Further Escape

There are few things as effective as getting through examination marking for imparting the sensation of being cabined, cribbed and confined in extremis. I suppose it's do with the triple whammy of simultaneously needing to note salient errors, keep in mind the five aspects of the marking rubric - applying them as you go along - and think your way into whatever thought-world the candidate is wandering in. It's pretty intense, and when all this is compounded by virtually unreadable handwriting (as it was with the last script I looked at yesterday) it approaches the impossible.

How lovely it is then to get away from it all, as I did yesterday evening by taking out the family to celebrate Fifi's birthday, which we did in some style. And this evening by getting to the gym for the first time this month (to try and mitigate some of the damage done to the waistline by last night's provender.) I picked up some sort of muscle strain on our trip to Melaka & KL at the turn of the month and, advised forcefully by the Missus, thought it best to allow for a full recovery before hitting the elliptical trainer again - and I'm hoping I haven't strained anything this evening.

It's amazing how just a few minutes of physical effort seems to clear the cobwebs of the day. Surprisingly I managed the full 35 minutes without feeling too bad, but I noticed that my heart rate ended up around 174 - 176, which is higher than it's been in recent times for the same settings. Fortunately the old ticker appears to be none the worse for these exertions. Just hope it keeps going!

Escape

Spent a fair portion of today getting through my mark load for the November IB examinations. Not exactly exciting stuff, but the day now looks brighter. Am losing myself in a few of Messiaen's birds having recently come to the conclusion that their songs might just constitute the greatest music for solo piano of the last century. Delighted to discover the Maestro's own Missus, the formidable Yvonne Loriod, pounding the ivories in a recording of the full set of Catalogue d'oiseaux right here.

All Made Up

One aspect of the Malay dramas that Noi so often watches intrigues me. There's usually at least one pretty young thing involved in the on-going storyline and the actress involved invariably wears make-up, regardless of whether the make-up is appropriate for the character. Assuming the world of the particular drama is not terribly realistic this can be easily ignored. But even in dramas involving a fairly realistic take on kampong life the make-up is still applied.
 
One show broadcast last night is set against a refreshingly small town - small village background, and visually it works well. The male performers uniformly look the part, but the young lady playing the romantic lead - who wears hijab, by the way - sports make-up that would not look out of place in a Vogue photo-shoot. It isn't that the make-up is garish, you understand, if anything it's very tastefully applied, but that's the problem. Young ladies living on kampongs in my experience don't spend time making sure they're wearing perfectly applied make-up every minute of the day.
 
What puzzles me is that the incongruity is so striking that the average viewer must surely notice it. So is this what the producers assume average viewers want, even though considerable trouble has been taken to achieve a reasonable degree of verisimilitude in all the other aspects of what's on view? It seems the very essence of the objectification of women that the fair sex so vigorously, and rightly, complain about. Don't the actresses playing these roles feel that this takes them completely out of character? Do they make a noise about it?

Or is there still a fundamental need for some kind of glamour to blind all involved, such that they don't really register the falsity?

Responsibilities

As I came back into the bedroom after a shower in the early hours of the morning, following the usual routine, I was struck, as I always am, by just how cold an air-conditioned bedroom gets. As I shivered in recognition of this routine truth I suddenly thought, for the first time in years, of the routine of going downstairs on a cold winter's morning when we lived behind the shop on Guide Lane, when I would have been eleven or twelve. Arriving at the living room there was always a cheerful little fire to warm you up, which Mum prepared even before I awoke. And then followed the bacon sandwich that constituted breakfast - and a jolly tasty breakfast it was too. At that age I was already daunted at the idea of adult responsibilities lying in wait, like going down to make a fire in the freezing cold before waking the kids.

Funnily enough, I've never had to do that. Nor have I ever had to make sure my shoes were polished to a perfect shining blackness every day, despite the fact that Dad repeatedly stressed how this was one of the key responsibilities of growing up, and was a crucial element of life in the army. And I've never had to consume a glass of milk containing a raw egg despite convincing myself this was what men had to do every evening, based on observing Dad do so.

Thinking back on these features of my childhood early this morning it occurred to me that adult life has been a bit disappointing in certain respects, though a good deal easier than expected.

Days Gone By

It's that time of year when I start to put my appointments diary for the year ahead in order. I can't cope with anything other than a week-to-a-view format and have established a routine over the years of exactly what needs noting for each week for me to cope. I remember once upon a time sort of attempting to keep each year's diary reasonably tidy. I gave that up a long, long time ago. Indeed, I vaguely recall a time when I didn't keep a diary at all but relied on memory. Good grief! 

Preparing the diary is tedious and intimidating in equal measures - a bit like the Toad, work itself, I suppose. How am I ever going to get through all this? is the irksome, slightly panicky refrain that pops up in the back of my mind as I write. The answer being, You will, somehow. You usually do.

But there's a plus side to this little job. In the course of noting key events to come I'm reminded of their equivalents in the year just past - and the good times that so often came with them. Memory is a funny thing. I know I had some bad moments in 2015, not to mention my fair share of bleak hours and darksome days; I have them in every year. But somehow the mind pushes all this to one side as if to say it's of no great note. Mercy of a kind.

Moving On

We find ourselves in the somewhat irritating situation of having to shift apartment to another location on these premises ahead of next year. The Missus, who's spent no little time and energy on getting our current quarters spick and span and uncannily comfortable, is not best pleased, I can tell you. But, having got the keys to the new place today, and having had our first prowl around, she's got that home improvement light in her eyes. We have a project!

Nothing Really Changes

Was looking back at a journal entry for this date ten years ago and found this:

Felt foolishly pleased with myself at several moments today which is a rather sad reflection on my character.

 

I've got no idea what those lost moments might have been, but it's good to know that all such moments will be lost to time, and soon. In the interim I can note that it takes a lifetime to fail to grow up.

Hard Thinking

I'm a great believer in the notion of the 'life of the mind', but if there's one thing I lack in this direction it's the stamina for doing genuinely sustained hard thinking. I'm referring to the kind of thing that involves relentlessly close study of conceptually demanding material to the point that one achieves some kind of mastery over it - like grasping a particularly dense paragraph of Kant at his thorniest. (Mind you, that's not such a good example as that might just be beyond any mortal.) Over the last couple of years or so I've come to recognise this deficiency in myself and developed something of a tendency to keep telling myself I need seriously to do something about it.

To this end, if I recall rightly, I was intending to get to grips with some heavy duty philosophy last year by reading and thoroughly assimilating (as it were) Ed Feser's Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide.) Read it I did; assimilate it, not so much. Just too darned lazy and, worryingly, possibly too darned stupid. Anyway, I told myself that one day I'd give it another go, and put it somewhere at the back of my mind.

More recently I got hold of Prof Feser's Aquinas and The Last Superstition, thinking that I really need to get to grips with his argument that Aquinas's five ways of proving the existence of God are valid. After all, as a theist shouldn't I have reason on my side? Well, I do think I have, but find it difficult to clearly articulate why. I read Aquinas last week, but I'm afraid managed to follow only about fifty per cent of the argument, though what I did follow was powerfully convincing stuff. I'm now about two-thirds of the way through The Last Superstition, an at times hilarious polemic against the New Atheists, and, again, following the hard arguments with some degree of clarity, but not enough to count as really grasping the case being made in its entirety.

So this is what I'm going to do. I'll finish The Last Superstition and continue to enjoy the excellent jokes. Then it'll be back to Philosophy of Mind and Aquinas with the intent of knowing exactly why Reason tells us that God exists. Pretty hard, eh? You can't say I lack ambition.

Mr Grumpy

Thought there might be a chance of making it through to the last week of November or thereabouts before being subjected to the ubiquitous canned Christmas music beloved of the malls but didn't take into account IMM Making the Magic of Christmas. (Not, as they say.) This isn't The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, or RVW's A Fantasia on Christmas Carols or Hodie, you understand. No, this is Boney M emptying Mary's Boy Child of all merit, relentlessly, over and over. Hope it's soon over, but it won't be.

Another One To Watch

I'd heard any number of good things about Amanda Lee Koe's short story collection Ministry of Moral Panic and it turns out they're all true. This I discovered on Tuesday, in the course of enjoying the public holiday for Deepavali, when I read the book cover to cover (having just finished Art Studio in the morning) in the process adding considerably to my enjoyment of the day. I couldn't put it down - not so much wanting to know what was going to happen next, though one or two tales had their fair share of that useful quality, as wanting to see what the writer was going to do next in terms of voice, perspective, point of view - all that tricky stuff about technique that is so irritatingly self-conscious when it gets in the way, but fascinating and somehow necessary when it's done with assurance. Ms Lee (I originally wrote Ms Koe, but I've got a feeling that could be wrong) has assurance in bagfuls. There's hardly a false, forced note in the collection, which is quite something considering just how technically adventurous she is.

Earlier today I glanced through the stories again feeling that I'd read them in such a rush that I'd better remind myself of the shape of the whole volume before writing anything about it and I was struck by both the cohesion of the whole and just how strikingly successful the best stories are. The exploration of taboos that seems to work as a linking principle is rightly unsettling at moments, but I came to trust the writer in terms of her purposes even when I wasn't entirely sure of what ends she had in mind. (I'm thinking specifically of Chick, of which the ending, surely crucial to an interpretation, lost me. Was I meant to be in any way sympathetic to the protagonist? I hope not, because I wasn't.)

Most of all I was impressed by the emotional wallop of so many of the stories. I sort of half-wondered before I started reading (don't know why, foolish prejudice against the young I guess) whether I was in for some post-modern ironic cool. Well, there is a distancing at times, but well-judged and one that adds to the sense of intelligent compassion at work. The placing of Love Is No Big Truth at the heart of things with the sort of two part Two Ways To Do This either side, these pieces featuring the most obviously victimised of the many victims we encounter, surely wasn't an accident? (Yes, they were the favourites of this old softy. But four of the other stories were close behind.)

For someone as talented as this writer I'd imagine that cleverness is a big temptation. Fortunately she doesn't succumb.