Wise Words

A very great man once said: Football, bloody hell, eh?!

Today a not-so-great man said: Basketball, bloody hell, eh?!!!

Just saying.

Top Notch

I've been cheerfully startled at the quality of the stories in Yusuf Idris's The Cheapest Nights. For quite a few years now I've naively assumed that Egyptian lit starts and ends with the brilliant Naguib Mafouz, with Nawal El Saadawi offering a powerful by-way into particularly feminist concerns. It turns out I'm definitely wrong on the first count (and most likely patronisingly all over the place on the second.)

There are fifteen short stories in the collection from Yusuf Idris and they are all beautifully crafted, but at least five strike me as absolute classics of the genre, up there with Joyce, Chekov, Hemingway and the like. If I were pushed I'd say that The Dregs of the City, in its evocation of the hopelessness of the poor quarter at the back of the mosque of Al Azhar, comprises in its 40 or so pages an urgent social critique that outdoes that of any equivalent writer from the west. The thing is that somehow he makes us understand that the denizens of the neighborhood in question are not hopeless at all because Shohrat, the servant and unwilling lover of Judge Abdallah, who journeys into that forbidden territory in search of her and his missing wristwatch, is more than a match for him, despite the degradation he visits upon her. The tale escapes summary and easy understanding, a notable characteristic of so much that is in this slim volume.

I suppose I think of Naguib Mafouz as a writer in the tradition of Dickens, considering the sense of The Cairo Trilogy as a sprawling epic featuring real 'characters' in the old-fashioned, but eminently valid, sense of the word. Yusuf Idris strikes me as his antithesis, based on what I've read so far: brutally focused and, somehow, cold in his analysis, yet wonderfully non-judgmental. I'd love to read more, but I've got a feeling that not much of his stuff is available in English translation.

Oh, and by the by, I'm guessing Wadida Wassef's translation for the Penguin Classics edition is excellent since it reads so well.

Visiting Hours

Spent a few hours out today engaged in visits for Raya. Actually we only went to Kak Kiah's and then dropped Hakim off at his new place, where we scoffed some pizza, but it still felt like a typical busy day in Syawal. A lot of fun in its own way. Better than work, I must say. But then most things are.

Bad Boys

I find myself thinking more and more of the days of my youth, often in the late evening and if I wake in the middle of the night. The period around 1970 tends to dominate, I find, in terms of the deep resonance that much of the quality music of that period held for me. I was finding my way as a callow teenager and beginning to form actual tastes, with a sense of excitement in my self-awareness that I was doing so.

Spurred on by a sudden memory last week of hearing Pete Townshend's The Seeker for the first time I recently listened to it again and was struck by just how obviously wonderful The Who were in their considerable heyday. It seemed axiomatic to me and my mates back then that Townshend represented the best of pop/rock and needed to be looked up to, as did The Who in general. And since I think exactly the same today this does seem to point towards the wisdom of youth. To be honest, it wasn't exactly an opinion I had conjured for myself. I soaked it in from all around me.

Just after enjoying replaying the song and video (which I don't recall ever seeing at that time) I got to thinking of a curious sort of coincidence. All the Big Four British pop/rock bands of the 60's had their Bad Boy sort of creative-thinker-cum-guru figure, in their own way. Townshend for The Who. Ray Davies for The Kinks - with the bad-boy-ness sort of split, Oasis-style, between Ray & brother Dave. John Lennon for The Beatles - with the creativity bit divided between him and Paul, but not the bad-boy-ness. And who exactly for The Stones? Well, initially Brian Jones, I suppose. But then it's Jagger and Richards - and, in the final analysis, I reckon it's Keef on his own, Mick being fundamentally the conventional capitalist, despite appearances. And, if I'm not mistaken, Peter, Ray, John and Keith all attended art school. (Though I might be wrong about that. I'm too lazy to verify, and it's a nice thought anyway.)

Real News

Very much enjoyed seeing a story relating to life beyond our solar system making it to the top of the news in the Graun today - the online version. It would nice to think it was the headline story in the print edition, but I doubt it would have pushed to one side the depressing stuff that passes itself off as international politics these days.

Must say, if there is Life on Mars, as a very great man once memorably asked in the days of my youth, they must be looking at us and thinking what a god awful small affair we've made of it all down here.

Conspiracy Theory

For the last two days for some reason best known to itself The Universe has been conspiring against me. Every time I've tried to get on with my marking, trying to hit tight, unforgiving deadlines, a minor crisis here and a slightly less minor one there has derailed me for long enough to build a sweat. Not sure what it's got against me. The Universe, I mean.

I explained the situation to The Missus earlier and even she nodded in sympathy, rather than subjecting me to her usual scepticism regarding my wilder knowledge claims. Mind you, she was sort of grinning as well. Odd, that.

Fullness

15 Syawal, 1446

Thought I'd put today's date according to the Islamic calendar as a reminder that we're at the halfway point of the month following Ramadhan and, in terms of the lunar month, that entails a full moon. It certainly looked full to bursting this morning, amiably glowing above my place of work, almost lighting the way. (I'm positively waxing poetic, eh?)

Anyway, it looked good to me. Just saying.

Yearnings

Reading in the news this morning that reggae singer Max Romeo has died triggered an odd reaction in me. It took me back to disco night at Hyde Town Hall in 1969, listening to what was then the singer's notorious banned single Wet Dream, only played twice on the BBC before their ban on it, and watching a line of very young ladies (probably around my own age, maybe a year or so older) dance to it in a very sprightly manner.

I don't think that up to that time I'd ever heard anything quite so explicit, and found it very edgy indeed. The fact that the girls dancing seemed to react with a kind of rhythmically engaged indifference added to the odd power of my feelings: sort of excited, perplexed, disturbed and a bit frightened by it all. I can actually conjure a vivid image of the moment & the dance even now; but today, this morning, as I did so, it all seemed just a bit sad and very charming.

And the same is true to some degree of what I felt on reading All On a Summer's Night by Yusuf Idris from the collection The Cheapest Nights which I referenced yesterday. Except beyond evoking sadness and charm the brilliantly crafted story had a most powerful impact on me in other ways when I read it this morning, just before reading the news. At one point, indeed, I thought it might take a turn towards brutal horror when the group of young fellahin on which it focuses are denied any release of the sexual urges that torment them and turn on their companion for setting them on fire with his entirely false account of an encounter with a very generous lady in a near-by town. But they hold themselves back, just, from beating him to death. And the story is as comical as it is sad. Inevitably so, I suppose, when dealing with the yearnings of very young men.

So, an odd parallel, though the young Brian was dealing with his inchoate urges at just thirteen years old (if I've got my sums right) and Idris's young men are clearly just that - men - and deeply confused, deprived and dangerous ones.

By the way, since my bit of reading in the early morning it's actually been a day of almost non-stop work, which I suppose is no bad thing when you consider the dark places music and fiction can take you to.

Not Much Choice

Am attempting valiantly, but somewhat vainly, to kickstart my reading of fiction over the weekend having stalled over the last week or so. But I'm a bit stuck as to whether to devote my full attention to the short stories in Yusuf Idris's The Cheapest Nights or get moving into the twelve tales in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, having now completed His Last Bow. Must say, I enjoyed the last two adventures in Conan Doyle's penultimate collection which seemed to me a fitting conclusion in aesthetic terms to his saga of the great detective. The shift to the third person narrative in the titular tale works really well and the valedictory tone created is genuinely satisfying. But I suppose that the aesthetics of it all had little to do with keeping a popular readership satisfied and it was inevitable that the stories would keep being churned out long after the edge had been well and truly blunted.

On the other hand the six stories I've read so far from Yusuf Idris being entirely fresh to me - never even having heard of the writer until I was given the volume as a gift a few months back - are all 'edge' as far as I'm concerned. But it's a bleakly uncomfortable kind of edge such that finishing one harsh little parable leaves me with little in the way of excitement to get on with the next, despite the obvious quality of the material. I wonder if the stories are popular in Egypt? The blurb tells me the writer is acclaimed and well-known in his native land and I think I can see why from what I've read so far.

Perhaps I'll just keep ping-ponging between the two writers. There's a kind of entertainment value to be found in doing that sometimes.

Something Wise

Received a message and picture in the very early morning, before doing the Dawn Prayer, concerning our feathered friend above, a wild owl, having found its way into our premises. Was hoping to see it for myself once I set out to work, but by then it was raining heavily, so that put an end to that project. Sorry to have missed it, but glad it was here. A blessing of sorts.