A Word Of Caution

For tyrants everywhere: You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire / Once the flames begin to catch, the wind will blow it higher. From the mouth of Gabriel himself.

Something Incredible

According to today's paper there're an awful lot of planets in our little branch of the Milky Way thought capable of supporting life. And I'm talking big, big numbers here - like five hundred million or something. Definitely more than ten, at any rate.

So here's a thought: it'd be pretty incredible if there were really life out there, eh?

But then, here's another: it'd be pretty incredible if there weren't.

So either way, it's all a bit mind-boggling. Which leads me to mention the incredible lamb shank the missus just cooked for dinner, which puts both the former observations into some kind of perspective.

Real Racism

Read Conrad's short story Karain: A Memory yesterday after completing my quota of marking for the day. It's the first time I've read it, and I made three or four false starts in the course of the week as I just couldn't tune in to the first page. The problem lay in the initial deliberate generalising behind the frame story, a feature of Conrad that can be irritating and endearing in roughly equal measures and accounts for the fact that rereading him is such a pleasure: the second time round you get the point of all you missed the first.

The fact that there's quite a bit of generalising about Malay culture added to the piquancy of the tale for me and got me thinking about Conrad and race in general. No, that's a bit misleading. I've been thinking about this since reading Heart of Darkness again since it's no longer possible to read the novella in the relatively innocent way I managed when a teenager. After all, if someone of the stature of Chinua Achebe tells you Conrad is a racist and you need to have that at the forefront of your mind when reading him, you'd better listen.

I'm afraid I've not managed to come to any deep conclusions on the matter. Pretty clearly Conrad is a racist in terms of seeing the racial divisions of humanity in what might be clumsily termed an essentialist manner - I mean, he obviously think that race counts big-time (as would have been pretty much inevitable for any man, or woman, of his time.). But does this somehow compromise or invalidate his work?

What struck me on my most recent reading of that fateful journey into the Congo was the determination of Marlow (or Conrad? - it's a typically tricky one) to make himself see the suffering humanity of the Africans encountered though fully aware that he sees them in a kind of distanced 'otherly' manner. (That's dreadfully expressed, but it will have to do for now.) It's not very pleasant or edifying, but then I don't think it's supposed to be. But it is very real and disturbing, necessarily so.

Making A Mark

Spent a fair amount of the day ploughing through various essays with the old red pen in my hand and, curiously, unbelievably, almost enjoyed the experience. I've always seen marking as important but in recent years I've come to regard it as moving to the centre of my teaching. I try to regard each piece as almost a cry from the writer's soul, worthy of my full attention. 'Try' is the operative word here, though; all too often the attempt ends in failure. Mind you, that's tied to the sad fact that the cry from the soul bit is generally just a useful fiction.

I also find it strangely useful to break off marking in the middle of an essay, do something else for a minute or two, and then get back to it. I started doing this because of problems with my back, seeking to ensure I didn't hold the same position too long, but I've come to find it psychologically refreshing. Usually it means I have to reread the bit I've already done but it helps me see the whole thing with fresh eyes somehow.

When I first started teaching one of the problems I found marking students' work was the pretty startling evidence of how often I'd failed to convey clearly what they needed to know. Now I've come to take that for granted such that when someone gets it right it's enormously refreshing. I can't think of that many jobs that have failure as a kind of built-in component. Banking, maybe?

Good Company

Finished The Fry Chronicles a few days ago, and glad to have to have done so. Mr Fry was good company - diffusely rambling in a relaxing sort of way - and it was just the kind of book to read when carrying out the messy business of moving house - but towards the end I felt I'd had enough and needed to get back to something with a bit more substance. Not that the Chronicles were entirely vapid - there's some very interesting material on the writer's bi-polar disorder, and quite a few passages of comment on various issues that had an impact through the tolerant good sense expressed - but they got a bit gossipy at times and a little overly indulgent when it came to spelling out the virtues of various partners in his work. Mind you, those are endearing faults.

And, all in all, it was an endearing read. I found myself really liking the guy despite - or possibly because of - his many faults.

Forbidden Fruit

Told a class today they were forbidden to read Blake's Proverbs From Hell which happen to occupy a couple of pages of an anthology we're using. This should guarantee some close reading and a fair bit of thought, eh? A touch of wisdom from the tygers of wrath. (Which I've always thought would make a great name for a punk rock band.)

The Heart of the Matter

As I was finishing Madame Bovary recently I found myself dipping into the Conrad collection we picked as a Part 4 text for the class with the Humanities Scholars in it. The thing about a text in that part of the course is that we don't really teach it as such in the old-fashioned 'A' level way. The students decide what they want to focus on for a presentation to the class from a group of four texts - probably just focusing on one - so we do little more than introduce each of the four and give broad guidelines for individual students to operate independently. I mention this partly because in some ways I'd really love to teach the Conrad and have to hold back from delivering it on a plate for the class. So dipping in was a bit painful as I was aware of a lot of material we would most likely by-pass.

The two stories I read at that point I suspect are not likely to attract too much attention and that's a pity because they're so darned good. I reacquainted myself with Youth, which ironically I last read as a youth, and got to wondering whether anyone has done the mystical lure of the Orient better than JC. The answer is no. There's more to the tale than that, of course (there always is in Conrad), the sheer unpleasantness of life aboard a merchant ship for one, but the level on which it operates as a gloriously nostalgic, melancholy mood-piece is unsurpassable. And the first story, An Outpost of Progress, which I'd not read before, seemed the perfect sardonic evocation of the depravity of Empire.

Perfect, that is, until you get to Heart of Darkness. This is the one I think the students who fall under the Conradian spell are likely to go for, and rightly. I can't remember how many times I've read it, but each time is new. I'm now on the final third, with Kurtz encountered in person, insofar as you can call it an encounter, and I'm stunned, again. It's as if Conrad is knocking on the door of some final meaning of things - but, of course, the door will remained closed. There are some texts that seem to take you beyond language, into the heart of things, I suppose. What a journey!

Film of the Year

As far as I understand these matters which is not particularly far, The King's Speech is likely to win a shelf-full of Oscars. It is certainly the Film of the Year for me and the missus, but since it's the only film we've actually been to see so far, and quite possibly the only one we're likely to see given our usual dismal track record on this front, this is, in itself, no great recommendation. Having said that, we both thoroughly enjoyed it and if it does win a load of silverware I wouldn't be terribly surprised. We went to see it last Saturday, by the way.

So what is there to like about it? Well, for one, it's a small film on a human scale, essentially about relationships. It's well acted, with solid performances from all, and a particularly good one from Colin Firth as the stammering monarch. He manages to play the man rather than the defect. It's a well-told, well-paced story that explores its themes intelligently with enough depth to say something useful about the virtues of behaving decently.

It also manages to steer clear of over-slavish appreciation of the various royals on show, though it gets a bit syrupy about the four at the centre. But then the point appears to be that they constituted a real family as Bertie sought to rectify the damage caused by his own dreadful upbringing.

I suppose it succeeds in depicting a chap, well a couple of them really, who managed to be what Mum and Auntie Norah and Auntie Bet would have termed true gentlemen. Not a bad title to aspire to. Better than 'king' any day.

Working for the Pharaoh

Recent events in the Middle East had me reaching for Richard Thompson's excellent Amnesia album this morning, specifically to enjoy the last track, Pharaoh, a song I've always admired. Oddly Patrick Humphries, the writer of a fine book on the great singer--songwriter entitled Strange Affair, doesn't have particularly positive things to say about the song, regarding its lyric as somewhat muddled, I think. I find this odd as the lyric strikes me as possessing great clarity and cohesion, being entirely successful in its overall effect.

I wonder if what is getting in the way of Mr Humphries' understanding of the lyric is a lack of grasp of the Islamic frame of ideas here. Although Pharaoh features on an album that comes after the more overtly Islamic-themed songs following Thompson's conversion, like so much of his material it benefits from some insight into the belief system that the writer still adheres to. A grasp of that system can help us appreciate the metaphorical underpinnings of the song. (By the way, lyric apart, the music is gorgeous, featuring a languorous melody that seems to hang somewhere between English folk and a prayer-like chant, and an arrangement subtly evoking some lazy desert ensemble whilst remaining solidly English in its instrumentation.)

The Pharaoh here is a dreadful tyrant, yes, but, and this is the tricky bit, he's ultimately trivial - which makes him all the more dangerous. This is similar to the idea that lies behind the slogan that emerged after the revolution in Iran characterising America as the Great Satan. In a sense this might have been translated as the Great Trivialiser, Satan, or Iblis, being seen as ultimately a trivial, pathetic figure who just doesn't get it. (Think Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost in the later books.) So the Pharaoh in our song is everywhere and we are all Living in Egypt land. We are all aware of the dogs of money, of course, and the song alerts us to their magicians, seen every night on our tv and computer screens, telling us what's true and real. Their images make them men of shadow - but there's a grim possibility that that's what we too have become.

It's easy to think of, indeed to see, the idols that rise into the sky and the pyramids that soar. Those lying sphinxes are more problematic, and by their very nature more enigmatic. To some degree I think its our choice for whom we shoulder the wheel. As another great singer-songwriter pointed out, working in a rather different religious tradition, you've gotta serve somebody.

I'm thinking now of those who've had no choice for the last thirty years of those they've had to serve politically and the powerful sense of exhilaration many of them must now feel and many of us feel for them. I hope they don't simply find themselves blindly kneeling to worship a new pharaoh, of whatever ilk that may be.

Mistaken

I misquoted Miller a Sunday ago, thinking Linda Loman told Willy that life was a taking leave. She was tougher than that. She told him it was a casting off. My version was so much more gentle. Linda's points to the sad truth that often those who leave us are heading for big new oceans where they hope the air is cleaner. Or we are deliberately pushing them away from us. Either way it's all very sad.

She immediately follows her observation by saying It's always that way, but Willy, of course, denies her wisdom. He's sure that some people accomplish something. Isn't that odd? She hadn't said they didn't.

So often we just don't hear each other.