What bacteria!

My efforts to spend the summer bonus before we are half way through the first month of the holiday continue apace.

Not content with buying a reclining chair and a GPS that talks to me urging me to “Speak your command!” I celebrated Spain’s deserved win in the World Cup by visiting a local bookshop and buying (on the slim and thinning pretext of possibly teaching the history of art next year) a positive collection of remaindered books and one full price.

I was particularly pleased with one volume which was on the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla whose lively impasto sketch like way of painting reminded me of John Singer Sargent. He is perhaps best known for the series of gigantic canvases that he painted for the Hispano American Society in New York which show the different regions in Spain through scenes that include national dress, dance, customs and work activities particular to each region. These were recently on view in the MNAC in an exhibition which I attended and very impressive they were too.

A book in the same series as the Sorolla was one on Surrealism which I bought because, whatever I think about the movement generally, once one gets beyond the commercial self-seeking vulgarity of Dalí, I find the serious play of the artists fascinating. To be fair to the book they actually chose to use a painting by Yves Tanguey on the cover. Tanguey’s paintings have always looked to me like Paul Klee’s doodles given a vivid and disturbing three dimensional reality; just like that episode of The Simpsons when Homer was sucked through a wormhole into a three dimensional world and cartoon became “reality”!

The other four books I bought (ah, brings back the old days of going into town and struggling home with half a library of irresistible books) were in the “Obras Maestras” series, books worth buying because of a few illustrations that I did not have in other works. But one volume was a purchase in spite of myself.

The subjects of the other three justified the “Masterworks” titles: Matisse, Cézanne and Gauguin, with the volume on Cezanne featuring a double page spread of the view of Mont Sainte-Victoire from The National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

The fourth volume was on Warhol. Now I think that Warhol makes Jeff Koons look live Vermeer and I further think that one of the pathetic daubs by Dubuffet are worth the whole of Warhol’s oeuvre, but there is a sort of sick fascination for the man who out-Dalíed Dalí in his zest for personal fame and the acquisition of wealth! How can one not feel a sort of excited contempt for an artist who produce s a page of badly drawn shoes and entitles the picture “á La Recherche du Shoe Perdu” His portrait of the squeaky weed Truman Capote manages to make him look like a slightly crazed Woody Harrelson! This is the “clean” version of Warhol’s work with only a sideways look at sex rather than the full-on for which he was infamous. But still, there is something there, even if I think that I am making his work art more than he ever did! I was twelve when the Campbell’s Soup cans came out and fourteen when the Brillo boxes were loosed on the world. I can remember that I was disgusted, confused and slightly excited by the sheer audacity (yes, I was using words like that then) of a so-called artist getting away with murder.

I might add that all these books are in Spanish so I can look on their purchase as a form of homework for my slow language development her.

On a far more disturbing note I have been watching the pool boy attend to our stretch of water: a stretch of water in which I have just had my early morning swim.

He took some sort of litmus paper out of its protective wrapping and dipped it into the water and was checking it as he was walking towards the little room in which all the machinery and chemicals are found. He stopped abruptly then scurried into the room and returned with pots of chemical from which he threw handful after handful into the water. Islands of congealed white formed on the surface and he then added tablets in each of the access hoes at the sides of the pool. He has now taken the long-handled net and is breaking up the islands and trying to get whatever he has thrown into the pool to dissolve.

He is also taking away the night`s crop of insect life which has met a chlorinated watery death and is floating on the surface waiting to be ingested with an unwary gulp of air by those among us who actually swim in the pool rather than hang about like manatees in the warm water.

After such panicked action I wonder what sort of primordial soup I was swimming in this morning!

Meanwhile after a hazy start the day has developed into one of clear blue skies and baking sun and engaging silence apart of course from the unholy trinity of barking dogs; recalcitrant children and amorous feathered flying things.

I’ll cope!