Good Times

Noi has estimated that we entertained over sixty guests last Sunday (and that despite the fact that quite a few folk couldn't make it). At one point I don't think we could have got anyone else in the apartment. Since her assessment of success is based on how crowded we get and how much food is consumed, and taken away, she's very pleased with how it all went. And me? I just had the usual great time, and have enjoyed chowing down on those edibles that did not get snaffled up on the day since.

I'd like to have uploaded a couple of pictures of the nosh in all its splendour, but Blogger isn't obliging. Maybe next time.

Pain

For some twenty days or so my back has been troubling me, and for the last three or four I've been dealing with real pain. Except it's not quite like that. It begins, when I'm standing, as a kind of absence in the lower back, an absence of ease, something like a numbness. This translates itself steadily over time into a distinct presence, accompanied by a mild heat, that seems to radiate in almost wave-like fashion. It's constant, but surprisingly easily forgotten, if something catches my attention. But there remains a kind of awareness, almost a memory of sensation - until I focus again on the idea of being in enough discomfort to call it pain and it becomes pain. Not terrible pain. In fact, quite easy to bear, but pain nonetheless.

I feel intensely vulnerable and keep thinking I don't think I could cope if I were in a fight. This is odd since it's quite some years since I fought anyone. I'm also aware of how easily irritated I feel once I've crossed the ten-minute standing barrier.

I am recognising an old companion - this is the chronic pain that dogged me relentlessly for some five or six years. I'm hoping this time it's here on a fleeting visit, but aware there's some possibility my optimism may be unfounded. But that's not too bad - this is a faint shadow of the real suffering that dogs so many unfortunates and I cannot count myself amongst their number. So this is by way of an acknowledgement and greeting, old friend.

Experience

When I was a kid, a young teenager, I used to wonder why Dad would get home from work and just zonk out in a chair. Now I know.

There's a kind of quiet heroism in just keeping going. And imagine how that translates for those who have so little to keep going for.

Open Doors

The apartment is in creative turmoil. I am hiding by the computer as Noi, aided by Rozita and abetted by Fi Fi & Fa Fa, puts the finishing touches to a mountain of grub and restructures the living space (as rooms are now called in lifestyle publications) to welcome a cartload of guests. As far as I know the missus hardly got any sleep last night as she was 'preparing'. She is quite remarkable. And I am lucky. Very.

When You're Smiling

I've read somewhere, and I just can't remember where - an increasingly common condition, in my case - that a colleague who worked with J. M. Coetzee when he was still an academic said he only ever saw the great man laugh once in the whole time he worked with him. Readers of Disgrace would find little surprising in this. It must be up for some award as one of the least humorous novels ever written. (Next to it Siddhartha is a regular laugh fest, English A1 students please note.) But what I find particularly interesting about this little story is the question of what it actually was that made him laugh. A joke? An ironic situation? Somebody breaking wind? What could have, albeit briefly, opened the floodgates? And would it have made me laugh?

It's increasingly rare for me to suffer a bout of uncontrollable laughter but there was one recently brought on by a reference in Bennett's Untold Stories to the message on a Christmas card from one of his friends. It's far too vulgar to repeat in this very public far place but it's on page 301 on my edition, in a diary entry for December 2001. And every time I think of it I crack up.

Beyond Compare

Finished Disgrace yesterday and moved onto a bit of Pat Barker. Trying to get some distance from Coetzee who seems to have reached into my guts, wrenched them in a number of novel directions and then left me to make of myself whatever I can. A visceral read. I don't suppose it would necessarily have such an impact on every reader, but for me every word rang true and glowed like burning coal as a master of song once put it.

I suppose this is what it's like to live with a skin too few.

The Blind Assassin is a wonderful novel, beautifully structured, written with remarkable assurance, chock full of penetrating insight. As you read it you're conscious of the sheer craft of it all, how it works. In contrast, Coetzee seems beyond craft. I have no idea how Disgrace works, why Disgrace works. I don't even know what exactly it thinks it's doing, or how it manages to be so stunning. For this reader it just is.

Another Rat

This one put in an appearance at the wet market at Geylang Serai. Noi and I were there earlier as she needed to buy various spices for the dishes she has in mind for our Raya Open House this Sunday. She's always bought them from one particular stall, and there we were, almost finished, the bags loaded, when this grey-pink fellow shot between us and the stall, almost directly across her feet, and made his way through a hole at the bottom of what seems to be a temporary partition wall made of plywood, I think.

He (or she?) was so fast that Noi didn't see him at all and, in fact, still doesn't know what happened. I felt that this was information she could do without.

I'm pretty sure the stall holders see this rat, or some of his companions, regularly. He didn't seem in the slightest perturbed by the fact that we were standing around, wilfully cutting across our ground, and I got the sense he was covering a regular route. I suppose the market must be home to a few hundred, possibly more, of these guys, my guess being that rats breed like rabbits, or vice versa.

I suppose I should be a bit disturbed by all this but for some unaccountable reason the thought of the fellow makes me fairly cheerful. But then I've been haunted by Coetzee's dogs all day, not to mention quite a few of the other inhabitants of Disgrace (of which more soon), and a fat Singaporean rat (but he was really quite slim, I just like the phrase) seems cause for at least a thin smile (or a slim grin).

Carried Away

Finished The Blind Assassin yesterday and jumped straight into Coetzee's Disgrace. Finding it difficult to put down, even though I have to due to being swamped with work. Surely we live in a golden age for fiction.

Missed Opportunities

It seems that 9 October was National Poetry Day (in the UK) as designated by whoever has the say on these matters. There seem to be days for just about everything now and I suppose this does no harm, but I don't feel bad about not knowing anything about it as I see no particular reason for going to a lot of trouble to promote the reading and writing of the stuff. I'm puzzled when people don't like poetry but not terribly upset. It's a free world and if you'd rather play computer games or follow Formula 1 racing, good luck to you. I must say I think you're missing out on a lot but I'm pretty sure a reasonable effort has been made over years to alert you to the virtues of poetry and that's about as much as one can reasonably expect. I certainly don't think it's going to do poetry itself any great harm if it remains a minority interest. Maybe that's what it should be? Though I hasten to add, I think there's a lot more readers out there getting thoroughly immersed in the stuff and writing it than tends to be assumed.

Oddly enough I suspect it helps a lot in the classroom when classes realise a teacher is not terribly fussed as to whether they pick up on the teacher's enthusiasm for a subject. A kind of odd reverse psychology kicks in.

But the missed opportunity I'm really kicking myself over concerns last Friday's concert at the Esplanade Concert Hall featuring Vaughan Williams's 6th Symphony (and a tasty bit of Walton plus the Enigma Variations) by one of the big London orchestras (the Philharmonic, I think.) How did I manage not to know anything about this until I read the review? I've heard the Enigma a couple of times in concert so that didn't hurt, but I've never had the chance to listen to the Vaughan Williams in the concert hall and, scary as it is to say it, there's a fair chance I never will again. Rats!

Dressing Up

Noi likes to draw attention to groups of people, especially teenagers, who are obviously out visiting in the post-Raya season. How does she know that's what they're doing? Because they are, almost to a man, or woman, wearing traditional Malay garb. Although she doesn't actually say so, I know she takes pride in the fact that Malays seem to embrace the visible aspects of their culture at this time, even though such aspects may seem, to some degree, in conflict with the broader culture. She'll also generally point out that this is not something you see the Chinese here doing (dressing traditionally, I think she means.) I don't think she means this as a slur - rather, she is genuinely puzzled regarding the lack of what she sees as a sense of identity.

We saw a nice example of this on Friday when we were out doing the rounds ourselves. On the way up to our third port of call we passed a group of youngsters, in their late-teens I'd have said, sitting around a table at a void deck. There was a roughly equal mix of boys and girls, and each was dressed to the nines. Ironically it turned out they were on their way to the same address as ourselves, being friends of the youngsters of the family we were visiting. I couldn't help but think of the almost-impossibility of seeing kids of the same age in England who would conform so readily to the customs of their parents and take such obvious pleasure in dressing in a way that was at such odds with what would normally be regarded as fashionable. At the same time I got the sense that they were appropriating the traditions for their own ends, enjoying being in the group, making a show of visiting their friends independently of their families, making their outfits look good due to their casual, youthful grace. It also struck me that passing a group of teenagers out on the streets at that time of night in Manchester would have made me a little uneasy, and certainly watchful. These kids, in contrast, ended up happily salaaming me, and all the other elders, in a show of respect.

There's a lot to be said for built-in structures of respect & deference, structures demanding these be shown to elders. Such structures can bind people in very healthy, productive ways and need not necessarily weigh us down.