experience

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It’s the last day of Spring, announced the radio presenter, and then immediately, cheekily, she played Vivaldi’s Summer. The raging storm that was forecast last night but never arrived, arrived this morning instead in musical form.

But the sky is clear today — a large expanse of blue to carry the heat of the sun across the city. 

One more month until the end of the year. It’s been a year where, every month, colleagues are heard saying, “Where did that month go?” And “How did we suddenly reach the end of this month?”

Or maybe that was last year. Or both.

Such sameness. But always a bit different.

Adventuring, exploring, discovering; but also retreating into the comforts of repetitions.

Choose your own adventure, as long as it’s within the given parameters. 

The most well-thought-out plans might still fall through. You cannot clear the fog-of-war until you enter the next cavern. The hidden grick will not reveal itself until you’re within tentacle’s reach.

Grounded, back in reality, it’s time to learn. So much learning to do, such limited capacity. Over-encumbered and slowed.

Perhaps I can blame the heat?

An old friend asked recently what books I most like to read. Without hesitation, I replied, “classics”. In the back of my mind Ulysses is still poking around, as is the recent article about the book club that spent 28 years reading and deciphering Finnegans Wake. 

Now Midnight’s Children is on the table, and I’m considering that it’s not necessarily “classics” that I’m drawn to, but to what is perhaps a sub-genre of historical fiction — novels that have some fantastical or absurd element, yet are irrefutably grounded in historical facts. Novels so poetic they must surely exist only in imagination, yet by their very magic are brought to life.

Earlier this morning, before Vivaldi, in the waking hour, the radio played Ludovico Einaudi’s Experience, played by Anna Lapwood on the organ (her own transcription). What a powerful piece to wake up to!

My younger self probably only ever associated the organ with that scene in The Simpsons in which Bart has replaced the church’s hymn music with a reinterpretation of Iron Butterfly’s In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, and the church organist (Helen Feesh is her name, apparently) does a 17-minute organ solo, and collapses at the end.

More recently, the organ invariably makes me think of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony, and how he was a bit strange (he wrote The Carnival of the Animals because of certain other interests), and how Saint-Saëns probably would be ok with his Organ Symphony being used as the theme for a movie about a talking pig (Babe).

And now there is Experience.

to read or not to read

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So I finished reading Ulysses. It took about an entire year, but I finished it. (To be fair, there were several times I didn’t read it at all for a week or so, so I probably could’ve finished it faster if I was less tired/busy and more dedicated. Alas, I was not.)

The great thing about Ulysses is that there is already so much written about it. There are scholars and academics who have researched extensively about the content, and written not only essays, but entire books about it. As such, I feel no great need to give my interpretation of it, or even write some kind of summary about the novel.

Instead, I thought it would be of more value to write something that helps others decide if they want to tackle this monumental piece of literature. I owned my copy of Ulysses for over ten years (probably closer to 15 years) before I had the courage to pick it up and open it. I didn’t know anyone who had read it, so there was no one to say, “Hey, you should read Ulysses. I think you’ll find it to be an interesting and valuable experience.” Instead, I was sort of half guilted into it, and half encouraged by a vague sense that maybe I was ready to read it.

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string quintet no.5

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One morning, at home, preparing breakfast and coffee, I started humming a tune. I had no idea where it was from or who the composer was, but it was jolly and cheerful and I liked it. I must’ve heard it on the radio one day, and it found a home in my head.

Another morning, cycling to work, I realised I was humming this same tune out loud. Not really loud but if someone had been next to me, they might’ve heard it. Being as it was, that I was in motion, cycling, at the time, there was probably no one close enough to hear it. No one, that is, except my conscious mind, who didn’t realise that my subconscious mind was producing this sound (if the two minds can be considered separate entities).

Yet another, separate, different morning, I was listening to the radio at home while getting out of bed, getting ready for the day ahead, and along comes this familiar but until then completely anonymous tune. Such joy to finally find out what it is, and who composed it. And now I can listen to it as much as I want without wondering if I’m actually remembering it correctly. And you can too.

Luigi Boccherini (yes, the same one who defied the King of Spain)

Minuet from String Quintet No.5 in E Major

I think it’s used a lot in TV and movies. Perhaps you’ll recognise it?

And while you listen, just a brief, unrelated thought about Ulysses, which I’m still making my way through, as I’ve been making my way through for about an entire year now, and am at last approaching the end (expect a wrap-up post of that in the near future). The peculiar thing about Ulysses is that it is the singularly most peculiarly written book I’ve ever endeavoured to read, written with such exorbitance of expression that it probably could be cut to a tenth of its full length (currently almost 1000 pages) and still tell the same sequence of events. But to do so would be to turn it into trash. 

Yes, it would lose all of its charm and character — all of its disjointed, tangential, nonsensical charm and character. But more on this another time.

captivated

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Well, ok, so it’s been a few months since I was last here. That was not planned. Not even this post was planned. Not really, anyway.

I was going to write about the Queensland Symphony Orchestra performance I attended a couple of weeks ago, but then I realised that I hadn’t blogged since March, so I was thinking that maybe some kind of “more general recap” was in order.

But first, the QSO.

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some pig

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You know what’s crazy? In all my years and years of reading, I’d never read Charlotte’s Web — a veritable childhood classic kept in probably every library in every school across the country. Why did I never read it? I’m not entirely sure. Maybe a story about a spider and pig just didn’t appeal to my younger self. Why read farm stories when I could read about the adventures of the creatures of Redwall?

Well, anyway, D. seemed to think this was unacceptable, so I decided to read it. I’m about a third of the way through Ulysses, so it’s probably not a bad idea to take a bit of a break, right?

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page after page

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It seems that out of every hobby, past-time, or leisurely pursuit, reading is the one that has endured the longest, and has been the most consistent in my life. I can hardly remember a time in my life when I was not in the middle of one novel or another (except, of course, those brief lulls between books when I need time to recover from book hangovers).

Running probably comes a close second, although I’ve been running less these days — mostly because this summer we’ve had a lot of days when it was too hot, or too rainy. Plus I’ve been doing several late finishes at work, and then week-ends are busy with other things. But overall, since childhood (maybe mid-primary school some time) I’ve always enjoyed running, and I ran pretty consistently year after year.

Now I’ve gotten back into cycling more. This week I cycled to work twice (yesterday and the day before), and surprisingly my legs aren’t quite as sore as I feared they’d be. The thing with cycling is that although I had a bike when I was a kid, and thoroughly enjoyed cycling whenever I got the chance, there’s a huge interval in my life when I didn’t cycle at all. I think I just outgrew my bicycle around high school time, and never got a new one until after uni (?)

I’m not really sure what happened there. Probably it was just easier and cheaper to run. I still think that running has a lot of advantages over cycling (like needing less gear, not needing as much preparation, having more freedom with where you go, etc, etc) but unfortunately it’s not feasible to run to and from work on a regular basis (not from where I currently live anyway)

Another thing that has dropped in and out of my life is writing. Take this blog for example: I used to write a lot more frequently here, but it has become less of a priority in recent months. I used to also write more stories and poems and other creative things, but I feel less compelled to write these days. I do miss it a bit, I guess, which is why I’m here again, but I’m not really sure where my writing will go from here.

So this was basically my train of thought the other night, when I went for a pre-dinner walk. And it was then that I realised that reading was the one true constant in my life — the one habit I cannot (and don’t intend to) stop.