Still Moaning

Just read this from this date from my journal of 15 years ago:

The SSO in fine form tonight. Their audience quite dreadful. Lots of students in attendance for some reason. Extremely limited attention spans, especially for the second half of the concert, which happened to be wonderful. Great piece by Toru Takemitsu: I Hear The Water Dreaming. Textures to drown in. Why is it so hard for people to just do nothing & listen?

 

So I was as much of an old curmudgeon then as I am now. But a curmudgeon with a pretty good point to make, I reckon. (By the way, I remember vividly the opening of the great composer's piece and just how noisy the idiots around me became as soon as they realised the music wasn't conventionally 'pretty' in the manner I reckon they expected. And I feel just as annoyed now as I was then.)

Getting Away From It All

Obsessively listening when I get a chance, which has been rare indeed in the last few fun-packed days, to the current incarnation of King Crimson as captured live on the memorably titled, Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind. I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but it's even better than Live in Toronto.

(Question: Can you ever have enough live Crimso? Answer: No.)

And when I've not been listening I've been running through whole segments in my monkey mind. (Actually starting humming bits of Sailor's Tale to myself at work. Fortunately I was alone.)

All Smiles

Rule of Life #176: Never trust a publication in which everyone in the pictures is smiling.

Nothing In Mind

Just enjoyed a bit of a neck-rub from the Missus before retiring to my bed. Puts it all in perspective.

Missing The Obvious

When I first read Boswell's Life of Johnson it never occurred to me that the oddities of Johnson's behaviour were anything other than the quirks of a great man and of no special interest. Since then on more than one occasion I've come across the diagnosis/thesis that he was bi-polar and that understanding this helps explain him.

Reading the Life now this seems to be obviously the case. Indeed, Boswell is clearly aware of the problem, or, rather, of some kind of problem associated with a kind of melancholia that he can't quite describe or put a name to.

The strange thing is that far from reducing Johnson in stature an awareness - perhaps in a somewhat simplified form - of the syndrome he's dealing with serves to enhance one's sense of his greatness. To have achieved so much, to have lived such a life, to have been so fundamentally sane despite his affliction is astonishing. And there's something deeply moving about Boswell's concerned awareness for his friend's extraordinary suffering.

For all our advances in understanding of the psychological problems that so many people courageously deal with, I'm not sure we see these with greater clarity or insight than the mighty biographer and his mightier subject.

Tightening Up

I suppose it's been in reaction to my reading of Ms Kay and Ms Tempest that I found myself reaching for that most patriarchal, often inflexible and studiously correct of versifiers John Milton today. (Yet this most canonical of dead white males was an outrageous Radical in his own time, I happily remind myself.)

I thought I'd reread the Nativity Ode, and I'm glad I did. I'm also happy to have prefaced my reading by listening to a most illuminating lecture on Milton's first great poem in English available on youtube via those good people at Yale.

And I realise that for all the contrasts between the great Puritan Poet and his modern (non-)equivalents there's one striking similarity. To get the real Milton you need to read him out loud, loudly.

Loosening Up

Passing my desk the other day Aloysius noticed New York poet Sarah Kay's No Matter The Wreckage lying thereon. It seems a friend had been recommending her work to him and he was struck by the coincidence. As I explained to him, my having the collection is actually a sort of random accident. When I was off-loading the Kinokuniya book vouchers I got at last year's Literature Seminar at the bookshop's main branch I happened to come across a few copies of the collection, in a rather handsome, nicely illustrated paperback and, as is my usual practice, I thought I'd pay a few dues to the world of poetry by buying the book on spec.
 
I'm glad I did. It's not my usual thing, I suppose, owing much to the world of Poetry Slams and Ted Talks - as I gathered from the extensive credits and acknowledgements. I'm guessing the writer is a bit of a celebrity in that world, which isn't really my world. In fact, I'm guessing that's where Aloysius's friend had made the acquaintance of the writer. But she's a very talented poet with a distinctive voice.
 
The distinctive feature of this school of writing (if that's what it is - I'm using the term in the sloppiest way possible) is the strong sense of the voice as a public one in performance, even when the material is seemingly of the most private kind. The rhythms of the verse are entirely colloquial, loose to the point of outright clumsiness on occasion, especially when a longer line is adopted. For someone like myself, essentially educated in the tradition of poetry as essentially finely hewn, it's a bit of an ask (as they say) to take these new formless forms on board. But, hey, even an old dinosaur can learn a new dance. (These days I can even find some small joy in mixed metaphors.)

Lifted

The Missus has gone off to Melaka for the weekend leaving me a bit at a loose end - but with enough work on the table to tie a couple of knots, so don't worry for me.

Thought I'd fill the void this evening by popping out to see our students making music and dance around the campus in a sort of talent show type evening. The thing is that we've got enough talent to keep several venues at once ticking over.

I knew I was going to be entertained but I didn't quite expect to be as wowed as I was by the acts I got to see. Lots of highlights, too many to list, including the rawest, smokingest version of I Heard It Through The Grapevine I've ever heard live and, trust me, I've heard a few versions. Mr Gaye would have been proud.

Bad News, Good News

Caught a stunning story the other day on Sky News about the exploitation of child labour in connection with the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was enough to make anyone who uses devices reliant on funky little batteries (that's basically all of us) feel very, very guilty indeed. I used to wonder how the Victorian middle classes felt when they read about the appalling lives of the little kids used to help sweep their chimneys and now I know. Really bad. But it's difficult to see this as just bad news, terrible as it is.

The fact it's in the news, due to excellent reporting, seems to me to offer some hope. There's a good chance that companies like Apple will need to take real action regarding their tainted suppliers to do something about the dreadful conditions in which cobalt is mined in order to limit the damage to their precious reputations - and they've got real power. (And, who knows, there may be people of real integrity working for them.)

So this news may do some little good. Let's not forget, the scandal attendant upon the abuse of the little sweeps meant that, eventually, it was no longer possible to abuse children in that manner in England. Shining a light on this darkness may have something of the same effect.

Still Keeping Still

The turning of the month is a good time to look back at my resolution for the year, which is no longer quite the new year it once was. And here's the thing: I seem to have gone beyond gracious acceptance of the need to be still into a positive relishing of such moments, sometimes minutes (though never quite hours.) Quite a triumph, eh?

Unfortunately, not really. The truth is that I've enjoyed a reasonably sedate time on the work front. Of course, I'm using 'sedate' in a relative sense. In my line of work you're always busy, sadly, but as long as you're not frantically so it doesn't seem too bad. And that's the way it's been.

It's not going to last though, and that's when the real test of my embracing of stillness begins. Soon, I'm afraid.