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!