Puzzled

Over the weekend I managed a bit of progress on three other texts in addition to the Stendhal. I suppose I'm still under the influence of the days of my youth when I could draw four books from Audenshaw Library and spend the ensuing three weeks we were given to read our cache rattling around them all indiscriminately. In this case The Red and the Black claimed most of my time, but I got a couple of pages of Finnegans Wake read (meaning I'll probably get through the full novel in around four years from now) plus a couple of longish poems from the Selected Tennyson and a chunk of Kotkin on Stalin.

Actually the pages I read from Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878 - 1928 weren't really focused on Soso Jughashvili at all (who is now no longer young and is very definitely Stalin) but on the situation that Lenin's Bolshevik 'government' found itself in as 1917 crossed into 1918. Frankly, Lenin's situation was close to impossible upon acceding to power, and got steadily worse in the months following. The Bolsheviks have just completely given up on the war with Germany and I can't see how they'll survive. But, of course, they will, horrendously so. And I can't wait to find out how they did it.

To be honest, I thought I knew. But now I know I don't.

Not Playing Safe

Just finished Book One of The Red and the Black and am beginning to understand why Norman Mailer rated Stendhal so highly. The final chapter sees the deeply ambitious Julien on his way to Paris with the world opening out for him, so he's got no good reason to stop off at Verrieres to do the dirty deed with his former lover Mme de Renal, especially when M de Renal is very much around and hyper-suspicious. But he does - and then sticks around for a whole day and it's all sort of sexy and funny and extremely exciting. Talk about living on the edge!

And there, I assume, lay the appeal for old Norman, a man and writer so used to being on the edge that he fell off it more than once, and spectacularly so. That a man of great gifts might risk it all for the sake of some fleeting encounter with the fundamentally ungraspable is something completely recognised, understood and sort of heroic to Mailer and Stendhal - and all of us via the gifts of insight offered by their fiction.

And I suppose for those of us with far fewer, if any, gifts it's useful to reflect on the degree that we can embrace risk, or at times feel impelled to. I'm keenly aware of my own deep propensity for playing safe, but I like to think I've not been entirely risk-averse, especially in moments that have counted for something. But Julien Sorel takes some beating. Can't wait to read what he gets up to in Book Two.

Also now thinking of revisiting some of Mailer's edgier early novels in the future. The sequence after the brilliant but relatively conventional war novel The Naked and the Dead made for sometimes quite weird but rewarding reading, I seem to remember. Even back in the early 1970s it was tricky getting hold of paperback copies, I assume because they had not sold so well on publication: Barbary Shore, The Dear Park, An American Dream, Why Are We In Vietnam? Punchy stuff. Somewhere along the way I lost all my copies. Hope somebody else enjoyed them.

Catching Up

Now playing catch-up in the current season of Slow Horses, having missed viewing the last three episodes on the days they were released. It's unsurprisingly easy to lose track of detail, there's so much of it, but never having been a 'plot' person not knowing what's going on doesn't concern me at all. I just embrace the prevailing atmosphere - darkly funny & brutally suspenseful - and just let the flow carry me along.

I think if I had the time I wouldn't mind watching every episode, from the very first, again. But I haven't, so I won't.

Remembering

Indulged in a lot of looking back this evening with Peter, Lia, Chris & Kishore, in addition to some excellent dishes at the Al Ameen Restaurant on Clementi Road. Was reminded of the fact that it's almost a full decade since Peter and myself had one heck of a good time putting together The Fantasticks. Not sure where we found the energy from to get a longish musical on stage that late in the year but can't recall feeling particularly stretched at the time. Looking back at what I wrote about it in this Far Place I certainly acknowledged feeling frazzled but seem more concerned about creating shameless publicity.

Now all Peter and I can remember is the simple enjoyment-cum-delight of it all both in the doing and the making. I suppose in a strange way we wish it were still going on. (Which it is, but only in our heads.)

All Quiet

Just got back from visiting Kak Kiah at the hospital. She looked comfortable, breathing easily; obviously well looked after by the nurses. In a good place.

Grabbed something to eat at the CBTL there. Realised this is my favourite version of that noble franchise, being the one Noi walked me down the hill to from the ward I was put in after my sojourn in ICU. What a moment of freedom that was back then. And in the now of the present it felt good to be back on an evening that was nothing special, just a quiet celebration of still being around and life going on in its unlikely way.

Happy Thoughts

Spent pretty much the full 60 minutes of my stint on the elliptical trainer engaged in a silent rant against my opponents in the War on Beauty. On completion of the stint, and attendant rant, It occurred to me that I hadn't exactly been doing anything particularly good for the World In General or my poor self over the hour in question.

So came back to listen for the second time to Vaughn William's one and only piano concerto. I have no idea why it took me some 40 years of fanboy worship of RVW to discover this beauty only today. But I'm glad I did and don't intend to stick around for an answer.

Beguiled

I started reading Stendhal's The Red and the Black back in early September and have only got as far as page 140 in the Penguin Classics edition. Quite embarrassingly slow progress I suppose, but only for someone capable of embarrassment. For my shameless self it's a matter of some amusement - as is the novel so far.

I thought that reading a 19C French classic would bear some resemblance to reading other classic novels of the century, whether they be French, Russian, German, American or British. This is not the case with Stendhal. He's not outrageously experimental in the vein of chaps like Sterne & Rabelais, who are sort of creating the form of the novel as a genre as they go along. But, as far as I can tell, he is doing something very different from all his contemporaries and doing it with extraordinary panache. So our hero, Julien Sorel - if he is a hero in any meaningful sense - is clearly going to have his story told a la David Copperfield, Maggie Tulliver, Rastignac, and Emma Bovary. But it's being told very differently and I can't articulate what the difference is. 

This reflects badly on me, I know, and possibly it's just a case of me being very slow and missing the point. But I'm having a fine old time doing so and am happily beguiled by every page. (I burst out laughing twice on page 138 and I'm not at all sure there are meant to be jokes in the text.)

Anyway, I'll probably try and write a bit more about this when (and if) I sort my confusions out. In the meantime I'll just crack on and pretend I know exactly what's happening.

Hardly Funny At All

I've enjoyed many a chuckle and quite a few giggles courtesy of the wit and wisdom of the estimable First Dog in the Moon. But today's cartoon just didn't do it for me, for some reason. Most likely because it wasn't supposed to.

No wonder I find it difficult to watch the news these days. Stop the world, please; I want to get off.

Not So Funny Anymore

Officially completed my rereading of Gazzaniga's Human this afternoon. Much to enjoy here & there, but I can't honestly say it deepened my knowledge of people's cognitive faculties in a systematic way. (My fault, not the writer's, I hasten to add.) Will probably go back a final time to the pages devoted to the nature of the arts, and to the segment on how we create a sense of the self from the various bits & pieces that arrive at our grey matter.

Realised that the last part of the book - looking to the future of our potential cognitive development as matters stood in the early 2000s - has very much dated. The segment on Artificial Intelligence especially seems from long, long ago. It also struck me that this is the place where the writer's propensity for wittily frivolous humour becomes distinctly tiresome. Now the future is upon us it seems anything but laughable. 

To Rest In Peace

We were at the Pusara Abadi Muslim Cemetery this afternoon for the burial of Sanusi, Kak Kiah's son-in-law, who died quite unexpectedly this morning. We'd last seen him in the middle of the week on a visit to see his mother-in-law at NUH. He hadn't looked well then, being very thin and obviously under the weather, complaining of the flu; nothing like his usual cheerful self. But there was nothing to suggest what happened today. He collapsed this morning, dying, I assume, of a heart attack.

Can't imagine the degree of grief felt by Aida, his wife. First her mother's dreadful stroke and now this loss. Good to see the family gathering around in necessary support.

It's difficult to see anything at all positive in all this. But Noi rightfully pointed out to me as we were exiting the cemetery, having visited the graves of Nosiah's father & brother before leaving, that it's a place of deep calm and peace. I always feel a strange kind of hopefulness there.