the file would turn up in what would turn out to be a perfectly obvious place when my addled brain finally figured out where it was likely to be. It did.

I suppose I should be wondering what tomorrow is likely to bring in terms of my escalating stupidities but I just haven't got the energy to go to that place.

Blundering Along

It's extremely useful to find yourself pushed to a place where you're not coping. In the late afternoon I needed to photocopy a new version of my timetable, the original version having become redundant. I somehow managed to make several completely unnecessary photocopies by brilliantly copying the redundant document - instead of throwing it away - even forgetting, at one point, that I'd left the redundant documents in the copier since I'd elected to wash a cup at the same time. It's not too difficult to find excuses for my appalling levels of incompetence since I'd been besieged by in-coming problems throughout the day and barely had time to think. But the fact that I was painfully capable of making such idiotic mistakes was a wonderful advertisement for the uses of humility. Sometimes it's terribly, effortlessly easy to strive to be humble.