Time to breathe again?

The fatalistic philosophy of David from The School on the Hill has proved its worth yet again.  Like a modern day Candide, his supremely irritating assertion that, in spite of all the factors hindering completion of any action in academic life, “It will get done!” has been shown to be true once more.  And, although the even more irritating and fiddly work of referencing is not complete,  a useable draft of my essay exists.  This writing has almost gone to the wire but, dare I say it, I have two days in hand and the thing (for thing it is) is largely complete.

            It will be a relief to get this essay out of the way, to allow concentration on the end of module assignment.  Quite what happens to Book 4 of our course which is now ahead of us with no essay or examination to force concentration, I do not know. But that is for the future and I am not looking forward with any discriminating clarity until the essay is winging its electronic way to my tutor and her fully justified condemnation!

Toni is working with what I can only describe as compressed smugness.  He is enjoying the thrill of horrified anticipation about the depth and width of the work that he will have to complete in the new courses that he has just started, but that is because he is no believer in the fear-fuelled production process that I espouse.  He looks back to his time in school as largely wasted and therefore the makeshift and lackadaisical approach that he had then is anathema to him now.  He works with oodles of time in hand and ensures that all his assignments are finished well within the limits allowed.  I do not think that he could exist in the digressive world that I inhabit!

            I am supposed to be writing an abstract of my ‘research’ so that its inclusion in some form or other might be considered for an exhibition on Guevara in Leeds University!  I am not sure that people outside the course A318 in the Open University have any real idea of what I am doing or what I am proposing to do and at what level – but I am enjoying the frisson of thinking that my work may extend out of the narrow tutor/student environment and gain further readers.  
          Yet again, as with my autumn book, all I have to do is write the thing so that there is some there to share!

Toni is using his blog (at: http://catalunyaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es/ ) as part of his course as he is able to try out the various technological techniques to which he has been introduced.  
          The number of restaurants that he has commented on has now reached double figures and I rather enjoy the fact that our eating out has now been given a sort of authority and vindication by the inclusion of each of our meals as raw material (though rather delicious and usually cooked!) for their critical inclusion in his blog - with photos!

            I think the best part of the blog is the illustration of the food, and for the photographs I have resurrected my old Canon G9 – probably the favourite of all my cameras.  This is a flexible and compact piece of kit, feels good in the hand and does not have the bulky ostentation of a bridge camera or full SLR.  I am inclined to take it with me to London for the photographing of the Guevaras when I finally get to see them in Chelsea.

            It will be interesting to see how Toni’s blog develops, especially when the Ruta de Tapa is in full swing as each offering will have an entry of its own and Toni has indicated that we could do one-a-day then the number of entries will be considerably boosted.  
          The only unfortunate thing is that these tapas are only produced for the limited period of the Ruta and therefore will be of only historical interest as people will not be able to sample them after the Ruta closes.  
          But I think that they will be interesting to look back on and, if Toni continues the blog for the next few years then he could show how restaurants respond to the Ruta by adding the new tapa to the old and linking this to the general meal entry.  
          Already we have revisited one restaurant and we have added photos of the ‘new’ meals so that the range of food available in at least one place has been demonstrated.

            Eventually this blog will be a fascinating pictorial record of the food that we have eaten over a period and also a way of keeping track of how restaurants keep up their standards.

            
          In my blog, the one that you are reading now, I am still mystified by the fact that one particular entry has had and continues to have a large and regular readership.  
          I have re-read this entry myself and I would like to think that it is because of the witty and insightful writing that it has such a continued popularity – but I don’t see it myself.  
          The ways of the blogosphere are weird and wonderful and I suppose that one just has to accept rather than analyse.

            My poetry blog (at: http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/ ) is altogether more rarefied and the readership is, shall we say, more select.  I would welcome ways in which to extend the readership, but I don’t know how.  I can hear Toni’s injunction to “Go on YouTube!” as the answer to all of life’s questions.            I don’t know why philosophy is still taught in universities because now all you have to do is “Go on YouTube”.  What is reality?  Why does pain exist?  Is there a God?  What?  All the answers to these and more questions are waiting to be experienced in a three minute barely articulate video made by some spotty teenager in Wisconsin.  It is such comfort to know that Knowing with a capital K is just a few clicks away!

Now for my swim, and then the fiddly bits of the essay – together, of course with my flamboyantly academic yet paradoxically popularist bibliography, all carefully double-spaced.  
          If nothing else, and sometimes my essays are exactly that, they look professional and polished.  Pity about the content – though there is sometimes an elegance of expression which almost makes up for the paucity of apposite perception!  Almost!

And let’s face it, sometimes that is enough.

Resolve!

Yesterday was not a good ‘essay’ day, but today, today is going to be different.  I have decided on the ¡anything is better than nothing’ approach to this particular exercise, and that usually works for me.  So, by the end of today I should have something, at least, to show for my worry and then that ‘something’ can be sent off before the deadline.  Job done.  In theory.  Now for the practice.

            However, before that I have to factor in the statutory prevarication which is now an integral part of my day: swimming, writing and note making – as well as a little light shopping.  We all have our burdens to bear!

The coldness of yesterday seems to be a little ameliorated by the welcome intrusion of sunshine, but the palm fronds in next door’s garden are waving about in a most alarming manner which indicates that there is too much wind about for my liking.  Although the car thermometer tells me that our daily temperature is as high at fifteen degrees Celsius, it reminds me of my one and only visit to Communist Sochi years ago.  The hotel that we were staying in had an electronic board in reception telling us the balmy temperature of the water in the sea.  We would look at the board before going to the beach and then enter the water chanting, ‘The water in the sea is X degrees!’ before having the air and coherent thought smashed out of us by the Arctic nature of the brine! 

This watery lie was on a par with a nasty question to our Intourist guide about why there was such a long queue outside a butcher’s shop in Leningrad - as it then was.  Her response to this pointed question about shortages in the socialist ‘paradise’ of Russia was to state, with a straight face, that the people were queuing for theatre tickets!  Yes, where else would you go for culture but your local slaughterhouse?

Our guide was a teacher, I discovered later in our trip, and was working in her holidays as her English was excellent.  We got on well and she became more open with me than with the bunch of pseudo-fascists that I was travelling with.  Her saddest comment to me in one of our conversations was, “I could live in your country; you could never live in mine!”  And that was because my wishy-washy liberalism (with a small ‘l’) would have been anathema to the Soviet authorities, whereas the narrow-minded, right wing prejudice displayed by many of the small shopkeepers that I was travelling with (long story, don’t ask) would have been perfectly acceptable to the Russian State!  That was Communism for you.  And just look at the character that Russia has as head of state now!  He may have been KGB, but he has the soul of a bigoted small shopkeeper!

Well, time for my mandatory swim (without which I cannot do) with added note making and exotic tea drinking.  The real trick will be, after the shopping, to come home and get down to the work that I should have done yesterday.

The flesh is weak and the spirit is hardly positive.  But we shall see.  Or at least we shall hope!

My poems can be viewed at: http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/

Get on with it!

Well, at least I have done half the essay which should really be complete by now.  And I certainly should not be writing about it, I should be writing it.  But, prevaricator to the last and displacement activity expert as I am, I can type (and feel slightly queasy at the same time) about it rather than do it.  And, even as I meander my way through the words that I should not really be typing, I can feel the comfort of self-expressive writing indulgence dull the panic of academic indolence!

            It may be a small thing, but the highlight of my day has been Toni’s cleaning up of the image I chose for the publisher’s logo for my book, ‘Flesh Can Be Bright.’  ‘Praetorious Books’ now exists and to prove it there is a stylish logo which figures on the front and back covers and on the title page.  It is my desire for my book to have a spine, and of course the new logo will figure on that as well.  It adds that professional touch – and consequently adds another layer of expectation for the contents of the book!

            John Lord has agreed to read through the book when it is still in its electronic form.  John has a keen eye and a fastidiousness when it comes to the English language which is worth its weight in gold when it comes to reading copy.  I am very, very grateful.

            I am happy about the number of poems that I have written to go into my book, but this time the publication is more of a combined effort with two people translating and three people producing artwork to go with it.  So, five people who are not me and on whose work I am relying.  It is good for the nerves to have to manage such an enterprise and I am convinced that it will, eventually, make me a better person.  And a poorer one!  But that is self-publishing for you!

            Step by step the book is progression, not only in terms of the content, but also in the look of the thing.  I am, it has to be said, absurdly pleased with the logo and it really does add a finishing touch.  Such little things occupy my mind to the pleasing exclusion of what I ought to be doing!

Lunch was in one of our favourite restaurants, La Rincon de Lola, which has an exceptional view of the sea and excellent food at a more than reasonable price.  As Toni has written about this already in his blog at http://catalunyaplacetoeat.blogspot.com.es/ we only took pictures of those dishes that we have not illustrated and, eventually, Toni will add them to the entry.  I think we both agree that this restaurant combines food, value and view in a way that no other does.

            We still have a few of our regular haunts for Toni to write about so it is worthwhile checking in from time to time to see what has been added.

It is not quite so easy to write entries for my poetry blog, but I am working hard to ensure that there is a healthy selection for my putative readers to enjoy!  I am also looking forward to May when the fun part of book production starts and I can start playing around with the layout.

            I have already made enquiries about the printing of the book, but what I asked about is not what the book is actually turning out to be, so I will need to get another quote and hope that the additions have not made the type of book that I have in mind impossible.

            That is for the future.  Now back to the essay!

There is always something better to do!

Now I can feel the panic slowly burn its way through my veins like some vintage 40-year-old Scottish island single malt.  Actually, the panic thing is right, but the malt thing is imagination.  For me Scotch is not a pleasant drink, though I think that I can tell the difference between Teacher’s and something decent.  But all of this is beside the point.  I have now left the writing of my Open University essay to the last few days and I am savouring, not the full bouquet of a cask matured liquor, but rather the familiar guilt flavoured concern that I should have started this weeks or at least days ago.  But I didn’t and, as I type, haven’t.  And I hope that this flirting with deadlines will improve the intensity of the writing.

            Fat chance of that, especially as my further development of my ability to improvise displacement activity at the most inappropriate moments, will mean that I will now go off for my swim and worry my way through thirty minutes of hard swimming and then through an equal time sipping my tea while making desultory notes in my ever-present notebook (without which, etc. etc.) which is rapidly filling, and will soon join the rapidly growing collection of multi-coloured volumes hidden under clipped papers which detail the stages through which each of my poems has gone.

            I did buy a slight more upmarket notebook which I fondly thought I would break out when I go to London, but it looks as though that one will be in use long before late April.  And in some ways I am please with that, because it means that I am using the notebook for what it was intended and not just a rather drab piece of pocket furniture.  I am looking at my present red notebook in front of me and it does look almost comically aged.  It certainly looks used and that is a good thing.

            What I write in the thing varies.  I have never recovered from hearing one real poet quote from her notebook and I was aghast at the polished quality of her first thoughts!  I have just opened my notebook at random and I read the great poetic musing, “I wonder how the taking for this place are doing!”  This refers to the refurbishment of the café/restaurant in my swimming pool and the difficulty I have of seeing how the large investment that has been put into the place is ever going to be recouped.  Hardly poetic.  Thought that thought in my notebook is followed by, “Dark frozen waves dissolve into light grey of drying cement defying an estimation of the flat.”  Which is a bit more poetic, but not quite so clear.  And not made much clearer by other comments like, “Vibration of the barber tape and questing lassitude” and “the wave curl embracing gravity”.  To be fair, I can remember writing these and they refer to building work.  Though I also recognize the comment, “Where are my poems?  I keep writing notes and nothing comes out the other end!”  If only the writing of notes was a mechanical part of the production.  But it’s not.  There is no strict correlation between the quality and quantity of notes and the delivery of something I could call poetic.  But I think that belief is the force of a word that I have written in capital letters in my notebook, “APPLICATION” might well be the key.  It is exactly that I need to apply to the situation in hand: have my swim, drink me tea and start writing!

My swim was quite satisfactory and the cup of tea even more so as I think that the hand of the person making it slipped and I had a lot more vegetation than usual and felt quite braced up at the end of my imbibing.

            Lunch was from Can Moncho and I actually bought some fideua to make up for the fact that we served it yesterday to the eager masses and didn’t manage to try any ourselves!  We were given half a chicken for our efforts so we have nothing to complain about!  We have yet to have a bad meal from this take-away and the chicken is the best in Castelldefels.

I have made a start on the essay by writing the bibliography.  Or at least some of it.  I have also set up the headers and page numbers for the finished essay.  I have set the two parts of the question out and I have annotated the two theoretical extracts that we have to use.  In other words, I’ve actually written bugger all.  But when I have it will seamlessly fit into place.  My aim is to get a draft of part one of the essay before I go to bed today.  Draft of part two by bedtime tomorrow.  Finished essay by bedtime on Tuesday.  Essay sent off by lunchtime on Wednesday.  An ambitious timetable which is almost designed to fail.  But at least it is something to fail against, so to speak!

            As you will have gathered, this typing is yet another example of the displacement activity for which I am famous.  But at least I have made something of a start.  And that has lessened the sense of panic to a ridiculous and totally unjustifiable extent.  But that’s how I roll!

What is a more real fear is that I will do other ‘work’ on my poems to add to the collection which is to be found at http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/

rather than stick to writing the essay which is the present pressing demand on my time.

            There, that was a more subtle introduction of the clickable link to the drafts of poems that will eventually make up some part of my next book, ‘Flesh Can Be Bright’ – publication date: Autumn, 2015.  (Pre-orders taken.)

            Almost professional!