No Choice

As a fun-packed month staggers to its conclusion I ask myself: Should it be J. S. Bach? Or should it be the Sex Pistols?

And I get the answer: Both.

Side-lined

Have had to do a bit of reading in the gothic tradition of late in concluding the Lit course for one of my classes. The text choices were made by Aloy and have been mildly uncomfortable for me, yet entirely fascinating and instructive. In fact it was Aloy who sort of forced me, very happily in the event, to teach Kawabata's Snow Country for the first time a few years back. Initially I was cursing him for the recommendation since I hadn't the slightest clue what the book was about on the first reading. Fortunately the class I was teaching pretty much taught me the text and it's been a hot favourite since - though I still find myself at a loss whenever I embark on it.

Anyway, I've had to get up to speed on the tales from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber which was refreshing to say the least. She's so obviously brilliant it fair takes the breath away. And now I'm getting to grips with the idea of trying to teach Bram Stoker's Dracula. But that's a bit of a problem, I'm afraid, since despite all of the good bits there's a fair amount of clunky filler in the text, in my not-so-humble opinion. But it's all great fun.

Astonishing that someone pays me for this.

Still Learning

Got back into my reading of the chunky Lowell Collected this weekend after a bit of a lay-off, and am particularly glad I did so.

Two reasons for this, the first being that I got to read two variant versions of his early poem, The Drunken Fisherman, the 'official' version of which featured in Lowell's 1946 collection Lord Weary's Castle. As I read the variant in the appendices I thought I recognised the poem from somewhere with some delight since it sounded so good. I had to do a bit of toing and froing to figure out where I'd met it before but this was worth it as I ended up reading it a few times, and it just got better, as poems sometimes do - the special ones. In the notes at the back of the volume the editors provide a much earlier, and very different version of the poem from RL's time as an undergraduate. Very accomplished for a very young writer, but not a patch on the 1946 version, which bears out Lowell's frequent claim that he was more of a re-writer than a writer. (I'm writing that without a direct reference in view, but I'm pretty sure he said something like that.)   

The second reason for my general gladness is that after the section with The Drunken Fisherman there's a whole segment of the appendices devoted to RL's translations of poems by Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian writers from the Stalin era. For some reason these came as a bit of a relief from the typical themes of the Collected, and pretty much every poem I've read so far has really hit the spot for me. In fact, I've found myself happily forced to do a bit of reading-up on the two Russians and realised there is a terrible hole in my knowledge of 20th century literature. This isn't to say that I'd not heard of them before or had a sense of just how admired and important they are, but now I feel I've been forced into a genuine engagement with work of enormous importance.

Exactly how I've managed to avoid any real engagement with them until my grand old age I really don't know. And this makes me feel really stupid. But usefully so. One of the pleasures of reading. Oh, and since I'm harping on about learning new things here's a link to an informatively appreciative account of Anna Akhmatova's work and importance by the excellent Clive James, from which I learnt a great deal.

Still Smelling

In tandem with the novel by Ms Bahrin I referenced yesterday, I've been reading Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain as my non-fiction roughage. He too is on the lookout for smells, at least occasionally, and early in his tome notes, To put it bluntly, many British people in the forties would, by our sensitive standards, have smelt a little. He's talking basically about the working class, but this is not some kind of middle-England prejudice as Marr backs it up with careful referencing relating to the lack of cosmetics and the irregularity of bathing in that period. This made me think of Orwell's references to working class smells in The Road to Wigan Pier, though that's from a slightly earlier time, and, if I'm not mistaken, his down-trodden proles in 1984.

But here's the thing that has set me thinking about my own experience as a little lad in the early 60s, and a callow teenager in the early 70s. I don't think the kind of conditions Marr describes had changed to any great degree for my family when I was a kid. Having a bath once a week, as far as I can remember, was the norm and I was only ever enjoined to wash my hands and face in between times. I know for a fact that the idea of showering everyday came as something of a surprise to me when I got to university since my room mate in my first hall of residence, the worthy Steve Cannon, did so and I thought he was more than a bit strange for being so fastidious.

So, if memory serves me well, and it well may not, I reckon I must have been quite a 'scruffy little oik' in the argot of the period. The funny thing is, though, that far from feeling a bit embarrassed about this I can't help but be perversely proud of the idea.

A Matter Of Smell

Reading a description of the cloying smell of nasi kandar joints in Karina Robles Bahrin's novel The Accidental Malay, my current reading on the fiction front, got me thinking of my own sense of smell. Quite honestly I've never noticed any particular cloying smell from any such place, and I've been in more than a few. But I think it's true to say my sense of smell isn't what it used to be.

When I first arrived in this Far Place, back in 1988, I noticed lots of smells, some fragrant, many less so. These days if a particular smell catches my attention in any way at all it's quite unusual. This can't be so for Ms Bahrin since in the paragraph immediately subsequent to the one about the restaurants she picks out the oily odour of yesterday's garlic bread, and there are at least two further references to specific smells in the final couple of pages of the chapter in question.

Of course as she's a writer consciously deploying all the strategies available to her to evoke a sense of place you sort of expect this kind of thing, but I doubt that I'd ever notice even a single one of the details in question even if I absolutely needed to for some obscure professional reason. Mind you, the smells that emanate from our kitchen when Noi is applying herself to cooking something special more than compensate for the general lack of odour in my life.

A Matter Of Taste

Maintaining the theme of food from yesterday's pithy post, I need to report that I just scoffed (and I mean scoffed) the tastiest shepherd's pie ever, from the oven of The Missus. This has rendered me deeply, deeply satisfied at the end of a generally dissatisfying day.

Now that's what I call making a difference!

Virtue Signaling

Got myself to the gym this evening, followed by a salad bowl for dinner. Oddly enough, enjoyed both experiences.

(And if you think I'm showing off a bit, you're darned right.)

Mastery

Played some four minutes of the original movie of A Streetcar Named Desire to a class today with Brando eating up the screen. I'd half-forgotten how good Vivien Leigh is as Blanche, but it's impossible to take your eyes off the young Brando just being Stanley. You can smell the sweat off that t-shirt. And he's just so subtle. The insecurity behind his eyes when he spells out the Napoleonic Code to Stella is perfection. Oh, and the actress playing her is no slouch either, though I've forgotten her name. (And I know I'm not supposed to say 'actress' but I'm too old to care.)

Just thought. Is it Karl Malden who plays Mitch? Must look it up.

Postscript: Yep, got that right. More perfect casting from Kazan (and me, I suppose.) Painfully brilliant in the role. What a phenomenal generation of actors (ok, I'll be a bit woke) that was, eh?

The Devil Lies In The Details

A day of overwhelming detail. But there are plenty of those in my line of work. (Days and details.) Indeed, I suspect the same is true of most occupations these days. I'm doing my best not to get lost in it all, but it's very easy to lose the way. And, again, I suspect a lot of other folk feel something similar. Another aspect of 'modern life'.

Simplify! Simplify! as a wise man once said. Or wrote. Can't quite remember the details involved.

Highly Creative

Hugely enjoyed watching the Independent Stage's version of Ibsen's A Doll's House yesterday evening (or, I should say one of its versions as I'm told that the four performances they gave over the last three days involved quite a variety of casting resulting in the play taking on subtly different flavours for each show) and ended up thinking further about what makes a creative, in the new sense of the word.

My own involvement in drama over the decades has involved the creative part of me, I think, but, as I have previously pointed out I don't see myself as genuinely creative in any real sense. I just don't have original ideas, though I have some facility for recognising and making use of the original ideas of others. And it strikes me that that is essentially what actors do. You play the assigned role, scripted or otherwise, by entering into the world of someone outside yourself and, as far as possible, abandoning the self to adopt that world. It feels like you are doing something new, certainly, and when you work with others all contributing to the new world a sense of something authentically new and different and original is created. And that feels great - ask anyone involved in theatre.

It seems to me that the young people creating their Ibsonian (is there such a word? Ibsenite?) world yesterday evening achieved something quite remarkable in that they made that world credibly hold together. The set & costumes weren't what exactly Ibsen would have wanted, but they worked so well in conveying the ambiance of the Norwegian middle-class household, and the performers entered into that world quite fearlessly. I believed in each of them such that the emotions involved worked, despite the distances in age and background from the characters of Ibsen's imagination. I watched something new, though deeply familiar, and the newness was refreshing (as theatre so often proves.)

Just one example: playing Torvald as really drunk in opening of Act 3 was a risk, but it worked in proving a kind of absurd comedy. Norah's disgust became that bit more real than usual, and the final doom-filled sequence with Dr Rank even more embarrassing since it was also funny in its way.

I came away convinced, as I always am, that setting students loose on stage to make something new out of old cloth, or new cloth, or no real cloth at all, is a splendid idea and deeply educational in a way that's difficult to articulate but oh so obvious when you experience it.

Not So Creative

I'm in the middle of marking some essays answering one of the questions on one of the May papers from IB. The question requires an analysis of quite an interesting little opinion piece on the use of AI tools by designers and is thought-provoking in its way, but one detail has stood out for me, not because it's a major analytical point but since it relates to a small change in the language I've noted quite recently. This is the use of creative as a noun, a countable one, as in: the creatives were gathered in the main office discussing the latest advertising campaign.

As far as I can tell this is quite a recent usage, but I seem to be encountering it all over the place (now including passages used in exams.) The thing is that, for some reason I can't quite grasp, I find it distinctly irritating. And I'm not the only one. I noticed that Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth fame, complained about the word in a recent interview.

Now normally I'm quite happy to embrace linguistic change, I suppose because of the inherent creativity involved in coining new usages. (See what I did there!) But I think it's the element of self-congratulation in the word that gets to me. I mean, imagine thinking of yourself as a superior creative, and I reckon that the sense of superiority is definitely there if you regard yourself in that way. But who knows, maybe this just gets under my skin out of a sense of envy, a feeling that somehow I should be creative but fall short of the mark when there are folk out there who can do it for a living?

A Bit Much

Yesterday's movie was Inside Out 2, which as far as I understand has had good reviews and garnered appreciative audiences. Certainly the student audience I was watching it with seemed to enjoy it. And I could see there was lots to enjoy: beautifully crafted animation, a clever script and what seemed like a genuine attempt to deal with somewhat tricky subject matter, the trials and tribulations of the onset of puberty in teenage girls in a generously understanding way.

But I walked out at the end feeling somewhat overwhelmed. It was a bit too dazzling for me, a bit too fast-paced, a bit too clever.

Maybe I was over-thinking it, but the allegory didn't quite work for me, despite some insights along the way. Envy seemed underplayed and the Ennui bit appeared a sort of fake boredom, performative in nature to impress others, when I would have thought the authentic emotion would involve a very real lack of energy, when whatever the film & its protagonist lacked, it certainly wasn't energy.

Oh, and the eyes of the characters were too big, too cute.

Unforgettable

How on earth did I manage to forget to include Springsteen and Messiaen (odd bedfellows!) when compiling yesterday's lists? Not quite unforgivable, but close.

Paid a delightful penance today listening to The Boss and his E Street Band-mates cutting it up with a cover of London Calling as performed in Hyde Park. Followed up by Apparition de l'Eglise éternelle played on some humongous organ somewhere. Not quite sure which is the heavier. Wonderful to have both.

Oh, and I mustn't forget to mention that I'm off to the cinema later for what is likely to be the only film I'll watch on the big screen this year. More anon.

Still Just A Fan

Since I mentioned in Sunday's post that I'd listed the musicians upon whom I have inflected my fanboy-ness over the years, I thought I'd better share that list as well, and make a clean breast of it. But reviewing the list I found myself struggling once more with the issue of leaving some key players out, hence the delay in following up.

Here's the original list of completely solid fan-worship from the get-go: King Crimson (still the greatest band in the known universe), The Beatles (duh!), Ralph Vaughan Williams, Steely Dan, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Stephen Sondheim, Ennio Morricone.

Here's the list of equally adored, but took a little bit longer to get there: Dylan (duh!), Richard Thompson, Radiohead, Prince.

Here's the list of those who got left out and I can't quite figure out why, so now they're on the list: Elvis Costello, The Clash, Stevie Wonder, Paul Weller. 

And here's the very short list of bands who recently have almost, but not quite, pushed Crimso out of first place, yet I stopped listening  to for years before a glorious rediscovery in my dotage: Van der Graaf Generator.

Not sure why I like making lists, but I do.

Just A Thought

Jotted down the following apercu in a notebook today: Thought is the enemy of flow.

Agree with it almost completely as an insight, but for the life of me I can't remember where I came across it.

But I have a reservation, hence the almost above. And the reservation is this: What if what is flowing is thought?

Quite a conundrum, eh?

Comfort In Distress

What to do to comfort my distressed soul? I asked on a day when such comfort was sorely needed. (Bad result in the Euro final* and very busy with the Toad, work.) The answer: Soothe yourself with Dylan in Triplicate, doing his inimitable thing with the Great American Songbook. Simple but effective.

(The distressed soul bit is a lift from Kit Marlowe's Doctor Faustus to which I've just been listening, whilst shaving, in a very tasty version from BBC Radio. Also oddly soothing, despite its overall grimness.)

(*so it wasn't coming home, after all.)

Just A Fan

I jotted down a few names in one of my journals for rough notes & stuff some months back, these being those writers & musicians regarding whom I considered myself an irredeemable fanboy of. I deliberately left the page open to amendment wondering if I might have left someone out, and it occurred to me yesterday that this had been the case with the list of writers. 

I'd felt a touch of concern regarding the list from its inception due to the lack of female names on it. Now this certainly wasn't because there aren't plenty of such I greatly admire, but I just couldn't think of any of the ladies who fulfilled the essential criteria: Love at first sight which carried over into everything read since plus a kind of unpleasantly personal curiosity into biographical background (close to a kind of conceptual stalking.)

And then it came to me that I'd missed out Jane Austen. I'm quite baffled as to why this was. From Jack Connelly's first lesson on Emma as an 'A' level text I just knew that I was hopelessly smitten and, if anything, Pride and Prejudice, read very soon after was even more appealing in its sheer exuberance. I suppose I left her out having mildly struggled with the later pages of Sense and Sensibility (just loved the Emma Thompson movie though) but that's weak quibbling. So now she's on the list and I'm yearning for a reread of Persuasion, for no good reason i can think of, but that's what being a fanboy does to you.

Anyway, in the interests of full disclosure here's the list as it stands today, in no order of merit, except for number one: Will Shakespeare, James Joyce, William Blake, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Ted Hughes, Stephen King, P.G. Wodehouse, Leon Garfield, Peter Ackroyd, Philip Pullman, David Lodge, Kurt Vonnegut, Ian McMillan, Anthony Powell and, now, Jane Austen.

And here's another odd thing. I added a space for writers I fell completely in love with, but not actually at first sight, and two names appear there. One is Marcel Proust, which makes sense since I knew eventually I would fall for him but made more than one false start on Swann's Way. The other is Charles Dickens. But, as far as I can remember, I fell hook, line & sinker for him on reading Bleak House straight after graduating from university. So I don't know why I hesitated over his unmitigated fanboy status a few months back. Was it because I was of that generation that 'met' Dickens through adaptations on the telly as a little kid and didn't quite realise then I was a fan? Not sure, but this isn't a question that will keep me up at night. 

Food For Thought

Getting on with the short stories in Ted Chiang's collection Stories of Your Life and Others, a gift from Saravanan, who clearly feels I need to do some deep thinking. Not easy reading, but rewarding if only at the level of offering a genuine mental workout every time. Well, for each of the five tales I've read so far. Chiang's stuff seems to be classified as sci-fi, with the blurb quoting the Graun saying he's a science-fiction genius. But it's a lot more Borgesian than that, I reckon. Each story invents a new kind of world, not necessarily one of the future.

I'm reading this alongside the poems in the Appendices to the hulking Lowell Collected and the opening pages of the second part of Finnegans Wake. So it's all pretty strenuous stuff at the moment.

Real Vision

Finished A Life on Our Planet this afternoon. Reading it has changed me. Previously I was essentially pessimistic regarding the future of our fragile home. I hope intelligently so. But after completing Sir David's A Vision for the Future, the second half of this brilliant book, I'd say I am now reasonably optimistic.

Now there remains the moral imperative to act on that fragile optimism. As noted on Monday, no choice really.

By the way, Gentle Reader, if there's one book from those I've referred to in this Far Place over the years I think you must read, this is it.

Great Expectations

Decided not to watch the footy in Germany partly on the grounds that I didn't want to pay the extra fees to watch on the telly, especially when the majority of games are broadcast at ungodly hours. But am watching stuff on-line, so I know how badly England have played so far. But the main grounds for not watching live games are actually part of a cunning plan on my part. Re: whenever I have watched in the past the three lions have come unstuck. So this time round my lack of presence is calculated to work in their favour.

The plan, as you probably realise, has proved a major success so far. Plus, by virtue of the team being so unimpressive their opponents are being lulled into a false sense of security.

So, it's really quite simple. I feel completely sure of success tonight against the boys in orange. And then Spain will fall in the final. Remember, you read it here first.

Still Fragile

Bit of a coincidence just now. Not spooky, but close. I was idly browsing some of my posts from years back in this Far Place, on a whim. Fifteen years, to the day, to be precise; a nice roundish number and date and entirely arbitrary. And I came across this, about someone in hospital: News of the sudden unexpected hospitalisation of a friend knocked me backwards, sideways and every which way today. 

Now the thing is that I had no memory as to whom the friend might be despite pondering for a minute or two - only to realise, as I browsed further through the month in question that it was no other than the mighty Boon. You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather. Yes, the 9 July in question was the date of his first heart attack, from which he made a reassuring recovery.

Anyway, he's now out of hospital after banging himself around in the bathroom, following the loss of unreasonable amounts of blood, to end up looking like someone who'd just been sparring with Mike Tyson (and I'm talking the young, ferocious Tyson here.) Hope the next fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years or so prove uneventful on the health front for him. And for me, for that matter.

Uneasy Reading

David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet is a model of clarity for anyone who wants to write accessibly without in any way patronizing the reader. His ability to use the technical terminology of the fields in which he specializes without a moment’s obfuscation is unparalleled.

So why is it so difficult to read, for this reader? Answer – Because the fundamental truths in which it deals are so painful. I found it difficult to watch the documentary that it’s the basis of for the same reason.

Fortunately I’ve made it beyond the first half in which the Greatest Living Englishman makes painfully clear how mankind has almost destroyed the planet. The second half, A Vision for the Future, allows for some hope. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure there’s any real foundation for the optimism on display. But I am completely sold on the course of action so clearly outlined.

We have no choice.

Reading Myself

Spent a bit of time today reflecting on the vagaries of my reading over the last two or three months. For reasons I can't quite grasp I failed to make the progress I expected to on the small pile of books I assembled back in early May. I thought that in our June sojourn at Maison KL I'd get to grips with all the novels, but this wasn't to be. It isn't that I stopped reading, but once I'd finished Dune I really had to force myself to make progress in The Battle for Spain. It wasn't that I was bored. I just found I needed to take things slowly to ensure I did justice to all the detail. And, I felt compelled, in a mild sort of way, to goof off on stuff on-line which felt then, and now, tissue thin, not like 'real' reading at all.

Oddly enough I didn't listen to much music either, and this despite having quite a bit of time on my hands.

In contrast, the last few days have seen me banging along with a few texts, and feeling compelled to do so despite having plenty of work to get through. I've picked up the pace on the big Lowell Collected and just finished the poems in his last substantial book, Day by Day - which I found pretty accessible in terms of his late period. The first three stories in Ted Chiang's collection proved distinctly engaging and I'm settling into Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet with relish. And I should add that I've been enjoying a paragraph from Finnegans Wake here and there on a regular basis for the last week and found myself zipping through a number of reviews over the weekend in the Christmas Double Issue of the Literary Review which I'd put to one side after mid-May despite very much enjoying to that point.

So why the sudden enthusiasm? I wish I knew; I remain a mystery to myself. But here's an awkward thought: Perhaps I need to be forced into action (needing to work) in order to feel a compulsion to read in order to create for myself a space for myself. If the time is gifted me, I lose something. An essential laziness asserts itself and I lose whatever sense of purpose I've got. I'm not sure I've read myself correctly, but if I have there are implications to deal with.

Definitely Full

We found ourselves dining in somewhat grand style this evening and in jolly company. It's amazing just how much it's possible to eat when the grub is easy on the eye and tasty on the palette. I even managed to ignore a delectable looking bread & butter pudding having overdone it on the fruity deserts. Doubt that I'll feel anything like hungry for the next couple of days.

Funnily enough, it's the fact that we rarely set the boat out in this fashion these days that makes going out on the lake feel so entirely and memorably satisfying.

Cause For Hope

Finally some good news out of the UK. A good chance of a competent government after 14 years of the less than optimal. Someone asked me about the new Prime Minister's lack of charisma and seemed surprised when I said I regarded that as one of his best qualities.

And I thought I was stating the obvious.

Look Back In Anger

For no reason I can think of I felt a bit angry at one point today. I wasn't angry at anyone. Just angry about things, sort of.

Sometimes anger is a useful emotion. An energy, as John Lydon would have it. And proto-punk Peter Hammill had it in abundance. Bit like Dylan. PH was still magnificently angry in 2005 and the world was the better for it.

Wish I could put my anger to such good service, but it just dissipates.

Looking Ahead

Am looking forward to the crushing of a certain political party in tomorrow's General Election in the UK and the restoration of something approaching sane governance. But, given the record of my countrymen in recent years in the ballot box, I'm not counting on this whatever the polls say.

A Simple Lesson

Returned Beevor's The Battle for Spain to the library today. It took me quite some time to read it, owing, I think, to the density of detail involved. But in its way I enjoyed that aspect of the text. Spain in the 1930's (and before, and after) was complicated, as is every nation, and trying to simplify the dreadful conflict would be a mistake. There were no heroes, but plenty of villains, on all sides. That's the way of the world when a nation slides into open internal conflict. 

If there's one lesson worth learning from history, that's the best one.

Not So Alarmed

Managed to get to the new Woodlands Hospital this afternoon to see Boon. In fact, we didn't even need to make our way to his ward as he was able to come down to the canteen, in his wheelchair, wheeled by Mei, to share a cuppa with us. The reason for the wheelchair was twofold: he's been suffering from vertigo, though this has now eased somewhat, but there's still some danger of fainting and falling again as he did last Saturday night; and he managed to break some toes when he fell, so walking is not a good idea for him at present.

Other than that we were treated to Boon pretty much as usual, which was a bit of a relief given what he's been through. He was talking of being released from hospital in a couple of days, which points to the fact that his physicians think of the bleeding he was suffering from being under control. Mind you, his blood count sounded on the low side so it could be he's being a trifle optimistic, but mindless optimism is always a good sign of someone on the road to recovery. So, hurray!

To be honest, I quite envied him the prominent indentation-cum-gash on his forehead - the most visible result of his unexpected blackout over the weekend. He looked like a true hard man, someone not to be trifled with. Serious people, as Dylan puts it. My own stay in hospital, in contrast, just made me look a lot thinner and a lot older. Not exactly 'serious'.