Swept Away

Bad day, dominated by the sudden, entirely unexpected news of the deaths of two dear, dear friends back in the UK. One died last night, and one, I discovered, back in late October. At moments like this I hate living 'abroad', though only at these moments.

I've spent the later part of the day being deluged by memories of time spent with my departed friends. And the memories are all so vivid, as if I'm also back there with them in that impossibly unreachable past. In a sense this is painful, but since every memory without exception is rich, warm, and usually funny, in a few cases unprintably so, it's also comforting.

Sometimes my students write about events being 'joyful' and I always think the word sounds wrong somehow - way too over the top. But those memories seem to me to deserve the adjective. The thing is though, it's all a bit too much, too rich, for now at least.

Truth to tell, at this point in time I'm not dealing with all this too well - who would?

Numbers

Normally I'm not one for dwelling much upon numbers. I've never had much talent for them. Somehow they always manage to slip away.

But over the last couple of days I seem to have had more dealings than usual with them, and it's not all been negative. An interesting discussion yesterday with a class as to whether numbers exist in any real sense at all led me to the realisation that, whilst I've not become a full-blown Platonist in any sense, I can now feel something of what, I suppose, our Greek friend felt concerning the Forms - at least as far as these particular forms are concerned. There's something very comforting, I find, about the idea that good old pi will still be around when I'm not.

And then today I've been concerned with the stark reality of big numbers (well, big ones for me) as reflected in terms of cold hard cash. You don't get much more real than that, eh? Or much less. Hah!

I suppose as long as we remember that all our days are numbered it keeps it all in proportion.

Problematic

Watched Ralph Fiennes's excellent film of Coriolanus over the last three days (in bits, that's all I can manage) in a bid to start seriously viewing what I've got on DVD. Fiennes is a predictably wonderful Martius, entirely convincing, but it's the performances of Vanessa Redgrave as our tragic hero's mum, and Brian Cox, gloriously subtle as Menenius, that steal the show.

Here's a thought: anyone who finds Coriolanus a compelling character given his, to say the least, glaring defects of character probably has major character defects of their own. But then I find him utterly compelling. Oh, hum.

Debasing The Coinage

Cool coinage of the day: someone asking a presenter to biggerise the font used on the screen to make it readable. Tempted to try and give this one a life beyond the meeting in which it so memorably saw the light of day. I suppose in its own small way that's the purpose of this somewhat subversive post.

Got some odd results, by the way, when I attempted an on-line search, undertaken to see if someone else had hit upon this gem. Not sure why pig-farming, of all things, kept coming up. Possibly something to do with those poor blameless piggeries? And sadly a spell-check resulted in some positively obscene suggestions for a substitution; but let's not go there. 

Remembering

Came across this in my journal from this day, ten years ago:

A boy in school today carrying a bag with a Nazi swastika. Odd world. There's some kind of commemoration ceremony taking place at Auschwitz even as I write. We are an odd and sometimes terrible species.

Just watched the news covering this year's ceremony (tied to the liberation of the camp on January 27 1945) involving the now aged survivors of the nightmare. One of the survivors, a lady called Renee Salt, explained that she was there despite the pain it caused her because of the need to remember the reality of what took place, especially in an age when some would deny that reality. Such remembrance seems to me more than just important. It's vital.

If we learn nothing else from history we need to understand how terrible we can be. 

Something To Cheer About

Was so impressed on completion of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key yesterday that I literally cheered. (Sotto voce, certainly, but audible and with no lack of enthusiasm.) What a brilliantly conceived, plotted and executed work it is. Not a paragraph wasted.

There's a sequence about a third of the way in, in which the protagonist Ned Beaumont first quarrels with his friend and sort of boss Paul Madvig, then crosses over to do business with a rival gang boss and gets himself severely beaten that is so utterly taut in terms of the tension created that I reckon my pulse rate went up just reading it. The thing that takes Hammett into another dimension here is that you're never quite sure of the moral ground you're on, or even what's really taking place in the novel, such that the whole is like some extraordinarily vivid dream played out with impeccable waking logic.

What Hammett achieved in his four novels, written astonishingly in something under three years by my estimation, is something to behold. He invents the hard-bitten, hard-nosed, hard-boiled noir genre, but, as if that's not enough, does something quite different with it in each work. With Red Harvest you have the vortex of violence playing itself inexorably out; with The Dain Curse the whole shebang goes mad gothic; with The Maltese Falcon we enjoy the ultimate Private Investigator as dark hero fantasy turned icy real; and in The Glass Key the level of cold sophistication moves into the reaches of a great novel without compromising its truth as a crime fiction.

It's interesting, by the way, that it's only in The Glass Key that the writer allows his central figure a genuine relationship with a friend, and so much of the power of the work comes from the shattering of that relationship.

Birthdays Are A Good Idea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's been a weekend of birthdays, or rather celebrating them. Last night we dined immoderately at the Straits Kitchen using Fafa's birthday as an excuse. And this afternoon we tore up one of the futsal courts at Kallang on the grounds that young Safiy is now another year older and he and his chums needed to play the beautiful game with those of a somewhat older generation.

I must say, I think we may all of us enjoyed ourselves possibly not wisely and very likely too well. I, for one, will be aching and heavier than I really want to be tomorrow morning. But it was all worth it, as the evidence above might suggest.

Speed Reading

Hard listening and slow reading: I suppose that sums up my artistic credo from a consumer's perspective. So why was it that yesterday found me reading a whole bunch of poems by Wilfred Owen at very high speed indeed? The answer lies within the remit of the Toad, work, though this work was of the fairly enjoyable variety, at least initially.

I was proof-reading a booklet we're putting out for students of a little collection of Owen's work, for the purposes of one of our programmes. This is a sort of 'improved' version of a previous effort in that we've decided to expand the collection a little to include a wider selection of the work to give a fuller picture of the great War Poet (or Great War poet, I suppose.) Specifically we've gone for a couple of pieces of his juvenilia - fairly awful ones, in my eyes, at least. He was under the then highly conventional, and very dangerous, spell of Keats as a youth, and it took the grim reality of the war to break that spell.

Anyway, I read the whole lot quite closely, alert for errors, in something under half-an-hour, or thereabouts. And the effect was extraordinary. The sense of enormous unrelenting anarchic energy emanating from the body of the verse was palpable - partly exaggerated by the sheer speed of Owen's development into greatness in such an incredibly short period of time - roughly a year and a half. I've got a feeling my pulse rate shot up during the exercise. And then there was the terrific sense of guilt involved. I somehow felt like one of those whom Owen so savagely criticises, safely at home whilst the flower of English manhood is being put through the meat grinder in the awful front line, and doing absolutely nothing about it. This went well beyond being made to feel the Pity of War. I was actually relieved when I'd completed Strange Meeting (our version of which had somehow acquired a couple of extra lines at the end which I was able to edit out, so I was at least still capable of doing my job) and I really didn't want to read any more, for then, at least.

I can remember reading somewhere about the RSC, I think it was, doing some sort of deliberately high speed mechanical reading of Oedipus Rex (I think - some incandescent sort of tragedy anyway) under the direction of Peter Brooks, in order to freshen their performances by forcing them out of the habitual readings they'd developed. it seems that the performers were unexpectedly overwhelmed by the exercise-cum-performance, with some of the cast actually fainting. The poet Ted Hughes, who was working with them at the time, tells the story somewhere. I reckon I tasted a little something of the same kind of experience.

Maintaining Standards

Got back a little while ago from a concert at the Victoria Concert Hall - the SSO doing their bit with some tuneful Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Piano Concerto No. 19 - and passionate Brahms - Symphony No. 3. Fairly standard repertoire, you're thinking, not exactly cutting edge stuff for an out there sort of guy like myself. And you'd be right; but that didn't stop me having a great time.

No wonder this stuff has lasted, and will continue to do so.

So Long

It's the anniversary of Dad's death today. Thirty-nine years gone. Thought of him a fair bit. Some happy memories. Some sad. One or two painful. So it goes.