Why are things, sometimes, so difficult!

Why is it so difficult to transfer music with iTunes from my Macbook Air to my mobile phone?  And that is a real question.  I have downloaded the programs that are supposed to help and all I have got is increasingly frustrated as the music stubbornly stays on the Mac and will not seamlessly transfer itself to my phone.

At which point, I know, some of you are going to ask, “Why are you trying to transfer music anyway?  Haven’t you heard of things like Spotify?”  Well, I have.  But I feel that there is something deeply unsatisfying about instant access to infinite music without some sort of effort.

This explains my love/hate relationship with the Internet.  There is nothing more satisfying that having an informational itch that can be satisfied by a few key clicks. 

I always forget the word for the technique of putting opposites together like “hot ice” in Romeo and Juliet, but I know that I can find it out by going on to Google.  Which I just did.  I first searched with “technical term for hot ice” and found a whole series of scientific, chemical references which, if I had not been writing this, I might have been tempted to delve into and spent god knows how much time getting further and further away from the original investigation! 

However, I added “Romeo and Juliet” to the search terms and got to a whole range of references.  Glancing through them I soon found the word “oxymoron” and didn’t even have to click on anything further to find it!

I had the whip of writing this to keep me on task, but the number of times that I have started off looking for something like, “When was Cervantes first translated into English?” and found myself, half an hour later looking at the latest finds from the ancient Antikythera wreck, and looking at the amazing “Mechanism” that was found that might well be the oldest computer in the . . .   You see what I mean! 

Fascinating stuff, but not what I was looking for.  [Though, if you haven’t heard of the wreck, you really should read about it.  The quality of stuff that has come from this sunken ship already is amazing, and the finds that might come to the surface next year promise wonders!  You can find more information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_wreck  Well worth reading.]

But to be realistic, you don't always diverge from your appointed task and find yourself reading about something as culturally uplifting as an old Greek wreck!  No, most of the time you discover that, for the last twenty minutes you have been going through a horror show of pictures that show "25 child stars who have not aged well" or "50 famous people you did not realize have died this year" or something similar and generally unedifying - but compulsive!

So, the excitement of the chase for knowledge has been made much easier.  The laborious use of the index in various encyclopedias and the frustrating page turning has gone.  But I seem to recall that my page searching days were just as frustrating, as my eye would inevitably fall on a tempting title and be drawn into seductive byways having nothing to do with the original search.

But the speed with which you can get through the ‘little’ things; correct the lapses of memory; check an irritating, questionable reference – for these the Internet is wonderful.  When I think of the amount of time that I have spent during my life in long, exhausting searches that could easily have been completed in a few seconds had I been able to move forward into the future and use the Internet I could weep!

But you can often only get so far putting your trust in the Internet.   

I have found that using the Internet in traditional specific research, certainly in the arts, encourages you by gains in the early stages.  You get the sense that you are making real progress and then something, sometimes something that you consider to be a minor obstacle, becomes immovable and whatever you do, the Internet does not seem to have the answers and you have to return to more traditional methods to get where you want to go.

As someone who is now outside the traditional university system, I do miss access to a decent University library and the library services that it provides.  Sometimes a thoughtful librarian can save you days of work!  

In my case, a couple of years ago, I was looking for an article in an Arts magazine published in the 1970s.  The Open University, with which I was then studying, had electronic copies of the magazine but not including the 1970s.  The ‘Night Librarian’ of the OU – a service of international librarians accessed via the OU website – found copies of the magazine for me in Milan and somewhere in Germany, but not in Barcelona. 

I sulked.   

I knew that I could go to the British Library, but that was a flight away from where I was.   

I sulked.   

It was only when I enquired about a book in the art gallery shop on Montjuic and the shop assistant casually asked if I had tried the library on the first floor that things became to happen for me.   

The library, whose existence I had not guessed at, was a positive treasure trove.  My magazine was there, and was photocopied for me; other books that I had hoped to read but had given up finding were there; suddenly, everything seemed possible!

Perhaps the mistake is mine.  I am in a foreign country and I have not exhausted the availability of institutions that might be of help to me.  But, sometimes you just have to admit that you have failed.

One piece of work that I was doing concerned the artists Álvaro Guevara and David Hockney. 

I was comparing Hockney’s A Bigger Splash with swimming paintings by Guevara.  I had seen one of Guevara’s paintings in an art book I owned, and I was able to find a colour reproduction on line from an auction catalogue, but I did not know where the original was. 

After much searching on line, I did see what I thought was the painting in a lifestyle magazine and I was eventually able to contact the owner who very kindly allowed me access to the paintings that he owned and I was able to complete my work. You can see the finished essay here:

http://independent.academia.edu/StephenRees

But one painting by Guevara (with a tempting title that paralled Hockney’s) I was never able to find.  I knew that it existed and had been exhibited, but beyond that, nothing.  I wrote, I telephoned, I searched, but I could find out nothing about the present whereabouts of the painting.  A dead end.  

Or a nagging lack that might, one day, prompt me to revisit what I didn't find the last time I tried!  

Something for the future!

As is getting to terms with Spotify if I persist in being unable to get music from one machine to another!

Bits of paper!

The Open University





It’s thinner, but more colourful; my name printed rather than hand lettered; it has an impressed stamp like the other, but as a sign of the times, also has a holographic stamp too; it’s A4 portrait on paper rather than landscape and card – it’s my degree certificate.

            A repetition of my first degree (right down to the class) though via rather different subjects.  It is difficult not to look at the piece of A4 paper and not think about the money that such a degree now costs to students studying in many UK universities.  Even without taking living expenses and the cost of textbooks, you are looking at twenty-seven thousand pounds.  I wonder what 27K would have got me when I did my first BA in 1970s – certainly more than Room 816 in Neuadd Lewis Jones in Swansea University, and all my textbooks rebound in leather with my personal monogram embossed in 24k gold on the front!

            OU degrees do not cost as much, but the cost of the courses has increased exponentially since I took my first course over thirty years ago: what was a couple of hundred pounds or less is now a couple of thousand.  Such costs are a reflection of political insistence, especially on behalf of the Conservative party which was a vociferous opponent of the whole concept of the OU.  It has forced the OU to become more financially commercial with the result that its courses have become further and further out of reach to the very people they were designed and intended to serve.  It is still a wonderful institution and I am very proud to be a graduate.  At last.  Only taken thirty years!

I have been reading “Great Lengths” by Dr. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis, which is a pictorial survey of the historic indoor swimming pools of Britain.  This was an inspired Emma birthday present to me as it fits well with the work that I did on the comparison of Hockney and Guevara’s paintings of swimming pools which was the subject matter for my extended essay in the OU course on Modern Art.

            There is still some discussion about the exact location of the swimming pool in Guevara’s paintings and I am hoping that some of the information in the book will allow a more precise identification.  There is a bibliography as well, so there is the opportunity for further research.

            The history of indoor swimming pools in Britain is not such an arcane area of knowledge as you might think.  The impetus to build such pools in the nineteenth century reflected the growing concern with public health and municipal pride.  Pools were divided into classes and the structure of entrances to the pools reflected the need for division of the classes so that they didn’t mix.  When you add concerns about lady swimmers and what costumes both sexes should use you have a complex history of social manners that delights!

            I have only just started reading the book seriously, but it looks like something to which I will return for future research.

            It was also poignant to see pictures of the Empire Pool in the centre of Cardiff opposite the bus station.  It is now demolished; an act of barbarism which I am not inclined to forgive.  I used the pool (only a trolley bus ride from my home in Cathays) when I was a kid and I used it until adulthood and only stopped when Cardiff built a series of new leisure centres which gave access to decent facilities in neighbourhoods outside the centre.

            I ended up using the David Lloyd Centre situated on what is laughingly called Rumney Common (you have to look very closely to find any vegetation finding a way through asphalt and concrete there now) and it had the advantage of being on my way to and from work.  I would sometimes debate, after a long and tiring day, whether I actually wanted my second swim, but I usually found that the car made the decision for me and while the debate was still going on in my head, the wheels of the car had followed the well worn metaphorical ruts and I was in the car park of the centre!

            It is much the same in Castelldefels.  I was a member (I still am, ah the stickiness of a standing order!) of a municipal pool on the other side of the town, but to get to it I had to go out of my way.  The nearest pool was only open air and, while that is more than acceptable in summer, it is a completely different form of masochism in winter!  When the local pool was reformed with a retractable roof I joined the centre and it is the one that I have used ever since.  My only desertions have been during the times the pool is closed for maintenance- and what happens then is a completely different story for another time.

Meanwhile, I am about to meet an ex-colleague from Cardiff who has come to visit Barcelona and we are going out to lunch to give her the opportunity to explain (as if an explanation were necessary) why I made the right decision to retire from public education!  The stories I am hearing about the administration of my last British school are heart-breaking, not only because of the misery of my colleagues but also because of the way that maladministration will make a difference to the way that the kids are taught.  It is at times like this that I remember that I am being paid money simply for being alive.  Even with a streaming cold that is something to warm the cockles of my heart!

And I’ll drink to that!

Pace increases

Day 5 of Bike Riding.

At last an uneventful day with the chain staying firmly on the cogs.  The wind, however, was another story.  And it was against me all the way there, even drawing water from my eyes.  There is nothing like discomfort to make you believe that you are really doing something major.  It allowed me to ignore the pathetically small distance that I actually travel each day to get to my swim.  Small enough to be manageable but long enough for me to feel that I have accomplished something when it is done.

            The aquacise or whatever they call it when a group of aging people stand in the pool and vaguely follow the gyrations of a raucous teacher shouting against pounding music.  A pair of earplugs and head under water modifies the noise level and anyway, I am usually thinking profound thoughts as I mindlessly make my way up and down.  Well, not necessarily profound but deep, deep as the pool.  And as this is a modern double shallow end pool and child friendly, you can tell exactly how probing those thoughts are!

            I am reminded of my time in university when I used to go for a swim in the pool next to Singleton Hospital every day.  The swim was a form of exercise and of relaxation too.  I thought, I am always thinking, but the level of thought was not quite so focussed, it became more wide-ranging and less serious, almost like a waking dream.  Sometimes I take a single part of a thought and worry it like a bone and let it go where it will.  The great thing about swimming is that if you don’t keep at least part of your mind on what you are doing, you drown.  So there is a dual control thing going on which is so different from normal living that it can little less than a form of escape.  Or at least that is what I tell myself.  Anyway, by the time all the half thoughts, the vague ideas, the necessary exercise and little distractions of other human bodies have played themselves to some sort of climax, it is time to end the swim.  And it can all start again tomorrow!

Support Toni’s Blog

Lunch now has become a duty.  We only eat to add another restaurant to the growing number contained in Toni’s Blog http://catalunyaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es/ this time going to a place that we haven’t been to for some time.

            The décor had been partially changed but the ambience of the place was just about the same, or rather it was a bit lopsided as if they hadn’t really made a final decision about how the almost revamped place should look.

            The food was fine with my main dish of wok fried chicken and vegetables being really rather good.  But look at the blog to see what we ate.

            I like the idea of each eating out experience being captured and blogified.  Over a year or so we should have a substantial number of entries and have a bewilderingly luscious selection of what Castelldefels can offer.

            I wonder if what Toni writes will develop more of a bite and be more destructive, or constructively critical as time goes on.  This is still very early days for the site and so there are all sorts of ways in which it can go.

The next book

Considering the actual ‘next’ book has not actually been produced yet, to be planning one for 2016 is either an example of exceptional forward planning, or a shining example of hope trumping reality.

            However, I have a working title, ‘Structured Sense’ and I have added the first poem to its pages and I am already thinking about ideas for the few sequences that I think I would like to include.  One of my favourite quotations concerns ‘vaulting ambition’ – though I have always considered that it only applied to murdering Scottish pretenders than to my good self.

            ‘Flesh Can Be Bright’ continues to progress and, as far as I am concerned, my poems for that book are done.  I am now waiting on the work of others – but I also have a plan B to cope with any and all failures of contributions.  Though I am quietly confident that everything will work out in the end.

            I am now editing and redrafting and I reckon that will take me well up to May and then final decisions will have to be taken about the final appearance of the book.  You would think that self-publishing makes things a damn sight easier – and that self-delusion is what I am working on.  And I like the ambiguity of that statement!

OU hysteria

Even when, or perhaps especially when, we are a separated group of studiers, hysteria has a way of uniting us in one howling band of paranoia.  This is partly because the next few weeks are ones of concentrated work production with two pieces of tutor work having to be sent in.

            We have just had an on-line tutorial.  I do not know what some of my fellow students use as microphones, but some of them do not seem to have the same quality of reproduction of a tin with a piece of stretched string.  One of them sounded as though he was in a cardboard box surrounded by cotton wool.  And people don’t read the instructions and the information that they are given and, I am sounding like a teacher.  So I will stop.

            At least my tutor seems not only sympathetic to my general choice of topic for my mini thesis, but also sympathetic to my bending the rules a little to further my ideas.  This is positive.  I will reserve my relief until I get back my academic pro-forma and see exactly what comments my tutor makes for the next stage.

            I am lucky in being able (in theory) to see both of my paintings in London.  One, the Hockney, I will have check that it will be on display when I am able to get to the Tate.  I bloody well hope it is as I have built my ideas around seeing it again as a central part of my thesis.  The other painting is in a private collection and the owner has, very kindly, invited me to view the paintings when I am in London.  This could all work out very well, and I still have in mind the development of the ideas to link up with the exhibition in Leeds.  That would be a major achievement.  But that is for the future.  The immediate future is the writing of an outline of what I think I might be able to do.