Spent the early part of the day marking exam scripts and listening to the Stones - albums from the seventies: Sticky Fingers, It's Only Rock and Roll, Some Girls. (All at reasonable volume since the Missus went out.) Decided I preferred the listening to the marking, but no great surprise in that.
Also decided that Some Girls is a work of pure genius, the equal of anything the British Bad Boys managed in the sixties, something I didn't quite grasp when I first listened to it in 1978.
Found myself this afternoon in a talk entitled 'Navigating a Complex World'. Coped by pretty much switching off. I'm quite happy not knowing where I'm going. With luck I'll arrive somewhere, somehow.
I've now experimented with playing two albums by Stevie Wonder at a couple of sessions in the gym and the results have been, as expected, excellent in all respects. One slightly unexpected aspect of the experience though has been the fact that I've found myself listening to songs I've known inside out for some five decades with new ears simply as a result of being on the elliptical trainer as they've been blasting out. I've always thought of Fulfillingness First Finale as pretty much a perfect album and that was amply confirmed by hearing it in the gym. It's so warm, so rich. And then tonight I gave a spin to the earlier, more raw and earthy Music of my Mind and just fell totally in love with everything on it precisely because it lacks the sheen of the later album. Those drums! So richly, drivingly, messy.
And that voice! Or, rather, voices since Stevie so often multi-tracked himself - and still sounded completely spontaneous. I've no idea how he did it, but I'm so glad he did.
Before embarking on Lowell's Life Studies this evening, from the chunky Collected Poems, I would have claimed I knew the 1959 book really well. So it was salutary, to say the least, to glance ahead over the collection and realise I've never actually read the prose segment, 91 Revere Street that comprises Part Two, and I'm not so hot on the poems addressed to various other writers in Part Three. Fortunately I genuinely recognised the poems from Part Four (the section actually itself entitled Life Studies) knowing them all very well, and the opening poems of Part One were pretty familiar, so I was not entirely deluding myself.
But now I realise what a mistake it is to think of the book as entirely confessional, Lowell with his jacket and tie off, the wonderful baroque manner of the early poems cast aside. That happens, but gradually, and the opening poem, Beyond the Alps, sort of predicts it, being pretty baroque in itself and sometimes obscure in the old manner. Take the final couplet as an example: Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up / like killer kings on an Etruscan cup. I mean, I love it and think I know why the French capital is black here, and have quite a good idea what an Etruscan cup is, but I still wonder if I'm missing something important out of sheer ignorance.
Having said that, it's the treatment of the Catholic stuff that's suddenly a lot more immediate than the impressive meanderings in The Mills of the Kavanaughs. The brilliant image of the Holy Virgin, risen - at one miraculous stroke, / angel-winged, gorgeous as a jungle bird! is lovely and funny at the same time. Let's face it, the dogma of Mary's bodily assumption, as RL puts it in the useful brief prose intro to the poem, was not exactly the One, Holy, Roman and Catholic Church's best moment of the twentieth century and it's nailed with humour, sympathy and (something there's precious little of in early Lowell) simple humanity.
Gosh, I'm looking forward to the rest of the book!
Reading my own deeply wise words, almost twelve years to the day, regarding bragging rights I am struck by how soon the whirligig of time brings in its revenges. And that's enough about the not-so-Mighty Reds start to the season.
It can only get better. Surely.
I was determined to make some progress in my own reading over the weekend, despite the marking piling up, and I'm happy to say that I've moved forward in Ken Follett's World Without End - easily done, hooked as I am at the straightforward levels of plot and sympathetic characters - and my Collected Lowell - much tougher since I'd been stalled at the opening of the longish Mills of the Kavanaughs and just couldn't get into it.
Now I come to think of it, it would be tricky to think of two writers presenting a greater contrast: Follett the supreme popularist, striving for an easy transparency of style such that nothing stands between the reader and the tale well told, yet also genuinely informative about the world of medieval England; Lowell the supreme patrician, creating gloriously obscure baroque structures that seem to go beyond the limited notion of simple meaning to enact thumpingly expressive experiences of the ineffable somewhere and seemingly all times in New England. (Sorry about the exaggerations, but getting through his second major book entails being temporarily infected by his style.)
The funny thing is, they go so well together. Breaking off from one to read a poem or a chapter by the other is curiously refreshing. And a lot better than marking.
Until today I never realised that the word 'dreck' has Yiddish origins. Now I do, courtesy of a particularly fine opinion piece by Michael Rosen about the value of writing. I could never quite figure out as a young teacher in the late 1970s how it was that his poetry somehow worked with all kids, but it did. And I suspect his remedy for 'the bothers' will work for lots of very ordinary people, kids included.
I intend to try it for myself - as an specific addition to my discovery in middle-age that writing stuff down - any stuff, any time, any how - is good for the soul.
This time last year I wasn't exactly fully alive. Being in an intensive care unit was, of course, wonderfully useful in terms of practical survival, and accounts for my being around to write this in 2023, but it's not a place I'd recommend anyone spending time in. And this is more especially the case when you're there in a comatose state such that your mind is somewhere else entirely, and that somewhere is an entirely unpleasant place to be. Or not be, if you see what I mean.
Being back in this world has served as a reminder of what a fundamentally wonderful place it is, if you're lucky enough, as I am, to lead a more than comfortable life - and one made particularly splendid by treats like curry puffs & teh tarik with The Missus at a near-by hawker centre, as we enjoyed yesterday.
It's a lesson I've been more than happy to learn, even if it came the hard way.
When we were in Rome last June I was surprised to hear something by Springsteen played in one of the Metro stations. I suppose The Boss is still fashionable enough in Italy to warrant such attention - and the Italians generally have great taste in music. Actually, it took me a moment to identify exactly what was playing. It was Ghosts from the recent Letter to You, and waiting for our train I suddenly realised what a great, great song it is.
A word of explanation here. I got hold of the album some time back along with the most recent albums from Elvis Costello and a whole stack of Radiohead and, in all honesty, I wasn't entirely enamoured with it initially. I already knew from a couple of reviews I'd chanced upon that it was a return to the classic E Street Band sound, but early listening had me thinking the classic sound was a bit tired (especially after the wonders of Western Stars.) For some obscure reason even the best tracks, like Ghosts, didn't quite do it for me. But just before Rome I was beginning to change my mind and, as noted above, public exposure to it pounding in the cavernous space of the Metro provided the illumination I needed.
Since then the song has become a special one for me, helping me deal with my own ghosts. But here's the thing. In Springsteen's brilliant lyric his ghosts can be heard rather than seen. When my ghosts come in dreams I see them with absolute clarity. But they are always silent. That's how I know they are dead, aside from the obvious fact that in real life they are dead. (What an odd sentence, but I have to let it stand because that's the way it is.) The silence is not accusatory in any sense; it's simply the way of things. And it is always sad.
Part of the brilliance of the song is the way it becomes a celebration of being alive, and rightly so. I wish my dreams had something of that quality, but they leave me with a mystifying sense of emptiness. Perhaps this is all a lesson related to the need to listen harder to all sorts of voices? Especially those of the dead.
All times are good, I suppose, but the best time is 10.30 pm. On a good day it means the shedding of burdens as one considers crawling to one's bed. And even on a bad day the night has arrived and, with it, all sounds become extra vivid, even as the solid world is fading.
