Great Villains

Slightly surprised myself by finishing Victory today. Found it unputdownable for the last two days. Not sure, though, that this is because I ascended to the seriousness that Conrad demands of his readers. In fact, I didn't really get what exactly was going on between Heyst and Lena, which is really the core of the novel, so that in some ways the ending escaped me. I grasped the desolation of it all, especially in the deaths of the trio of villains, but not what was specifically motivating the central couple at key moments. I suppose I missed the ways in which they failed to understand each other, rather taking it for granted that their relationship was a good thing, which may well have not have been so clear to the characters themselves.

What I didn't miss was how wonderfully nasty the antagonists in the novel are. It seems there's a school of thought that sees them as overly melodramatic and lacking in basic realism, and I think that's a reasonable point of view. But if you allow yourself to suspend disbelief and enter into enjoying the horror of it all they make for great reading. Also they are strangely plausible as comically trivial yet dangerous predators. I can see why Victory was another popular success for Conrad following Chance given the hypnotic power of the chapters dealing with the bad guys' invasion of the delicate paradise of the lovers' hideaway.

By the by, the sheer range of Conrad's work is astonishing, isn't it? What a pity he seems to have been reduced to just being the writer of Heart of Darkness for so many.

Uneasy Reading

My progress on Conrad's Victory, which I embarked on towards the end of last month, has been fitful to say the least. Of the obviously great novelists I find Conrad among the most demanding (not quite in the league of Henry James, but getting there) but there's a certain pleasure in reading him at very slow pace to ensure both a genuine grasp of what's going on and why the writer thinks it is important. I suppose that's why I've come so late to this novel, despite having a sense of the high regard in which it is held by some major critics. (I'm thinking F.R. Leavis here.)

Conrad's sombre view of life and human effort can also feel somewhat overwhelming. I've just reached the well known lines: he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul. I didn't realise that this is actually articulated by the protagonist, Heyst, in dialogue with the woman he gets involved with. And it's so strange that the writer describes his tone as light as he tells her this.

I feel I need to become more serious about life when reading Conrad. A good reason for persevering with his work in a world that often appears to value only what is fleeting and superficial.

Farewell, Again

15.40

We're setting off for Mak's house in Melaka later today. Noi is putting the finishing touches to her final cleaning up of the premises, and we're assessing what still remains to be fixed and made ship-shape in 2026, when we'll next be here again. There's always something, of course, as a reminder that any home is a work in progress - and it's the kind of progress that, in its way, is worth looking forward to. Anyway, we're used to moving on, as this week's survey of my back pages was a powerful and sometimes melancholy reminder of.

22.25

Arrived about an hour ago here at Alor Gajah after a reasonably easy drive south. Every exit is an entrance somewhere else, as a wise man wrote (or something close to that wording.) More pages to be written. Hoping to avoid pointless repetition.

Looking Back

Finished working through my appointment diaries up to 2023, and will be discarding them in Melaka, where we're off to on the morrow. (Noi wants to burn them.) Going back over the years was an interesting experience, but not something I want to spend too much time doing at the kind of length making my notes involved. The version of the past I garnered turned out to be a burden of sorts. Not because of bad memories. Far from it. It was the amount of quiet happiness accumulated over time that felt strangely burdensome.

Best to fare forward. Especially since we have little choice but to do so.

My Back Pages

I have two large cardboard boxes here filled with my appointment diaries stretching back to 1988. For some time I've been intending to throw them out once I've made a note of the major 'events', like vacations taken and shows directed, across the years. Not sure why I feel the need to record in this fashion, but it seems important as a way of capturing a few milestones along the way and I don't think I'll be able to discard the decaying diaries unless I do this.

I made a start today, transcribing key stuff from 1988 - 2000, and I'm hoping to finish the remaining years tomorrow, then take the diaries to Melaka to burn them there. It's been quite strange revisiting the past in this way, especially given the careless nature of the various scribbled entries. I only noted as sparely as I could what I needed to do to keep my life on its tracks, and little on the page makes coherent sense now.

I can't help but notice how the diaries tend to increase in terms of the detail of what I recorded over the years. Either my working life got more complicated, or my memory got worse, or a bit of both. I'm also struck by how the terminology I employed changed over time. There are quite a number of acronyms I suppose I must have understood then and deemed of some importance that just seem downright strange today. So much that mattered then that's entirely lost.

Regular Viewing

Ashraf worked very hard yesterday to enable us to download the Sooka app on our new telly. This will enable Noi to watch all the Astro stuff she wants, assuming we're able to subscribe to their various offerings without any hassle. We haven't really tried to use the app yet as we've plenty to occupy us on Apple TV, which we've been watching late at night. So it looks like we can do away with the Astro box and cancel our subscription, the only problem being that terminating the service is a bit complicated and we're not going to have time to get that done on this visit.

In the meantime we're quite far into the second season of The Morning Show and there's a lot, possibly too much, going on in terms of storyline, so we're happily watching an episode a day and getting what we regard as value for money.

I've come to realise that one hour of viewing on any given day is quite enough for me. That's something that my childhood self, pretty much addicted to the goggle box, would not be able to recognise. So some kind of progress there.

Looking For Positives

One of our priorities coming over has been to visit Sharifah in Shah Alam and catch up on how she's faring under the treatment she's been receiving. Very unfortunately we've not been able to do so as the treatment hasn't been going so well, resulting in her being hospitalised for most of the last couple of weeks and not being allowed visitors due to concerns about her picking up infections in her weakened state. She's at home now, but still not allowed to see people.

We're going across anyway later today, to take Hamzah & Aziqah & whoever else is around to dinner and offer whatever weak support we're able. To say this is not a happy situation is an understatement, but these are the kind of people who I know will find whatever positives are available and make the best of them.

Something Accomplished

Let me be frank - painfully, brutally honest. At 10.30 this morning I didn't feel in any way whatsoever inclined to start cleaning the many windows in this house. But I'd cunningly told The Missus I would do the job the night before, and before coming up to KL I'd imagined the satisfaction of completing the job, so I really had no choice.

I started slowly, lethargically, and the pace never picked up. But that's the point. You can't clean windows quickly. By its nature it's a tedious job and needs to be done in a steadfastly tedious manner. Which meant the exercise worked well for me. It took me until the late afternoon to get every window done, but done they are, and I'm now highly satisfied by how I've fooled myself into some kind of minor accomplishment.

Highly Readable

It would be misleading in the extreme to claim that the second part of Frederick Douglass's Life and Times is a gripping or compelling read. Little of interest happens to Douglass other than his achieving a fruitful life in terms of supporting his chosen causes, unless you happen to find the finely wrought rhetoric of his many speeches something that demands attention. This wasn't true for me, though I suspect that hearing the speeches delivered live by the great man might have done the trick. But I've found it very easy indeed to break off from reading this part of the autobiography.

On the other hand, I've also found it very easy to pick up the tome and start reading again. There's always much to admire in terms of Douglass's supreme command of his rhetoric, such that just following the flow of his thoughts is pleasurable. And I find it striking just how often I've found myself recognising that this isn't empty rhetoric. The style is allied to substance. The thinking is clear but can be complex, as in his speech on the unveiling of the Freemen's monument to Lincoln, in which the dead president comes in for some pretty trenchant criticism in places, making the praise for his achievements all the more convincing.

Douglass spares nobody, not even himself. But his readiness to praise the good he sees in others, and himself, is deeply refreshing.

Making Connections

Got back from Penang in time to get to the office of our service provider in order to re-establish the functioning of our modem. We've been a bit lost moving around without Google Maps to guide us for a couple of days now, though we somehow managed to get where we wanted to go. Which was a reminder of the seemingly distant past when we get to all sorts of places without any electronic assistance. Mind you, we also managed to get spectacularly lost on occasion. Particularly in Bali for some reason.

By the way, the helpful assistant at the shop who did the necessary for us commented that our modem was very old. That struck me as odd as I had the impression it was fairly new. But since anything that lasts longer than 12 months is now by definition old I suppose I can see where the guy was coming from.