Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians!

Never ask a swimmer what he is thinking about as length after length is completed: he might tell you!

            Which is a lead up to my telling you what I was thinking about as I swam my way through my daily metric mile.  I would love to admit that poetic ideas swirl through my mind as my flailing arms create more substantial currents in the placid salty waters of my local pool; or that the themes from my Open University courses course through my mind – but that would be, generally, a lie.

            What actually went through my head was the phrase, “Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians!”  If I could work out why this, admittedly delightful, phrase went through my mind, I feel that I would gain a valuable insight into my basic motivations and understand my character with a clarity which is so sadly lacking in my day to day existence.  But I can’t.  It came out of nowhere and, once I had thought of it, like one of those irritatingly compulsive snatches of music that you dread hearing because you know that you will be hearing in your mind for the rest of the day, it battered its way back and fore in my brain for the rest of the swim.

            I know swimming is essentially boring, but it’s not so boring that the repetition of an out of context phrase is enough to keep you stable.  I had to think of context and I soon realized that my knowledge of this phrase comes from an opera.  Admittedly an opera that I have seen on television rather than in an opera house, but one that was deliberately provocative and created ‘problems’ in Cardiff, prompting a far-right, so-called Christian demonstration outside the Millennium Centre shocked at the language and themes in the piece which was based on a musical interpretation of ideas suggested by the Jerry Springer show.  The actual phrase was part of the lines sung by a participant in the show called Baby Jane who enters singing,

This is my Jerry Springer moment. 

I don’t want this moment to die. 

So dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians. 

I don’t want this moment to die

I had actually remembered the line as “Coat me in chocolate . . .” which is not as effective as the ‘real’ line, but that is not the point.  My mind did not stay on this, shall I call it ‘concept’, and instead as I continued my swim I began to think about other odd lines in operas.

            Probably my favourite odd line in opera is from Albert Herring by Benjamin Britten which is, “And a box of Swan Vestas!”  An opera which stays in my mind from the Welsh National Opera production in Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre, because when Albert’s flowered circlet (he had been crowned Virgin King of the May) was thrown into the audience, it was caught by my friend Robert!

            “Pigeons on the grass, alas!” was the title of one of James Thurber’s wonderfully funny occasional pieces written for the New Yorker.  As Satan said to an insufferably smug member of the angelic throng in an unpublished extract from Paradise Lost that Milton never used, “Not to know Thurber is to argue yourself unfunny, the lowest of your throng!”  It was with unparalleled delight that, having bought an interesting looking second-hand record in Kettering market, I discovered not only the music of Virgil Thomson, but also the ineffably pretentious libretto of the one-and-only Gertrude Stein and the fact that “Pigeons on the grass, alas!” was one of the more memorable lines from the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Thomson and Stein!

            When I finally got to see a production of this somewhat obscure opera in London with the ENO I was overwhelmed and turned to the staid lady sitting next to me and said breathlessly, “Wasn’t that wonderful!”  To which she replied, “No.”  Ah well, each to his or her own. 

And “pigeons on the grass, alas!” by the way, is one of the more comprehensible lines in this opera.  For odd quotations you are spoilt for choice in Four Saints in Three Acts, but if I had to choose just one, it might be, “Having happily had it with a spoon.”  And if that doesn’t make you want to find out more and listen to it, then you are made of sterner stuff than I.

I will end with a line that I did not hear in the whole opera, but heard in an extract, “Life without hats?  How extraordinary!”  That is a line where context really makes it.  I have forgotten the composer, but I know someone who will know, if I can be bothered to ask.  Or there is always Google, or ‘research’ as we used to call it!

            Now off to Terrassa for a Birthday Celebration for which, for once, all the presents are ready and wrapped!

Lazy lacuna

For a person who enjoys writing as much as I do, there is not really any convincing excuse for not having produced more entries in this blog than the inescapable accusation of laziness.

            Admittedly I have been completing the last assignment for the Open University course on Modern Art of the Twentieth Century – but that was handed in (or at least sent off via the internet) on the 26^th of May, and while that might have explained the lack of other written work leading up to this date, it does not really explain the lack of words after it.

            I propose to ignore everything and write as if there was an unbroken daily chain stretching back to when there really was an unbroken daily chain of blog entries.

Come September I will be plunging back in Art History and doing my last course for my degree (I think, you never really know with the Open University, as you need much more than a mere degree to work out the fiendish complexity of how a degree is actually worked out given the courses, modules, exemptions and the phases of the moon than have to be taken into consideration.  And don’t get me started on the impenetrable calculations which go into deciding the class of degree that you get!) in Renaissance Art.

            I am fondly hoping that this course will have less pretentious theory and more taking about the actual paintings.  It says something about the works of art that we will be considering that I have had to search out my old copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Saints so that I can work out why the various slaughtered fanatics with the shining heads are carrying miscellaneous hardware, botanic specimens, weapons, models, keys, books or body parts.  Decoding paintings is hard work at the best of times, even in the modern era when we have plentiful primary documentation to work with, it is even more taxing when we are dealing with paintings whose moral, religious, social and artistic purpose is more distant.            

          But it is stimulating to find out that even the smallest and seemingly most insignificant details might have a truly significant importance.  And this is not just like finding a bee in an Italian painting and being told that the name for the insect in Italian is a pun on the name of the family that commissioned the painting; or that the material used in a tomb is actually an elegant comment on the antiquity and power and wealth of the person who caused the tomb to be built well before his own death. 

            You will notice that there are no specifics in those examples because I am too hot and sticky and lazy to go downstairs and find the books that I would need to fill in the names.  I can, at least, remember that the material was porphyry – a word that I knew and I have used, though it is only recently that I actually looked it up and discovered its unlikely source.  I am sure that I will not be able to stop myself ‘sharing’ my discoveries as soon as the next course gets under way.

            Assuming, of course, that I have passed this one.  Although the work was given in at the end of May the results are not due to be posted until, possibly, the end of this week.

The ‘proper’ restaurant in MNAC, Barcelona’s main and most prestigious art museum on Montjuic came into its own again last week when I met Suzanne on Tuesday and had lunch and catch-up.  Both the conversation and also the food were excellent.

            I have always recommended the restaurant as having the most breath-taking non-view from the large windows.  The restaurant is in the front of the museum and, as the whole edifice is on a hill it commands a sweeping vista of the city up to the surrounding hills.  But, and this is the point, not of the most interesting parts of the city.  Admittedly the large fountain was, for the very first time in all my visits to the museum, working!  That made up for the lack of detail in the expansive panorama which you always assume will be more impressive than it actually is.

            If the restaurant had been on the side of the building then you would have been able to eat looking out towards the sea and would have had an excellent view of all the more famous monuments in the city.  But it isn’t.  Still worth going there and having a meal.  Never let me down, and the lamb shank I had this time was outstanding.

            I did also go and visit a possible candidate painting for the final essay that I have to do on the Renaissance Course.  You have to write about a work or works that you have actually seen, so one of the vast collection in the museum is a given.

            The one that I glanced at was actually commissioned by the city of Barcelona almost 500 years ago, or possibly more (again, I am not prepared to go downstairs to determine exactly when) and there seems to be an interesting divergence in the appreciation of the painting: some critics claim it as one of the first works to bring the Northern Renaissance and the techniques of oil painting and a particular approach to perspective to this area.  They also laud the particularisation of the characterisation of the five donors which appear in the painting and say that this is a dramatic moment in the history of portraiture.  One other critic that I noted while browsing through expensive books that I have no intention of buying dismissed the painting as a mediocre copy of a Van Eyck and complained robustly about its lack of originality.  At least there is a controversy, I am sure that I could make something of that!

            I may work on the painting through the summer and see what information I can get together without too much ‘research effort’ to see whether it is a viable candidate.  I am greatly encouraged by the fact that the contract for the painting figures in one of my set texts and is conveniently translated into English as well.  That is a very good start.

Toni is now back home after an eleven-day stay with his mother, looking after her as she recovered from her recent and successful operation.  To celebrate his return, any excuse, we went out for lunch to the restaurant of the hotel where most of Cardiff will be staying for the publishing event of the year in October.

Talking of which.  My bits are done and edited.  As the days follow each other I am starting to worry, a little, about whether my original plan is going to become a reality.  I still have faith, though each day when nothing happens lessens my optimism.

Still, the sun is shining and even at night there is a more than pleasing warmth.  Admittedly, sleep is impossible without the gentle wafting air of an electric fan, but that is a small price to pay for the sun.  Though not at night.  Obviously.

I am trying to get back to putting my poems on line and have added one, Fatal Flaw, which can be found at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es  Though, come to think of it, I am not sure now that the second word should start with a capital, no, I think that Fatal flaw is better.

Wednesday we are back up in Terrassa for a birthday.  Never a dull moment.

Commercial & Cultural

You are never safe in a capitalist society!

Just when you think that you have got the safely-living-in-a-consumer-society thing sorted, Pebble asks for money. 

To those benighted Luddites that have no response to the word Pebble with a capital letter, other than thinking of important stones on the sea shore, I must inform you that the company of Pebble was originally a Kick-starter company which an early developer the workable concept of a reasonably priced smart watch.  I bought one.  No surprise there I suppose, but I did resist until the watch worked with Mac products and it was waterproof enough to go swimming in.  Oh, yes and it was made in metal because I didn’t like the early plastic versions that they had.

            The watch was worth the money I paid.  Not because it is the best watch that I have ever owned or the most elegant – or indeed is it the watch that I am wearing at the moment.  And that final comment is one of the major drawbacks of the whole enterprise.

The battery life of the Pebble Metal (which I think is the name of the model that I have) is about five days.  The watch I am wearing at the moment is powered by the sun and by the actual action of wearing it.  The watch I am wearing gives time, date, etc. it has digital and analogue and checks itself every day with some sort of atomic clock which sends out a radio wave.  In other words, it’s magic.

But.  And it’s a big ‘but’ – my smart watch has a large and informative watch face and it also informs me when I am called on my phone.  I virtually never turn the sound of my phone on so, as far as Toni is concerned, for this aspect alone, the watch is worth what I paid for it.  In my particular set of circumstances, given the way I use my phone, a smart watch works.

And there the expense could have rested.  I have my watch.  Other non-Pebble companies have produced their versions and I have carefully checked them out and they usually fail on battery life or compatibility with Mac or, more usually than not, on being waterproof.  It seemed that I was safe.

And then Pebble started a new Kick-starter appeal with a new watch that does something or other and is waterproof.  And, out of a misplaced concept of commercial loyalty I have joined the countless thousands of people who have probably been Mac-trained and therefore have developed an instinctive gadget loyalty hardwired into their wallets – and bought a new watch.  Which hasn’t been made yet and for which I will have to wait months.

But it might be engraved on the back saying that I helped ‘Kick-start’ – so that’s all right then, isn’t it?  Oh and its plastic – and that means that I will have to buy the metal version when it is produced.  And.  And I don’t care.

Poems against arboreal outrage!

Priceless artefacts are being smashed by religious fanatics; corruption stalks the land; the situation in Ukraine worsens; nuclear proliferation threatens world peace and the Israeli Prime Minister is sinisterly terrifying – yet I get worked up about cut trees.

            The car park continues to be closed as the final remains of the twenty trees await their final destination.  Workmen are walking around, sometimes with bits of paper and looking at where the trees used to be with intense concentration.

            A lone workman is doing something with a pneumatic hammer and is possibly tracing out the course of a future drain.  Things have changed.

            And I sit inside the café (all the chairs outside have been taken away for some reason) forcing the hopelessly addicted smokers to stand around looking even more shifty than usual, while I sip and note, sip and note.

            I now have pages (admittedly small pages) of comments and notes about what I see, delightedly, as an outrage against the trees.

There is something determinedly small-minded about cutting down a single tree - cutting down twenty smacks of inhumanity.  Except of course, it’s not.  There are many more important crimes in the world, but this ‘crime’ is here and now and is a substantial part of my world.

Like one of the cultural and moral vultures that I denigrate, I am now using my feelings about the ‘slaughtered’ trees to provoke a poem.  I have written one (see yesterday’s post) and I fully intend to write at least one more.  In a reworking of a famous French phrase: ‘What I have I use!’  It can always be edited into oblivion, or at least a sort of oblivion, at a later date.

I am aware that anything that I post has a sort of illusory permanence.  Though my blog is a ‘hosted’ one which means that Google can stop or destroy it at any time they choose for any reason they choose.  Which is a sobering thought.  But I am not sure that I am prepared to pay a monthly fee to own my site. 

I need to take advice on this.  Not sure from whom though.  In the same way that I expect someone to come to the house, knock on the door and hand me a winning Lottery tickets that have been bought on my behalf, I also hope that advice about what to do in Blog terms will simply happen.  I should take note that, in spite of my patience in waiting, no one has actually offered me a ticket and therefore I need to be a little pro-active.  Writing about being pro-active is stage one.

You call that art?

Conceptual art does not usually bring out the best in people.  Especially when you try and defend it.

            The Open University course is creeping closer to the end of the twentieth century and trying to chart a way through all the excesses of Post Modernism – a difficult task when there is not really a settled definition of what the term means!

            Still, flicking through the final volume in our course material I can see that there is a fairly extensive concentration of Louise Bourgeois, an artist I like and admire.  I think that we will be concentrating on her more challenging pieces so that they can link with concepts of race, gender, identity and everything else that the OU finds important.

            As far as I can see, there is a lot of work in a limited amount of time.  I have therefore decided to be a little more anal in the way that I approach this assignment and study to the essay.  I think it is the only way.  Then my ‘release’ will be the work that I do on the mini-thesis that ends the course.

Getting my money’s worth

Walking in to the new British Library as a full ‘reader’ is something that I am looking forward to.

            According to a telephone call with the British Library, now in Kings Cross and not the Reading Room of the British Library, I will be able to renew my much lapsed Reader’s Card and pre-order books to be looked at when I am staying, coincidentally in Kings Cross, when I go to London for the Study Day. 

            In the British Library I always find that I am drawn to the fact that they have a copy of everything ever printed in Britain and a great deal more besides.  I therefore I have to resist the temptation to order things that have nothing to do with what I am supposed to be studying!

            My worst literary digression in the old Reading Room was ordering, on the most spurious of grounds, a first edition of ‘Noddy Goes to Toytown’.  I have rarely read a more sexist and racist book and I couldn’t remember it being quite so bad when I first read it.  Mind you there was a considerable number of years between my readings - and on my first reading I was the proud and passionate owner of a grandmother-made golliwog! 

Is one allowed to use such vocabulary these days, even in a memory!

Stay wet!

If the important research that I have done is correct then I should be within walking distance of a swimming pool when I am staying in the hotel in London.  I wonder if you have to wear flip-flops and a swimming hat in London pools?

            Perhaps I am thinking in the same way as British visitors to Spain think when they worry about forgetting the toothpaste, as if such things are not available here!

            It is second nature for me to think to myself that I could always buy what I do not have. 

When in doubt shop!