My Aunt Bet is not well. My cousin has written to me saying that she has taken to her bed and is not reading or doing crosswords. For a fanatical reader like my Aunt not to be reading is like taking away intellectual oxygen!
My thoughts go out to her and I wish her a rapid recovery so that the printed word can do its magic for her again, soon.
Although I am surrounded by thousands of volumes of the printed word, what I have been looking at increasingly over the past few years (has it been that long?) are electronic forms of writing rather than paper versions. Apart from computers I have three electronic “books” two of which have fallen into disuse as my Kindle takes precedence not only in the ease with which I can load new books on to it, but also because it has the most efficient cover, incorporating as it does a built-in light!
Saturday saw me in Barcelona to meet Suzanne so that we could discuss the content and planning for the next term’s course in Art History. As Suzanne is deeply into Project Based Learning and the theory thereof she forces me to take a more academic approach to the structure of this Credit than I would usually tolerate – and to use the fashionable buzzwords that go with it! I am sure that it good for my soul to behave as a twenty-first century educationalist from time to time!
We are planning a small inter-active booklet to accompany the course and, whereas I would have made do with stick, paste and photocopy Suzanne is constructing (I think that is the right word) the whole thing in some exotic version of Publisher! I have left her with the detailed fiddling with the pages that we have roughly designed and I will wait to see how much better it is than my hastily fabricated cover for the Current Affairs class!
We have brought the course content down to eight Movements in Art History: Fauvism; Cubism; Dada; Expressionism; Abstraction; Surrealism; Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Futurism was one of the many ‘isms’ that didn’t make the final cut, but we have had a great deal of pleasure in deciding which of the many and currently proliferating groupings in art we could safely “ignore”!
I did manage to find time to call into El Corte Ingles but was very disappointed at the so-called “offers” that were displayed in the Classical Music Department. There were discs with -50% emblazoned on them, but investigation revealed that they were extraordinarily expensive items to start so the reduction made them merely extortionate.
There is some marking that ought to be done, but I am thoroughly disinclined to do it and instead I am going to trawl my way through a selection of Art books to see if I can find a short and pithy summation of each of the art movements that we are going to study. If they do not come to hand fairly quickly then I might have to write the damn things myself instead of resorting to The Teachers’ Friend – or plagiarism, as it is usually known!
Although today appeared to be setting itself up as a wonderfully sunny spring-like day, its early promise evaporated and grey skies gave warning of the quality of the weather that we have been promised for the forthcoming week. I will take rain on Monday as long as it is sunny on Sunday!
A chance comment by Stewart about what he was reading on his Kindle sent me to a well frequented shelf in my library and choosing a volume at random I starting reading “Trouble for Lucia” by E F Benson in my rather nice 1994 Folio Society edition printed on Hamilton Wove paper using Goudy typeface and with suitably fey line drawing illustrations by Natacha Ledwidge.
I read all the novels on a beach in Sitges in 2005 (in the Folio Edition of course) and any catalogue description would have to take into account some slight sun tan oil staining to the boards!
That is the sort of thing that a Kindle lacks: physical reminders of when a book was last read and, as in this volume a photograph and a receipt to give you the date.
But the wonder of the Kindle does not diminish: the Bible; Shakespeare; Paradise Lost and a host of other works all unobtrusively contained in a slim, elegant package. A true wonder!
All I need now is time to read the bloody thing!
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