A Sense Of Completion

Completed a rereading of Maya Angelou's I Know how the Caged Bird Sings today, ahead of teaching the memoir next term. Read it with much enjoyment at quite a lick to try and get a sense of the architecture of the work. As I've vaguely felt previously, it seems to me to divide into two segments which don't necessarily hang together: the childhood in Stamps, the teenage years in San Francisco. Both are fascinating but the years in Stamps have a mythic power quite lacking in the later chapters. Indeed, I really can't quite get hold of the odd later chapter in which Maya becomes a sort of member of a teenage gang for a month or so. I suppose it was simply something that happened and needed recording, as in any accidentally constructed life.

Was the book written as part of a larger autobiographical project - successfully delivered over the years - or is it meant to stand alone, coherent in itself? Either way, it's good stuff. 

Strong Medicine

Am continuing to work my way through the cache of Shakespeare-related DVDs acquired earlier this year. Today was the turn of The Winter's Tale, the RSC's 1998 version recorded at the Barbican and it didn't disappoint. Antony Sher is a scintillating Leontes, the best I've ever seen, but he's matched by the ladies in his life: Emily Bruni lovely as Perdita (and Mamillius!), Estelle Kohler a wonderfully fierce Paulina, and Alexandra Gilbreath a heart-breaking Hermione.

It was all very theatrical in the best sense of the word, as The Winter's Tale has to be, and if I'd seen it in the theatre I would have been embarrassed by my tears.

Strong Stuff

Yesterday turned out to be something of a landmark day for me in terms of my experience of reading poetry. It's not unusual for me to encounter moments of remarkable intensity in reading poems, points at which poems seem to blaze and dazzle, points at which the entirety of a poem seems to lock together in an overwhelming unity that transcends its individual moments - such that the experience is greater than a 'point' but appears to condense into one. This doesn't happen every day, which is a relief as, whilst it's highly enjoyable in its way, it's also in some ways disturbing - as if opening a door onto a world that's just a bit too intense in which to reside for any length of time.
 
Yesterday this happened to me three times, twice in the classroom, and then at home in the late evening.
 
In retrospect these intensities had been presaged by some of my reading on Monday evening. That was when I suddenly realised what William Carlos Williams was up to his longish early poem The Wanderer. This concludes Al Que Quiere!, but there's a somewhat earlier version of the poem (I think from 1914) that he revised for the later collection of 1917. Since I'm reading through the Collected sequentially, I'd read the 1914 version some days previous, but with little in the way of insight. Then I found myself re-reading the poem, now comparing the two versions which are similar but with some interesting revisions. I suppose this closer reading helped result in my realisation that the poem is essentially one of initiation, with WCW finding his real subject, the America he intimately knew through his wanderings as a doctor, the old woman he encounters in the poem being his muse (and grandmother). It's so obvious, and I'd missed it completely. And I also realised the extent to which it's the voice of Whitman in the background of the poem and that Whitman is in many ways the dominating influence on early Williams - rather than Pound. Anyway, the poem came satisfyingly alive for me, as if I'd been initiated into something.

Then in two quite separate lessons in the course of Tuesday, poems that I know well, one very well indeed, sprung to visceral life for me in readings aloud, one in a completely unintended almost accidental manner. This left me by the late afternoon in some small way reflecting upon the nature of poetry, which, in turn, led me in the evening to look up the Poem of the Week page in the Guardian-on-line. Carol Rumens makes great choices and provides wonderfully insightful commentaries, and the accompanying Comments are nearly always as readable as what's above the line, so I was looking forward to a good read as usual, and in my somewhat 'enhanced' state of mind I suppose I was even more receptive to having a good time than on a typical visit.

As it was, the poem featured, Barry MacSweeney's Daft Patter, took the top of my head off, just when I would have preferred a bit of gentle calm. Apart from being an obviously wonderful poem its concerns spoke so directly to me that it was uncanny. As Mum would have said, it all felt a bit much. 

I've avoided reading any poetry at all today.

Uncertainties

One of the fascinatingly unsettling aspects of living through a major health scare, such as the current one related to the spread of the coronavirus, is observing how we deal with a situation in which we simply don't know enough to predict outcomes of a very serious nature. It's a brutally useful reminder of a truth we generally blind ourselves to: we may think we know a lot but we are deceiving ourselves. Indeed, one of the most crucial things we don't know is the extent of our self-deception.

Mind you, the current on-going possible emergency is also useful as a reminder of the value of those with real knowledge and expertise, however limited that may be in the great sum of things, and how much we need what little we do know when the going gets tough.

Certain Matters

Not entirely certain how it must feel for those living by the rivers in England now bursting their banks, though I think it a reasonable guess that it must feel dreadful to the point of despair. The coverage remains as surreal as it seemed in years previous - February 2014 being just one example - and I'm pretty sure this will all continue into a future of what are now familiarly known as 'extreme weather events'. We've not proved good custodians of the planet, have we? And somehow or other we continue to fail to learn the obvious lessons.

Out Of Time

It's almost two months to the day since Noi and I were in Tameside General Hospital seeking attention for the nasty rash on her back that turned out to be shingles. Not the best way to spend Christmas Eve, but an absolutely necessary one that turned out for the very best since we dealt with the problem in its early stages. And a powerful reminder of the fact that matters of health come first, second and third in terms of sensible priorities.

For some reason I've been thinking a lot lately of matters of diet - not so much going on a diet, which is happily quite unnecessary at the moment, but adjusting our diet to allow for even more of the healthy stuff than we already take in (and we don't do too badly at all, I think.) I'm thinking particularly of the kind of nutrients which are believed to stave off dementia and promote the well-being of the brain.

That's the useful thing about getting old. Finally you have little choice but to get going on all the plans for self-improvement-cum-self-preservation that you've been thinking of for ages, but managing to put off. If not now, when? A sobering thought indeed.

Spoilt For Choice

We've just acquired Netflix, quite unexpectedly. Now watching an episode of the excellent Doc Martin from one of the later series that we've never managed to catch previously. This is, I suppose, a good thing - I'm just not sure it's entirely a good thing. I mean, we suffered no shortage of things to watch earlier. And now we have a veritable plenitude.

Stay tuned for further developments, as they say.

Stormy Weather

I acquired a few DVDs early in the year, nearly all Shakespeare-related, and I'm now trying to get round to viewing them. Today I watched the second half of Julie Taymor's screen version of The Tempest starring Helen Mirren and featuring a very strong cast, having watched the first half a few days back. Of course, that's not exactly the best way to watch any movie and I felt I hadn't done real justice to this one, although overall I enjoyed it. I found myself taking the special effects a bit for granted, which wasn't very fair as it's, as you might expect coming from Ms Taymor, a visual delight.

I thought the scenes featuring Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano were excellent, even enjoying Russell Brand's performance as the jester. But on first viewing I couldn't get my head around the idea of a female Prospero, even though Helen Mirren was predictably excellent. That's unusual for me as I'm no purist when it comes to the Bard on stage or screen, but for some reason the concept didn't work for me - perhaps because I'm sort of playing the role myself in my head as I watch and can't surrender my expectations.

I've got a feeling, however, that on a second viewing I'm going to be able to enter into the spirit of the production, partly as a result of viewing the accompanying documentary on the making of the film. It's a funny thing with me but whenever I'm exposed to explicit authorial intent I find myself able to defer to what was intended.

Above All

Now listening to Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux, Book 2: Le Traquet Stapazin (The Black-eared Wheatear) and massively glad to be doing so. Peter Hill is delivering the bird's music, alternately knocking hell out of his piano and then laying down lines of crystalline beauty - with lots of scrawls and squiggles in between. One chord sequence reminds me of the Turangalila, specifically Jardin du sommeil d’amour (Garden of Love’s Sleep). Yes, it's that good. Transcendent. Healing. Should be made available at all pharmacies.

(The link above is to Yvonne Loriod's version, by the way. Just as good as Hill's - as, of course, you'd expect from Mrs Messiaen.)

What Ignorance And Racism Does

The reliably excellent and informative On An Overgrown Path recently featured a blistering post on the injustice done to Rudolph Dunbar, a black conductor of the mid-twentieth century of whom you and I have never heard. The post explains why this is so and the injustice involved is such as to depress and enrage in equal measures. Not exactly a pleasurable read - but a necessary one.