Nice article in today's Straits Times about the launching of Bookshop.sg. Very much hope these guys are successful. My intuition tells me this is of greater importance to the future of this Far Place than many of its citizens might realise.
On the whole I'm a cynic when it comes to the world of business. But this strikes me as business at its best.
Back in the deeply dark days of the pandemic Robert Fripp released, through You Tube, a series of very beautiful soundscapes, one a week, for fifty weeks. It struck me then as an act of extraordinary imaginative generosity. A practical way of making the world a better place. Now, some five years later, that seems to me even more the case.
Today I listened again to the opening Pastorale, Music for Quiet Moments 1. Glad I did.
Spent a very satisfactory few hours at the Choa Chu Kang Sports Centre in the early afternoon, the highlight of my visit being watching our guys play out another solid victory in the quarter-finals for Basketball. But generally it was good to see a lot of youngsters from various schools having a jolly good time showing off their talents and letting off steam.
One downside though, and do excuse me for being unbearably petty. I really need to ask: Who thought it was a good idea to make all the drinks machines at the location cashless? I ask this since I'm afraid I failed to get the drink I sorely needed in the humid centre, when I would have succeeded had simple cash been acceptable. Actually I paid my $2.50 for the drink I fancied through Pay Now, but it took so long to arrange the payment that it seems the machine cancelled my order and refused to give me access to the bottle I'd paid for. And there was no one to make a protest to regarding this injustice.
Let's face it: Modern life is rubbish.
(And, on another related note, we still can't register an appointment for the VEP thing despite remorselessly uploading everything the system asks for.)
It was just a week ago that I thought we were on the verge of getting an appointment with those who know about these things in Malaysia to install the device thingamajig that would signal our possession of a Vehicle Entry Permit for our motorcar. We had downloaded a Vehicle Registration Confirmation Slip and just needed to do something fiddly with a TouchNGo eWallet and that was it. Except it wasn't.
We did the necessary with the eWallet and actually put some money in it. But the website for the VEP kept telling us we still needed to do this. Then, after a couple of days, the website appeared to accept the fact we had an eWallet. Unfortunately it then informed us that we had failed to register the vehicle, despite the fact we had the confirmation slip. It seems we hadn't uploaded an insurance document, even though Faris had done this for us. Or, rather, that we needed to upload a pdf version. Which we have now done. But we still can't get an appointment as they need a copy of my passport and ID. Which we uploaded more than a week ago.
This is all quite exhausting in its way but, fortunately, doesn't count for much of anything at all since vehicles are being allowed into our neighbour without the entry permit since to all intents and purposes the Immigration Authorities at Tuas don't care.
Completed another excellent book today, and another disturbing read. I've been aware for some years now of the broad outline of the events which led to the tragedy of Karbala and the dreadful death of Hussein, the grandson of The Prophet (may peace be upon him.) Now I know a good deal more of the details, and I'm not sure that such knowledge is necessarily a good thing, though it's certainly a necessary thing. Lesley Hazleton's clear and compelling account of what took place in the years 632 - 680 AD in After the Prophet proved easy to read yet painfully so. I finished it at Holland Village outside the Tiong Bahru Bakery at 4.00 pm feeling dangerously, publicly moved.
She makes a case for equating the story with that of the Christian passion in terms of its deep and abiding power. And, now in some sense 'knowing' both, I cannot but agree.
I wondered last weekend whether I might finish Yan Lianke's The Four Books before the working week began. It was proving a fascinating read. I wasn't at all sure I had a solid grasp on the allegorical elements of Yan's account of the years of the Great Leap Forward, but the broad outline seemed clear enough and the surreal power of the plights of the various characters stuck in the Re-Ed camp by the Yellow River was clear enough. The novel won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 and that was obviously a fitting award.
Up to the final seventy or so pages I'd found Yan's story easy enough to read in the sense of not being too overwhelming in its sense of outrage over the historical events involved. I suppose I'd been half-expecting something along the lines of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and was a touch relieved to avoid that level of intensity. But what started to slow my reading down last weekend was the advent of the famine resulting from the insane agricultural practices that the second half of the work turns its attention to; quite simply, I found it difficult to deal with pages evoking the grim reality of starvation on a grand scale.
So I've spent the week dipping into the ensuing horrors attendant upon people starving to death, finishing the novel today negotiating depictions of cannibalism made all the more horrendous due to the deliberate blandness of the descriptions thereof.
I've never read anything quite like this before. Brilliant stuff. But close to unbearable.
In my early teens the director Ken Russell was a big name in cinema, for the Brits at least. It's a lasting regret of mine that I've never seen his highly controversial movie The Devils since I loved Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon on which it was based. Thinking back, I was too young to get in the cinema to see it when it first came out and I don't think it ever made it to the goggle box. But Russell's wonderful films based on the lives of various composers were usually repeated on the Beeb and, in that sense, easily available.
Now, of course, the wonders of modern technology mean that we're just a couple of clicks away from being able to watch nearly every single music-themed offering from Russell on our personal devices (though The Devils remains, probably sensibly, out of reach.) And just today I discovered there are more such films than I realised when The Secret Life of Arnold Bax popped up in my YouTube feed.
For once the algorithm got it right. Glorious stuff.
I'm writing this in the brief pause between two bowls of porridge. Consuming them, I mean. The Missus asked if I wanted more after I dispatched the first hot, supremely tasty, bowl and, nothing loath, I readily assented to seconds.
What's not to like, eh?!
I'm glad I've never been placed in any position in which I've had to make genuinely momentous decisions. In general I think I get a lot of things right; but I'm keenly aware this leaves room for getting a fair number of things wrong.
I'm pretty sure that if I had things my way as dictator of the world I'd prohibit the ownership and possession of smartphones for anyone fourteen or under. An article relating to such a ban appeared in The Graun today, and confirmed me in this belief. Must say, even if I knew this was likely to turn out to be a wrong-headed decision, I reckon I'd still go ahead and make it. The glimpse afforded of a saner, safer world would be worth the opprobrium likely to descend on my old grey head.
Zoomed through Ibrahim Abdul-Matin's Green Deen over the weekend. Not quite what I expected. I assumed I'd be getting a fairly systematic exposition of the case for a sort of environmentalist view of Islam and was given no such thing. The writer makes the assumption that there's no real case to make as the fundamentally 'green' outlook of Islam is obvious, a no-brainer, if you like. And he's right.
What we get is a simple, deliberately, relentlessly repeated sequence of ideas revolving around the key terms: tawhid, ayat, khalifah, amanah, adl, mazin to hammer the obvious home. And this works brilliantly, such that the reader is more than happy to then read of the practical applications of real environmental action as seen in the writer's country, the USA, with a few supplementary examples from other nations.
So the book turns out to be a kind of inspirational yet practical manual of how to get green stuff done. For this reader that seems to be exactly what is needed in his life, in which he's well short of doing anything significant. So far he's just been paying lip service to an area of his life that demands far more.
