Paying The Price

It was around the middle of July, at the start of the one week mid-term vacation, that I last went to see my back doc. He's moved his premises to a spot around the Serangoon Road area, just across from the Mustapha Centre. After the appointment the Missus and I went for a cuppa just outside the centre. It felt good to be amongst the crowd again with the shops in the area beginning to pick-up business after the lockdown - this being some seven weeks after schools had opened again.

The signs then were good, since it didn't look like too many places had needed to close down. So it was saddening today to read of the lay-offs at the Mustapha Centre itself. Most of all, the lay-offs of their staff from overseas who'll have their work passes rescinded, I assume, and have to go back to their countries. I'm guessing it won't be easy for them, to put it mildly, though the resilience of folks struggling at the bottom of the ladder can be astonishing.

I know of quite a few people who've not found themselves terribly troubled by the unusual circumstances we've all found ourselves in this year. Indeed, I'd count myself as one of them - with a very keen awareness of the luck involved in that. But it's deeply worrying to consider the likelihood that such people are a minority and others have been paying, and may well come to pay, a devastating price as a result of those circumstances.

Keeping Focused

I'm going through one of those periods in which I find myself deeply interested in whatever crosses my path, especially in relation to various writers and musicians, and greedily want to read (or reread) everything and listen to everything. The state has a slightly manic quality about it, and very enjoyable it is.

Today, for example, in fairly rapid succession I felt a compulsion to read Dickens's David Copperfield again (and it's not even a novel I have a particular fondness for within the oeuvre); get hold of all the Faulkner novels in the Library of America editions and read the ones I haven't read - about two-thirds of the total; and reread Robertson Davies's Salterton Trilogy, mainly for the sake of the first novel therein which is about a staging of The Tempest. To be honest, I've got a feeling if I pondered hard enough I'll be able to recall a number of other minor compulsions felt on the literary front in the course of the day, but it's a bit tiring to even think of going there.

So the challenge is to just get on with the reading I've got going in the here and now without being unduly distracted - but since it's all gripping stuff that isn't proving too much of a problem at all. (One thing that's been in my mind, though, since I was triggered over the Faulkner: what was it Jack Connoly, my beloved 'A' level Lit teacher, had against the novelist? I mean, he utterly detested him for some reason. I'm pretty sure he called him sordid and disgusting - yet Jack hadn't he slightest problem with any other of the moderns and was something of a Beckett fanatic. Go figure, as they say.)

Being There

I held off from reading Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust, Volume One: La Belle Sauvage until I got hold of a smaller size of paperback than the rather large one originally published. I was confident of a great read and successfully steered clear of the reviews, fearing spoilers. So, having acquired a paperback edition that suits my odd preferences, I'm now just over halfway through, gloriously without a clue as to where the story is going and very content indeed to be led in that direction.

I'm struck by how in the moments of narrative rest Pullman, like all great writers for children, draws the reader into a richly comforting world despite the menace at its edges. You somehow want to be there with Malcolm (and baby Lyra).

More Than Crafty

I have some sympathy with Leonard Cohen fans (since I am of that ilk) who feel that he was more deserving of the Nobel Lit Prize than Dylan. And the same goes for Joni Mitchell (again, as a fan myself.) Funnily enough in my interview in the last century for university admission I held firm to my belief, at that time, that LC could be held the superior wordsmith in a comparison with JM, the interviewer being of the contrary opinion. I still think that is the case, but I also think the comparison is pointless, both being superlative artists we should simply celebrate, both being expert in their craft.

As is the Bobster - but he is something more, going beyond craft - when on top form. It's worth noting that Dylan has himself talked of how the way his songs have so often come as gifts has sometimes deserted him. Case in point, the wonderful Street Legal. The album is a sort of special favourite of mine, but I'm conscious of a sense of something forced about the lyrics, as if Dylan is consciously writing like Dylan writes - a slight clunkiness haunts almost every song.

Rough and Rowdy Ways is soaked in giftedness: the songs are coming from somewhere else, somewhere beyond. Much of the excited commentary on the lyrics of various tracks as they came out understandably focused on the jaw-dropping zingers. It's difficult not to draw attention to the perfection of I sing songs of love / I sing songs of betrayal (from False Prophet.) And then, of course, you notice what has preceded those lines: I search the world over / For the Holy Grail, and you realise that the slightly clichéd reference to the Grail quest is revivified by the False Prophet context and the brilliant Grail / betrayal rhyme, a startling yoking of opposites that the voice forces to echo each other.

But then you get to realising that beyond the obvious 'moments' pretty much every line of the song adds richly to the whole, sometimes not so much in the content as in the peerless delivery. This was brought home to me a day or two ago when I was listening to the song whilst following the lyrics from an on-line source. I laughed aloud on the line: When your smile meets my smile something's got to give, not just for the engaging wryness of the statement, but because of the pause punched in on got to ... give. The line itself 'gives' as it is sung.

As I say, beyond craft. (And I'm guessing that when he's back on the road, (God willing) Dylan will find a new way to deliver the line if we're blessed enough for him to include False Prophet in the set (or a set.) 

At A Glance

Happened to have a quick glance in my journals to see what I was up to on this date twenty years ago, and came across this: Brainlessly busy at work at the moment.

Not much changes, eh?

Monarch Of All I Survey

It's that time of year when I'm told I'm obliged to complete a number of surveys which are seeking to capture my feedback. Often they do so by couching statements in an odd kind of jargon that means little or nothing to me and then giving me the 'choice' of the options Strongly Agree; Agree; Neither Agree nor Disagree; Disagree; Strongly Disagree. I look in vain for the options: I Have No Idea What You Are Talking About or I Don't Care About The Statement Enough To Offer A Reasonable Response; but these sensible options somehow never appear. And the funny thing is that you have to fill in something before the system will let you move on.

Usually the surveys end with something to the effect that whoever has forced me to reply is interested in my feedback. Odd that, since they've gone to so much trouble to devise ways of never knowing what I really think.

Beyond Words

I gave a bit of a nod here to Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways a week or so ago, partly as a way of psyching myself to try and communicate at some point what an overwhelming experience the album has proved to be for me. When Murder Most Foul, I Contain Multitudes and False Prophet appeared out of nowhere during lockdown I was, like the rest of Dylandom, stunned by the quality and variety of what the great man was putting out. I held back from listening to the other songs from the album that became available on-line once the whole set had been released, deciding I'd wait for the physical CDs for almost superstitious reasons. I had the oddest feeling that I was going to listen to a stone cold, bone fide, top level Dylan album - in every way equal to Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, Desire - the pinnacle stuff. (Just as a matter of interest, I'm very close to including 'Love and Theft' and Tempest in that list, and am now convinced that Dylan's 'final period' equals the 60s.)

That feeling about Rowdy Ways turned out to be eerily prophetic. I know I'm a hopeless fanboy, but the extraordinary consistency of the 2 CD set has convinced me. Talk about no filler!

Which leaves me with the problem of having so much to say that I can't say enough, and feeling guilty at not being able to do justice to the gift of these songs. I can't solve this problem, so I'll sidestep it by saying just a little now, and hoping more will emerge later. And the little I'll say is this: the time he spent recording all those Sinatra classics, the great American songbook albums, apart from providing some wonderful listening, has done something to Dylan's voice. It's got warmer, more tuneful, more ready to seek out and enjoy melody. He's never sounded so utterly relaxed, so mellow; so when he hits you with the Apocalypse it's a double-whammy.

Enough for now.

Not Getting It Wrong

The eagle-eyed reader may have spotted the lack of the apostrophe in my reference yesterday to St Elizabeths Hospital and understandably thought, the old chap posting this has powerfully blundered in omitting the possessive apostrophe where it is obviously necessary. Trust me when I tell you that it hurt to type the name in the way I did, but Congress is, or rather was, to blame. In officially re-naming the hospital in 1916 from the Government Hospital for the Insane they inexplicably left out the apostrophe, as a very interesting Wikipedia article on the place makes clear.

Actually I was following Moody's punctuation when I wrote the name thus, assuming that a top-level academic of his ilk would have known what he was doing. Indeed, I wondered if there might be some 'explicable' reason for the omission of which I was unaware when I did so. Now I'm wondering how all the linguistic pedants in the US who had dealings with the hospital managed to put up with it. After all, I am a bit of linguistic anarchist at the deep bottom of things and my linguistic fascism is a pretty shallow phenomenon, these days being something in the way of a pose necessary to keep the day-job going, and even I was irritated.

Yes, leaving it out hurt a bit, and I've got to confess that when I realise I've made an error with the use of the apostrophe in this Far Place I do spit blood to some small degree and I'll go and make the correction.

Getting It Wrong

Everything I knew about the trial of Ezra Pound for treason and his incarceration in St Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane was wrong. Not that I knew a lot. But I thought I knew that Pound had definitely committed treason, had gone more than a bit crazy in the war years, and had been declared insane in very dubious fashion in order to protect him from execution by understandably sympathetic friends.

I'm now reading Moody's account of all that took place, a very detailed one indeed, and now I think I know the following: Pound had by no means definitely committed treason, and those who were tasked to prosecute him knew that and had reached the conclusion he would walk out as a free man from any real trial; he showed a number of very understandable signs of stress, but nothing close to what might generally be thought of as insanity, and the majority of the doctors who dealt with him knew that perfectly well; his defence may have thought they were helping him, but were complicit in an appalling injustice in locking him away for twelve years.

Having got it so badly wrong for years I'm loathe to accept Moody's conclusions without deep consideration but, my goodness, he's convincing in his thoroughness and general intelligence of analysis. And in his empathy for a difficult subject, an empathy that is by no means all-forgiving, by the way. He calls Pound out for his anti-Semitism in no uncertain terms and makes his readers well aware of the sometimes egregious extent of the poet's political naivety in regard to what Hitler and the Nazis were up to.

One thing, by the way, that I got wrong and that I can offer some defence for. I genuinely thought I'd heard tapes of Pound's broadcasts with EP raving in dreadful fascistic fashion - as bad as Lord Haw Haw, I always thought. But Moody is very convincing on the fact that the general content of the broadcasts was by no means so dreadful and the sense of Pound raving can be connected to the poor sound quality of the broadcasts and subsequent recordings and his ill-informed choice of a hectoring tone which he assumed would somehow cut through to his listeners (of whom there were very few.)

Business As Usual

Noi got back yesterday from the clinical trial she was involved in, and we've settled back into our usual happy routine. She reckons four days was just about the right length for her stay. Towards the end of the final day she was beginning to feel more than a little uncomfortable with some of the ways in which they'd got her wired up and felt she had given more than enough blood, thank you. They kept sucking my blood, she vividly and, if you think about it, accurately related. She's got a few pin-pricks on her arms to contend with as a result.

Today we've celebrated our return to normality with a spectacularly lazy day, not bothering to step outside the door. A little bit of lock-down nostalgia in its way.