Barcelona, winter 2020/2021

 

Barcelona, winter 2020/2021

 

And light rain

developing out of mist—

meet the cold snap as

a friend of old,

lingering present

to walk with.

 

Still mostly sunny days,

wintering sheer from harbor to hills—

large portions of hope

range forth,

frosty breath

through new shutters.

A December haiku

 

Early December, Barcelona

 

Misty rain,

an early winter cold snap—

yellow elm leaves drift streetward.

winter holidays, Barcelona 2020-2021

 

winter holidays, Barcelona 2020-2021

 

myriad tiny bulbs

           electric picturing

 rangy skies’ assortments

           cling through distance

to this fence          these stalks

          grains

          color returns

 a tree

 a star

 these lights

Color studies, figs

 Plein air watercolor studies. Colors somewhat intense.....

Euryops pectinatus

 Walking in the Parc del Guinardó in Barcelona on Sunday morning. Great to see so many people out and enjoying the sunshine and warm weather. Everyone wearing protective masks of course. But how important it is to be able to meet up and walk around together!

Below is a picure of the flower referenced above. Unable to resist using only the Latin name...... In this age of easy dictionary & encyclopedia searches. Have an enjoyable week!

Water

Water

Or looking for visuals to accompany poetry readings. This one didn't come out very well but it's the shortest one I have and at the moment the only one I can fit here. Hopefully half a minute of haptic pleasure......

States of emergency

 

States of emergency

 In Spain as well the pandemic is hitting hard. This weekend marks the beginning of emergency measures whereby cafés and restaurants are allowed to open only for takeaway service, cinemas that open require mask use and spacing measures, and shops limit numbers of shoppers. The general rule is to remain at home unless you truly need to go out, although parks and wide avenues are open for exercise.

Today is the final day of Barcelona Poesia. My original intention was to announce this here as it began, but in the end I left that at likes and shares of the information on Twitter and Facebook. The Barcelona City Hall (Ajuntament) website informs only in Catalan and Spanish (top bar). Late as it is, smacking my own wrist for not acting sooner, I’ll leave the link below.

The current perceived emergency has brought a lot of thought about space/place and human roles. Informed about the safety of staying inside I find articles on this dyadic relationship merging with news articles (often unsolicited so to speak) on space/place travel. So one swivels around the /. In any case here is the Barcelona Poesia link:

https://www.barcelona.cat/barcelonapoesia/

Vote

 

The wires are alive with talk of unfair elections, not only in the United States this coming November but yes, pretty loudly about the United States this coming November. One of the problems is the fact that election rigging is surprise surprise not a recent practice.

 Gore Vidal spoke of it not only in his novels but also in his book Imperial America (New York, Nation Books, 2004). He brings in a comic note with the anecdote about Eleanor Roosevelt’s shock at seeing people buying votes. Her eventually presidential husband Franklin tells her not to worry, “the Republicans are buying them, too.”

Not so funny of course is the actual practice of election rigging and its current electronic extensions. Already on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, Gore was recommending the use of paper ballots as opposed to machine counts (p. 37). This however may not prove as easy as it sounds. As a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly notes, “Ballots for the fall presidential contest cannot be printed until every party certifies its candidates.” And that is only one hurdle in the mess the magazine predicts (link to article below). By all means, vote. We must vote.

 As to the history of vote rigging, a short summary may be found at

https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/a-brief-history-of-election-rigging-in-the-united-states/

  The Atlantic Monthly article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/november-election-going-be-mess/614296/

In progress....

 A small acrylic "sketch" done some ten years ago and shown in a small format exhibit at the Julia Karp Gallery in Barcelona. Looking for new ideas, going over old ideas......... Acrylic on canvas, about 10x10 cm. Untitled.

September

 And on the eve of this year's Diada, Catalonia's National Day.

Tomorrow we'll drive to Torrefarrera to celebrate with the whole family.

Home cooked lunch, conversation. No large demos are planed this year due to the pandemic.

Stay well, our watchword!

Wild Roof Journal

Many thanks to Wild Roof Journal for including my poem “ringing rocks” in their current issue. I hope you’ll look in, of course. There are also prose and visual art sections in WRJ. And lots to explore in previous issues, the ones that first got me interested.

So…. Repetitively, poetry, prose, visual art for anyone interested.

Pencil drawing (copy)

 In fact a copy of a copy of a copy, playing with the light. The first time I posted it, several years ago, it was much darker. fwiw ; - )

News in brief

 I've let some time pass since last putting anything up so I just note briefly that work continues in these hot days of August. The pandemic, as is well known, has surged on the Iberian peninsula in addition to other places. So along with the métiers of poetry, drawing, doing photography, Montse and I have been careful to look after ourselves, limiting social occasions taking care to social distance and stay well. More news follows, but for now just to wish everyone happiness for the remainder of August and....... too soon? the work loads of September. Stay well!

Textures (walking in the Pyrenees)

 A few "abstract" photos..... The wall masonry in the second shot is from a house we passed on our hike in Durro. The third shot, at closer range is of a rubble wall seen as we walked. The tree bark is from an old ash (I think)

Boí Valley walk

Some of the things we saw enroute to the Sant Quirc hermitage from Taüll....

A rubble wall, or two views of it as we walked, the mountains in the distance........

The Sant Nicolau River, July-August 2020

The Sant Nicolau River, a tributary of the Noguera de Tor.

 This is in the Pyrenees, in the Boí Valley, in the Aigüestortes National Park, a few kilometres from the town of Barruera.

We stayed in Barruera for four days, driving to different places in the area for short treks. Aside from the natural beauty of the region, the Pyrenees haven’t been hit by the Coronavirus anywhere near as hard as other places in Catalonia. So we felt safer as we travelled and obviously pretty awestruck by the mountain views.

 In a few days I’ll post some photos of different spots.

The Giant's Causeway

(in fact a revision of a previously published version)

The Giant’s Causeway, August 2, 2015, morning

Imagined footfalls on basalt

overshadow my blue path stroll.

The blue Atlantic froths

against black rock—

white fletchings

needling

waxed tidewater.

color study

work in progress

Hod carrier

Hod carrier

FT

But to repair masonry with someone,

even (as now, or then-in-now) only

to help out as a friend—that I say

is to form a bond, a mortared seal

in the gardening time of youth.

True it is that our readings conflicted.

Some slight increased our differences,

like mortar or brick giving

just enough to add a fissure

in a wall that still is sound.

pomegranate

The flower with the poem. Or the poem with the flower.

growth

waxy vermilion paint—

these pomegranate flowers

swept sunward

haiku

growth

waxy vermilion paint—

these pomegranate flowers

swept sunward

(based on a longer piece published in Ferbero some years back)

Firecrackers

Firecrackers

I know it’s a long argument but as one who is disturbed by the harmful effects of fireworks on the natural environment I think that part of the new reality should consider the harm that traditional fireworks displays can do. I say fireworks but even running an internet search for “firecrackers + air pollution” without the quotes brings in a good deal of scientific information in this regard.

By scientific I mean organizations like Science, Forbes, Sciencedirect.com, three of the first hits to come up in my search this morning.

No doubt pyromancy has something to do with the enchantment that fireworks explosions continue to provide (some) people with. But it seems to me that professional displays and smaller household get togethers could at least be more limited than they are currently. My immediate context for this is the Barcelona area, but there’s also the international arena television and newer related media bring out.

In any case I feel encouraged by the previously mentioned scientific material. Long arguments have to start somewhere, right?

Barcelona

Up and down the Passeig de Sant Joan. Along the carrer de Mallorca as far as the Rambla de Catalunya. My meanders around our neighbourhood and beyond grow longer.

Barcelona is famously a walker's city. But Phase Three in Barcelona means we still have to wear protective masks even if we can at least we can be out and about, working slowly toward a routine closer to what we consider our ordinary schedules.

“Phase Three”! Who would have thought our lives would come to anything like this? But it’s false to think a bad pandemic wasn’t foreseen and warned against. The signs were there in the specialized press, magazines like The Atlantic, not to mention Nature and others such as Virology Journal. They were there when hand washing and wearing protective gloves in supermarkets began to be advised. 

We simply didn’t know when this would happen or how harsh it was going to be.

So, yes, we go out, but we continue to take care….

Bloomsday and Dalloway Day

Today is Bloomsday, celebrating the publication of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. As it happens, however, tomorrow will mark the third occasion of the similar celebration of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. So the close relation between these two writers grows.

The two books just named have long been linked together, and for a variety of reasons.

Woolf’s novel is a double parody: its hypotexts are Homer’s Odyssey as well as Joyce’s Ulysses.* In the 1919 essay “Modern Novels” (later published as “Modern Fiction”) Woolf praises Joyce’s writing, although with reservations. Offered the chance to publish Ulysses, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press declined (on the grounds that to do so was beyond the technical means of their small company, although the true reason involved the high risk of being sued for publishing indecent material.

Much ink has flowed on these topics and to some extent there is a kind of polarization between those who believe that Woolf admired Joyce’s writing and those who believe the opposite. There is obviously a deeper vein here, however, that of censorship, despised by both of these Modernist writers. In any case it seems to me important that there is now a Dalloway Day as well as a Bloomsday. By way of celebration of both, I would like to quote something from A History of Reading, whose author, Alberto Manguel, tells us of an observation by Spinoza:

 It often happens [Spinoza wrote] that in different books we read histories in themselves similar but which we judge very differently, according to the opinions we have formed of the authors. I remember once to have read in some book that a man named Orlando Furioso used to ride a kind of winged monster through the air, fly over any country he liked, kill unaided vast numbers of men and giants, and other such fancies which from the point of view of reason are obviously absurd. I read a very similar story, in Ovid, of Perseus, and also, in the books of Judges and Kings, of Samson, who alone and unarmed killed thousands of men, and of Elijah, who flew through the air and at last went up to heaven in a chariot of fire, with fiery horses. All these stories are alike, but we judge them very differently. The first one sought to amuse, the second had a political object, the third a religious one.**

Not that I think people will read less as internet and other technological novelties continue to grow. Only that it does seem good to point out that different types of text serve different purposes.

*My source on this is Molly Hoff’s “The Pseudo-Homeric World of Mrs Dalloway,” Twentieth Century Literature 45:2 (Summer 1999), pp. 186-209.

**Manguel, A History of Reading, Chapter One.

First steps

First steps

Sunday, 7 June 2020. Today Barcelona, like so many other cities, was the scene of a demonstration to denounce police brutality and, more specifically, the recent police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Interlinked oppressive acts like this cut right into the heart of our societies. Such treatment by the police is appalling at any time, but in this case there is the added factor that Afro-Americans are known to be proportionately at greater risk of mistreatment.

This is not only a question of Minneapolis. It involves the entire country. By extension, in a globilizing world, we really are “all in it together.” The United States prides itself on justice for all, and yet race seems somehow to continue to be a factor that sparks injustice and further inequality. The underlying racism and authoritarianism of the Trump administration and our inability to come to terms with an endemic racism makes us look ridiculous. As Jennifer Rubin, writing in the op-ed section of The Washington Post on the hypocrisy of the Trump administration, has written: “Should we feel the need to rebuke a strongman in another country (e.g., Turkey, China, Russia, Hungary) one can only imagine the guffaws that would ensue.”*

The announcement in today’s papers that Minneapolis aims to dismantle its police force and newly rebuild it to promote public safety is a welcome first step.** Obviously many details will have to be attended to in order to carry out such an extensive move. Two questions immediately come to mind: Will it work? If so, can other cities follow suit?

* “How the United States might have condemned the Trump regime”, The Washington Post, 4 June 2020.

** https://www.startribune.com/mpls-council-majority-backs-dismantling-police-department/571088302/

Walks and ways

I’ve resumed my longer walks, now, daily or almost so. All of this in accordance with my interpretations of the official information in our area regarding the situation with the Covid-19 pandemic. In Barcelona, as in many other places, the quarantine restrictions are being relaxed with caution.

Meanwhile my account on Facebook is @WBainPoetry (with or without upper case). I’ll be linking accounts here soon but I should add that my Facebook posts primarily deal with more general information, especially things related to current events and the influence of social media. I’ve noticed that searches for the previously mentioned “@” tag brings up my FB page in a simple search on Google. The other search engines I’ve tried don’t do this, however.

In the context of conversations about social media usage this seems worth mentioning.

Barcelona

In the Barcelona area…… As restrictions begin to ease we’re going for short walks around our neighbourhood. So good to be out on the street! At the same time it’s disheartening to see how lightly some people take the cautions about using masks or maintaining safe distances.

More inspiring are the measures that are already visible of adapting the City’s streets with more bike lanes and designated parking areas for motor bikes. From some of the press I’ve seen this is another initiative that’s global. London is planning similar moves, also San Francisco, I think.

For years, for decades now, there have been plans to cut down on motorized traffic in cities. If memory serves one of the architectural solutions for Barcelona—the idea of having commuters coming into the City park in special areas outside the metropolitan area—was mooted 30 years ago or more. An accompanying shuttle system would then be used to get drivers back and forth to their cars.

So, hoping for healthier measures…… On we go!

#staysafestayhome

Out on the street last Friday for the first time in nearly two months. The quarantine has been hard to deal with generally, but perhaps especially in tersms of creativity.

But then… all of this is global, which in many ways is something positive because we’ve known for some time that the world has to work together more than ever to confront the Coronavirus-19 pandemic and many other environmental threats.

Global warning has to be addressed. The destruction of Earth’s rainforests has to be addressed.

So while unable to go out for those refreshing walks and get togethers, telematics and informatics have become an even greater part of our lives.

Underlying the ways we look at the quarantine are ideas about the human biome, both macro and micro—especially micro just now, with regard to the virus that has sparked this global response.

It’s still a pretty big shock to see TV news broadcasts showing the streets of Barcelona empty of crowds of walkers.

There is the upside of course that atmospheric pollution has dropped by something like 70 per cent. But there is also the very sad occurrence of lost lives and suffering. As in so many places the world over, every evening we stand on our small balcony and along with our neighbors applaud the courage of our health workers and others who are directly confronting the pandemic.

Continuing to create is obviously harder just now. But part of the job of dealing with the challenge is precisely to find ways of going on in life positive ways.

At the moment we’re forced to teach by conference call, to samizdat using WhatsApp, to enjoy a Sunday chat with friends using Zoom or similar techno calls…..

#staysafestayhome

Earth Day 2020

Earth Day in times of emergency….. If not for the pandemic and the quarantine currently in force we might be out in the country somewhere celebrating the arrival of spring. Well…. perhaps if not for the rains. 

Instead of an Easter season trip this year what comes is a series of memories of walking a patch of land that alternates areas of flowering clover with balding places giving over to dandelions, chickweeds and some other wilds I can’t even guess the name of.

Then notes I made from a trip we took to Viladrau jog my memory back to flowers seen—dandelions (again) in seed and flowering; nipplewort, violets, something like coltsfoot. Some tiny white flowers. 

And then that beautiful scrubland with Spanish broom and what I think is gorse. Of the trees in Viladrau—holm oak, cork oak, innumerable firs, pines, birch, hazel. Animals? Not so many, aside from different birds like magpies, sparrows, blackbirds there were the insects—3 bee types, ants, spider…

As people have been saying (including Greta Thunberg and earth systems scientist Johann Rockström in today’s The Guardian), after this emergency we are/will be in a changed world owing to such things as global warming, the related loss of Earth’s polar ice caps, the destruction of the Amazon and other rainforests.

This crisis is surmountable but it will take work and patience and far better decision making to learn from our past errors. Below, two links I believe to be of interest.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/14/archives/our-oceans-are-dying.html

https://notesfromgalilee.wordpress.com/tag/mediterranean-is-dying/

Alternate take

Still housebound in the global attempt to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic. Some very good news seems to becoming—that related to a peak in the number of cases in Spain. If this is confirmed it will obviously be a major step forward, although lots of caution is needed before the confinement measures come to an end. So “lockdown” here in Barcelona as well as in other places has to go on. Very important to work together on this all over our beleaguered planet! Below: some color & movement to pass on hope & cheerfulness!

World Poetry Day

Whuck

Wind in a tarpaulin.

Clothes drying on the line.

A billowing sail.

nature study, 2 March 2020

(taken in Vilanova i la Geltrú, in February)

Madrid and our recent visit

Taking advantage of the gift of a hotel stay we spent last weekend in Madrid visiting museums and some of the other notable places in the city. The coronavirus outbreak has us concerned of course, and today (Wednesday) it has even worsened somewhat. However, the trip was made in line with the general knowledge that the best course of action is calmness and cleanliness. The exhibition “Rembrandt and Amsterdam Portraiture” at the Thyssen Museum told me a lot about both large and small scale pictures of people—people and their activities, because human actions are naturally associated with what we look like, an obvious context. Rembrandt used postures and body language very intelligently in this respect. The Museum's website has a virtual pre-visit, so I'll end with that for the moment. (Link >>>

https://www.museothyssen.org/en/exhibitions/rembrandt-and-amsterdam-portraiture-1590-1670

Vilanovan reflections

Vilanova i la Geltrú, January 11-12, 2020

Vilanova i la Geltrú, January 11-12, 2020

Balloon volley ball after midnight. No net of course, no limit to number of players or boundary. Rhythmically swaying to whatever the restaurant puts on, a semblance of dance yogas the birthday celebration’s conclusion. But wait, there’s more. Don’t stop laughing, don’t stop dancing. But inevitably a few kisses, a long held hand and we’re out in the night air in close to freezing temperatures and a mile or so to the hotel. Moon coming to the full. Sea now audible as we walk. A turn toward the hills then and the simple luxury of a hotel visit, a gift received some months back. So the fragments come in. The false scare of an electricity black out, then relief at a magical repair. And

the following morning, Sunday,

looked down at the hotel pool,

closed but undrained. For

who will deny the beauty,

sometimes found strange, of

an outdoor hotel pool, closed but undrained.

So I stood at the window, waiting for my turn in the shower, thinking of the expansive hours and the waves of emotions that turquoise rectangle would have seen.

The problem with using a camera here is the screen covering the window.

All the same I shoot the pool, go to the adjacent window, take a shot of the street, the palm trees flanking the strip of beach,

the long low roll

of the waves

coming in.

Storm Gloria

Very concerned at the destruction caused by the recent storm. There has been loss of life on the Iberian peninsula and in Catalonia the infrastructure of roads, railways and agriculture has been hit especially hard. I'm sure people will already know of some of this but the link below provides more information.

https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/23/storm-gloria-death-toll-and-fears-of-floods-rise

Winter river (3)

The cry of a single magpie greeted us as we locked our car and walked our luggage across the Cappont bridge in Lleida last Sunday. The sighting of odd numbers of certain birds, magpies included, is considered unlucky according to some customs but this one only made me eager to walk along the Segre, whose marsh grasses and reeds I enjoy exploring, as must be obvious by now. Then from the bridge I could also see a cormorant diving on the waters below. That afternoon however the cold held me back and I ended up taking only short walks in the town, punctuated by a few visits to book stores and cafés. So the picture below is from a previous riverine wander. The fog level was about the same both times! Luck by the way was good in terms of feasting and exchanging gifts, the main reason for the visit.

Winter River (2)