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Showing posts with label Puritan Work Ethic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Puritan Work Ethic. Show all posts

Sunday, March 08, 2015

Work has to be done!


A working lunch

The Puritan Work Ethic, which is supposed to buried deeply in such northern Protestant (atheist) capitalist people like my good self, means that something you have worked for must have that added extra that easy-come never gives you.  Which is my way of saying that lunch should have tasted better because I cycled all the way to the take away after having completed my swim (to which I also cycled) without once getting off the bike and walking it!
            The result of such exercise is that my knees feel as if someone has packed them full of slightly blunted tacks.  So much for exercise!
            To my continuing concern, the workmen who slaughtered the twenty trees have done nothing further to the sandy waste that they have created.  Where are the preparations for the laying of the cement – and, more importantly, the re-opening of the car park?  Where indeed!
            If the Fates think that they are changing my way of life by extending the cycling duties that I am grudgingly undertaking until they become second nature and I cycle through my own free will – then I warm them never to let it rain again.  The first sign of atmospheric moisture and I will be back behind the wheel and roaming though the residential areas like an Urban Flying Dutchman looking for a parking space.  And it if ain’t there I ain’t swimming!  Perhaps it’s the atheist bit of me that denies the full working potential of the old ethic!
            I have to admit that I do feel a sense of achievement about the effort that I am now making and my appearance on a sit up and beg, ‘S’ frame, basket carrying cycle has not gone unremarked – and I have not even written a poem about it!

Private faces in public places

The reality of having to make something of my whimsical choice of swimming pool paintings by Alvaro Guevara and David Hockney is becoming a little more problematic now that I am having to turn my whim into something academic.
            I have thoroughly enjoyed hunting around the Internet to try and discover the whereabouts of Guevara paintings and am thoroughly satisfied that I have found a location (that I will visit in a couple of months time) where someone has very kindly allowed me to book a visit to photograph and study the paintings he has!
            My tutor has suggested that I try and contact Hockney, as he is still very much with us, unlike Alvaro who died in the 50s.  But I am not sure that Mr Hockney actually talks to mere mortals any more.  It may well be worth making the effort to find out though as honourable failure is also an achievement!
            The details on the pro-forma that we have to submit giving an outline of what we intend to write about are coming together and my bibliography looks very impressive.  And that, after all, is the main thing!
            It is very difficult at the level of the course that we are studying, to add anything new and indeed, ‘real’ research is not a requirement of the enterprise.  As this piece of work is taking the place of an examination, there is a requirement that we use the scope of the course in the written work that we produce.  So, as the basis of what we are currently studying is Modernism, its development, critical basis and reactions to it, as well as the ‘rejection’ of it as a way of thinking about the more modern manifestations of art, our choices should allow some discussion of this.  That is the difficult bit, on which I am still working!

Politics and Big Brother

It is difficult for me to work out which I have more contempt for: the politics of our present Spanish government which has just promoted a hit-and-run hag as their preferred candidate for the leadership of the government of Madrid, or the Spanish version of VIP Big Brother.  The characters in both ‘drama’ are, to my mind, equally contemptible – though at least the ‘who the hell are they’ celebrities are at least openly doing it for the money!
            I am convinced that Toni only watches the interminable broadcasts of this awful programme in the same way that Wittgenstein used to sit in the front row in cinemas and watch Westerns – it was one way to stop him thinking about what he was doing.  Toni is so immersed in the complexities of installing and working virtual computers inside his computer (don’t ask!) and then making them work and speak to each other, that he sometimes, wild-eyed, needs some relief from the computer screen!
            I always feel a bit of a fraud when I think about my own use of computers.  I am, after all, an early personal computer adopter, but I have rarely used it as anything more than a glorified typewriter!
            This is not stopping me from exploring the possibility of turning away from Apple and embracing the Dark Side and reverting to Windows and PCs.  Even I, a dyed in the wool Mac user, have become disgusted at the single minded, dedicated pursuit of money at the expense of their customers.  The cost of the new version of the iPhone is little short of criminal extortion and has finally opened my eyes to just how callous Apple are/is – for they are legion!
            You can get so much more for your money for a PC rather than a beautiful looking Mac.  I am thinking.  And taking photographs of alluring machines with 1TB or even 1.5TBs of storage.  I know that everything should be in the cloud nowadays but I trust that thing as I would a rabid dog.  In the same way I still buy CDs – which I know appears to be absurdly quaint to those technophiles amongst whom I used to count myself.  But, I know what I know and there are machines that are tempting and yet do not have a logo that lights up on the cover!  Who would have thought it!

Now a little more on my Art course and then bed.  Deserved, I think.