From Somewhere

Was taken by surprise just now visiting the gym. Last week I managed three sessions, and each was a struggle. The thought of just giving up the whole business of torturing myself occurred very distinctly indeed to me a couple of times. And was almost instantly dismissed. I'm just not capable of submitting to the easy way out. But occur it did, accompanied by the understanding I wasn't going to improve my fitness no matter how hard I tried.

So I was expecting more of the same this evening. But it didn't happen. I don't mean I suddenly recorded any improvement. But I didn't struggle in any real sense. Time flew by when I was on the elliptical trainer and I barely registered what I was doing on the weights. In fact I seriously thought of re-circling the little circuit I've devised.

I have no idea where the new-found energy came from, but I don't care. Just as long as it arrives occasionally. A bit like the entirely undeserved grace of the kind we could all do with.

Just Being Grouchy

Why do so many of the hosts & hostesses on tv shows originating in this part of the world feel the NEED to SHOUT with EXCITEMENT so much of the time? If the show in question in question is genuinely exciting then the raised voices are superfluous; and if it's not, you're not going to convince anyone it is by SHOUTING THAT it IS. 

And why do members of an audience arriving late for a live performance need to check their phones once they've pushed past those already seated? And then text whoever they're in contact with even though what's actually on stage should be claiming their very much delayed attention? The point of going to a play is TO PAY ATTENTION to IT.

And why am I bothering complaining about this here? Completely POINTLESS.

But good to vent, eh?

Very Much Alive

After being adjacent to matters of mortality for some time it was rewarding to get out this afternoon to a live performance of the theatrical variety. In this case a distinctly youthful production put together in every sense by students from NTU. Through Your Eyes, written by a young lady from NTU-USPRESENTS (I think I got that right), played this afternoon in the black box at the top of the National Library building down town and proved highly engaging. I'd been notified of the show by my ex-student Shana, who was playing one of the leads, and I'm very glad she did so.

There was no shortage of energy and talent onstage and the whole thing was very much 'meant', if you see what I mean. It had urgent things to say about the choices facing intelligent young people on this island and said them with balance & sensitivity; and it managed to be funny when it needed to be.

My only quibble with the show involved the use of the mikes. This was very well done, actually, and the sound balance with various effects had obviously been painstakingly put together. So this is not a criticism of the show in itself. But I would have preferred unamplified voices in that space, which I think would have carried to what was a genuinely attentive, supportive audience. I just think you get more range & nuance with 'real' voices.

But that's an insignificant point really, given the life that those involved created. And it was a delight to see how the efforts of the whole team were reflected in the publicity materials and the curtain call. That in itself had the stamp of truth and lived experience about it.

At Rest

Kak Kiah's grave is quite close to that of Sanusi. She was laid to rest there in the late morning after prayers at the Masjid Pusara Aman. The weather stayed fine, engendering a sense of ease somehow. Much sadness, but a strong sense of the business of life being able to go on. The sprinkling of flower petals on the soil of the grave says much.

Flown

We'd planned to go to NUH this evening, but it wasn't to be. Kak Kiah died this afternoon, and now Noi is out at her place at the West Coast to help the family prepare for the burial tomorrow. She'd looked comfortable when we saw her last Sunday, but earlier this week her doctor had noted some deterioration in her condition. So the news was no surprise. Sad, but good to know the drawn-out uncertainty of being hardly alive has been spared her, and the family.

Not Funny

I posted the topical image above to prove I have a sense of humour, despite everything. 

The problem is, I don't. Not today. 

I foresee that one day in the distant future I'll access this post and smile. But that day is a long way away. And, by the by, the acquaintance who sent me the image this morning will live to regret it.

Flying

I have a huge soft spot for all Messiaen's 'birdsong' compositions. But today his 1956 piece Oiseaux Exotiques shot decisively into first place on my list of stuff by Messiaen to play when in a bit of a bad mood. This was on account of a brilliant performance by ensemble oktopus. I've never heard of the ensemble before, but now I have I really need to find out more about them. I suppose the fact the players look so young added to the charm of the music. (By the by, I might be the only listener on the planet who finds the Maestro in this mode charming, but I do so that's it really. I actually started chuckling at one goofy moment in the first extended piano break. And chuckled again when the phrase that set me off was repeated a few bars later.)

Changing Times

I start my day tomorrow in a meeting, a small one of no great note or significance, in which the discussion will centre on AI in education, in a loose manner. Now I'm used to attending meetings that don't feel like they are going anywhere - and arrive there quickly. Oh, and meetings that aren't really meetings at all, but occasions on which you're told what you should be doing and thinking, which don't really work well for me as I'm very good indeed at ignoring what I should be doing, very much favouring what I actually want to do (and what will work.) So it would be fair to assume that I'm not looking forward to the confab scheduled for the early morning. But you'd be quite wrong to do so. In my small way I'm entirely fascinated by the whole AI thing in all its dimensions, and the educational one, being close to home, is especially engaging.

It helps that tomorrow's meeting will be genuinely open in terms of where the discussion might go. I am happily clueless as to how the whole AI 'thing' will change the landscape, but I'm close as I can be to certain that it will, and I'm happy to be around to witness what I suspect might be the stirrings of a radical shift in the way classrooms operate.  

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.