Grumpy!

A fair amount of writing done today.  Some good, some very ordinary, but all competent.  I think.  The major trouble, as far as I can see is that our tutor is more absent than present.  She may well be reading everything, but her touch is light and I think that we need guidance and in your face evaluation and that is what we are not getting on a week-by-week basis.  We are doing all the work in tutorials, but there is little to no tutor guidance.  I am getting a little miffed and I am finding myself acting like a teacher and doing the evaluation myself, when what I need is informed evaluation for me!  This moan is in the process of development and I will work on it for the next few days – and then probably decide to do nothing.

The answer is probably to write more and be more methodical about the way that I evaluate my own work.  That means going through my notebooks in a more rigorous way and perhaps finding a way of taking the stuff worth saving and finding a way to make is more accessible for use in future writing.  I have to be more methodically professional about this or I am not going to gain as much as I need to from this course.

The more I write, the more I feel myself drawn to script writing rather than the other forms of literary creation.  I have always considered myself a poet manqué but perhaps I have been deluding myself by following the paradigm promulgated by Aristotle in looking at the arts.  Poetry and tragedy are only deemed the highest literary structures because we have lost what the Master said about the others!  This is still relatively early days in the course and I will wait to see what develops – but I am dissatisfied at the moment and feel that we are working in some sort of vacuum. 

Toni has now brought his blanket which is a clear indication that Winter is truly here.  In January we both sit around like monks shrouded in blankets to keep the warmth in.  Dark days ahead.  Or we could put the central heating on, but that seems like such a denial of the advantages of living in a country like Spain in the first place.  We still have not put the central heating on.  Defiantly.

My Great Achievement of today is the removal of the resin from the car.  God alone knows what damage I have done to my lungs with the inhalation of so much acetone, but the majority of what was previously immovable has now gone.  There is nothing like giving yourself a spurious sense of value than doing a simple mindless task and getting a disproportionate amount of pleasure from the simple removal of stains.  It remains to be seen if I have removed a layer of paint or varnish.  Nothing stays the same.

Tomorrow is a writing day in which I have to work my way through a whole range of exercises that my colleagues on the Forums seem to have ignored.  I’m harking back on the same theme – this is arid so I should stop and go to bed.