Malaysia 4: An inaugural lecture at the library

A brief 6 minutes extrat of Wayang Kulit. Full hour long vids are available on YouTube

Another hazy day in KL, the light a little more forthright than yesterday but still hesitant and uncertain.

Yesterday afternoon (24th) was the inaugural PUSAKA lecture and the presentation of the Abdullah Ibrahim Memorial Award for Cultural Preservation. (For a little more information see here) We are driven in by Ken, a friend of P and E, who works with orang-utans and many other species in a protected environment at Sabah in the north-east of Malaysia.

The library is in Merdeka Square that Clarissa recognizes from her childhood, and it is a grand occasion. The Regent Raja Nazrin Shah is present complete with family and entourage.

First there is a brief musical performance by a group of traditional musicians, mostly drummers, from Kelantan, associated with the Wayang Kulit (Shadow Play) tradition, about which much more later. Enough for now to know that Wayang Kulit lies at the heart of PUSAKA's interests since it is an ancient and threatened cultural form whose meaning extends beyond western notions of theatre. The music begins as a chant by the healer then a storm of drums, maybe a dozen or so. It is over all too quickly.

E then makes a speech, quite astounding in that it is perfectly organised and weighted and delivered without a glance at the notes. He talks about the wildness and beauty of the tradition, about the passions associated with it, its importance, his personal involvement, and gives an account of the twenty years of the organisation. Though I know only the little I have read about it in a hurry before we came the speech engages and enthuses me. I think I understand the importance of the form a little better. In political terms it prevents the domination of one culture over another: it asserts the power of the human imagination over the temporal and formally religious powers that seek to define and control it. We are going to see a performance in Kelantan in the next few days and now there is even more reason to look forward to it.

After a brief official speech by the Director General of the responsible ministry, we get the prize giving to Abdul Rahman Dollah, a master musician of the Wayang Kulit tradition.

The inaugural lecture is given by the major Indonesian poet, editor and writer of scripts for Wayang, Goenawan Mohamad (see also here). Beginning with Cartesian notions of the distinction between mind and body he moves on to an exposition of the Other, the way we create distinctions, and how the important thing is not the distinction but the understanding of the creative process that gives work its life. The traditional, he argues, is not a finished historicised object of the past (an Other) but part of the developing creartive process whereby significance is retained and reformulated. I am familiar with the broad lines of the argument but it is presented with grace and power and is a corrective to state enforced notions of identity, privilege and belonging, albeit in a subtle fashion.

(My own thought is that the Other is unavoidable and fully internalised as a distinction between our consciousness and the world, beween individuals and indeed within ourselves, so we may be and are Other to ourselves, but that the idea of art as an enacted process rather than a series of externally viewed objects is right. That is how I myself feel it. I also think the historicised reading of cultural works which are also products of specific circumstances, in other words, history - a Sheridan play for example, or Donne's sermons - is not wrong headed at all in one sense, unless one makes that the exclusive and, eventually, dogmatically determined approach. We live in tensions and move between correctives. )

But this is something we can talk about later with Goenawan himself.  He seems such a good man and afterwards, over food and drink, we talk a little about - well, again - the politics of our respective regions and lives. Before that we nibble some food in the library and meet the singer / dancer / healer who talks - as interpreted by Ken and Pauline - about the nature of the healing, about interpreting sickness, about finding the appropriate words, music and gestures to expel the 'wind' of it, to entice it from the sufferer into the healer. Also at the table an Egyptian writer to whom, naturally, we address a few tentative questions about the situation in Egypt. He is pleased Morsi has gone and says Morsi was trying to turn Egypt into Iran and that he was moving very fast in that direction. The implication is that he had to be stopped.

I should add that the idea of these blogs is not to recount personal conversations in detail. I am not entitled to do that, but the broad swing of talk seems fair enough. It may also be that my impressions are not always right.

Meanwhile the hot KL night sees us drift from bar to restaurant to bar where we - that is to say Pauline, Eddin, Goenawan, Iqe and Karl are joined by Alvin and other writer friends.

KL so far seems to be mainly cars, dual carriageways, flyovers, one-way systems. But there are pockets of pedestrianisation, small squares with bars and big open restaurants with revolving electric fans. But I can't piece the bones of the city together at all, am constantly disorientated by the carriageways. I have some idea of the points of the compass and what lies broadly where, but where we are at any given moment, I cannot tell. That may chiefly be because we are driven from place to place.

Today is the launch of the magazine Obscura where Alvin, Goenawan and I will read, not only from our work but from Eliot and Byron.

Malaysia 3: Reading the papers

View from fifteenth floor

A daily paper The Star is left at our door each morning. E used to write for it some years back. Yesterday's front page splash was a tragic bus crash in which, according to some, the driver got into road rage with another vehicle and drove straight into the valley at high speed killing many of the passengers. It is still the headline news today with photographs of the wrecked bus both on the front page and inside, with now some dispute about the condition of the driver, who had been working for the line just two months and had received no complaints about his speeding. His son declares in one headline 'My dad wasn't an angry man', the word 'angry' in red, an interesting feature of the paper  where many of the headlines have a key word or phrase in red. Driving and safety seem to be an issue here.

In another headline Thieves loot 180-year-old temple in Penang. Penang is where we are due in a few days time.  Yet another headline - interesting for an Islamic state - Sex bloggers file application. A man and woman apparently run a sex blog for swingers, and producing an inappropriate Ramadan greeting on Facebook, or at least that is how I understand it. They are appealing to have one of the charges dropped.

Most interestingly, in view of the rise of Islamic power and the Ramadan speech about 'the enemies of Islam' there is an article titled Need we be so sensitive (I'd link to it if I could find a link), in which the writer reflects on the incident of a surau in Sedili Besar, which a Buddhist group had booked. This was looked upon as an offence to Muslims (the great majority in the country), who have demanded the building be demolished now. The author pleads for some charity and laments the tendency of the Muslims to see offence everywhere. By way of counter example he quotes the experience of his son in an Anglican boarding school where the school immediately granted him 'a spiritual space' and heard him recite the Takbir when the school parents were in, applauding him afterwards. He says that Islam isn't a small religion to be wiped out with the stroke of a pen and asks that Muslims be loving and merciful. The author is a female social activist who wants to promote a progressive and inclusive Islam. It will be interesting to see the reactions to her piece. A pity I can't link to it: much else in the paper can be linked.

The ancient technique of breeding paranoia and suspicion and seeing offence everywhere works in most circumstances. It is particularly successful in puritanical periods and in authoritarian states. The message is:

Everyone is against us, we must use harsh methods so your freedoms will, as you will understand, be necessarily curtailed. Just look how [the enemy] despise and want to destroy you. Let us show you their atrocities. Some of the atrocities may look small but they protend greater evils. As for those enemies, they are powerful and barely human. Do not trust them an inch and, at the slightest provocation, step on them like noxious insects and crush them.

This is not specifically Islamic teaching (like all religions Islam is complex and has many strands), it is, as we would now say, the discourse of power and, like Lily the Pink's medicinal compound, 'has appilicaitons' in every case. In our time it is the expanding discourse of some forms of puritanical Islam.

But then you get back to the pornographers with their Ramadan greeting and you see how life is complicated, contrary and not a little mad, as we were told it might be.

Malaysia 2: Meals and meals and high rise views

Eddin and Pauline 

Clarissa, Iqe and Karl

Up till 3:30am last night and feeling fresh, but that is  because it was only 8pm UK time. Consequently we don't wake till 11:30 this morning. It is lightly cloudy and will reach about 33C later with some rain. The view from the eleventh floor is much like it was yesterday afternoon, the traffic gently and quietly creeping past on the four-lane carriageways and flyovers below, but just some twenty minutes ago the sight of two storks working their way across the sky. It is many year since I have seen storks.

Yesterday evening we were just by the Indian quarter, full of small Hindu temples and a market. We started in a restaurant opposite, meeting two young friends of P and E, Iqe and Karl (I don't know that I have spelled either of those correctly) both lawyers, one qualified the other about to be. We have a quick light meal, talking throughout, then we move to a restaurant / bar owned by E's friend Ed, which is where our Sunday event is to be. After that we sit down upstairs by the window together with Ed. More talk of politics and film and books. Then we move on to a bar / cafe for a light bite and some sweet tea. Talk doesn't fail, we joke, tease each other a little. We hear about the ins and outs of Malaysian politics, about the role of rhetoric - people addressing stadiums full of supporters. I talk about the function and power of rhetoric in British politics. I doubt whether any British politican woulf even think of trying to fill a stadium. Politics is, generally, articulate, but its effects are restricted to sound-bites. Talk too of political charisma and what that means. I have a faint suspicion of the great charismatic leader, or charisma in general. Dull administrations seem less egotistical and paranoid. Sometimes more radical. No one ever accused Clem Attlee of being charismatic (the old Churchill joke about an empty taxi arriving at no 10 and Attlee getting out). Churchill was witty, but the Attlee government was the most revolutionary British government of the 20C, until Mrs Thatcher who may have been spell-binding in some ways but not exactly charismatic either.

Soon going downstairs for lunch, then in the evening to see Becky, a good friend of daughter Helen.

Strange aquarium-like light. No blazing sun yet. More later.

*

So, lunch with P and E. They have so much planning to do. Now back in hotel for about half an hour. Learning a great deal about how Malaysia patronage works, more about the rise of fundamentalist Islam which, seems at moments, to parallel the rise of puritanism in many other places. Last Ramadan sermon was on 'the enemies of Islam' - not so much political as ideological, enemies such as liberalism, socialism, feminism, etc. The same aquarium light. More later.

*

No rain. About 4:40pm we ask for a taxi to take us to B's place. The taxi arrives and using a mobile phone satnav he gets us there. He is a sweet man. When it comes to payment it is a small fee but I only have large denomination that he cannot change. I do have one small note that falls short of the fare by about 40%. He smiles, says don't worry, takes the note and drives off.

B is an old close schoolfriend of our daughter. Her husband is away in Poland, she has a 15 month old son. The building is in a very expensive part of the city, the apartment, up fifteen floors, is paid by his company, the company she too worked for until the baby arrived. The flat is enormous - like a small town, I say - immaculate, modern, up to date in every respect with magnificent views. It feels vaguely unreal and the great glass windows with the views - there is also a balcony - add to the sense of illusion. It is almost film set. Top of Gotham City without the gothic. (I'll put up a photo of the view at dusk soon.)

Poor construction though, she says. Since they've been there over twenty windows have smashed or fallen out. The fabric is not what you'd expect. Corruption, she suggests. We go out for a drink. The security is considerable, all charming Nepalese. B knows them all, they all greet the baby. There is clear mutual fondness.

At the bar she talks about what she doesn't like: the way the state treats people at the bottom of the heap. The way the Malays occupy every position of influence. We are sitting outside. The bar is expensive with a small pool and cascade, the staff very friendly. We are sipping wine, in my case, beer.

B is very impressive, ex-Oxford psychology, years abroad with the big company. The mistreatment of poor minorities rankles with her. So does the crime. She has been shaken down by a policeman looking for easy money. Cops are badly paid. She dislikes both injustice and incompetence.

We drop into the nearby supermarket, which is like a dream of Harrods, to buy some potatoes. The staff greet her. One of them offers me a copy of a glossy mag, The Expat. Then we go back to the dream flat and she gives baby a bath. I tinkle the baby grand piano, then we sit out to eat on the balcony, which is cool and offers spectacular spectacular. Very good talking to B. An outsider's view (though they have been there almost three years). Will she go back to work? She is learning Mandarin. She wants a second child. And then? That is too far ahead.

Taxi back is more expensive, the meter starting at twice the fare the last had started at. It's still cheap. As soon as we arrive, there are Pauline and Eddin with the Indonesian poet Goenewan Mohamad and our good friend Alvin Pang, the two poets with whom I am to read on Sunday, as well as Ken, an old friend of Pauline's who has come to help. Coming for a drink, they say? And food, they add. We have just had a full meal at B's.

But we go, sit round a big table and we manage to nibble something. Talk is difficult to hear but in the middle of the meal a phone message for E. Great news. Bank support for the next five years.

So we return to the hotel. It is 1:15 am.

Malaysia 1: Descending from clouds, standing on clouds

We set the alarm for 04:00 and made the 05:45 from Wymondham to Heathrow 4, leaving our friends in charge of the house. Two trolleys and light hand luggage, with books to give as presents and many books on the Kindles for reading. A very quiet walk down to the station and, at first, a bare platform then just before the train a slow gathering of early travellers.

We arrive at Heathrow about 09:20, then the long wait. Security double checks my Kindle, then we sit, read and wait. Once on, the flight at 12:00 GMT arrives in KL at 19:40 local time, a flight of a little over 12 hours. It's a packed flight. The boy next to us was born in Trinidad, father a helicopter pilot currently stationed in Malaysia. Bright eyed boy, wants to be an aeronautical engineer, has flown planes, is about 17 maybe.

I watch four and a half movies - reading when tired isn't easy. The Negotiator is very good. Batman Returns (I had never seen it through) is a nice Tim Burton fantasy with Michele Pfeiffer as Catwoman. There is a kind of psychological exploration here but it doesn't go deep. I rather got to like the Penguin by the end. Tough life for a mutant. To stick with mutants I also watch X-Men which sets out as a potentially interesting take on post-Holocaust notions of dangerously gifted mutants, mutants being essentially Jewish untermensch, but quickly moves into zap-the-villain-mode. Start watching Sherlock Holmes, the Guy Ritchie version, but even as semi-dozy hallucination it works more as annoyance than pleasure. Watch Bad Company through. Heaven knows why, possibly because it is close to landing. Chris Rock is in sub-Jim Carrey gurning mode, part cool, sickly sweetness part full eye-stretching panic model. Deeply stupid stuff.

I will only note that in three of these films men are shown apologising to women, two of them with almost exactly the same text. 'I'm sorry, I messed up...'  What are they apologising for? One for getting wrongly accused and shot, the other for being, well, a young man.

Keep apologising guys. It'll put you on the side of the angels, which is where you need to be most of the time.

*

Arriving in KL it is warm and a little muggy, but far from uncomfortable. Pauline and Eddin meet us and drive us about an hour's distance to central KL, stopping for refreshments (breakfast for P and E, a coffee and an orange juice in my case), on the way. We talk all the time, about Malaysian politics, literature, poetry, novels, the exoticisation of Malaysian experience in books, and about ourselves. P and E work on several fronts. We feel immediately at home with them both, intelligent, beautiful and deeply read people involved in translation, publishing, editing, writing, journalism and more. We talk a little about post-colonial history, about the stages of its development and what effects that has on writing. We talk about the Malay language, its history, literature and future. About the Islamicisation of the country, about how the young are often angrier about what never happened to them than are those who were part of history. 'Few of us have been historical actors, even in a passive sense,' I say.

I go on thinking how those only a little younger than us have watched history happen but rarely as it affected them. Even though Clarissa and I are products of violent historical moments, we too have seen terrors and dramas mostly at a remove. Those a generation down from us will have seen history as ever more a series of semi-virtual moments that disappear almost as soon as they are over. Think Baudrillard. Baudrillard is a dreadful show-off in some ways but he does grasp something valuable. Who remembers the Cold War now? Did it really happen? Did World War 2? Did the first Iraq War? It is as if we were standing on clouds composed of movies clips and nightmares.

Tonight we eat out with Pauline and Eddin and meet some of their friends. It is a privilege being alive, as we often forget, and this is one of those privileges.

Guest Post by Denni TurpEnthusiasm: On Coursera

[S]ometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Here’s an impossible thing to believe—totally free, short online courses on a vast range of subjects taught by 62 different universities in 16 countries and with NO advertising!

Especially for all you poets reading this, here’s a cliché warning.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  And so on. And when I first heard about Coursera, I was sure that there must be a catch. 

But there isn’t!

I’m currently doing two courses, The Fiction of Relationship, looking at prose fiction with Professor Arnold Weinstein (Google him—he’s one of the best!), and a multidisciplinary course on The Holocaust (which has introduced me to the poetry of Paul Celan).  Earlier this year I took a course on fantasy and science fiction, and I’m signed up for Modern and Contemporary American Poetry which starts in September.

As you’re reading this on George’s blog, I imagine you might like the same kind of courses, but there are about 400 on offer, ranging across not just Humanities but also Medicine, Social Sciences, Biology, Mathematics, Business (yes, I know!) and Computer Sciences.  Some of the courses about to start include: Introduction to Sustainability; Creativity, Innovation and Change; History of Rock (music, not stones!); From the Big Bang to Dark Energy (very tempting, this one!); Metadata; and Online Games: Literature, New Media and Narrative.

This is a truly global community, with over 9 million students across 195 countries.  Every course is set up with interactive forums so I’ve had the opportunity to share ideas, to converse with people from around the world, people who speak so many other languages, whose experiences may be very different from my own, whose ages range from late teens to well over retirement, some of whom are themselves professors or teachers, but who all share an interest in the subject and a passion for learning more.

Courses are usually about 10 weeks long, with a series of video lectures every week.  There is no requirement to watch the lectures at set times or on set days, or to continue with a course once you start, nor is it essential to take part in discussions, or to complete any of the assignments.  If you want to receive grading and feedback on each of your own assignments then you must review at least three of those submitted by your peers each time:  that’s all.  And, as I said at the beginning, it is all totally, completely and absolutely free.  You might need to buy a book or two (terrible hardship!), but many of the course materials are available online via Project Gutenberg and YouTube, for example.  You will probably find, especially if you sign up for any of the literature courses, that you already have many if not all of the required reading.  And libraries are pretty good for that kind of stuff, aren’t they?  Use them while we still have them.  Prove we love them, prove they are an essential service.

What more can I say to encourage you to have a look?  I think, just give you the link.  Go for it!

https://www.coursera.org/

*

Note
I don't do ads but am very happy to do enthusiasms, especially for learning. Delighted to have this by Denni Turp.

Red Man's Way: Guest Poem by Kim Moore

Red Man’s Way

When I finally get here and see the channel
with the tide out and the boats drowning 

in sand, and the gulls wheeling overhead,
sometimes hassling a lone crow from the sky

and the old path across the channel,
as if someone has drawn a finger across

the wet black mud to make it so, I feel full,
as if one person can’t carry this with them

and be unchanged, as if I could speak seagull
and they would come, cursing, articulate,

their wings the colour of sky, as if I could 
hold my hand up and stop the noise of traffic

from the nearby road, or pinch out the lights
from the shipyard with my finger and thumb

and it’s never silent here, because the wind
likes to run its hands over and over the land,

shaping the newly planted trees to strange angles, 
as slowly, year by year, the bank covers itself

with grass, and last summer, for the first time, 
ox-eye daisies, tall as your knees and fearless. 

*

I was glad to ask Kim for a poem after I first heard her at Leeds when we read together. I am really pleased with this poem. Red Man's Way, the place, is a 'recreational path running the length of Barrow's slag bank site, in the area formerly occupied by the Hindpool Iron and Steelworks'. 

It is, in effect, a walking poem, both tender and rapt. The emotions are full ("I feel full, / as if one person can't carry this with them // and be unchanged") but the gestures are delicate, of drawing a finger across, pinching out lights with finger and thumb and the wind running hands over the land.

Time and change are major powers in the poem in which change, both in place and person, takes place both immediately and over a vast period at the same time: it is a slow, year by year change among fleet seagulls and the wind.

 Facing the changes implicit in such great temporal powers requires hardiness and courage, a courage particularly  located in the ox-eye daisies at the end. The landscape is ravishing yet potentially a cause for fear in those trees at "strange angles". In the 1870s, as the linked text says, the site was "the biggest Bessemer steel production plant in the world and employed over five thousand men."

The idea of the 'nature poem' as we understand from Wordsworth lies in a sense of the sublime (those great temporal powers) and the memory of childhood experience. More recently Alice Oswald has attempted a direct relationship with the forces of nature, to allow natural forces and patterns into the poem and to steer it. These attempts, now more referred to as ecopoetry - and also associated with John Kinsella, Mario Petrucci and Forest Gander (and possibly John Burnside and others) - often spring out of a desperate sense that we might be losing nature altogether.

I can't speak to that with any authority. Brought up in capital cities and educated in a major industrial city, the urban is what I have known, though my last forty years have been spent somewhat closer to nature. Nature to me has been the movement of wind and light, the look in a cat's eye and its body language, the feeling of fragility about the human bodies around me, including my own.

Kim's poem moves me though because some of those very feelings are applied to water, birds, mud, trees, banks and ox-eyed daisies without forgetting the nearby shipyards. The human trace is part of the poem, and I can't help but read the ox-eyed daisies as human emblems too. They are after all "fearless".

I could say a good deal more about the poem in terms of its blend of freedom with technical control. The language is passionate without being a dramatic performance, the rhyhms quiet on the whole but not muted. It's a very good poem and a pleasure to have.

*

Kim Moore's first pamphlet 'If We Could Speak Like Wolves' was a winner in the 2012 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. It was named in the Independent as a '2012 Book of the Year' and was a runner up in the Lakeland Book of the Year awards. She won an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010 and is published in various magazines including Poetry Review, The TLS, The Rialto and Magma. She works as a peripatetic brass teacher in Cumbria.

Kim's website is here.

Giving up on Southcliffe

I rarely sit down to watch a TV serial. It's mostly the time they demand and the work I'd rather do. But I have watched the first three episodes of Southcliffe. I have now given up.

I did watch the first two episodes as much for the filming and the way the narrative was organised - and the idea that the film was going to concentrate on the effect the killings had on the fictional town rather than doing yet another serial-killer frightener. That was a good idea while it lasted. But it didn't last very long and it ran out in episode three. Now the metaphors are showing and they are fairly big.

The small town, according to the reporter who blows his top because he remembers the wrong done to his father by the town, is a microcosm of everything that is wrong with small-town, white, Anglo-Saxon people. Those are the terms he used. They all deserve to be butchered. I hadn't been sure at that point that it was their whiteness or their Anglo-Saxon genetic make-up that had made the townspeople deserving of death - there are certainly no black characters in Southcliffe.

But then everyone in Southcliffe is mad or corrupt in some way. The father who has lost his daughter, the pub manager who has the hots for every woman in sight. The ex-SAS sadist. The people who work in the bar, the customers in the bar.

We know this is so because the Rory Kinnear character is telling us THE TRUTH. The fact that he is drunk at the time only convinces us the more.

*

The metaphors rule now. Any resemblance to the realism the film set out with is gone. All we have are realism-devices and smart cuts. But the metaphors are smug and come up with all the easy answers. The easiest answer is that the town (read white, Anglo-Saxons, Brits) breeds its killers out of guilt over corrupt industry and Afghanistan (or Iraq).

I prefer metaphors that don't shout so much, especially when they are banalities.

But this is lazy stuff parading as depth. I don't know why it takes a Hungarian-born writer brought up in two European capital cities to point this out.

The style is great. The slow film is great. I like slow film.

It's the the big easy metaphor I hate.