Serious Stuff

The other day I mentioned current uncertainties as to the fiction I intend to read in the next month or so. Those uncertainties partly relate to a sort of plan I have in mind with regard to what I regard as my serious reading. I've been thinking of rereading Iain McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary for some time, and I've decided that now is that time, with the end of year break not far off. I'm talking about a very slow reading indeed to ensure I've picked up every nuance of McGilchrist's argument, such that I can defend or promote it in genuine fine detail. The first time round I bought into his ideas big time, and now he's become a bit of presence in terms of on-line talks it's been easy to re-visit those ideas in a broad iteration. I'm absolutely convinced now of their value - I'm certain he's got it right. And since I now think in the same terms I need to ensure those thoughts are clear at every level.

In a similar way, I need to seek similar clarification with regard to Ed Feser's highly persuasive arguments that Aquinas got it right with his proofs of the existence of God. Though a convinced theist myself, I've sort of taken it for granted that such philosophical arguments, whilst broadly persuasive, can't deliver a genuine certainty of proof. But the last time I was reading Feser's The Last Superstition I had one of those moments of thinking that he'd achieved (through Aristotle & Aquinas) precisely that and knew I had to get back to the metaphysics involved with more mental energy than I was prepared to put in at that point. I've since acquired Prof Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and that acquisition has made aware I need to rise to the occasion with some serious thought (and some urgency.)

I have enough self-knowledge to acknowledge a fundamental laziness of mind. I've done enough thinking to know how hard it is to think, even when someone has provided the thoughts to think about. But it feels like letting the side down if I fail to get my neurones moving. Actually, I know where these thoughts lead; I just need to get there in a genuinely rigorous fashion.

Just One Look

Just before I went off to the bedroom for the Isha' Prayer, Noi enjoined me to have a look out of the window after praying to take in the crescent moon floating above the big tree we have the privilege of gazing out onto. I did so and a day that had gone pretty well all told blossomed into something even more special. The book of the world repays close reading.

The Way Ahead

I'm trying to figure out what to put on my reading list for the next two or three weeks. The big Hughes's Collected is on-going, so that's a done deal, but I'm blank on the fiction front having completed reading all the books I was given on Teachers' Day. I don't think I would have actually chosen to have read any of them, but they were all rewarding in different ways. Actually I forgot to mention the first of them I read, an off-beat novella entitled The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman, a translation from the French-Canadian writer Denis Theriault. One of the students I went to Japan with last year, Priya, got me this, I think because of its employment of the writing of haikus as a central feature of the plot, and general reference to Japanese aesthetic thought. I'm glad she did (though all my students please do note that giving books as presents goes way beyond expectations and is to be discouraged) because it's a nicely crafted, appealing text, which, I'm guessing, has brought the writer some success since he's now written a sequel. The writer has a gift for deploying post-modern artifice in a light, almost fluffy manner, which is a lot more enjoyable than the usual 'look-at-how-clever-I-am' approach.

Anyway, having this and the other two novels that made their ways to me meant I didn't make a visit to the bookshop that I'd intended and now I find myself thinking I should continue to put that visit off and get on with a whole bunch of plays sitting on the old bookshelves alongside some serious reading I've been setting up for the final months of the year. But I'm also hankering for a good murder and a good frightener (King-style) so I'm feeling oddly undecided as to exactly what comes next.

The Price Paid

Found an excellent Tony Palmer documentary about Sir Malcolm Arnold on YouTube today - having listened to the disturbing Ninth Symphony in the morning. I knew before this that the composer was a bit of a mess as a human being before this, but I did not realise the extent of his problems; and I knew how gifted a composer he was but had never quite taken in the range of his achievement. More than one contributor to the programme linked those two ideas together, which is in itself disturbing. Was the mental turmoil a kind of price for the gift of the music?

Actually, my answer to the question is a 'no'. I've ceased to believe in that archly Romantic trope of the madness of the artist. But it isn't an emphatic 'no'; the jury remains out on the verdict, and witnesses like Sir Malcolm don't exactly instil confidence that we can trust in some kind of essential sanity in the creative muse.

(You can find the documentary in question at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsuYbn8DaE.\, by the way. Well worth a watch - or even two. Great tunes throughout, even if you don't care much for MA himself.)

Better Days

Just watched an interview on CNN in which the interviewee seemed to think it was a good idea to rant at the interviewer for his 10 minutes of air-time. As a result the interview was extremely difficult to listen to, which was a pity as the case the interviewee was putting was genuinely interesting, even if you fundamentally disagreed with his political position. I can remember a time in which politicians being interviewed generally seemed to think it was a good idea to sound reasonable in their arguments and seek to win the good opinion of most viewers. I suppose I'm naïve in hoping we might see such days again.

In Space

Spent part of the morning thinking about space, as in the space, or spaces, we inhabit and through which we move. Was struck by how differently we experience common spaces and uncommon ones, for that matter. Found myself re-experiencing in memory the small back yard at Gresham Street and the games I devised within that oblong. I suppose I knew it was small and shabby but I can't recall any sense of constriction. Far from it. Indeed, I never felt constricted in any of the houses we lived in. I felt properly at home.

Big houses always seem empty to me.

A Kind Of Magic

I finished Nguyen's The Sympathizer today, and I'm conflicted about it. Specifically I'm not entirely sure of the exact superlatives I want to apply to this wonderful novel, though entirely convinced of its brilliance. I can't quite figure out whether I think of it as a superbly crafted text, pursuing a necessary thesis with regard to the nations and ethnicities at its centre, a kind of thesis-novel in the best possible sense, or evidence of an extraordinarily inspired writer who may have individual greatness within him regardless of subject matter. (Both?)

In a sense, it doesn't really matter because either way we have a great book. Remarkably Nguyen goes some way to doing justice to the terrible cruelty at the heart of the Vietnamese experience of the war and its aftermath in the dark violence of some of the later sequences in the novel. I didn't see this coming at all when reading the first half, but there wasn't any contrivance at all in the plotting. Everything just falls into place.

I suppose the strangest thing for me as a reader was the way I turned Vietnamese as I was drawn in to the narrator's world. At one level that sounds weirdly arrogant, as if making claims for some laudable capacity for empathy, but I don't mean it in that sense. The writer worked this magical transformation by addressing a Vietnamese audience so you are forced to live up to expectations, however shabbily you can manage it. Having a superbly observant guide helped considerably, I can tell you.

Sub-optimal

My right arm has been hurting for quite some time now. Today my right wrist decided to join in. Marking anything is very painful. As in: Very. Painful. Indeed. But what to do? as the Missus so elegantly puts it.

Continuing To Impress

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer continues to impress in a big way. I was wondering whether the writer would maintain the effortless mastery of the narrative as demonstrated in the first half of the novel and the answer seems to be emphatically affirmative. There are some darkly violent stretches of writing in the second half but nothing is gratuitous. The excessive is rendered quite normal and the sense of a lived reality is pervasive.

I think I mentioned some comparisons to Catch 22 in my previous reference to Nguyen's novel. There are some superficial links in terms of satirical content, but the texts involve different kinds of satire. What links them is the simple brilliance in each of a fully realised world, brilliantly imagined.

Playing False

Inaugurated the great Mozart Opera listen-through project this morning. Quite by accident, as it turned out. I'd finished playing a bit of VW and was wondering what to turn to next when it occurred to me that after listening to my box-set of the big 7 operas helmed by John Eliot Gardiner (the Archiv set) some time in the distant past I'd hardly played anything from them again. The thing is that operas have this way of demanding you play them all through and follow the words and action, which is a pretty big demand in terms of time. I had no intention of (or time for) listening to the whole of Idomeneo, but I thought I'd sample a bit - which turned out to be Act 1 and the interlude that follows. And having had a thoroughly good time I decided that this would be my approach to the full set: one act, or the rough equivalent, at a time.

The thing that very much took me by surprise was that somehow I managed to adjust to the fact that the male lead is sung by a woman (which seems to have been an opera seria convention of the period.) I recalled the first time I played the disc when Anne Sofie von Otter's singing of the role of Idomeneo's son Idamante completely threw me, especially when duetting with his love interest, Ilia, given voice by Sylvia McNair. The first time through I honestly was unable to distinguish between them - whilst this time the difference was so obvious I was baffled as to what got in my way the first time round.

I suppose it was an inability to accept the convention such that I was unable to enter even the highly accessible sound world on offer. But what makes this convention any more strange than a soliloquy in Shakespeare? I suppose we're so used to being deceived by the apparent realism of acting on the tv and film that we've forgotten how to forget. It's useful to be reminded just how much we must learn to play false in order to render something like truth.