Almost Forgotten

The month concludes with another rich & rewarding day - but this time with something of a gap at its centre. My morning was spent enjoying the Teachers' Day festivities in school, followed by a satisfying lunch related to the same. I got home around 2.30 pm and soon happily conked out, and I mean completely so.

Then waking at some time after 5.00 I fortunately remembered that I had an evening duty overseeing a couple of classes. Somehow this had managed to completely slip my mind despite being of enough importance to have made me think in the early part of the week that I couldn't possibly forget about it. I also needed to complete some marking, answer a bunch of messages, and go out to shop and eat and get various other things related to the domestic front done with The Missus.

Now feeling happily satisfied and more than a bit relieved that everything eventually fell into place. And looking forward to a lie-in tomorrow. Over and finally out.

Feeling Full

A richly non-stop day, featuring an awards ceremony, an excellent game of basketball (which we lost, unfortunately) and two exceptionally filling meals with excellent company at both. Not quite sure how I'm going to cope with what will probably be another rich version of lunch on the morrow. But I'll find a way.

I'm pretty good at coping with first world problems.

Real Work

There's always been a part of me that says what I do isn't quite real work. The real thing is physically tough, leaving you worn down at the day's end. And for the real thing you need a union to protect you.

Today's story about a guy dying of heat exhaustion in a factory in Memphis reminded me of this. I suppose I'm expressing a sort of prejudice in my almost atavistic distrust of so-called management, but the older I get the more I know my instincts are founded in an unappealing reality. Since 2011, there have been 436 work-related deaths caused by environmental heat exposure, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that's in a nation in which workers are accorded some basic protections. Or so they say.

Rough Ideas

So what goes on in my head when I'm watching a play or reading a novel or listening to music? I have next to no idea, but I know something goes on. Today it struck me that it might be interesting to transcribe some rough stuff I jotted before our final performance of As You Like It, just for the sake of trying to capture it before it faded. (I've already forgotten all of Old Adam's lines, having agonised for four weeks or so to inscribe them in memory.)

Anyway, this is what I jotted, in poor handwriting, backstage, insofar as we had a backstage:

from a love that is amiably intense & simple to one that has all the signs of being rich & strange & complex & capable of change & development in the fullness and sprawl of time. Because Rosalind can do strange things and can teach strange things in a complex, strange & transient world sounding suspiciously like our own. Nothing can last. But what there is can shine preciously. In imagination. And in a generosity of feeling for others. Whoever/whomsoever comes into the orbit of Ros will be the better for it. whoever goes into/comes into the Woods will find something of themselves - in losing other somethings.

Odd what passes for thought, eh? (I reckon the first bit is copped almost verbatim from Shapiro's 1599 which I'd been reading just before the show. Always steal from the best.) 

A Question Of Detail

Finishing The Stand I was struck by just how good the ending is and just how much I had managed to forget about it since my long-ago first reading of the novel. Which was pretty much everything. Indeed, I vaguely thought that the last section was going to be a bit predictable and perfunctory - which is why I couldn't remember anything - and was pleasantly surprised at the strength of the chapters centred on Las Vegas and the Stu & Tom return to Boulder coda of the final stretch. The only way I can explain my oddly thorough forgetfulness is through the assumption that the supernatural apparatus shows through most obviously in Book 3 and my younger self was going through a stage of dissatisfaction with this aspect of King's work and sort of switched off to the merits of it all. Or possibly I didn't have the staying power for the epic back then and read the final chapters too quickly simply to have done with it all.

Thinking about this today led me to an odd moment of illumination apropos of how Tony must have read the novel in even earlier days. It forcefully occurred to me just how much of a man for details of the plot (of any work, including films & musicals) he was. He'd frequently remind me of specific moments or scenes in stuff we'd both encountered and harp on about these in a way I found faintly tiresome and broadly pointless. I remember a lot of this in relation to King's stuff in general but most of all with regard to Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time sequence - the twelve novels comprising which he'd borrowed from me soon after we finished university. I suppose this was the most obviously genuinely 'literary' work we had in common and he was always on about particular details, especially with regard to the early novels in the sequence. So this led to my moment of insight: I reckon Tony saw novels as things he needed to, in some sense, learn. He needed to remember exactly what happened as a kind of proof he had assimilated them and they were now of use to him, they were worth something in terms of what he could remember of them. In contrast I've always regarded what happens to me in the process of reading the whole point of the exercise. I don't care much for plot detail unless it somehow really counts in enhancing the process. And I'm happy to forget a novel, a play, a poem so I can enjoy it all over again when I return to it later - usually a lot later.

Of course, there are texts, especially notably elliptical, nuanced ones, for which a grasp of detail is essential in terms of a solid general understanding - The Great Gatsby springs to mind. And when I'm teaching a text I strive to have a reasonable handle on all the details. But I'm often struck when teaching quite well known stuff, especially Shakespeare, of how much I've forgotten, or never bothered to pin down in the first place. At the moment I'm enjoying teaching Hamlet (yet again!) and I keep being surprised by fairly major bits & pieces that have managed to escape me. Like his dad's ghost popping up in the bit with his mum towards the end of Act 3. This manages to surprise me every time I teach the play, or watch it, for that matter.

Happy final thought: I really must get round to buying the Music of Time novels again (since I never got my boxed set back from Tony) and reread. What a joy that's going to be, insya'allah.

Time To Relax

Got a fair bit of work done this morning but spent the rest of the day hanging very loose indeed - though I did finish The Stand. Stuffed my face just now with Noi's signature salmon dish while watching one of those BBC programmes featuring various chefs doing incredible things with all sorts of foodstuffs. The collapsing of two treacle showcases provided quite enough stress to add spice to the day. And now I'm hanging spectacularly loose in between various moments of nodding off. Nice.

Continued Outrage

It's pretty much a year to the day that I sank for some three and a half weeks into what I have come to think of as The Delirium. After considerable reflection upon the process of that sinking, a frightening period of semi-lucidity lasting a little under 24 hours, including some sleep (I think), from around 5.00 pm on Thursday, 25 August to the conclusion of Friday Prayers the next day, I've come to realise that the closest I came to something akin to a restoration of sanity was connected to an article about Stephen King in the on-line Graun.

I must have read this early on Friday morning, and I read it with enough attention to make a coherent note in my journal that I needed to get hold of the extended version of The Stand and all of the Dark Tower series. And I was also outraged at the omission of The Shining from the recommendations on where to start with the Horrormeister. In fact, I still am outraged which is the main reason I'm writing this now since I couldn't manage anything from my hospital bed back in 2022.

Must say though, other than that one faux pas it's a great article.

A Bit Of Gratitude

Elisha, one of our Assistant Hall Tutors, and a lovely guy, led some students in a sort of 'gratitude exercise' this evening. I joined in, filling in the little slip of paper distributed to me with some gusto. It turned out that I was supposed to put several items as answers under the first three headings, but I filled it in too quickly and my writing already filled the spaces available by the time I'd realised what the actual instruction for answering was.

Anyway, in the interests of full disclosure here come my answers, to the grand total of six sort of questions:

I thank God for: People: My Wife; Places: SAC, the Oasis stall; Things: teh tarik.

I thank God even though: 1) Spurs beat Man Utd; 2) life isn't fair; 3) I have 15 Paper 1 essays to mark tomorrow.

Must say, I felt a whole lot better for filling it in.

The Ghost Reader

My reading of The Stand continues to lumber along - meaning, I'm enjoying every step of the journey, but other considerations mean I can only make progress in stolen moments. 

I've now arrived at the final quarter - Book 3, with our heroes on the way to Las Vegas and their 'stand'. (By the way, I'm reading the older version of the novel, the original, not the full length, unedited, second version that King published in the 90s. So this is just around 800 pages overall.) As I said earlier in the month, I've forgotten all the fine details of the plot so it all seems new, yet mildly familiar. But something I didn't say earlier: there are times when I seem to be reading through the eyes of my old chum Tony, long gone to his long home. Why so? Well he read The Stand before I did in our long ago glory days, much of it in a pub at Summit, where he was living at the time, in the room set aside for playing pool. The novel made a huge impact on him for reasons I never quite understood. Possibly because it was the first 'long' book he'd ever read? He told me about how the other guys in the room couldn't work him out at all and themselves became fascinated with what he was reading (between beating them all at pool.)

Sometimes I find myself reading a paragraph with the naivety of the non-specialist, 'innocent' reader. And Tony is over my shoulder or in my head: And there's this fellah called Randall Flagg, kid. He's summat else. Never such innocence again, eh?

In The Moment

After completing the Isha' Prayer just now I wasn't in any great hurry to get up and move. I suppose I was feeling a wee bit tired after the mild rigours of the day and found myself just sitting there, a bit lost, mind wandering. I'm not entirely sure why but it wandered into the worrisome territory surrounding the big story of the week in the UK: the trial and sentencing of that nurse from Chester hospital who murdered all those babies. Without really meaning to I'd picked up quite a bit of the deeply sorry tale from fitfully watching Sky News and referencing the on-line version of The Guardian in the morning.

My thoughts were solemn and sad in nature, of course. A bit despairing. A bit hopeless. What other response can there be to the deaths of children? To the pointless malice involved. To the sense of irreparable damage that will disfigure so many of those families. To the emptiness of it all. 

And then I raised my head to look up through the bedroom window. A thick crescent moon, not large exactly, but somehow filling the dark sky. Eerily bright. It seemed to me that it was something I needed to see, but I don't quite know why.

Funnily enough when I came out of the room Noi, who was involved in a sort of zoom class she's attending, looked up from her screen to ask me if I'd seen the moon. I think we both knew we were sharing that moment of illumination of the darkness. Some kind of grace.