Obsessions

One of the CDs currently residing in the car's CD changer is a rather tasty compilation of singles previously released by Suede cunningly entitled Singles. It came as a present from Deepak a couple of years back and, despite its aforementioned general tastiness, I don't play it often enough. Anyway, I've been remedying the situation over the last week or so and, as a result, I find myself haunted, most appropriately, by the blistering excellent cut Obsessions. The bass-line alone is worth the price of admission and the song built upon it is a classic. (Actually, it's misleading to talk of building the song on the bass-line as the bass is extremely melodic for certain lines, playing in very much the upper register, such that, whilst it drives along it seems sort of independent of the general groove somehow.)

What is it about certain songs that makes them seem so utterly right, to work so perfectly? It's almost as if such songs are discovered rather than created, as if they had lain in wait to be found. All their pieces fit: in this case the driving rhythms, the hook, the verses feeding into it, the guitar figures embellishing the chord sequences, the yearning yet hard vocals, the lyrics that say exactly what they need to - and a bit more in the superbly compressed "simple yet complex". Suede were an extraordinarily mannered band - to the extent that, much as I enjoy their stuff I can never get genuinely inside it, though I can understand the appeal to what was obviously a passionate base of followers - but here the mannerisms gel into something that could really get under anybody's skin, and into anyone's ears.

I think this is what the best 'pop' music can do. Oddly enough I've got no idea if this particular track was a successful one in commercial terms, which is some indication of how out of it I've become in my adult years, but I kind of hope it was. It deserves it somehow.

More Forbidden Fruit

Now I can upload pictures once again, the evidence of my wife's recent durian feast in Melaka can be revealed to the world. Fortunately for those of a tender disposition the on-line multimedia experience does not include the sense of smell. Various writers have attempted to do justice to the fruit's extraordinary fragrance and usually have failed. I'll simply say the odour lingers, and lingers, and lingers. Oh, and it penetrates.

Notice the niece, Ayu, in attendance. The corruption of innocence. The scrawny chicken I include as a casual bystander.

Pains & Aches

I seem to be recovering well from the exercise I've been doing. Other than a very minor nagging pain in my right side, barely noticeable most of the time, I feel in good shape. I tend to take it for granted when I feel okay, and I suppose when I was younger I assumed it as a kind of natural right, the way things were meant to be. A few years of persistent back pain have cured me of that illusion but, even now, I don't feel as thankful as I should for the mercy of good health. So I'll say thanks for it now.

Living in comfortable circumstances is also one of those slices of enormous good fortune one does not in any sense deserve. This morning I awoke to startling pictures on tv of floods in Sheffield. A whole stretch of the M1, a stretch up and down which I used to travel regularly, was immersed. These will be hard times for some of the home-owners there, even though they're probably generally better-off than the people in Malaysia whose homes were flooded earlier this year. A crisis of that nature I suspect would be likely to bring out the worst in me after a life of easy-living.

The Shape of Things To Come

Accessing From A Far Place by a different computer I realised that the formatting buttons are available at Blogger. It must be something to do with my computer that means I'm restricted in what I can do from home. At least I managed to get the font I wanted on the last few entries by editing from the other computer.

Noi and I survived our little jaunt to East Coast on Saturday night and I got out today to complete eight laps of the track at school, in the afternoon as part of the Staff Wellness Programme, no less. Tomorrow we're hoping to make it to the gym when I get back from work. We're fueling our determination to actually do some exercise by watching a jolly little programme on the Discovery Health & Home channel the title of which asks So You Want To Live Longer? Well, yes we do. In each episode a redoubtable soul alters their lifestyle enough to knock years off their 'biological age' in just six weeks. And I look on enviously, thinking: 'I could do that!' and so too, I think, does the missus. I think this is what is meant by 'motivational'.

Retrospective

I'm now gearing up for the rigours of what will be a busy term, 'busy' here functioning as euphemism for impossible. The break in Malaysia was a restful one, despite the various nieces & nephews in attendance. I forgot to mention the reading I completed at Mak's place the other day. I reread an old favourite, Narayan's The English Teacher. One of my students wants to write his extended essay on the novel and I was more than happy to be his supervisor. This time round I was struck by the glorious casualness of the narrative. (I think the first time it was a case of simply being beguiled by the story and sort of surrendering to it.) Has any writer ever got closer to the accidental nature of our lives - and the preciousness of their pettiness? is there a saner writer to be found?

I also read a children's book that I bought many years ago, before coming to Singapore, yet never got started on. My discovery of the excellence of so-called children's literature was possibly the single most liberating aspect of my career as a teacher and I was a consistent reader of such in the eighties. Sadly, I've not devoted as much time in recent years to the genre (if that's what it is) as I was doing then, and my life is the poorer for it. This novel, Helen Cresswell's The Winter of the Birds, remained stored away in England for ages, with a pile of other books, but I finally shipped them over when we settled in the house in KL. There remain one or two unread ones amongst these and I must amend this situation over time. Anyway I sort of enjoyed The Winter of the Birds, but I don't think it's in the league of Cresswell's classic The Piemakers. This one seems to be aimed at slightly older readers and has a kind of working class 'real world' setting, as opposed to the fantasy world of The Piemakers, but it doesn't really convince in terms of making that real world believable. It deals with the need for freedom of the imagination but seems more interested in enjoying that freedom rather than convincing you of a real world in which it might be earned. The action takes place as Christmas is approaching and something of the potential magic of the season lifts the second part of the narrative but we're quite a while getting there.

Blogger still isn't providing its usual full range of services, so no pictures at the moment. I can't even get my usual font.

Catching Up

Since getting back from Malaysia I've found myself being kept fairly busy. We've been getting on with rehearsals for Made in the Middle Kingdom and things are progressing nicely, and the ACSIS students organised a kind of farewell for the Year 6 people on Thursday which was fun to attend - oddly I found myself answering lots of questions about bands I'd seen in my teenage years, so it was curiously nostalgic somehow.

Noi and I are about to renew our acquaintance with the world of physical exercise via a bit of a walk-cum-run to the East Coast Park. Other than having a swim when we were in Melaka I've not exercised in earnest since the end of May. I'm hoping it's not going to be too much of a shock to the system.

Forbidden Fruit

We’re now back in Singapore after a couple of days at Mak's in Melaka. Hanging loose there is always a good way to conclude a trip to Malaysia. Usually we confine ourselves to our small lives at the house and don't wander around too much. A trip to Cheng Heights to use the swimming pool there is about as far as we normally explore, and we duly took to the waters on Monday with four nieces in noisy attendance. But today we found ourselves in Alor Gajah for the first time in quite a while, having rather a jolly time. Noi and the girls drank chendol from a stall on the square, near the little museum, and time stood still. The town has developed somewhat from when we more regularly used to go there - before we really moved into Maison KL. Having said it still aspires to be little more than a sleepy small town in Malaysia, a pretty good thing to be.

Back at the ranch Noi decided to sample some durian, from one of the trees around the house. This is the only chance she gets to eat the stuff domestically as it remains fruit non grata at Still Road. There was nothing about its odour today that was going to soften my stance on the matter. I was going to post some photos as evidence of the afternoon's gourmandising, but Blogger seems to be a bit limited in its functions today.

Tidying Up

We’re in the process of putting the house in order before driving down to Melaka where we’ll stay until Tuesday. Over the last few days we’ve had some workmen around repairing some of our fencing and painting the woodwork, along with a few other jobs. The house is looking good – we’ve finally got the welcome sign up next to the door - and it’s a pity we can’t stay longer to enjoy it even more. Also pictured above are the flowers Fa Fa & Ayu picked for Mak Ndak on a jaunt we made around the taman earlier this week. Sweet memories.

Yesterday we got back late having spent the evening at Hamza’s place in Shah Alam, celebrating his birthday and that of Sabrina. Good food and good conversation. It’s quite a drive over there, especially when you’re not entirely sure where you are going, though. We seemed to chosen a particularly long way to come back, following the signs for Kuantan. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Earlier in the day we managed to get to the Islamic Arts Museum with no trouble at all, one of our rare triumphs in navigating KL. The museum was well worth a visit; in fact, we didn’t have time to do it justice. Even the girls were keen to return in December, when we assume we will next be in KL with them. One exhibition, of monochrome photographs of various dignitaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had possibly the most informative and interesting signage I’ve ever seen in a gallery or museum. The seemingly stiff and forbidding subjects of the portraiture came startlingly to life and you became aware how important it might be for them to have been wearing a suitably stiff collar or striking necklace at that moment of their lives. The pictures were originally meant to impress, to assert status, if not grandeur. Now their struggle is tinged with an odd sadness as their world has somehow dissolved in time. As ours will.

I finished V For Vendetta and feel bad about saying it was by Alan Moore when he makes it abundantly clear that the artist David Lloyd was equally responsible for the storyline, and everything that makes up the text. I consistently underestimate the importance of illustrators in this genre and I don’t know why this should be, considering how much pleasure I get from the visual aspects of comic books. I also finished John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? and found myself in agreement with almost everything he had to say. Most of all it was the emphasis on art as something that one should be doing rather than evaluating that seemed to me common sense. It was good to see him acknowledge the value of gardening as an art. I would add cookery, which I don’t recall him mentioning. I’m not entirely sure I share Carey’s confidence that literature represents a superior form of art, but I enjoyed his enthusiasm in attempting to make the case. What I found interesting here was some avoidance of consideration of the study of Literature as an academic subject, which I take to be what the writer is professionally involved in on a day to day basis. Does such study mean we are involved in literature as art?

On Friday night Noi and I watched Later with Jools Holland on the BBC Entertainment channel now available on cable here. It was a salutary reminder of how much excellent music is routinely being created by all sorts of musicians. I can’t go along with the idea that popular music isn’t what it used to be. There’s so much out there that’s so good, the problem, if problem it is, is simply one of choice - there's so much that's worth listening to, you can't do it all justice. I just hope all these guys manage to earn a decent living doing what they do so well

Reading Around

Perhaps it was not quite accurate to claim we’d hardly bought anything, the other day. The girls got some books at Kinokuniya, in Suria KLCC, Noi bought a Malay novel and I shelled out for Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta – treating myself to a graphic novel has become a feature of our KL jaunts – and John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts? I noticed Carey’s book when we were in England in December and was attracted then on the strength of the fact that Carey has written two of my favourite books of literary criticism (the ones on Donne and Thackery – the one on Dickens being a bit of a disappointment, I’ve always felt) and writes with great clarity, wit and insight, and the subject is something close to my heart. I didn’t buy it then because I had quite enough on my plate, which I still have, I suppose, but the temptation (I suppose pure curiosity to find out what exactly Carey had to say) proved too great. As it is I’ve been racing ahead with What Good Are The Arts?, moving steadily through V For Vendetta, and the rest of my planned reading has been side-lined, as a result.

In addition to the books I also bought a couple of CDs whilst I was at Tower Records (and Noi & the kids were in the supermarket.) A bit of Copeland ( a CD with the Billy the Kid suite and Third Symphony) and some John Williams playing Bach (the lute suites on guitar.) In my teenage years I would have regarded buying so much at one go as extravagance indeed. It says something of the nature of my (relative) affluence that I now take such spending as almost a basic right. I’m not sure this is entirely a good thing: as a teenager I pretty much wrung as much as I could in terms of close listening and reading of the liner notes, if there were any, to any lp I bought, in order to get my money’s worth. Now it’s unusual for a CD to get from me anything like that level of attention, respect, I suppose. The loss is mine.

In terms of the side-lined reading, Robert Louis Stevenson has been the main victim. I brought along a paperback comprising The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston. I got through the first but have laid poor Weir to one side. I suppose Jekyll & Hyde is one of those stories that everyone knows but people rarely read. It’s not exactly an accessible text, despite the gripping, resonant core of the story. The apparatus of multiple narrators might sound terribly modern but I think it comes across more than a little ponderously. It doesn’t help that there’s precious little real differentiation of narrative voice. But I found a kind of fascination in terms of how Stevenson did treat the story and how this lined up with the tale as told in movies and as part of a kind of popular mythology. Two things jumped out at me. First, that it’s clear in the original that Jekyll is so much drawn to the pleasures of life he can remember leading as Hyde that he is tempted to go back to that life when it’s clear he has escaped it. Usually the story is rendered such that Jekyll cannot prevent the metamorphosis to Hyde in a purely chemical manner. Stevenson is painfully honest in this regard. Second that, in contrast to the point I’ve just made, the text is incredibly evasive when it comes to describing any of the actual evil done by Hyde. The bit about him running the girl down is extraordinarily unconvincing. Only the beating and murder of Sir Danvers Carew has any real power, and even that’s a pretty mild affair. Is it simply the case that Stevenson could rest assured the majority of his readers were well enough acquainted with the vicious reality of the underbelly of respectable society to simply not require any further elucidation? Or was that respectability so powerful as to drive to self-censorship even a writer with a direct, live connection to the dark side of consciousness?

Keeping the Troops Amused

The last couple of days have been devoted to marking in the mornings and entertaining the girls in the afternoons. To that end we spent yesterday afternoon, and a good bit of the evening, at Suria KLCC, the shopping centre at the twin towers. We watched Shrek 3 at the cinema there which was judged to be a big hit. Favourite characters were as follows: Fi Fi - Puss in Boots; Fa Fa - Snow White; Ayu – Cinderella; Mak Ndak – Shrek’s babies; Uncle B – Donkey. Today was spent at Petaling Street (the Chinatown area of KL) and the Central Market, from whence we’ve just made our weary way. As usual we got lost in the maze of KL, and, as is the custom, Noi somehow found us a path home.

Considering the amount of time we’ve spent in places devoted to the cult of shopping it is to our credit that we’ve bought hardly anything.