First Rate

A particularly enjoyable double barreled ending to the afternoon today. First up: watching the dress rehearsal of The Weed Dreams, the 'junior' division of Drama Club's offering for the Singapore Youth Festival (which they'll actually perform for the judges on Monday.) Today I saw it for the first time with the full cast - there's a whole crowd who have non-speaking roles and previously I've only seen it done with the three principal characters and the three guards. Alex & co have done a tremendous job. The full ensemble add a whole new dimension to what was already an excellent piece. Just the gradual entrance of the crowd to their seats in the first three minutes or so is grippingly spooky. It's always great to watch kids doing a good job on stage, but there's something particularly special when they do so with dark, forbidding material. When I first saw the script I couldn't really picture it as do-able. How wrong I was!

And following that: eating Noi's inimitable sup tulang (bone soup) which she has been preparing today at Kak Kiah's ahead of Udin's wedding. There's only one sensible way to eat this dish: messily. And I did. Noi will be staying overnight at the wedding as she continues cooking on an industrial scale for all and sundry. I'll be back tomorrow afternoon for more delicious grub.

Since Noi isn't around I'm afraid it's time for some seriously loud music. I reckon a spot of Robert Fripp's Exposure would be just the ticket, bringing the day to a fittingly splendid conclusion.

To Hell and Back

I finished Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell's deeply impressive From Hell this evening, after a deliberate effort to spin my first reading out for as long as possible. The final chapters were particularly strong, and it was refreshing to get some distance away from the murders. But then I suppose anything set outside that room in Chapter 10 in which poor Marie Kelly is carved up would come as a relief. I don't think I want to go in there again; not soon anyway.

Gull's trip through time in Chapter 13 had great hallucinatory power, and the connection with Blake touched upon genius. The treatment of the Montague Druitt story turned out to be affecting in a way I could never have predicted. Moore got inside the names, the places and events and made them true through deliberate fiction-making The whole thing just works!.

Gently Simmering

My teaching load for Wednesday in Week B (we operate on a two-week timetable) is heavy - very, very heavy. And the day ends with a session with the senior end of our Drama Club. So I'm not surprised that I now feel frazzled to the max, running on empty, completely cream-crackered. Yet it's been generally an enjoyable day, despite the frenzy of it all. I enjoy my classes and the drama session was a blast. I look forward to seeing what the students are going to come up with, especially in the short pieces for performance we usually end with. Today we did an item I've used a few times before entitled Uninvited Guests and the freshness of approach from the groups doing it was revitalising for me. At least two of the performances could have formed the basis for development as thoroughly scripted items.

I suppose that was on my mind as we're in the process of putting together a plan for a show from Drama Club for performance in July as part of the school's Festival of Arts. I ran one idea by Ferdinand this afternoon, more to see how it sounded to myself, and it seemed to gather legs as I was talking. So that much is promising. But these are early days in the business of planning. The trick is not to rush these things: let things simmer, let things grow. Maybe we'll end up doing a show called Mixed Metaphors?

Health Matters

I completed 8 laps of the track at school this afternoon in a fairly steady jog. I don't seem to be suffering any back problems as a result so it seems I'm really on the mend in that department. A bad back leaves you feeling extremely vulnerable. You tend to think there's nothing much can be done to put things right and any kind of exercise is likely to just make matters worse. So it's very satisfying to be proved wrong. I just wish I could get more swimming done as I'm still wary of the high impact nature of running. But then you can hardly call my pace 'running'.

Downtime

The rather jolly picture below represents my first rather miserable attempt to get something visual on From A Far Place. It's the 'ming' vase we destroyed at the end of Black Comedy and looks better than it actually was:

Generally the weekend is a time of recovering for me, and this one has been no exception. I've spent a fair amount of it simply crashed out, catching up on sleep. It's not exactly a creative way to use one's time, but, I suspect, it's something of a necessity.

However, on the positive side some things have been achieved: the car finally has leather-covered seats and a new CD-player (as promised by the dealer when we bought it) and Noi and I now have library cards again after a hiatus in our membership of some three years. In truth I still have a few books on my shelves that I need to read so resuming our visits was hardly a necessity but I couldn't help but feel there was something wrong with the world when I didn't have a library to go to. We allowed our membership to lapse over the three years I spent in my previous school due to the impossibility of establishing a routine that gave us the chance to go there regularly, so that doesn't exactly reflect well on that job - especially considering the fact that the building is only a ten minute walk away.

On the reading front, I completed Roddy Doyle's The Snapper yesterday and have now moved on to the last of the Barrytown trilogy, The Van. The dialogue is so well done, the rhythms perfect. This is prose of great economy - spare, yet nuanced. Poor Noi had to put up with me reading a whole slab of dialogue out to her, concerning the twins' decision that their dancing lessons are stupid and that they are not going to perform in the competition for which their mother has been sewing sequins to their outfits, in the middle of a shopping centre.

Also I've got a bit of work done, setting a test and planning a few lessons - so it's not all been beer and skittles, I'm afraid. The test draws on the end of one of the many novels of an extremely famous writer with a brilliant ear for the vernacular in which that ear for dialogue has transformed itself to tin, and cheap tin at that. I'd not be likely to read it out anywhere, but I think our Year 3 students will be able to say what they need to say about it without too much trouble.

Best Foot Forward

What better way to spend a Friday evening than a brisk walk, incorporating a slow jog, to East Coast Park, there & back again? Then a couple of prata at Jago Close. Then a bit of a listen to my cassette tape of Joyce's Ulysses - the BBC Book at Bedtime version, with Stephen Rea reading, among others. His Stephen is wonderfully callow; the Bloom (Norman Rodway? James Greene?) is appropriately fruity. "Oh rocks! Tell us in plain words." Useful advice for all aspiring writers. Splendidly ignored in this case.

Aches & Pains

I felt quite a twinge in my back early this morning. The swubuh prayer was uncomfortable and driving into work was mildly iffy. After that things steadily improved and now there's only the memory of vulnerability.

My back is so much better than it was five or six years ago that it's hard to credit the improvement. Even feeling the twinge this morning I was confident things would be okay. Of course, there'll come a morning when they're not okay anymore but until then I'll enjoy time's mercy in providing days in which I can still enjoy a measure of something approaching health.

Quick afterthought following yesterday's entry: we've been pretty good at making this world a hell for many of our own species also.

A Dog's Life

I've just been reading a few e-mails from our taman in KL regarding stray dogs on the estate and the need to deal with them. (I think that's a euphemism for killing them.) Of course, it's quite right: there's a need to control the problem. But another part of me wonders whether we (our species, not just the taman-dwellers) are not just brutally destructive for the sake of our narrow, irrelevant comforts. Consideration of the experiences of animals is invariably a fascinating way to approach topics in the IB subject Theory of Knowledge, and it's interesting how often students seem to effortlessly put these questions to one side. Do animals know things in the same way humans do? Do animals know more than us? Is instinct a kind of knowing? I think when I was younger I wouldn't have worried too much about these issues. Now they fascinate, and worry, me. After all, we've made this world a kind of hell for other species. Perhaps we're getting closer to payback time?

Darkness & Light

Progress with From Hell has been fitful lately. I hardly touched it in the week of the production and didn't take it to Melaka, having other fish to fry there. It's difficult to read in bed due to it's sheer size so I've taken to dipping into Colin Wilson's book on the murders, last thing at night, the one he co-wrote with Robin Odell. Doing so helps to create a necessary distance from the mesmerising, sometimes overwhelming power of the graphic novel. (There are moments when I feel I'm drowning in black & white.) I've just got to the end of Chapter 9, the titular From Hell, and it feels a bit like being on the edge of the heart of darkness.

There were a few fish in Melaka. I reread a few of the stories in Salman Rushdie's East, West, as preparation for introducing the text to my classes soon. The stories seemed to pack much more emotional power the second time round - my first reading seemed to be spent coming to terms with the verbal & stylistic fireworks. In fact I found the ending of Chekov and Zulu extremely moving in this respect. In between times I glanced at The God of Small Things, essentially to sort out certain details of the plot, again as preparation for lessons. I feel keenly the need to read it again cover to cover (to do it artistic justice) but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to hack out the time. And, finally, I luxuriated in the first third or so of Roddy Doyle's The Snapper. Apart from the fact that it's an hysterically funny read it also seems to me to be slyly wise. It's made me uncomfortably aware of my occasional (possibly frequent, let's be honest) priggishness. I suppose there's a fairly good working definition of Literature (with a capital 'L') lurking here: books that are even better the second and third time around that entertain you in ways that are less than comfortable.

Grace

We got back from Melaka around 8.00 pm. It was too brief a visit to completely relax there, but I enjoyed it while it lasted, particularly since it incorporated a fine Saturday night United victory over Bolton, 4 - 1. I also got some marking done and a reasonable amount of stuff prepared with the week ahead in mind. My classes have altered a bit from the first term as I'm taking over a couple of Year 5 groups from a teacher who's left, and I'm losing my Year 3 guys. That's a pity as I was just really getting to know them but switching of time-tables is fairly frequent here so you just get used to it.

I was thinking about the intensity of drama productions over the weekend, how they never quite fade from memory as you might expect. I think I remember several moments in performance and rehearsal from everything I've ever been involved in, and I'm talking about something close to total sensory recall here. Why is this so? The single most important factor I believe to be a curiously impersonal thing: the fact that you are in touch with a kind of creative download from somewhere quite outside yourself and you get some sense of the stunning power of what potentially can come through. That's not to say you are realising much of the potential of that power, far from it, but it's exhilarating just to get caught in a small slipstream of what is more thoroughly available to others. It is oddly magical, other-than-the-everyday. It feels like a kind of blessing, a sort of grace. It seems that in those moments you are somehow more alive and more accessible to important things about life. I know this sounds more than a bit overwrought, but that doesn't alter the fact that I think it's true for most people. I feel privileged to have had the chance to feel many such moments.