Back again!

 

Old habits die hard.  Or at least they have a way of rising zombie-like from time lost in laziness or indifference.

This writing is a case in point.  I am using, not my newish laptop bought after extensive trawling through reviews and at least one expensive mistake, but my old trusted MacBook Air.  Although I have abjured the buying of new Apple machines after the shameless pricing of the latest iteration of the Apple Watch, I am ever drawn to my MacBook Air.  It is the only piece of computer technology which, even after the decade (or ‘century’ in computer age years) of use that it has given, it still looks the business and its svelte metallic appearance still makes it a little object of desire. 

I understand (horror of horrors!) that the Apple logo does not light up on the latest versions of the machine – that surely is a travesty!  I speak as someone who bought an entire music system (there are three words that you don’t often see together nowadays) because it met two of my basic requirements: it had to have lots of flashing lights and the cassette eject system had to open in slow motion.  The user may not see the illuminated logo, but other people do and they either feel a fellowship with the user that they can see, or they know themselves cast into the other darkness of lost souls with dead logos.  It may not add to the operating system but the light from the logo paradoxically puts others in the shadow.

Little things are important.  And they are not ‘little’ either.  The last time that an Apple Dealer saw my MacBook Air when I was trying to update the system, he described it as ‘Vintage’, as all machines over five years old are described!  That lustrum is the age of a Secondary School generation as it progresses from Year 7 to Year 11, and I suppose that kids in Year 11 looking back to their younger selves in Year 7 would wholeheartedly agree that anything that they liked and admired when fresh-faced first formers (forgive my own regression to out-dated nomenclature there) playing ancient games on their outmoded mobile phones in those far-off times!

But the look and the feel of the MacBook Air from 2010 still looks good, still makes other machines look clunky and somehow stodgy.  So, in spite of the fact that my (expensive, compact and powerful) Dell is within a hand’s reach, I am typing on the Mac.

And typing a blog entry.  I have been very remiss over keeping up my blog and it has become very much an Occasional Feast for me instead of the Daily Duty that it was at one time.  My self-protestations that I will produce a piece of writing every day, have been empty, and each day without writing makes it easier to add a further day to the dilatory approach.  But today, today I feel inspired to put finger to key and get back into the habit.

Why, you might ask.  The sad reason is that I have left my mobile phone upstairs and I am too lazy to go up and get it.  My morning schedule includes going the quick crossword in the Guardian and I usually complete that on my phone.  I can do the crossword on my iPad, but I have allowed the battery to run down and I have had to put it on charge.  I could, of course, use the very computer that I am typing on now to do the crossword, but doing the crossword on the computer smacks of slight perversity – so, it was either sitting down sipping tea and trying to look demure; going up stairs to get the phone, or setting-to and writing.

Today I had a lie-in and didn’t go for my usual early morning swim, so the opportunity to write in my notebook after my swim had been taken away.  Yes, I know that I can write in my notebook at any time, but I do it after my swim, so I hope that you begin to see that ‘circumstances’ have conspired to get me writing another entry for my long ignored blog, because ‘historically’ most of the entries for my blog have been written on the machine that I am using now, my Mac.

So, from the dark days of wordlessness, I lurch towards the light of articulacy and prose.

As someone who find the style of ‘Tristram Shandy’ eminently natural in its predilection for digression, I do not find it at all surprising that I have taken the best part of a couple of typed pages to say, “I’m writing a blog entry.”  And I now feel that I can get on with what might be appreciated as actual subject matter.

Since Christmas, indeed since a little before Christmas, we have been beset by noise.  Now, Catalonia is not a quiet place (although, paradoxically it is only the lingering sounds of the tail end of Toni’s cough that echo through the house at the moment) but we have had the cacophonous horror of the house next door being completely renovated.  As far as we can appreciate, this involves hitting all wall, floor and ceiling surfaces an infinite number of times with hammers.  As we live in a group of five conjoined houses, structural sound in one is seamlessly transferred to the others – and even more so if you live next door.  As far as I can tell, the workmen must have hit every square inch of the surface and each of those blows we feel.

One Sunday (sic) the noise was so intense that I couldn’t hear the radio in our living room.  I complained, but if the work needs to be done, what can I reasonably expect?  This is what you get when the skeleton of our houses is concrete; hit one part of the frame and it is shared with all!

This evening, Opera, Mozart’s last, La Clemenza di Tito – and not one that I know particularly well, but I am open to being enthused by the production, and of course the music!

When I go to the opera I take the opportunity in the interval to go to the Café de l’Opera in the Ramblas and scribble a few notes about the production with a view to writing a review in the blog.  I have again been rather remiss here too and my notes have remained notes.  Today, however, I will assume that tomorrow I write and post the review!

Talking of writing.   The production of my latest book, The eloquence of broken things[1], has been beset by problems.  The pdf of the book was used for the print but, for reasons that have not been discovered, a double series of printing errors made their way to the finished books.  The printer has not been able to explain how a good pdf copy produced faulty final product.  A reprint was necessary and I am more than pleased with the results.  But.  In reading through and admiring my and the printer’s handiwork, I noticed a typo in one of the first poems!  This could not be put down to the faulty printing; this was a proof reading error.  By the time I noticed it, it was too late to change anything.

I decided to make the best of a bad job and therefore wrote an insert ‘celebrating’ and explaining the error in a poetic mea culpa, tucked inside the front cover – each copy individually initialled to make it more official!

The poem is included here as part of the lead up to the publication of the collection.

 

Erratum

p.14,  l.2,  w.6
for hr read her

Within a Turkish rug’s

expensive symmetry

is woven an intentional false note –

because perfection’s the preserve of god,

and not of stumbling, imperfect Man.

But, isn’t there an arrogance

in saying, “Yes, of course there’s that –

but all the rest . . . !”  As if

parading of a self-made fault

limits additional faux pas?

It’s Baldrick’s bullet[2]. 

Logic?  False!

Yet it’s a way of life we all adopt

because we live inelegant reality,

not textbook-sharp, black-outlined clarity.

Mistakes and errors?  That’s who we are!

Come with the territory.

Flaws are the marbling of life.

We have to say.

Because it’s inescapable.

I’d read and read again

the poem that contains the fault,

and yet not seen the missing ‘e’

until the final print was done

and it was then too late to change.

The sticking-plaster-sized

erratum slip is grudgingly applied

accepting and bewailing

my falling short.

But, what are vowels in the scheme of things?

Thngs tht cn b thghtlssly gnrd –

and still the consonantal frame

allows a certain fluency. 

If there had only been a gap

the reader could have,

would have, filled it in

without a thought.

But these are cavils

trying hard to justify

imperfect sight.

I should regard the ‘humbling by slip’         

as something more akin to public sacrifice:

(expiation, celebration,

for inexact humanity)

than hoping that,

in spite of all the odds,

the misprint, all alone,

is by itslf.

---

[1] Rees, SM. (2020) The eloquence of broken things, Barcelona, Praetorius Books.

[2] Private S. Baldrick, Captain Blackadder’s idiot batman is caught inscribing his name on a bullet when in the trenches in 1917, his explanation is, “I thought if I owned the bullet with my name on it, I’d never get hit by it.”  Blackadder Goes Forth Series 4, Episode 1.  First broadcast 28^th September 1989, 9.30 pm on BBC1, written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton.

Before the bell rings.

Unease by proxy. 

That’s what I call this weekend.  The holidays are almost over.  Today is Kings when Catalan kids will expect their second (or third) tranche of presents, sweeping together the loot from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the sweets from the procession of the Kings and parental presents for the day itself.  And Monday, reality hits.

As a SRP, (BBLE) that is, Smug Retired Person, Baby Boomer Leading Edge, I regard the end of the holidays and the reopening of the schools as the start of the time when we can reclaim streets, shops, supermarkets and open spaces as the noisy neophyte life forms are herded back into the rightful (if all too brief) seclusion of secure institutions.

As a retired teacher, however I cannot fail to feel that familiar frisson of dread that comes with the looming opening of a new, long, school term.  In Catalonia the new school terms also comes with the deadly threat of Staff Meetings.  However awful you think your experience of meetings might have been, you have not truly suffered until you have undergone the trail by frustration of a Spanish staff meeting in a school. 

I have been to thousands of meetings during my working life and indeed before and after, and the range, complexity and variety of those meetings and the different sorts of people who managed them and participated has been exhilaratingly different.  I was just thinking about the range of ‘meetings’ that I have experienced and the proportion of time that must have been spent on them.  At every stage of my life committees and meetings have been a constant.  In school: clubs, societies, sports, library, Prefects, magazine, orchestra, brass band, charity, hobbies - all have demanded some sort of committee work.  In university: clubs and societies again, but this time with a more formal structure of committee work; student politics; senate sub committees; subject work; trade union activity.  Work: departmental meetings, faculty meetings, union meetings at school, local, regional and national level, educational meetings of all sorts, Heads of Department Meetings, Staff meetings and on and on and on.

And throughout my long and generally soul destroying experience of committee and meeting I have never, ever experienced meetings of such vicious vacuity as those that I have experienced in Spain.  Ever.

For me, the Patron Saint of Meetings is Girolamo Savonarola, (1542-1498) the Italian Dominican friar and Renaissance Florence troublemaker.  He was one of those historical characters where there was much to admire (his hatred of clerical corruption, his rejection of tyrannical government and the exploitation of the poor and his championing of Republicanism) while, equally there was much to be disturbed about (his ‘prophecies’, his iconoclasm, his extreme puritanism and intolerance).  However the element in his life that both appeals and appals is the concept of The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

This bonfire was literal and the flames were fed by the population, responding to Savonarola’s urging, throwing luxuries into the conflagration to show their rejection of the ‘vanities’ of the world.

I am no great supporter of iconoclasm, but the idea of a Bonfire of the Vanities is a powerful one.  Especially when you are sitting listening to people waffling on about nothing in particular in a meeting that is taking up hours of your life.

I am reminded of a Robert Heinlein story in which the ultimate authority in the known universe was a powerful female figure.  She was respected throughout the galaxy etc. and delegations came to her for advice that would be followed strictly.  I remember one example of her advice being that members of the delegation that came to see her be executed as the solution to their problems!

How many times in my life have I imagined a Bonfire of the Loquacious in various meetings that I have attended where selective burnings would have concentrated the minds and shortened the meetings (and all future meetings) considerably.  As well as giving real satisfaction at seeing the guilty burn.

As I’ve mentioned before, some colleagues were only able to survive the more infuriating meetings by watching me as the supressed fury that I radiated in the more boring sessions could (my colleagues hoped) suddenly burst forth in a glorious display of justified ire that would make attendance justified.

I never did ‘break’, but I came close on a number of occasions. 

The truly and unbearably awful meetings in Spain were only made tolerable by a stratagem that I devised for survival.  I took my MacBook Air into the meetings with me and wrote personal, unexpurgated and real minutes in which my true feelings found full expression through my touch-typing.  There is nothing more satisfying while looking and listening to some idiot waffle on while your eloquent fingers say exactly what you are thinking as you stare at the guilty!

Each piece of idiocy was loving described by my tapping fingers and each fragment of fatuousness was highlighted by venom infused description.  This literary scorched earth assassination made the meeting just about bearable, but there were dangers in such an approach. 

In one meeting, a member of the English Department was sitting next to me and she began reading what I was typing and laughing.  Each time something stupid was said she looked over at the screen to read my assessment: in this way we both managed to survive the meeting relatively unscathed.

The real moment of tension occurred at the end of the meeting when the person who was chairing (I use the term because I can think of no other, but what she did bore no relation to what I would understand even a marginally competent chair might do) the meeting said that she had seen me making notes and would it be possible for her to have a copy!  I explained, with a straight face, that the notes were personal and not for general consumption and were in English that she didn’t speak.  While I was convincing and composed, my colleague was convulsed by what might have happened if she had read (and understood) what I had written!

God knows, teaching is a demanding enough profession in the day-to-day interaction of teacher and pupil, without making the whole thing so much worse by having cruelly pointless meetings.

And we had one meeting on a Saturday morning!  Though that criminal occasion was years ago, I feel I cannot write about it, as the wounds are still too fresh to cope with!  Saturday morning!  I can neither believe that it actually happened, or that I actually attended!  The Horror!  The Horror!

So, I feel for my colleagues.  Today is Saturday and the real stomach churning will not get into gear (does that mixed metaphor work, I wonder?) until Sunday evening and the realization, as the bedclothes are pulled up to the chin, that the morrow brings work!  In a school.

The nearest I will get to a school on Monday is the pool where I take my daily swim.  Two schools are next to the centre and I have to admit that there is something deeply satisfying as I sip my tea, to hear young voices in the distance and know that I will not be teaching them and I will be paid for not doing so!


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Do not die Seneca!

Every music goer has his or her own story of ‘The Supressed Cough’ or perhaps a description of when the supressed cough came out, and the consequent feeling that the entire audience was glaring in your direction wanting to rip you to pieces for ruining their favourite passage in the piece.

My moment came towards the end of the first half of The Coronation of Poppea in the Liceu last night during the death of Seneca.  This is one of my favourite parts in the opera and I would have preferred to have enjoyed it in tranquillity, rather than while wondering which of us was going to die first, Seneca with his vein slitting or me trying to keep in a cough that was bursting its way to the surface like magma from a volcanic explosion.

Things were not helped by the fact that the orchestra was in keeping with the ‘early’ nature of the music with sparse and delicate orchestration and so there was rarely sound sufficient to mask any “audience participation”.  I found that I could not breathe properly and had to take tiny bird-like sips of air so that I didn’t activate the full cough that any reasonable breath would have guaranteed. 

Somehow or other I managed to keep the cough under control, though to the people sitting behind me there must have been some strange writhing to observe before black-out and merciful release.

I will spare you the phlegmy details of that luxuriant cough, but the relief did not make up for the previous minutes where the sonic restrictions imposed on an audience member trying to be considerate had appreciably limited my life expectancy.  Not coughing I felt, was my Sydney Carton moment, “It is a far, far better thing I do etc.”  Admittedly I was not taken to the guillotine, but I did die a little death during the struggle for silence!

Apart from that, what was the performance like?

Well, this production of The Coronation of Poppea (1642) by Claudio Monteverdi was a concert version so there is no dramatic production, scenery and costumes to speak of, though the singers made the most of their score-bound, music stand limited opportunities – but the major action was through the music and the voices, as it should be.

One of those who defied the limitations of a concert performance and who had a great stage presence was Filippo Mineccia, a counter-tenor singing Ottone.  He had a beautifully modulated voice and, while it lacked power, it was expressive and touching.

The key roles of Nerone (David DQ Lee – counter-tenor) and Poppea (Sabrina Puértolas) were central to the drama.  Puértolas brought more raw sexuality and sensuality to her singing than I have heard in this role, while the oafish, self-satisfied vulgarity that Lee brought to the character of Nerone was a counterpoint to and at the same time a development of the characteristics inherent in the character of Poppea.  I would have to describe Lee’s voice as a Helden-counter-tenor, it had a throaty fullness that could, and did fill the Liceu and gave a real masculinity to the role.  This was a voice that could easily be imperial and the contrast with the more delicate voice of Mineccia gave a dynamic to the drama of the interactions of the characters.

Maite Beaumont sang Ottavia and produced a version of the Lament that I have not heard bettered in any live performance that I have been to.  Her voice was point perfect and the pathos that she injected in her song of loss was astonishing.  She showed herself to be dramatically and vocally versatile in singing through a whole range of passions, and each one of them convincing.  For me, her voice was the stand out performance of the evening.

Luigi De Donato as Seneca was magisterial and his vocal range was strong in every register the music asked him to hit.  A rich and full voice that seemed to relish the challenges in the role.

There was some doubling in the roles so that, if you were not sure about the narrative, you could be confused as a character you had just heard being one person suddenly transmogrified into another, but the music led you surely and with voices of this quality who cares if you are kept guessing!

The role of Arnalta was taken by Krystian Adam, and he made the most of the opportunities that it offered especially in the lullaby, a real moment of pathos in the power struggles going on in the imperial court.

Drusilla was sung with intelligence and grace by Verrónica Cangemi, while Franciso Fernández Rueda sang his variety of roles with competence and musical precision as did Cyril Auvity.

The scoring of the piece allows the music director a fairly free hand in how it is presented.  I have heard productions of The Coronation of Poppea which have been accompanied by what sounded like the 101 strings of Mantovani in lusciously Romantic music and I’ve also heard ‘authentic’ productions where I have failed to recognize any of the instruments in the orchestra.  This version led by Jean-Christophe Spinosi was a little more conventional.  The orchestra (Ensemble Matheus) resources were limited, with recognizable strings, continuo, harpsichord, lute, harp and what looked like a dulcimer.

I have to admit that I was a little disconcerted by the sounds in the opening of the opera, by what I took to be roughness from the wind section, there was also a certain scrappiness from some of the strings – but as the piece progressed so I became more immersed in Spinosi’s approach.

You could say that Spinosi was less of a conductor and more of an actor in the piece as he sat, stood, clapped, stamped, smiled and encouraged.  He was not afraid to go for dissonance in the name of drama, but at the same time, he was more than prepared to manufacture musical moments of tremulous delicacy.

When, at the end of the production and for the curtain call, everyone, singers, director and the entire orchestra came to take a bow in a line together, it seemed like a fitting accolade for what was an ensemble piece realized by individual virtuosi!

This is being typed on my MacBook Air now that the battery has been replaced.  I was informed by the Apple Centre that I went to that they would have problems finding a battery because my machine was ‘vintage’!  Vintage!  I asked how this was possible and I was told that Apple describes as ‘Vintage’ any machine over five years old, and that specific parts would cease to be readily available.  If this is true then it is a truly disgraceful example of forced obsolescence.  However, in spite of the machinations of Apple, they did manage to get a replacement battery and installed it in double quick time for which I am grateful.

And what a joy this machine is to use, I am now remembering! 

It turns out that I do not want a two-in-one tablet and laptop; I do not want a larger screen; I do want a ‘proper’ keyboard layout; I do not need the extra memory that I thought I did.  In short, I should have stuck with what I already had, instead of which I spent a lot of money on a ‘better’ machine that I do not like using.  Ah well, hoist by my own gadgets.

I have to admit that coming back to a small, light and stylish machine like my MacBook Air is an absolute delight: yes, it is overpriced and it doesn’t have the specs that many cheaper machines boast, but it does have an illuminated symbol on the front cover and it still looks as slick as it did when I bought it.  All those Vintage years ago!