Experimental

My last lesson of the day was a bit of a first for me. I've often used stuff I've written in school - song lyrics, material for the stage, short poems written along with the kids - but today for the first time I allowed a poem to be subjected to critical analysis by a class, in this case my very bright and occasionally downright frothy HL class from Year 5. Now this might sound intolerably self-indulgent and self-regarding (basically the reason I've never done or thought of doing such a thing before) but there was a reason behind it which I think might save me from those more than reasonable criticisms.

Back on Tuesday it was clear that we would be short of a presenter from the class for their on-going oral presentations, part of their assessment for the diploma. Daryl, whose turn it was, needed to attend a rehearsal for the Festival of Arts and I didn't want to force someone else to present earlier than I had time-tabled feeling this wouldn't have been fair. Also no one was keen to go earlier than expected and get theirs out of the way. So I suggested we look at a poem and see what kind of commentary we might come up with. As it happened we finished the lesson on Tuesday with a bit of a natter about authorial intent, for reasons I can't quite remember. I pointed out that the discussion was distinctly TOK-ish, I suppose due to its fairly philosophical nature. I distinctly remember gleefully casting aspersions upon literary theorists of all shades. Suddenly I found myself being asked whether I wrote poetry, the follow-up being that, since I did, wouldn't it be interesting to carve up one of my pieces with the author on hand to say what he had intended as a sort of TOK experiment. Well, it sounded like a jolly idea, the sort that might be unexpectedly illuminating (or a complete disaster which is sometimes just as good.)

Back home I went to dig up something for today and I must say that if no one else found it worthwhile I got a lot out of it. I'm the kind of writer (I'm using the term in the loosest possible manner) who generally invests little of himself in his work. Trying to do so has never done anything for me. I suppose I write to order (most of my stuff having been of a 'public' nature one way or another) even in the private domain. I found myself utterly detached from the poem today and enjoying the perspicacity of the comments about it, almost every one of which was resonant to some degree, chiming with something I felt about the piece. And that was something I tried to communicate to the class - I wasn't particularly clear about my intention when writing the poem, though I had set clear parameters for what I was doing in very practical terms. I suspect a lot of (real) writers feel the same way about what they do - a much greater degree of detachment than the layman might suspect.

Anyway, here's the poem in question, just to make it clear I am entirely shameless in these matters:

Slow Poem

Sometimes what you have to say and saying it seem very

Far apart, not so much like banks of a river but opposite ends

From source to lazy delta with lots of busily pointless meandering

In between. On the other hand, taking your time to say what

Needs to be said can be oddly satisfying. There are trees

Down the road that probably have taken decades, maybe centuries

To say something like: Look at this, all this blooming, this leaving!

If I knew the language of trees I'd have something to say about them.

Getting Critical

Interesting article in The Straits Times today from a certain Lee Wei Ling, director of the National Neuroscience Institute, who, I'm guessing from a couple of references in the piece, is former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's daughter. By a brilliant process of deduction I suppose this makes her sister to the current Prime Minister. The interest lies in her call for direct, fearless criticism of 'leaders' in organisations by their subordinates, even those right at the bottom of the heap, which might seem unexceptionable stuff if you happen to live in, say, the UK, but is quite striking here. (Actually, this is now the party line in a lot of organisations here, it's just that, in the majority of them, everyone knows that no one really wants it or does it.) She sounds convincingly sincere and I'd be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt that she practises what she preaches.

I can vaguely recall a time that I would feel rattled and put on the back foot by criticism of anything I was sort of in charge of, but even then I was usually interested in why people should be so wrong-headed about the obvious rightness of my every action. Over time the realisation that I, like everyone else, was capable of doufusness on a major scale dawned, bloomed and flowered as a given in terms of my work and became an enormously useful tool for repair. When possible I tried to institutionalise the means by which criticism might be elicited. A neat trick was to devise a questionnaire about the work of a department of which I was in charge with a big, inviting blank page asking those filling it in to say what we were weak in and how far this stemmed from my 'leadership'. I tried to make it sound like I really, really, really needed to know what was going wrong - which was, in fact, the case. To be honest, I'm not sure how far this really worked - it's quite possible that colleagues avoided saying what they really wanted to for fear of hurting my feelings (I'm really quite a tender bloom), or me retaliating to any personal 'slight' (I'm one tough cookie), or out of worry we'd end up having to work a lot harder to put right what was seen as being wrong. But I do think it was rather a good and simple wheeze.

Now all this sounds more than a little self-serving (if not downright saintly) but I'll try and argue it isn't quite as much so as it sounds. The fact is I've never been in charge of anything really big in terms of numbers of people and I consider this an extremely good thing. I'm temperamentally completed unsuited to be anyone's boss as shown by the fact that I detest being such. So my ability to take criticism (if I'm not deceiving myself) is related to the fact that I've never really ever had to face too much in terms of simple weight of numbers. In addition, I've always enjoyed, no, more than that, relished a good argument and find a sort of deep fascination in people disagreeing with me, even when it's pretty annoying. It helps that they're usually wrong.

And that's another step in the process I need to make clear. I don't think I'd ever just accept a criticism at face value, though I hope I'd never forget a criticism even if I assessed it as inappropriate.

In this respect I've learnt a lot about listening to what people say in relation to stuff I've directed for the stage. I like hearing praise, of course, but it's not terribly useful except as a means of confirming one's original hunches about what is likely to work. In contrast, even what might seem to be the most off centre criticisms can be revealing and useful, if not directly for the 'current' work then as a factor to be considered for stuff that lies ahead.

So that's my contribution to all this stuff about leadership - nothing terribly new, just tired agreement with what Ms Lee gets over rather more convincingly. I'm naïve enough to think that there's really not much to it other than some fairly obvious common sense.

In Training

Just completed a 40 minute run going up and down the park connectors around Katong, part of a plan involving, if not cunning, then significant degrees of chutzpah. Yes, I am in training for the staff run, all 3.5 kilometres of it, this Friday morning at West Coast Park. Unfortunately, I can't honestly say my training has prepared me for the event in such a way as to guarantee even an average performance (like making sure I get round in one piece.)

The problem is that there's no predicting exactly how my body will perform even the most mundane tasks, like climbing stairs, on any given day. A couple of weeks ago my right knee decided to declare itself unavailable for use twice in one afternoon, without any particular provocation. I'm hoping I will wake up tomorrow still able to move with reasonable fluidity signaling a full recovery from this evening's really quite gentle workout.

And yet another problem lurks slightly further into the future. Supposing I reach the starting line on Friday, I'm hoping the teenage bits of my brain won't delude my body into thinking it might just be worth going a little quicker than it's normally used to. That would be an excellent way to scupper the weekend.

So why am I doing this at all? For the glory, what else?

Oh, and I'm a couple of kilograms over my fighting weight and I'd like to shift at least one of them ahead of fasting month (which is not far away now.)

Words and Music

Now deeply into Dylan's Love and Theft - it sounds particularly good in the car. I found myself going back the other day to Christopher Ricks's somewhat eccentric but always entertaining and massively insightful Dylan's Visions of Sin to see what the good professor had to say about those songs off the album he chose to analyse. I remembered from my first reading of the book that Ricks had covered at least two songs in depth, but these segments didn't mean too much to me when I first read the book as I hadn't then heard anything off the album at all. Anyway, I was right about the two songs, which are Moonlight and Sugar Baby, and Ricks, as I expected from one of the great close readers of any 'text', illuminates both. He's especially good on Dylan's pauses in Sugar Baby. Indeed one of Ricks's great strengths when dealing with Dylan is his readiness to take the words in the context of actual performance.

It's odd to think that quite a lot of people think Dylan has a poor sense of rhythm. They can't see (should that be hear?) that he begins where they leave off.

Incidentally Ricks's book Keats and Embarrassment is the best critical text on Keats I know. I was lucky enough to hear Ricks lecture, as a guest lecturer at Sheffield University, on prejudice in literature, I think around 1976. He was particularly good on that old fraud, fascist and genius Ezra Pound.

Need

Earlier in the week, or possibly the week before, J Chris, one of our drama guys, asked me about something related to King Lear at flag-raising. This wasn't because he happened to be a key performer in our manic Kabuki-style Lear, part of the exuberant Competition Piece, but was more related to the very practical concerns of an oral examination he is about to take with King Lear as one of the texts. Specifically he wanted to know what the opening lines of Lear's O, reason not the need! speech meant.

This jarred me (in a nice sort of way) for two reasons. First of all, I can remember finding this a particularly odd speech when I did the play myself for 'A' level a small lifetime ago. The oddness came not from any especially difficult line, though getting one's head around Our Basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous takes some effort, but from the dizzying perspectives on what humans can consider themselves (un)reasonably entitled to. After all, in the immediate context of Regan's cruel yet penetrating What need one? Lear has no actual need (whatever that is) of followers. I think it was only after several years had passed that I began to grasp the wisdom and unwisdom of Lear's denial of reason and the potentially explosive qualities of this realisation for how we live. (Isn't it odd how elemental this play is, how utterly primitive almost in the fundamental questions it poses about the most simple things of all?) Secondly, for some reason I've found myself thinking about this speech over the last couple of years, and how it relates to that strand of the drama that relates to issues of nature and need, rotating some of its implications for my own life. Chris's question, coming unexpectedly from nowhere, as it were, seemed to crystallise all this.

So I'm thinking about this now. How pervasive, yet undefined, our sense of need is. How it relates to our biological programming. How far such programming might be over-ridden. How far I would want to describe myself as needy. How our needs might affect our environment.

And going back to Shakespeare, what is true need? Lear cries out above all for patience and Edgar advises his blinded father to Bear free and patient thoughts. But just when you think you're been given some sort of answer, it's all taken from them.

And Now, The End Is Near

Our final performance of School Daze approaches. It will be nice to finish. It will be a relief to finish. It will be sad to finish. We've lived for a long time with both The Chronicles of Jane and Competition Piece one way or another and we've more than successfully made them our own. Of course, it never really finishes.

One thing living long enough teaches you: when you create something it remains fresh, young, alive in the mind. For those looking for an anti-aging formula this is one that works to the extent that such a silly desire might bear healthy fruit.

Light

Getting back very late from work most evenings this week and feeling rather too frazzled, though happily so, to do much reading, I've found myself picking an old favourite off the shelves to easily escape into. In fact, in many ways Colin Thompson's picture book The Paradise Garden (a note parfect birthday present from Karen some years back) is all about escaping and, possibly, dealing with what happens when you get back.

Thompson has a genius for packing pages with the sort of beguiling detail that means you're so busy just noticing it all that there's no time to leave - you just get yourself gloriously lost. I'm puzzled as to why I've only got one of his books and really must track down some of the others. In the meantime his excellent home page can supplement the delights of Peter's paradise.

Darkness

Got back fairly late from work, settled down with a cup of tea and a curry puff, switched on the tv just for something to do, flipped to the History Channel which I usually find disappointing, got sucked into a brilliant documentary on the genocide in Rwanda. I suppose 'sucked into' isn't quite accurate: I found a good deal of it so painful to watch that I was basically stunned into a kind of grief and anger that made it almost a duty to watch. The programme featured contributions from Philip Gourevitch whose book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families is the best one I know on the tragedy. (I almost wrote 'the most readable' then realised how extraordinarily inadequate such terms are in the face of what took place.)

When I was in secondary school, the second year I think, we were exposed to short documentaries related to the Holocaust. (I don't think the term was in use then - we thought of them as films about the concentration camps.) I remember thinking then how utterly dark the heart of man can be, and how important it was to understand that. I assumed that all kids were exposed to this material and it was only years later, when I became a teacher, that I realised this was not the case. It seems to me that no education is close to complete that goes without a long hard look at the enormities of which our species is capable.

A Disappearance

The mystery of the failure of any new edition of Islamica to appear in absolutely yonks has been solved. They are going bust, or, as they more delicately put it: certain funding sources did not materalize as expected - this according to an announcement for subscribers and supporters on their webpage. Actually they sound fairly hopeful they will be able to publish again so perhaps all is not lost. It would be bitterly disappointing for such a sane voice to be silenced.

I was ruminating over whether they could get funding from some sympathetic government but then realised this made no sense at all - firstly, because governments are not keen on small magazines representing independent views of a sane nature - and, secondly, because to be funded by big brother is essentially to lose all independence, and usually sanity somewhere down the line.

In the meantime here's a link to a rather fine letter published on Islamica's webpage concerning the (latest) Anwar Ibrahim affair. There goes the possibility of any funding from UMNO!

Departures

Over last weekend and this I've recorded the two programmes comprising the BBC's An Islamic History of Europe. They've got a lot going for them - wonderful photography of Spain, especially Cordova and Toledo, Sicily and Paris, and a most personable presenter in Rageh Omar. But they were not entirely to my tastes, incorporating an awful lot of repetition and a rather corny frame story of Rageh conducting a kind of personal search and all that stuff. I suppose in an era of short attention spans this is sadly necessary. Having said that, some of the personal elements worked rather well simply on the level of reminding the viewer that the notion of an Islamic presence in Europe is not the stuff of academia but is about what is taking place now. In the simplest terms of all, it's impossible to buy into all that clash of civilisations guff when a self-evidently amiable bloke like Rageh represents the alien Other.

Of course, the two programmes have made for deeply sad viewing. The autumnal, elegiac note has been prominent. The sense of opportunities being lost has been palpable. There was a moment towards the end of the second programme when the fate of Spain's Jews in the newly unified Christian Spain, following the fall of Granada, was lamented that cut very deep. It's remarkable how rarely we are reminded that the peoples of the Jewish faith have almost invariably faired better under Islamic rule (frequently thriving) than in Christian lands, though we seem to be told with increasing frequency that Muslims and Jews cannot live together.