Catching Up

Enjoyed a surprise visit from Karen this evening, who'd dropped Ryan off somewhere near Holland Village to do something or other connected with school, and rightly decided to spend her waiting time with us at the Hall. Getting up to date with all sorts of family news is the way a good evening should be spent. And that's exactly what we did - with Noi also making some epok epok for tomorrow as the icing on the cake (with apologies for the dreadful mixed metaphor.)

Wise words of the evening (uttered by self): You can never have enough fridge magnets. (A lifetime's experience lies behind that, by the way.)

A Further Update

In summarising the reading I did back in KL the other day I forgot to mention The Faber Companion To Samuel Beckett, edited by C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, a compendium of articles on all aspects of old Sam, arranged alphabetically. Initially I was just dipping into the rather grand tome as the fancy took me, but then decided to read it sequentially, basically just for the hell of it. I'm halfway through 'E', just past Endgame. Highly informative and a little bit loopy at times, much like the great man himself. Of course, as a result of my reading I now feel a burning need to read the trilogy, Murphy, Watt, etc.

And, although this is not strictly reading as such, I should mention that I listened to my CD set of Jim Norton reading Finnegans Wake from cover to cover, as it were. The editor reckons this covers a quarter of the actual text, which is pretty good going for a supposedly unreadable text. Whilst it may be unreadable it's far from unlistenable. Indeed, this is the medium in which I reckon it should be encountered as above all it reminds you, well me anyway, of what a delight the work is. Funny to think that the young Sam Beckett once sat taking Joyce's dictation on the Wake. Well not funny really. Illuminating.

What I didn't read in KL was Prof. Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment, though I started on it well before going up north. I mention this simply because I finished it this evening, having drawn out my reading just to slowly savour its insights. Apart from its many other virtues it contains long chunks of quite a number of Keats's letters, with attendant sympathetic readings, reminding me I don't have any edition of them for some reason I can't fathom. Ricks seems to think that many are as good as the poems, and he's right. The last one Keats ever wrote, to Charles Armitage Brown, is powerfully moving and Ricks leaves it until his particularly fine final chapter which in itself almost justifies the sorry business of lit. crit.

Note to self: Must get an edition of the letters and Andrew Motion's biography of Keats when I finally allow myself to buy some books again.

A Bit Of A Mess

Water-cannon and tear-gas on the streets of KL. Quite exciting, as long as you're not in the middle of it, as fortunately we are not. Some sort of Arab Spring going on? I don't think so. It was easy to see this coming when we were there a couple of weeks ago, and it was easy to see how it could be avoided. Nobody comes out of this one with much credit, I'm afraid.

Confessional

Still in minimalist mode, I followed up Plastic Ono Band with Dylan's John Wesley Harding the other day. Another album which puzzled me in its heyday, aside from the instantly accessible All Along The Watchtower, but which I came to some terms with some years ago. So nothing revelatory, as with the Lennon, this time round, aside from a heightened awareness of just how many masks the Bobster wears in the various songs. In fact, how indirect an artist he really is, always coming at things at a slant, crooked. Always trying on the character who sings the song, who's never quite really Dylan. Whilst Lennon absolutely is himself in Plastic Ono Band, painfully, sometimes embarrassingly, but always wonderfully so.

Two ways of making art - from the utterly sincere, to the entirely false. Both turn out to be true.

Back To Basics

Came back home yesterday to listen to Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album. Sometimes a voice (in this case a great one), a piano, a guitar and an attitude are all you need. (Though nice bass - Voorman - and gut-bucket drums - Ringo - help.)

I didn't quite get that, back in the seventies, when I thought John had rather lost the plot. Yesterday I grasped the album for the first time - I mean I really got it. And when you're in it, it's difficult to get out, happily so.

Down The Road

We're now well and truly into Syaaban, the month preceding Ramadhan, so we're peeking ahead beginning to plan for fasting. Not too many years ago I would have been nervously expectant at this point; now it's a happy expectancy - with just a touch of nerves. Bring it on, say I!

Delusional

Still reflecting on recent reading, the one that got away was Dawkins's The God Delusion. I've been meaning to read it for a while, basically to see what all the fuss was about. These New (or Gnu) Atheist chappies seem very vocal of late as if something has really rattled their cage, and the good prof appears to be prettty much their patron saint and in large part responsible for the fuss. At least two bloggers I think are generally fairly sensible hold the book in high regard. So I live in hopes of finding something genuinely stimulating and challenging when I finally get round to it.

Unfortunately I found Hitchens's rather silly book on the same lines so disappointing that it quite took away my enthusiasm for reading the more celebrated tome. And I'm still manfully avoiding the buying of new books until I clear the backlog on my shelves. So eventually I passed on the Dawkins, for the present at least. It might be fun to read in fasting month though!

The Odd Bunch

Now reading Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in the handsome Library of America edition, which includes Walden and a couple of other pieces. Actually I bought it for Walden, a classic I've never read cover to cover, but started on A Week as it's the first thing in the collection. Relaxing stuff so far. A reminder of a better age.

I love the LoA editions, of course, but it was odd finishing Ubik in the Philip K. Dick collection the other week as I can't help but feel that Dick should be read in cheap paperbacks. I don't mean this in an insulting way, far from it. Cheap paperbacks often feature fine works, as in the case of Dick, and the raw vigour of his novels seem better suited to them somehow.

Ubik was part of my scheduled holiday reading which, other than the stuff I've already blogged about, also included Ackroyd's nifty, and delightfully demotic, 'translation' of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Heaney's The Spirit Level, Beckett's Waiting For Godot and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex (in Don Taylor's translation). The last two are texts I am teaching later in the year, but I'm happy to say that I was reading them purely and wonderfully for pleasure. All in all, a fruitful list, I think, if a slightly odd bunch.

Western Eyes

Finished Conrad's Under Western Eyes just now, having read most of the final section on the bus up to Melaka, and most of the rest in the last days of my June vacation in KL. It wasn't actually on my reading list for the holiday but I completed the other stuff I brought up from Singapore (of which more later) and picked up my old Pan paperback from the shelves of Maison KL realising I didn't think I'd ever really got into the novel after the brilliant first section set in Russia and it wouldn't do any harm to see if this time I could. And I did.

That first section is like something out of Dostoyevsky, consciously so on Conrad's part, though I don't think he thought all that much of Dostoyevsky as a guide to life. When I first read it I was deeply into the second greatest Russian novelist - to the point that I thought him the greatest - which is something that should be the case for all literary-minded teenagers. (I suppose it's the intensity of it all that does it - like Dickens on amphetamines.) So, of course, the Dostoyevskian Conrad had me hooked. But then comes the Conradian Conrad, and this is a kind of criticism of Dostoevsky - distant, cool, ironic, sceptical - and I suppose I just didn't have the temperament for it then. Why the distancing narrative that makes us view Razumov from the outside rather than treating us directly to his tortured consciousness? Why the clear-eyed, jaundiced view of those loopy 'revolutionists'? In fact, why the jaundiced view of everyone and everything, except perhaps Miss Haldin (and that's a big perhaps)? Now I think I get it, I suppose because I share that jaundice.

In these troubled times Conrad is an amazingly prescient guide regarding fanaticism of all stripes. Reading Under Western Eyes today you get an extraordinary sense of how right Conrad was about early twentieth century Russia. Note to self: must find time to reread The Secret Agent soon.

Matters of Life and Death

Sitting with Noi, talking. Mainly about the small things. The real things. The only things that matter.