Kenneth Roy
The students missed
their chance to bring down
the crumbling house
Bob Smith
Charles Kennedy
Walter Humes
How can you
tell when politicians
are lying?
The Cafe
Bill Heaney
Jill Stephenson
The spectre of shortage
that shaped my
post-war life
The Cafe
Alex Cox
Alan Fisher
Yemen and
America’s fear
of the franchise
Rear Window
Hydropathic holidays
Andrew Hook
In Barcelona, I was struck
by two presences and
one absence
The Last Word
John Brown
31.03.11
No. 386
31.03.11No. 386
The Last Word
As an avid reader of SR for the past four or five months I very much appreciate the forthright, thought-provoking articles set in a modern no-nonsense layout free from distracting adverts. The artwork and photos are also distinctive and pleasing in that they fit well with the literary and journalistic content.
I like the new page logos. They add a chunkiness to the pages and despite the mix of colours are subtle in their design. However the fifth logo had me puzzled for a couple of minutes and it took considerable brain power to work out the full title.
Initially, I thought it was just a jumble of shapes and colours above the word ‘LETTERS’, then I decided that given the quality of the publication it had to be a visual test or an encryption puzzle. I started working backwards to look at the previous four pages to find the cipher or clues. This did not help but I did notice the overall size and shape of logo five was different.
So I set about squeezing my eyelids (and possibly certain portions of my brain) to view it through dislodged contact lenses and this seemed to work. I think now it reads ‘LIFE & LETTERS’ but of course I could be wrong. Was it really a test? Will it be different next time? Have I missed something? Will it distract me again from the content of the articles?
If I am correct and it is ‘LIFE & LETTERS’ may I make a suggestion so that I do not need to go through the eyelid squeezing process again. Please rescale the fifth logo to match the others and place the ‘&’ at the end of the row.
John Brown
Yes, you’re right, it is Life & Letters! I have passed your suggestion to the one and only Bob Smith – Islay
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In Barcelona, I was
struck by two presences
and one absence
Andrew Hook
Like most people I imagine, I have a list of places in the world I’d like to visit. In my case not a particularly long list; but in recent years it has certainly included Barcelona. Indeed such is the Spanish city’s popular appeal that I’ve often felt I was the only person I knew who had not been there.
Well that is no longer true. A month or two back I heard from American friends that they were going to be in Barcelona for a week in March. Too good a chance to miss I thought – and arranged to join them there. (I should say I’m not one of those bold spirits who enjoy holidaying on their own.)
So had I made the right decision? Was Barcelona worth waiting for? Unquestionably. Despite arriving in a storm of torrential rain and hail, I became an instant fan of this handsome city. Its grand avenues, wide, wide streets, spacious squares and vast plazas, elegant shops, classy restaurants and characteristic tapas bars, cannot fail to impress. They certainly impressed me. But what did I really make of this sophisticated city?
I was struck most of all by two presences and one absence. Perhaps surprisingly, for me the first presence was that of Barcelona FC. Images and insignia of the football club appear everywhere. Every street and avenue seem to have stalls and souvenir shops festooned with memorabilia of the triumphant team. Its colours appear in every possible form: team shirts and t-shirts bearing the names and numbers of the most famous players – Messi, Xavi, Iniesta – are ubiquitous. Barcelona is proud of its team and won’t let you forget it. Okay Glasgow has its Celtic and Rangers shops – but a tourist could visit and hardly notice. In Barcelona it’s impossible not to notice. And, in fact, Nou Camp, the football team’s stadium, is now the city’s second most important tourist destination, attracting 1.2 million visitors a year.
The most popular? The second of my two presences. Antoni Gaudi, who died in 1926, continues to dominate one’s cultural experience of Barcelona. The iconic Sagrada Familia church, plus a range of other examples of Gaudi’s prolific genius, inevitably attract almost every visitor to the city. There is a wonderful Miro collection in a beautifully designed modernist museum (the Miro Foundation), in which the full range of the artist’s work is magnificently displayed. There is a somewhat less impressive Picasso museum.
Mies van der Rohe’s pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition has been perfectly reconstructed. There are galleries in which the work of Antoni Tapies, and other contemporary Spanish artists, are on display. But Gaudi and his works remain at the centre of Barcelona’s cultural appeal. Of course that appeal is not necessarily wholly positive. I was amazed more than moved. And dare I say that the grand Park Guell, overlooking the city, has a hint of Disneyland about it.
But for me what came to mind in the extraordinary La Pedrera building, which presents the visitor with a comprehensive account of Gaudi’s life and work, was the comparison between the careers of Gaudi and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In today’s Glasgow, Mackintosh dominates the city’s art and architecture almost as totally as Gaudi dominates Barcelona. Both figures have become iconic, attracting visitors from around the world. Both cities, that is, flourish as tourist centres on the backs, as it were , of these artists.
But there is one crucial difference. Gaudi’s career did indeed flourish in Barcelona. He enjoyed endless commissions for churches, schools, parks, houses – buildings of every kind. So many in fact that only a few were completed. Mackintosh, on the other hand, never flourished in Glasgow. Despite his early success with the splendid Glasgow School of Art, he struggled to find work in the city. The Scotland Street school in 1909 was his last commission, and a few years later he was forced to leave Glasgow for good. Do the contrasting fortunes of these two gifted artists tell us something about the difference between Spanish and Scottish culture at the opening of the 20th century?
The one absence? This is a tricky area, and perhaps it is not appropriate for me as an outsider even to mention it. The people of Barcelona are presumably as aware as the rest of us of the fearful crises afflicting our world. And one afternoon I did see a demonstration by a couple of hundred protesters against Spain’s use of nuclear power. (The tough-looking police were there in almost equal numbers.) The pro-Benghazi and freedom in Libya demo on the other hand was a tiny, bedraggled affair.
My point, however, is that the city chooses not to celebrate its own political history. Nowhere did I see any kind of reference – not to mention memorial – to the crucial role that republican Barcelona played in the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps the city feels that that tragic episode in its history is not remote enough to require memorialisation. At the time, George Orwell paid homage to Catalonia. Perhaps a day will come when Barcelona’s thousands of visitors are asked to do the same.
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University
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