Take it easy!

I dutifully got up at my accustomed time of 6.30 am, responding to the intense irritation of the ‘music’ of my phone alarm, sat on the edge of the bed, then had a pee (in the bathroom!) and promptly returned to bed.  Sometimes, you have to do what you want rather than what you think that you should do.  It makes you a better person.  I think.

     And even if it doesn’t, I am not going to beat myself up about missing an early morning swim once in a while.  It does mean that I get the Guardian Quick Crossword done and dusted and have a leisurely cup of tea and am able to face the rest of the world with something approaching equanimity – even if lacking the smug self-satisfaction than early morning exercise gives you.

     The ostensible reason for my indolence was to give myself more time to study for the Catalan examination that is going to take place on the 13^th of this month.  Given the format of the exam, and the extensive explanation about the content that we have been given, there is a reasonable chance of actually passing it.  But and this is where the rejection of swimming comes in, only if the time gained is actually used in revision (or something nearer to learning in my case) and the hard slog on forcing foreign words to at least have a temporary residence in my memory.  As far as I can work out the major emphasis in this exam is on the ability of, we candidates to demonstrate that we have retained the accurate orthography of the more cunningly accented words in Catalan.  The area we have to consider is one which is limited, but the use of the correct accents will be a crucial factor in gaining marks.  This means that the old look-cover-write-check technique needs to come into play.  Repeatedly.

     As it happens, I am still much more drawn to working on the pages of notes that I have for my latest poem, than I am for the hard slog of learning.  I know that one should never reject opportunities for learning, especially after the ‘official’ period of education has passed!  But it is much harder to force new information into my brain than it ever used to be.

     And yet.  Take this morning.  I was checking through my emails and I noted that Academia.edu site had suggested an art history paper that I might have found interesting.  This paper turned out to be part of a substantial book which offered a more than readable overview of a section of art history.  The extract on Cezanne got me interested and I jumped my way through to Chicago skyscrapers and the honorary Welshman Frank Lloyd Wright and then onto Picasso and abstraction and at that point I realized that I was in the grip of the you-may-as-we—finish-it syndrome and so I stopped.  Ostensibly to check on the publishing details of the book which were somewhat vague on the site.  This got me into the Baltimore Museum of Art and I was starting to flick through the site when I realized (again) that I was being taken further and further from what I had started out doing when I opened the computer.

     The point of that last paragraph (in case you were wondering) was to illustrate not only the ease with which I get side-tracked, but also the fact that I was gleefully hoovering up small facts about the artists and movements that I was reading about.  I am conversant enough with mainstream western modern art history that passing comments about how Seurat got the colour theory wrong, or than curtain walls allowed skyscrapers to have more glass, or that Synthetic Cubism literally emphasised the presentation of painterly element on the canvas, almost like a dish – that fascinated me.  Ever the snapper up of unconsidered trifles (is that quotation accurate?) I felt the drug-like pull of the writing, and I thought that I could buy the book (the very substantial book) from which the writing was taken.  But, so far, I have been unable to find it.  But I will.

It is one of those books (should it actually exist) that always seem to me to need to exist before it can be written.  The range and depth of knowledge it contains is the sort of book that would have been consulted to write it – if you see what I mean!  I have a History of Art book by Meyers (I think, I’m too laze to get up and look for it to make sure) that thoroughly intimidated me when I was younger because of its ease of flow from earliest times to the present.  You can’t be interested or know about it all.  Surely!

     It takes a while before you realize just how much of scholarship is built on the work of others: synthesis is what keeps you sane!  Over the past few years I have found, when searching for some fairly obscure information that, certainly on line, you find that there is often a core of Ur-information that has been ruthlessly plagiarised (without attribution) as the basis for what appears to be original research.  And, very often, searching backwards, you often find that confident assertions of fact are based on the flimsiest of factual evidence: suggestion develops into statement.  How often have I wished that there were footnotes so that I could find out just what the quality of evidence for the assertion had!  But even with what appears to be scholarly footnotes, you often find that ‘evidence’ is ‘personal’ book based and not on primary sources.

     In the Open University students are encouraged not to cite Wikipedia as it is not a ‘clean’ source of information, because it is able to be edited without the care that academy demands.  We OU students still use it of course, it is far too useful to ignore, but we look for another source to cite to give credibility.  This has meant that for one of my references for a particularly useful comments by Sir Laurence Olivier, I cited (in the correct manner!) a dubious website that I found.  That reference went through my tutor on the nod, but a Wikipedia citation would have been frowned upon.

     But, lurching back to what I was taking about some time ago, the book seems to me to be something worth looking for.  I have a possible author’s name, I know that it is connected with the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I suspect that it is also linked to The Cone Collection in the same institution.  So, you can rest assured, that when I should be learning and revising my Catalan vocabulary, I will be searching for yet another art history book to add to my collection!

Wish me luck!

Sunshine after rain

No sooner had I started for my Catalan lesson on my trusty bike than the skies opened and lashing rain assaulted me.  I had to wait for the protection of a bridge before I could dismount and rootle around in my backpack for the bike rain trousers (there must be a single word for them, surely, that phrase is just so unwieldy – leggings perhaps) and go on my less damp in the nether regions way, conscious at the same time of the amount of static electricity I had to be generating from the swathes of waterproof nylon in which I was now encased.

     God alone know what impression I made as I eventually dripped my sodden, baggy way into the class – though one member of the group was delighted that she had finally seen me in a pair of long trousers, albeit of a strictly utilitarian persuasion!  I divested myself of various wet garments and eventually I was able to sit in remarkable dryness given the ferocity of the storm.

One of the reasons that I love this country is that, at the end of the class, I went out to ride home in blustery sunshine.  There is none of the spitefulness of the lingering rain syndrome so common in British weather.  In Catalonia it can be raining, misty, cloudy, cold, blowing a gale – but you can virtually guarantee some sunshine at some point in the day.  It is a rare occurrence indeed when the sun stays away for an entire twenty-four hours.  Delightfully rare!

The waterproofs (that’s the word!) were bought during my last visit to Wales and haven’t been used since I returned, so I will have to ensure that they are thoroughly dried before they are put away, because it might well me months before they are needed again and I do not want to withdraw a moldy garment from its packaging when occasion calls.  In the UK you can put them away in their damp state because they will be called into use far sooner than any mold could form!  Or at least, I like to think so, it makes me jocose when the weather here is not as equitable as I would wish it to be!

The fear of the upcoming examination in Catalan is developing.  One of the participants in the class asked for clarification of what exactly was going to be in the test (a much more comforting and less intimidating word) the week after next, no, at the end of next week I now realize.  We have done two pieces of writing (that have been corrected) that will be models for what we will have to complete in the test and we have been given pretty clear indications of what sort of vocab we will need to be conversant (exactly!) with.

In the description of my house that was one of the topics, I tried to explain that of the three stories that comprise the dwelling, the ground floor is taken up with the entry and the staircase, the living quarters start on the first floor with the living room/dining room and the kitchen.  The problems came in the way that I translated ‘living quarters’.  I went for a literal translation from English to Catalan “els quarts d’estar” which I suppose would be something like “quarters of being” – perhaps unsurprisingly this stumped the teacher who demanded to know what I meant.  My explanation ranged over three languages and was not easily resolved.  There is a Catalan phrase for “living room” which is “sala d’estar” – the ‘room of being’, so I think that my attempt is more than reasonable.  But it didn’t pass muster, and I was offered the complex alternative of “l’allotjament” or the much simpler “l’habitatge”.  The ore astute among you will have realized that my typing all of this is merely a device to try and fix the words in my mind so that they can be used to great effect in the examination.  Anything is worth a try, to get a foreign word to stay in my mind!

The other topic we had to complete was an email to a friend.  Given a free hand to write what we liked, I always tend to veer towards my own interests, so exhibitions in art galleries or operas in the Liceu tend to be my stock in trade for such pieces of writing.  I told my friend that I had been to an excellent exhibition in MNAC and I was then able to list the Catalan artists whose work was featured in this fabricated show.  Outside of Catalonia how many of the following artists would be known: Ramon Casas, Joaquim Mir, Joaquim Sunyer, Modest Urgell, Joan Brull, Ramon Alsina?  The Catalan artists with world recognition are probably Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró – and Picasso, of course.  Yes, I do know that he wasn’t Catalan, but Pablo himself said that he had the soul of a Catalan and so he is counted!

It is one of the delights of living near MNAC in Barcelona that I have been able to get to know a whole range of Catalan artists of whom I had never heard before I lived here.  All of the names above now mean something to me and I can link specific works of art to the names.  Of all of the artists that I have come to appreciate living in Catalonia and being able to see their paintings relatively easily, the artist whom I most admire is Ramon Casas – a draftsman and painter whose charcoal sketches of the good and the famous in Barcelona (his sketch of a young Picasso is constantly reproduced) are astonishing.  Yes, perhaps his art did not develop in a way that influenced world painting, but he remains a remarkable second or third order artist and one who deserves a wider audience for his work.

Not long after I first arrived in this country a local newspaper produced a whole series of books featuring Catalan artists, all of which I bought and which provided a firm foundation for me to begin to build my knowledge of a whole new school of art.

Always learning!

Sunday start

A lazy day today, I didn’t get up until 8.15 am!  I decided to give swimming a miss and will compensate by having an extended bike ride on the way to and from getting lunch in the local chicken place.

     I’ve completed the quick Guardian crossword, though it was a little more taxing than usual and I am sometimes stuck by the brevity of the clues that give a slanted version of the necessary word’s definition, so I often get the word before I realize its link to the clue!  Still, it’s done and that gives the start of the day a sort of achievement to add to the impetus of filling time with something useful.  Not that I have to search around for things to do as each day ends with my only having completed a part of my ‘to do’ list.  At the moment, for example, Catalan homework is handing over me and this writing is, yet again, displacement activity to compensate for my not doing it!

     There is a whip to get me in line with the work that I need to do for Catalan, as the examination for this section of the course will take place on the 13^th of this month.  We have been given fair warning, have been told what sort of vocabulary is going to be tested and have been given direct and clear indications of what sort of writing we will need to complete.  With such clear directions it is perverse and churlish not to get stuck in to the work and start the process of learning.  But I haven’t yet got round to starting this.  In my notebook that is supposed to be for my ideas for poems, I often find myself writing encouraging or admonitory notes to myself about work that needs to be done.  This writing too is another way of my communicating with myself to get geared up to start the hard work of learning.

     I find learning new words difficult; I discover a new, often useful word in Catalan, look at it, try and memorize it, write it down a few times – and then it’s gone.  The amount of effort needed to set the words in my memory seems disproportionate and I therefore tend to enter my learning zone with negativity washing around my mind.  I try and reason with myself: I live in Catalonia, I am surrounded by the language, learning it is merely a matter of common courtesy as well as increasing my understanding and so on and so on – but whatever psychological boosts I give myself, the simple inability to retain new vocab. Is a settled fact.  This in turn means that the examination will be another depressing indication of inability as I stagger my illiterate way towards the end of the scholastic year!

     In my own language, however, I continue to thrive.  The latest work on the ‘recalcitrant’ poem is producing good results.  Even though I may not have written a single line of poetry, the ideas and some phrases are steadily coalescing and the structure is beginning to emerge from all my pencilled scribbles.  I know for past experience that the present discrete idea elements scattered throughout the pages that I have already written will, eventually come together into a (hopefully) coherent poem.  Even if it doesn’t, the process is one that is enjoyable if demanding!

 

Today is Saint David’s Day and I have hunted around (as I do each year) to find the little artificial daffodil (purchased in aid of the Marie Curie Foundation) to wear for my National Day.  And, each time I wear it, it focuses my attention on my nationality.  In my next book, The eloquence of broken things, there is a section that brings together poems I have written that consider my nationality and what it mean to me.  For a numerically small nation, identity is a constant preoccupation and with the swamping proximity of England and the overwhelming use of English as the language of Wales the relationship between Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom is a critical element in the national sense of identity.  Each St David’s Day has become an opportunity for me to indulge (and I think that is the right word) in a particular form of introspection that rarely affects me on other days of the year – which is significant in itself!

     Only once has anyone commented on my wearing of a daffodil on St David’s Day and I assume that it will go generally unnoticed today as well.  Though there is a slightly different dimension because daffodils are yellow. 

     Let me explain.  I wear a metal pin of a yellow ribbon to show my support for the Catalans who are still in prison or restricted in their public lives because of the Spanish justice system in the aftermath of the referendum for Catalan independence.  Putting the question of independence aside for a moment, I consider the jailing of so many Catalan politicians to be reprehensible and perhaps an indication of the politicisation of the Spanish justice system. 

     The reaction of the Spanish to the Catalans has sometimes been little short of paranoid, with some instances of the banning of the colour yellow e.g. football supporters wearing yellow t-shirts or scarves having to give up pieces of yellow clothing before they were allowed into the games!  So a yellow daffodil could be seen as a statement of support for the prisoners and Catalan independence.

     In my case as I am wearing it next to the yellow ribbon, obviously for aesthetic rather than political reasons, the link is more obvious!

Life today

I have just been listening to the afternoon play on Radio 4, not only because it was a dramatization of part of Muriel Sparks’ life, but also because I caught on a trailer for it, that it was about disinformation during the Second World War in Britain. 

     With a bump I was taken back to a library book I took out when I was in school and the name Sefton Delmer came back to me.  It took a bit of Google searching, but the title of the book that I read (I actually recognized the cover!) was called Black Boomerang, written by Sefton Delmer the head of our black propaganda efforts during the war and published in 1962, so I was remembering a book I read over half a century ago.

     Although most of the details of the book are long lost to my retrieval system, the name of the author is something that has always stayed with me, together with thoughts about the morally ambiguous basis for black propaganda.  I have used this concept as something that linked usefully in to my work in school with media, advertising and indeed literature in the ways that all of them attempt to persuade and convince.

     The Radio 4 play was a fairly insubstantial piece of fluff, but it did raise a number of interesting ethical dilemmas and, although the ending of the play was flip and facile (even if it was true, which given the subject matter of the play etc etc) but has provoked me into writing.

     It has been famously reported that when Sir Strafford Cripps found out what Sefton Delmer was doing, he wrote to Anthony Eden the Foreign Secretary and said, “If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, why, I’d rather lose it.”  Perhaps, even at the time, this attitude was considered a trifle precious, after all we were fighting ‘total war’ that seemed to justify anything – and against a foe whose moral worth was demonstrably low.  But, and there is always a but, if you lose your own moral standards in fighting someone with low moral standards how are you better than they are?  The ends justify the means is Machiavellian, literally!

     And the times in which we are living make you wonder if the pioneering work of Sefton Delmer in the black arts of information manipulation are not now the normal way that all governments behave – but openly and with a complete lack of shame and a totally confusing acceptance of fabricated lies are truth and reality.

     The present governmental attitudes towards information about the Coronavirus (or ‘Caronavirus’ to the idiot in the White House) have much more to do with presentation than reality.  We expect totalitarian regimes to hush up, massage, lie, obfuscate, whitewash and bluster – but these techniques are all too familiar to the degraded governments of the part-time British Prime Minister and the full-time American golfer.

     Given the state of truthfulness in the political world today, perhaps I should re-read Black Boomerang to remind myself of the techniques that are being used on me today.  If you are interested, then all of Seton Delmer’s books are available on-line at psywar.org.

In spite of the fact that I sometimes use the weekend to justify laziness in getting up, today I got up for my early morning swim and was rewarded with a lane of my own (eventually) and a well-deserved cup of tea outside (in my coat, obviously) afterwards.

My post-swim cup of tea and notebook use produced further ideas for the recalcitrant poem, or maybe another completely different one.  I will try and mash the concepts together and find out what happens, though I think that I have a title.

     For the first time in my life I actually thought about the phrase, “Now then!”  And wondered why its contradictory nature had never struck me before.  It can be used in different circumstances and could mean anything from “Steady the Buffs!” to “That’s enough of that!” to “Just wait until you hear what I have got to tell you!” to “Don’t be nasty” and so on.

     I liked it, when I thought about it, for the way in which it links the present to the past in an easy colloquial phrase.  And ambiguity is always stimulating! If you are interested in further discussion then I suggest you look at the site https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24882/the-origin-of-the-phrase-now-then

I will, however use the phrase in my own way!

My zest for lino cutting did not win out against tiredness and bed last night, but I might be open to doing a bit of artistic slashing this evening. 

     The major problem for me with this new/old hobby is that I never can find enough free surfaces to allow the prints to dry before I make other cuts and prints. 

     I think that I will have to ‘prepare’ backgrounds so that I have a ready supply of treated pages to use at leisure. 

     Well, it’s worth a try and, as I always say about my attempts at things artistic, “What have I got to lose but my self-respect”!

Fight the good fight!

In my own language, I am an articulate, responsive and witty speaker.  In Spanish I am enthusiastic early Tarzan and in Catalan epsilon semi-moron.  As someone who loves language and the speaking thereof, my inability in any other tongue than mine own is baffling.

     Of course, you could point to the fact that, apart from the lessons, I do virtually no other work.  My expectation that language will work by osmosis, though patently not working in my case, is still firmly a methodology to which I adhere with monomaniac fixation.  Well, it beats methodical working and revision!

     Even though I am something of a past master in blagging my way through Spanish, I have even less basic linguistic information with which to work in Catalan.  And we are now getting close to a crunch time as, in the middle of next month (which, horror of horrors, starts tomorrow) I have an examination.

     It makes no difference how many times our present teacher assures us in his class than the examination, nay, not examination, more of a test, really, is simple beyond belief – I still know that with my level of ability ANY bloody casual (let alone searching) examination of my knowledge will lead to hot-faced humiliation.

     At this point, the more incisive reader might wonder about my typing about these concerns, rather than actually doing something about them.  If so, you haven’t read the previous short paragraphs where I freely admit my lack of effort in acquiring or attempting to acquire another language.

     The one positive point about this next ‘test’ seems to be that it is vocabulary heavy with an unnatural concentration on the direction and existence of accents on individual words and, in any choice between the two, ‘vocab’ is an easier option than ‘grammar’.  So, you never know, if I play to my strengths of being able to cram discrete points of information for the duration of an exam I might even be able to scrape through.

     Though, I do admit that scraping-through in the language of the country in which I actually live is not a very inspiring (or indeed worthwhile) goal, but it is what I am working towards. 

     And you never know, now that the date of the examination has been set, it might (just might) encourage me to make a start on the tedium of vocab learning this very weekend.  There is, after all, nothing quite so self-satisfying in doing a minimal amount of work sufficient to engender the feeling of complacency in knuckling-down to something worthwhile.  Obviously.

It’s all about the far end lane.  Of the swimming pool I mean.  Of those hardy folk (or nutters depending on your point of view) who turn up at 7.00 am when the pool opens, the one thing motivating their early appearance is the claiming of an empty lane for your lonely furrow.

     There are five lanes in our pool, and they fill up quickly.  Lane one is usually taken by a sedate looking retired lady who makes stately progress up and down the pool.  Lane three or sometimes four is taken up by two ‘youngsters’ whom I call the twins who are dedicated and athletic and look as though they are training for a triathlon.  Lane four is taken up by a recent arrival to the family of a snorkeler who rushes into the pool to try and get the Crown Jewel of lanes: lane five.

     Lane five is the lane to get.  Why?  Because it is slightly obstructed by the metal access ladders.  The way the ladders slightly jut out into the pool space means that two swimmers in a lane is somewhat awkward.  Therefore people go to double-up in the other lanes before trying the end lanes.  Lane one is for the slower swimmers and the periodic exercisers; they rarely go to lane five.  So, if you bag lane five early enough you are almost guaranteed to have it to yourself for the whole duration of your swim.

     The problem with this is, no matter how early I get to the pool, even if it is before the pool has officially opened, one man, the same man, always seems to get there before me.  So I am reduced to going to one of the other three lanes (remember lane one is given over to slower others) and hoping that it remains uncluttered with extraneous swimmers for my metric mile.

     If you are an early morning swimmer then the intensity of possession in the highly charged first hour of opening is something that will not need to be explained to you; if you have not experienced the rush of claiming a lane and swimming in a savagely elegant style to keep it to yourself, then I would suggest you think about the last time you went on a train or a bus and looked for a double seat for yourself and the looks and hopes that kept people away from you as a guide to how we feel.

     This morning, for example, I was, yet again beaten to the fifth lane by my friend, but I managed to claim the fourth lane and keep it to myself until almost the end of my swim when I had to share it with another swimmer for a few lengths until my friend left the fifth lane and indicated to the other person in my lane that he could take over the vacated fifth lane.  Now that is courtesy and civility of a high order!

 

I am working on a poem at the moment which grew out of notes that I made in my pocket notebook: two days’ work; five unsatisfactory lines, no, four and a bit lines now I look at it.  I mapped out the ideas behind what I want to write in annotations of the transcription of my notes, but the working-up is taking longer than I expected

Some poems write themselves, in so far as the structure is concerned, the skeleton is roughly assembled and then the hard slog of fleshing-out takes up the real time.  In the present instance, I only have fragments of bone, meaning that my construction of meaning in my writing is more palaeontology than poetry, but it is getting there, or more accurately it will get somewhere sometime.  And there is no title yet, either.  Working on it, working on it.

The daily crash-bang-wallop of reformation in the house next door continues unabated and is now producing a steady stream of rubble which is filling bags which are taking up parking spaces on the road.  One of the (industrial sized) rubbish bags has been in situ for over two weeks.  This is not satisfactory and ‘steps will be taken’.  I have already asked about them and the workmen have shifted the blame on to the company that should have picked them up.  As I recall, there are usually by-laws about leaving household rubble on the street and on Monday I will make a trip to the city hall after my Catalan class and find out the legal situation.  I will also take photographs (they like photos) to illustrate their wicked deeds.  Our city hall is generally helpful, and I look forward to being armed with the Regulations of the Righteous to smite the rubble makers hip and thigh – if necessary with the jaw-bone of an ass.  And I wonder how many people nowadays will pick up that reference!

So, lots to do this weekend: planning, scheming, writing and lino-cutting – never a dull moment.