On Poetry and Culture Shock

The Spanish government has just arranged to sell ships and other military equipment to Venezuela. Spanish conservatives yell and despair. The Socialist government points out that the deal will create or secure plnty of employment at the shipyards that the last (Conservative) government endangered. I think it is all very sad.

Elvis Costello wrote this song about the situation of unemployed shipbuilders when England went to war against Argentina over control of the Malvines.

Shipbuilding.

Is it worth it?
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife
And a bicycle on the boy's birthday
It's just a rumour that was spread around town
By the women and children
Soon we'll be shipbuilding.......
Well I ask you
The boy said "Dad they're going to take me to task, but I'll be back by Christmas"
It's just a rumour that was spread around town
Somebody said that someone got filled in
For saying that people get killed in
The result of this shipbuilding
With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls
It's just a rumour that was spread around town
A telegram or a picture postcard
Within weeks they'll be re-opening the shipyards
And notifying the next of kin
Once again
It's all we're skilled in
We will be shipbuilding........

¿Merece la pena?
Un abrigo nuevo y zapatos para la parienta
y una bici para el cumple del chico
No es más que un rumor que dicen por ahí
las mujeres y los niños
pronto volveremos a construir barcos
pues verás,
el mayor me dice “Papá, me han cogido pero vuelvo a casa por Navidad”
No es más que un rumor que dicen por ahí,
alguien dijo que a alguien lo ficharon
por decir que hay gente que se muere
cuando construimos barcos
Con toda la voluntad del mundo
Zambúllete para salvar la vida
cuando podríamos estar buscando perlas
No es más que un rumor que dicen por ahí
un pésame oficial, una postal,
En pocas semanas reabre el astillero
y empiezan las notificaciones a las familias
Otra vez
No valemos pa otra cosa
A construir barcos....

When I say "Other people's poetry" I mean "other people's art". I adore Forges. It’s a family tradition, I think. His cartoons are very much culture-specific so it’s not just a question of translating words but of expressing stuff that you wouldn’t understand if you had not in Spain for the last months or years.

This one expresses wonderfully well the impression that I’m getting from the Spanish conservatives as I read what they do on online newspapers:

NOTICE: ACCESS TO PARLIAMENT. FOOL DETECTOR.

Security guy: Place all bullshit on the tray and then pass through the detector.
Conservative Politician: This is a direct attack against our debating strategy, I swear!

Precisely after the server has been down for a whole day, now I'm abandoning you to go to a Middle Eastern Dance seminar. 12 hours of workshops and four hours of shows in two days. If Plan A (for Academia) doesn't work, I can always give a try to Belly Dancing...

If you are reading this from in Ithaca, the Saturday show is open to the public. Unmissable.

Raíces

No sólo los árboles tienen raíces.
Es raíz lo que te sujeta.
Raíz lo que apoya.
Raíz, origen.
Hasta los números tienen raíces,
quien diría que algo tan frío
tiene un principio.
También los dientes tienen sus raíces.
Algunas
sólo se pueden recordar cuando duelen.
Cuando no se tienen.
Si las rompes.
Si se van.

Decido separarme de mis raíces, marcharme, y dejarlas aquí.
Que les vaya bien.

Roots

Not only the trees have roots.
Root is what supports you.
Root what holds you.
Root, origin.
Even numbers have their roots,
who would’ve thought that something so cold
has a beginning.
Teeth are born from roots too.
Some
are remembered only when they hurt.
when you lose them.
When broken.
When gone.

I decide to sever off my roots, go away, and leave them here.
Fare them well.

I wrote this one very soon before coming to Ithaca. I still don’t know it is good enough to compensate for being so self-indulging.

In case you wanted to know how many hours of dancing I can accumulate in these two hips before they collapse: 15. I have done about 15 hours of dancing in three days. First shock: many people organise this sort of thing, it happens very often. It is a wonderful way of getting first-hand knowledge of other people’s techniques, but I wouldn’t want to do this sort of demanding physical work more than once or twice a year. But then, I’m not a professional dancer, and I guess that for people like June, three to ten hours of dance a day are just like my three to ten hours a day at the library.

It was wonderful to see dancers of all abilities, shapes and sizes have fun and learn new things. It was, in a way, a very geeky atmosphere: like a convention of extremely dedicated fans of a very obscure sci-fi series, although instead of talking of characters, actors, and whether the original comic book was better, we talked about the advantages of coin belts over hip scarves or about belly roll techniques (I want to be Émiline when I grow up). There may be a few divas, but the professionals have all the time in the world to talk to the newbies.

In spite of all the fun, something that I find very sad about Middle Eastern dance now is that even though there are many things I cannot do yet, I hardly ever watch a belly dancer and think “How the did she do that!?”; I know the theory behind nearly everything. Now it gives a different level of enjoyment, but there isn’t any mystery and that’s sad. I need to see the “How the did she do that!?” look in other people’s faces to remember that there is magic in it.

I thought that in English, “no strings attached” meant “no need to make any further commitment”. I just found out what it really means (in a word, “flawless”).

See that link there? It takes you to my online jewelry shop, which is more a shop window than a shop because I have so many different things that if I showed them all you’d get tired of browsing.

A note on the prices: I have been making a selling jewelry for about nine years. In my hometown, you get the same quality from shops, from authorised street vendors and from unlicensed ones. I like to keep the prices a little bit below the prices of shops; most people that I know that sell more or less as a hobby have always done the same as me. Also, I want to be inexpensive for students out of principle. So, when I came to the US I worked on the same principle. I could easily double my prices and still be cheaper than most shops. Buying the beads yourself might be even more expensive than buying from me (definitely so, if it’s one of my pieces with real semiprecious stones). I don’t care. I can afford to sell at students prices, so I don’t have any reasons not to. But I would hate it if anyone suspected that there something wrong with my jewelry or the materials I use just because I keep things affordable.

Imagine this. May in Southern Spain. Heat, 40 first-year University students taking a survey course in English Literature. Understanding plain English is sometimes a challenge. And about three lectures before the end of the semester, T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland is presented. General hostility follows. It makes no sense.

Although I disliked it initially, it was the second time in my life that someone introdued me to such elegant, fluid free verse, the first time being Pedro Salinas' La Voz a Ti Debida (The Voice I owe to you). Today, a sunny April day with the crocuses starting to bloom, is a perfect occasion to post the opening of The Wasteland.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

1. ENTERRAR A LOS MUERTOS.

Abril es el mes más cruel, criando
lilas en el yermo, mezclando
memoria y deseo, revolviendo
raíces moribundas con lluvia primaveral.
El invierno nos dio calor, cubriendo
la tierra con nieve olvidadiza, alimentando
un poco de vida con tubérculos secos.
El verano nos sorprendió, llegando al Starnbergersee
con un chaparrón; nos detuvimos en la columnata
y salimos al sol, al Hofgarten,
y tomamos café, y charlamos una hora.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
Y cuando éramos pequeños, en casa del archiduque,
mi primo, me llevó en trineo
y yo tenía miedo. Él decía, Marie,
Maríe agárrate fuerte. Y allá que fuimos.
En las montañas te sientes libre.
Paso leyendo casi toda la noche, y viajo al sur en invierno.

I found out y chance that there is an excellent collection of children’s literature and a good collection of comics in Uris Library. I quickly borrowed everything by Neil Gaiman,little by little, since they were often taken. The discovery was a big surprise, since our University libraries are more technical, and what I wonder, do we have those books in the library for the Popular Culture Studies types or simply because it is good that I can take Roald Dahl’s Matilda or Gaiman’s Preludes and Nocturnes as comfort reading after a hard day of Derrida?

(Mental picture of Cultural Studies clever one doing a dissertation on the influence of French Deconstructionism in contemporary comic writers).

One tree in the desert,
A tall man waiting.
He has never seen the flowers.

Un árbol en el desierto,
Un hombre alto que espera.
Nunca ha visto las flores.

Flower woman asks an innocent question.
A green smile and no answer.

Mujer-flor hace una pregunta inocente.
Una sonrisa verde, y ninguna respuesta.

Two of my oldest haikus. They were not meant to go together, although they are about the same man.

I am going to repeat myself here. Every artist that has stopped to theorise about the creative process, about What Art Ought to Be, reaches a simple and easy conclusion. Art ought to be what I do. Of course, I have no intention of being an exception. When I have written about why I like what I like, the result has been in the negative: instead of a list of things to do, I have a list of things that kill poetry. When I write (poetry or prose: it doesn’t matter) there are a few things I always try to avoid. Good writing is often a matter of leaving things out; most of the stuff I’ve read by bad or mediocre writers was so because of what was superfluous, not because of what was missing.

It probably sounds destructive, but in the hope of offending someone (oh yes, please, disagree), I’m going to blog a number of “effects”, flaws to be avoided like the plague. This is the first one: the T. S. Eliot effect is a double-edged sword. It is impossible to write without having influences. Really impossible. Sometimes those influences are evident, sometimes less so. Influences are good. But if your work has influences that are both obvious _and_ obviously better than your creations, be careful. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is a poem I used to hate because it screams

I WANT TO BE DANTE BUT I’M NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

And what’s the point of that?

(Brought to you by the composer of haikus who has stolen quotes straight out of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Pink Floyd, Beowulf, William Butler Yeats and Amaral).

I’m being a bit unfair because as time goes by, Grandes writes better and better, but there we go. Almudena Grandes is a Spanish novelist. As far as I’ve read, all her novels have first person narrators: one of them has four alternating narrators (each narrator a chapter). The problem is that all her narrators, all of them, even the four women in Atlas de Geografía Humana, have the exact same voice.

If you are going to write narrative, please don’t make a teenager and his grandmother use the same register. Don’t be Almudena Grandes and don’t make your readers confused about who is telling what. The moment one of my characters opens his or her mouth, I want the reader to know who’s talking.

Someone criticised my short stories because the female characters are far more articulate than the male ones. I don’t do that on purpose, and I don’t think my women are better or more intelligent/educated than my men; it simply came naturally to make the women resemble me, but with a more ornate expression. The men are a bit like some of my male friends, precisely the ones who express themselves very differently from me. All I have been able to manage so far is to make characters that don’t have all the same voice, although I don’t think my dialogue is good.

Pink Floyd gave the feel and texture of the winter. This spring belongs to e. e. cummings. This cute little poem reminds me a lot of the topics and mood of haikus.

Tumbling-hair
.............Picker of buttercups
........................................violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
..............................through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
..............also picking flowers

Pelorrevuelto
.............buscador de ranúnculos
........................................violetas
diente de león
y las margaritas grandes bravuconas
..............................por la pradera maravillosa
con los ojos un poco tristes
Viene alguien
..............también cogiendo flores.

Since lately I have been even more enthusiastic than usual on the topic of Middle Eastern dance ("belly dance", if you wish), a few people from the real world have asked me if there is any place in it for men. My experience with flamenco, instinct and common sense told me yes, and an article by Tarik Sultan in Morocco's website tells the surprising truth.

Come on guys, dancing is fun. And last time I checked men had two hips and two shoulders. Go on and do something with them more interesting than jogging.

I repeat that I use "poetry" to mean "art". Ysterday I went to a reading of the brilliant Misty Urban, who just won a prize for her short story "The Keeping of the Counts". If that's not poetry I don't know what is. I thought I would cry on a couple of occasions.

It was in a way very typical, predictable in its starting point and suject matter (I don't mean to say that this is a bad thing!!), considering it is coming from an MFA student. As I have said before, Cornell's student literary magazines include a disproportionate number of pieces about families. Pieces that cannot possibly be autobiographical, sometimes. But the main theme seems to be fear of loss or incommunication between close relatives. I don't think that anyone at all on Misty's position in Spain would have even thought of writing about a woman with a 4-year-old very sick son. We prefer to write about peer relationships, or love stories. We rarely find families that interesting, unless they are absolutely hellish, and then we are using them as an excuse for social realism.

Those stories on perfectly normal, slightly tense families (are you reading this from Spain? think of the first half of American Beauty, but without the climax) might be caused by the American sense of isolation and incommunication you get in a country that wants everything bigger better faster now, where people are made to choose between meaningful relationships and competitive careers, with relationships losing (I'm paraphrasing the lovely Autumn Watts here). if that is so, then.why is it that Spaniards on Misty Urban position always write love stories?

Therapy should remain between you and your therapist. I am not your therapist. If you write to vent things out, good. That’s fantastic. Just don’t show it to anyone else later. I like the Elusive Poet (I mean as a person) because he doesn’t go around rubbing our noses into his feelings. Thank you, Poet.

I’ll say that again in case it’s not clear: writing is great, but showing it to others is not always so. I know people who think that since creative writing is very hard (or because they say they have no talent for it) they can only admire, never criticise or comment, on amateur work. Wrong. Amateurs are to be praised for trying, and then dissected if they dare showing their work in public. It is part of the process (am I being arrogant? Sure, but I’m fair. The comments section is there, and I’d love any feedback on my poetry).

Every time I write a therapeutic piece, something to help me get rid of a feeling, I tell myself I will hate it in two weeks. Then I put it into the quarantine folder and when some time has passed, I go back to it, thinking I will hate it. The prose is always horrible, no exceptions; most of the poetry can be saved with a bit of editing.

Of course I don’t mean that any poetry written “therapeutically” or anything that deals with very personal feelings is necessarily bad. But writing, like any craft, tends to need polishing, and it is harder to have the necessary distance when writing about our own emotions while they are still fresh. We all love our own feelings and it is very hard to see them, and the art they inspire, as different things.

Suzanne passed on to me this poem by Mary Oliver, not knowing that I' m so much against "the Therapy Effect". I like Oliver's take on it not just because I agree with her but also because of her interesting images, although I dislike the broken-line effect.

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need anymore of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

El Poeta con la cara entre las manos.

Quieres gritar por tus
errores. Pero la verdad es que el mundo
ya no necesita ese sonido.

Así que si vas a hacerlo y no puedes
impedirlo, si esa boquita no puede
contenerse, por lo menos ve solo, por

cuarenta praderas y cuarenta caídas oscuras
de agua y rocas hasta el lugar donde
las cataratas arrojan sábanas blancas

como locas, y hay una cueva detrás de todo ese
júbilo y diversión acuática y puedes
estar de pie allí debajo y chillar todo lo que

quieras y no molestar; puedes
mojarte en tu desesperación toda la tarde y aún así,
en una rama verde, con las alas apenas rozadas

por el brillo del agua, el tordo,
sacando pecho, le cantará
a la perfecta, durísima belleza universal.

In a campus as multicultural as Cornell, these sweet, small, amusing things must happen all the time, although we rush so much thinking of our own worlds, looking down to the ground, that we miss nearly all of them. This is what I saw this morning:

Two Asian girls, one of them vocalising to teach the other, who repeated tentatively, how to say "I love you" in Japanese.

I have no idea if they were flirting, or on a date. I hope so. Maybe I found it so touching and fun because it remindd me of two drastically diferent people, one who trusted my love teaching me to say exactly that, and another one who hd no idea of my feelings teaching me to say "i love you" in Russian. A very nerdy seduction strategy, isn't it?

I said some time ago that “Mr Money” sounded like such a good name that I had to find the original poem for you. This is one of Quevedo’s satirical masterpieces; Francisco de Quevedo was a Spanish poet from the 17th century who wrote one picaresque novel, and poetry (love, satirical and romantic), mostly in sonnet form. Something like a Spanish John Donne but with a wild sense of humour. Take away the sense of humour and add Latin syntax and you have Góngora). This is a very free translation of the first stanza; the others have jokes and puns so local or historically bound that they would need footnotes. I stopped there so I don't go to the Hell of Translators, where people have to translate Finnegans Wake for eternity in punishment for their translating mistakes. The complete original can be read here.

Madre, yo al oro me humillo,
Él es mi amante y mi amado,
Pues de puro enamorado
Anda continuo amarillo.
Que pues doblón o sencillo
Hace todo cuanto quiero,
Poderoso caballero
Es don Dinero.

Mother, I kneel before money,
My one and only, my beloved,
Though, fearful of my waywardness
He is forever green-eyed.
And since in all size and colour
Always does what I demand,
Such a powerful gentleman
is my Mister Money.

I like The Beatles. They’re fun. Sometimes they were good. And they were the kings of the bad rhyme. The Beatles effect is what happens when you care about rhyme so much that it destroys your poem.

I don’t have anything against rhyme. As long as it’s good. Don’t rhyme “-ing” forms, don’t rhyme “be” and “me”, “you” and “do”. If you cannot find better rhymes, and you still like very traditional forms of poetry, write blank verse. If Milton wrote Paradise Lost in blank verse, it should be good enough for you.

¿Estás leyendo esto en español? Al español el verso blanco no le pega tanto como al inglés, pero antes que rimar participios e infinitivos, siempre será mejor la rima asonante. El romancero tradicional le da cien mil vueltas a las rimas facilonas.

Corazón en bandeja.

No,
no voy a poner mi corazón en un poema.
No,
No en un poema como en una bandeja.
Pues entonces
ese pedacito de mí –quizá tuyo
lo leerán otros,
y otros se lo contarán a alguien.
Mi corazón que empezó mío
y luego fue tuyo
acabará repartido.
Cortado con tenedor y cuchillo.
Todos podrán compararlo con los que ya conocen:
Los otros corazones puestos en bandejas,
Pinchados sobre un panel,
Intimidades que otros incautos (no yo)
Pusieron en un poema para compartirlo.
Yo no,
prefiero no ponerlo.
No.
En un poema, no.
No es en un poema donde puedo darte mi corazón.

Heart on a tray.
No,
I’m not going to put my heart into a poem.
No,
Not into a poem as if on a tray.
Because then
That piece of me –maybe yours
Will be read by others
And others will tell someone else.
My heart initially mine
And then yours
Will end up spread
Cut up in little pieces with knife and fork
Everyone will be able to compare it with others they know
The other hearts set on trays
Pinned onto a board
Innermost thoughts that the naïve (not me)
Put into a poem they would share.
Not me,
I’d rather not.
No.
Not in a poem.
It’s not through a poem that I will give you my heart.


So this is what I wrote when I wanted to put into a poem what now I call "The Therapy Effect". The initial intention was to satirise a very dominant style among the poets in my hometown, maybe in my country as a whole, a certain melancholy-surreal mode. The effect was not exactly what I had planned.

Something that I envy of American Universities is that they have flexibility in designing departments and courses. In Spain, the contents of a course’s syllabus are up to the professor or the department, but the names of the courses themselves and the University’s division in departments is fixed and can only be changed through a very slow and complex bureaucratic process. That's why most of the courses I took as an undergrad had empty names, for example “English Literary Texts 1 (2, 3, …)”, so that the professors had more freedom in choosing the content. A consequence of that rigidity is that in Spain there aren’t Gender Studies departments. We work on Gender Studies, sure, but no one even thinks of starting the process that would officially create a department under that name (I suspect that by the time the bureaucracy was over, Gender Studies would be out of fashion). Professors associate in official “research groups”, but those remain invisible from the point of view of the students.

And now there is this new concept (new for me), Queer Studies. (Warning: I use "queer" in its technical sense of "people who are not heterosexual": I don't mean only "gay" and I am not using it as an insult)

Is the label “Queer Studies” useful? I once wrote a paper defending that Renaissance women poets should be studied alongside their male contemporaries, instead of keeping the token “Women Poets” lesson on the syllabus. I still think so, and it applies to queer artists. We study Michelangelo as the sculptor and painter of the best nudes of the post-Classic world, not as a predecessor of Mapplethorpe. We study Shakespeare’s sonnets because they are excellent, not because they were dedicated to both a man and a woman. It doesn’t change the value of one comma in the Jane Austen canon to speculate that she may have been a lesbian.

Of course there are authors that are better understood in the context of their sexual orientation, or in the context of everyone else’s attitudes towards it. But I’m not sure there is really enough yet to establish courses on queer literature. Besides, undergraduates (and everyone outside academia) would get the impression that we aren’t interested in poet A or B because they are good, but because they are queer. And that isn’t doing any favours to the poet or academia.

Having said that, I think that in a generation or so there will be very clearly established queer genres, of which we have the seeds today. A love story is a love story, no matter the gender of the protagonists. But there are some things that are inherently queer. The coming out story, for example. There is a novel genre, the Bildungsroman, in which someone goes from youth to adulthood, maturing in the process, and the coming out story is a subgenre of it. For example, Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson.

A second genre would be the “gay-man-knows-he-has-AIDS-and-has-just-about-enough-time-to-say-goodbye-properly”. All the examples I can thiink of are movies, not books. A connection to “straight literature” is the death haiku: classic composers of haiku could write detached, elegant compositions about facing death calmly, peacefully. Facing the perspective of your own death without fear and drama is not a very Western thing to do.

It will take about one more generation of very talented authors to make sense of these new tendencies. And it will be important that there are good, very good authors, so good that people without the least interest in queerness are interested in their works.

Etiquetas: Queerness, Winterson, Bildungsroman, Mapplethorpe

The cover of Mary Dorcey’s The River that Carries Me, lying misplaced at the library, looked inviting. The back used words like “love” and “the struggle of women”. So I took it, and once at home I read the author’s biography inside: it said that Mary Dorcey is a lesbian.

The problem with minority authors that aren't gloriously original, classic and perfect is that the nagging question always remains: would this person be famous in their own right if he or she was not a feminist/ not white/ not Christian? Sometimes the answer is not easy: I’d rather read Christopher Marlowe than Aemilia Lanyer, but she was one of a tiny handful of Elizabethan women poets and I have to read her if only for historical reasons (meaning I’m more interested in her writings as expression of a female point of view than as art). Other times the reverse is true and a work is disregarded because it was written by a “minority” writer even though it is brilliant. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is an example. The world was not ready for a black woman writer in the early 20th century.

Here is something by Mary Dorcey so that you can judge if she belongs to the “special point of view” group or to the “this is good no matter who wrote it” select club. It is a bit long, but I didn’t want to edit it to give you a better picture. I picked on purpose a poem without obvious lesbian or feminist themes.

This Day I have Turned my Back on Sorrow.

Enough of this.
I have had enough of repining,
Of loss and lament.

Enough.
I want to dance in the street.
I want laughter –
Loud days and wild nights.
I will make it up,
If I have to
Until it happens.
I will make it happen
If I have to.

I have had enough of repenting
Of loss
And lament.
I want
Dancing in the streets,
Laughter.

I will go into the fields
And under a white hawthorn tree
Dig a grave
Six foot deep.
Into it I will put
Regret and remorse.
I will cover it up,
Shovel the clay
And lay down my cross.

I have had enough
Of lament
And loss.
After all
I wrote my own story,
Chose my course.
I brought myself
To this edge of the river.

Enough.
It is over;
the sad times
the bleak.
Put behind me.
I have taken what I need –
The few things of value
Salvaged from the wreck.
I carry the in my flesh and blood
Until the last day.

Enough of loss and lament.
I want to dance in the street
I want laughter
Luminous mornings, long nights.
It is over,
Finished,
Remorse and lament
I have buried them,
Turned the clay
Six foot deep, under
The white hawthorn tree.

This day
I have turned my back
On sorrow.

Etiquetas: Queerness, Dorcey

I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a country ruled by a king that was neither very old, very rich, or very wise. And there were elections to the City Councils of this country (to save time and paperwork, all Town Councils were elected at the same time) and the Republican party (meaning the anti-monarchy, absolutely nothing to do with American republicans) won the elections. Technically, to overthrow the king they would have had to win the Parliament elections, but the king thought he had overstayed his welcome and left the country (cowardice or good sense? who knows). Soon after, the Republican Party, which was a lot more lefty that socialdemocrats nowadays and a bit less radical that communists, won the Parliament and Presidential elections. They changed the Constitution and dedicated themselves to the task of improving the national school system. They had two pillars: good quality public education for all, and some hostility to religion. In this country, there had been a privileged religion that was not happy at all with its loss of status and with the new secular schools.

The Republic lasted only a few years, very few, until some very rich people, together with most of the military and with the official approval of the religion I mentioned, made a coup d’état. Then there was a war and the country’s economy and its people’s quality of life went down for decades afterwards.

When the country had a one-in-a-lifetime chance of becoming democratic and peaceful again, the grandson of the king who was neither old nor wise seemed to be an unavoidable figure that had to be put at the centre of the game board as a handful of men tried to decide the future of us all. There were a lot of compromises and the only thing that made a majority of people happy was that we were indeed a democracy –not a very peaceful one, but still. The Republicans old enough to have actually lived through all four political regimes (the old king, the Republic, the dictator, the new democracy) were probably the ones that compromised the most. After all, they had been stripped of more legitimate rights than any one else.

I’m not Republican, because I’m not against the fact that there is a king in Spain. To me, the royal family are like honorary ambassadors that didn’t need to major in Political Science at college. I don’t care one way or the other. If they are there, they might as well do a good PR job and deserve their salaries (yes, they receive a salary out of people’s taxes because they don’t have a private fortune, like, for example, the English queen). I like everything else about republicans: the importance of freedom, of public education, of secular public life, and keeping religion well off politics. And they have had better reasons than other people to make their demands by force, but we have never had Republican terrorists in Spain. Of that, I’m thankful.

Today is the anniversary of the Republican Constitution. So, Happy Birthday, Republic.

A poem to order you to go out, have fun, and find love. I don't want to hear how many exams or papers you have to prepare.

1.
Dance with your eyes closed.
The smell, the music, the heat
Are all you need to see.
Baila con los ojos cerrados.
El olor, la música, el calor
son todo lo que necesitas ver.

2.
I like your blond skin
I want your blond smile.
I’m looking for some blonde fun.
Me gusta tu rubia piel
Me atrae tu rubia sonrisa
Quiero divertirme rubiamente.

3.
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (W. B. Yeats)
Do I dance better if you watch?
¿Cómo distinguir el baile de la bailarina?
¿Bailo mejor cuando me miras?

4.
Dawn sets the sky on fire.
Day comes to stop all parties.
Survivors crawl out.
El amanecer prende fuego al cielo.
El día llega para acabar con todas las fiestas.
Los supervivientes se van, arrastrándose.


I think that Aurora said once that she liked to be as inside as possible the creation process of other writers, so for her and anyone else who wants gossip this is the biographical note of these little babies. The only one of the four poems that didn't just come tome as a flash of inspiration was number 4. Numbers 2 and 4 came first chronologically; Number 2 I actually composed (that is, I made it up, but I wrote it down the morning after, of course) during an alcohol-soaked party and it does express the way I felt about the friend of a friend. The mutual friend, Virginia, helped the morning after with the translation, mostly with word order. Number 4 mixes the exhausted feeling after that party, which was in Limerick (Ireland), with a photograph of the sunset over Aberdeen (Scotland) and it is my attempt to turn Björk's song Pluto into a haiku. Number 1 I composed while I was dancing in a bar in Granada with my oldest friend, Irene francés; that one had been waiting to come out for ever and ever because I do dance with my eyes closed, at least when I'm really happy and relaxed. This happened a whole year after the original two party haikus, ad since I already had three I shuffled them a lot trying to compose a fourth to balance a party cycle. The answer came nearly a year afterwards, not at a party but at a Belly Dance class recital, the first time I ever danced for others to see. I composed the poem a few days afterward, and the "you" is the only friend of mine who came to see the recital. I didn't really steal the quote from Yeats, but from an analysis of him by the philosopher Paul de Man. After that it was only a question of arranging them in the order that nights out usually take: Dance, lust, dance and lust put together, home.

I first posted this haiku sequence in December. It is still called “The Friday Cycle”, a title I wasn’t too happy with. I’m still trying to get used to it. Any suggestions for a change?

This makes a lot more sense when talking of writing in Spanish, but I’ll do my best to make it understandable.

Góngora was an excellent poet, maybe a cultural equivalent of John Donne. The problem is that he used such convoluted syntax that nowadays we need a footnote translation into plain Spanish.

Literary language does not have to be harder than the non-literary. You don’t need to make sentences longer than usual. A difficult word order (in languages that are more flexible than English) is very, very tricky. Use tricks if you want to, but never think that your writing is better if the syntax is different from that of expository writing. One test is to read your work aloud and see if the natural pauses you need to make to breathe coincide with punctuation marks. A second test would be asking yourself why have you “broken the rules”. If there’s no answer, or it is nothing more specific than “it sounds better like that” “it sounds different from prose”, “just because”, mend it. The most obvious example I know of useless changes to word order is the Spanish epithet, so I will go on in that language.

No soporto, de verdad que no soporto los adjetivos colocados antes del nombre cuando no son estrictamente necesarios. Por ejemplo, Neruda sabe lo que hace cuando dice:

"Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos”.

Para empezar, está jugando con el ritmo de la frase, y para seguir, el blanco lo rodea todo. Es un “blanco cuerpo blanco”. Hay una razón ahí. Lo que no entiendo es porqué a estas alturas hay gente que piensa que para que la poesía sea poesía es necesario anteponer los adjetivos por las buenas. Esto no es el Siglo de Oro y hacerle esguinces a la sintaxis hace siglos que ya no sube puntos. Neruda lo sabía y por eso decía “puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche”, ni “los más tristes versos” ni tonterías. La canción desesperada es una canción desesperada. No es una desesperada canción, y menos mal.

I adore Nacho Duato, the director and main choreographer of one of Spain's Nationall Ballet Companies. He is in charge of the one that does modern dance. After decades of experience he is beyond trying to please anyone; today he's been interviewed in El Pais and as usual he says interesting things about art and how to express it. I can't link to the original interview because it works by subscription.

P. Entonces, ese talento natural no basta...

R. No. El talento te lo tienes que buscar. Cuando vivía en Holanda, mis amigos se iban de discotecas cada fin de semana. Yo me quedaba estudiando. También iba a las discotecas, claro, pero menos. Los bailarines dejamos los estudios muy pronto y por eso tenemos que esforzarnos mucho más. Tenemos que prepararnos. Quizá tengo talento para la danza, pero lo más importante es que ese talento no se te escape. A veces es preferible la convicción al talento.

Q: So, natural talent is not enough...

A: No, it's not. Your talent is something you have to look for. When I was living in the Netherlands, my friends went clubbing every weekend. I stayed at home and studied. I went o the discos, of course, but not often. Dancers have to give up their studies soon and that's why we should work a lot harder. We have to get ready. I might have natural talent for dancing, but the most important thing is not letting that talent slip away from you. Sometimes, conviction is better than talent.

In Aberdeen (Scotland), daffodils are wild flowers, growing like weeds in unexpected places. I have seen them in a dumpster next to the railroad tracks. In Ithaca they are in the process of becoming wild, but it is still possible to guess where people planted them initially. They mostly bloom in polite lines along sidewalks, and they remind me of Aberdeen, making me homesick of a place where I never belonged.

Wordsworth’s famous daffodil poem, stereotypically Romantic, verges on Bécquer’s nauseating sentimentality. Even so, it supported me at one of the toughest times in my life. Here you have a bunch of pretty daffodils, because things are never as hard as they seem. Enjoy.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

This is the biggest problem of free verse; it doesn’t apply to (almost) anything else. Free verse seems easy, but it’s not, among other reasons because it doesn’t have rules. Mistake: it has one!

Read your poem aloud. If the line endings do not naturally correspond to pauses in syntax, intonation, or meaning, or if the lines’ length could be distributed in another way without hurting the meaning of the poem, you have not written a poem; you’ve raped and maimed a piece of poetic prose.

A “broken lines” effect is good, only as long as it is supposed to achieve a particular effect. T. S. Eliot, no less, said that “good verse can never be free” (I’m quoting from memory here, so I might be wrong). You don’t need to make lines coincide with grammatical phrases, but if you break rules, do it to improve the effect. I suggest an experiment: forget about the line endings, write or type the whole thing as a paragraph, and read it again. How does it sound? Good? Good! Welcome to the wonderful world of poetic prose. It didn’t have to be split into little bits to be beautiful, did it?

Poem by e. e. cummings, painting by René Magritte.

the hours rise up putting off stars and it is
dawn
into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems

on earth a candle is
extinguished the city
wakes
with a song upon her
mouth having death in her eyes

and it is dawn
the world
goes forth to murder dreams....

i see in the street where strong
men are digging bread
and i see the brutal faces of
people contented hideous hopeless cruel happy

and it is day,

in the mirror
i see a frail
man
dreaming
dreams
dreams in the mirror

and it
is dusk on earth

a candle is lighted
and it is dark.
the people are in their houses
the frail man is in his bed
the city

sleeps with death upon her mouth having a song in her eyes
the hours descend,
putting on stars....

in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems

Las horas se levantan apagando estrellas y
amanece
en la calle del cielo la luz camina esparciendo poemas

en la tierra una vela se
apaga la ciudad
despierta
con una canción en la
boca tiene la muerte en sus ojos

Y amanece
el mundo
sale a asesinar sueños...

Veo por las calles donde fuertes
hombres están cavando pan
y veo las caras brutales de
gente contenta horrible desesperada cruel feliz

y es de día,

en el espejo
veo un hombre
débil
soñando
sueños
sueños en el espejo

y está
anocheciendo en la tierra
se enciende una vela
y está oscuro.
la gente está en sus casas
el hombre débil está en la cama
la ciudad

duerme con la muerte en la boca tiene una canción en los ojos
Las horas caen,
encendiendo estrellas...

en la calle del cielo la noche camina esparciendo poemas.

There are a lot rares now that it's sunny, although I still see them occasionally. The knitters, sitting on benches, or waiting for the bus, or at the doors of professors on office hours. Filling dead time knitting. No, they are not little old ladies. They are Cornell students, young girls, making the most of the empty minutes between two classes.

Isn't that a great idea? I like to do things with my hands (embroidery, cooking, jewelry) but I never carry anything on me that I can do while waiting. My discman or a novel fills in that function. The first time I saw a knitting girl, I as suprised but then I thought it makes perfect sense. Let's see. It is a cheap hobby, it is portable, you choose for how long you want to do it (you cannot read three lines of a novel, stop, then read fine lines, stop...) and at the end you have something useful (you definitely need those hats and scarves in Ithaca).

Considering that a huge number of students at my home university are commuters, the surprising thing is that they don't do anything at all with their waiting time (up to three hours a day in my own experience). Oh, yes, they do something to keep their hands busy, sure. They smoke. Bleh.

I like to take part in a couple of literary message boards, and in one of them someone said recently "I'm not interested in erotic literature at all. Explicit or not explicit, good or bad. Sex should not be told or read, sex should be practised". This guy is mixing unrelated stuff.

Would we say, "don't read travel literature, travel instead!"? "Don't read love stories, find love!" "don't read murder mysteries, have adventures!" "don't read political literature, go out and be an activist!" Exactly. We don't normally say those things.

Some people think that erotica is written and read as a substitute or complement of sex; it may be so, but that is not its primary function. We could argue forever what is porn and what is erotica, but for artistic purposes, the pornographic function is to arouse sexually; erotica is art that happens to have sex as a theme. "Porn consumed for its artistic qualities rather than its arousing ones". My definition is 100% subjective: porn or erotica are only functions; they are not even qualities. According to my definition, Titanic the movie, for example, has a pornografic function, at least for some people.

So, this guy from the message board is wrong because he took erotica to have an exclusively pornographic function, while it is merely art with a sexual theme. Right?

A little announcement here. I'm very conservative with the right margin of the blog; now that there are a few changes here is a comment on it. So that you know why I link what I link.

First blogs, then useful things, then my other sites. If you are frustrated by the mixing of languages, don't worry, that is the way it is supposed to be. Comments in English for sites in English, and in Spanish for sites in Spanish.

Gapingvoid started as a cartoon website. Then it became a cartoon blog. Then it slowly became a marketing blog that sometimes posts cartoons. Its creator has some good ideas about making creativity compatible with making money.

La Vidriera Irrespetuosa es el blog de Zifra (se hace llamar como el personaje de Matrix). Es temático, más o menos; me interesa cuando habla de política, de educación laica, y de chistes frikis.

Carboanion es amiga mía. Se supone que su blog no es temático; habla de literatura, de manga, y de cosas que le sorprenden o le molestan.

Neil Gaiman is a wonderful writer. The function of his blog is to keep his fans informed of what is going on in his professional life; the blog is only a section inside his personal site, which has plenty of information about his books.

Eduardo Haro Tecglen pone todas sus columnas de prensa juntas en un blog. Aquí no hay nada que no se pueda leer en los periódicos.

Knickers in a knot is a very new blog about American politics, with an emphasis in feminism, reproductory rights, and education.

La Teatral es un portal con información y recursos sobre teatro, ya sea en España o en español. Creada por los organizadores de la Feria La Teatral de teatro de calle (no os la perdáis).

I don't want to have more than one link about Middle Eastern dance. It is next to impossible to find websites that are more informative than promotional. Morocco´s site is the closest I have found to a sit that explains what "bellydance" is, instead of just trying to sell you classes or DVDs. And I've had the privilege of seeing her lecture, teach, and dance, so I can efinitely recommend anything that comes with her name on it.


My Amazon Wish List once made a complete stranger give me a book she no longer wanted, so I like to keep it visible. You never know. My birthday is in December.

Nia's Jewelry is more a shop window than a shop. Now with photographs of some lovely Cornellians wearing my earrings, to give a better idea of how everything looks. My thanks to the models.

Los siete puentes
abrazando la ciudad,
a todos nosotros.

Our seven bridges
Hugging the city,
hugging us all.

The mantra goes:

Alamillo, Barqueta, Chapina, Triana, San Telmo, Delicias, Quinto Centenario.
A harp, a leap, a ship, a dance, a park, a road, a tower.
To Gran’s, to bars, to walk, way back, to class, to park, and trucks.

I think I’ve made myself very clear. If you know any towns where the North is to the left, of course.

I don’t like to have purely bilingual posts apart from poetry translations, but Book Day is special. Scroll down for the English version of this entry.

Mi madre siempre ha celebrado el día del libro como si fuera Navidad o el cumpleaños de un miembro honorario de la familia (la biblioteca, claro). Tengo recuerdos borrosos de Días del Libro cuando yo era muy, muy chica. Como mi madre salía del trabajo un par de horas antes de que mi hermano y yo saliéramos del colegio, iba al centro, compraba libros para ella y para nosotros, y al llegar a casa a comer era como una mañana de Reyes. Mis padres no nos hacían regalos fuera de ocasiones señaladas, y mi cumpleaños es casi en Navidad, así que esos libros eran aún más especiales por lo extraordinario de la ocasión.

Años más tarde, mi madre esperaba a la tarde del 23 de Abril o al fin de semana más cercano para llevarnos a mi hermano y a mí de librerías. Yo no devoraría libros como lo hago si no fuera por mi madre. Ahora nos recomendamos libros. Yo le digo cuáles de mis novelones victorianos le pueden gustar y ella me persiguió hasta que me leí Falsa Identidad de Sarah Waters. Que mi propia madre me dé a conocer a Sarah Waters es una buena medida de lo estupenda que es (¿cuántas madres recomiendan a sus hijas novelas de amor de escritoras lesbianas militantes?).

El sábado es el Día del Libro, y yo no voy a estar por aquí un par de días. ¿Qué le puedo recomendar hoy? Pienso en los autores que me gustan, descarto los que ya conoce, y los que no creo que sean de su estilo. Le gustó Caramelo (se lo leyó en español y le gustó tanto que me lo compró en inglés: me tiene malcriada), de una autora chicana que no recuerdo, así que allá van un par de frases de The House on Mango Street de Sandra Cisneros, también chicana:

Siempre nos dijeron que algún día nos mudaríamos a una casa, una casa de verdad que sería nuestra para siempre, y que no nos tendríamos que volver a mudar de año en año. Y nuestra casa tendría agua corriente y las tuberías funcionarían. Y por dentro habría escaleras de verdad, no para llegar a la casa, sino escaleras dentro de la casa, como en la tele. Y tendríamos un sótano y por lo menos tres cuartos de baño, para que cuando fuéramos a bañarnos no tuviéramos que avisar a todo el mundo. La casa sería blanca con árboles alrededor, un patio enorme y césped, pero sin verja. Papa hablaba de esta casa cuando tenía un billete de lotería, y Mama hablaba de la casa cuando nos contaba cuentos antes de ir a dormir.

^^^^^^^^^^^

My mother has always celebrated Book Day as if it was Christmas, or the birthday of an honorary family member (the library, that is). I have vague memories of Book Days when I was a wee child. My mother finished work about two hours before my brother and me finished school, so she would go shopping, buy loads of books for herself and for us, and when we got home it was just like Christmas morning. My parents never gave us presents outside special occasions, and my birthday is in December, so those books were more special because gifts were so rare.

Years later, my mother would wait until the late afternoon or until the weekend to take my brother and me book-shopping. I wouldn’t feed on books the way I do now without my mother’s influence. Now we recommend books to each other. I tell her which of my Victorian novels she’d enjoy and she kept insisting until I read Sarah Water’s Fingersmith, which is a good measure of my mom’s coolness (how many mothers recommend lesbian authors to their daughters?)

Book Day falls on Saturday this year and I’m not going to be around for the next couple of days. What can I recommend her today? I think of the authors I like, take out the ones she knows, and the ones that wouldn’t be her style. She likes Chicana writers (she read Caramelo in Spanish translation and got it in English for me, isn’t she a love?), so here it goes a little fragment of The House on Mango Street:

Thy always told us that one day we would move into a house, a real house with that would be ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each year. And our house would have running water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway stairs, but stairs inside like houses on TV. And we’d have a basement and at least three washrooms so when we took a bath we wouldn’t have to tell everybody. Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence. This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed.

What is a haiku? Some would say, “a haiku is a poem with seventeen syllables, 5-7-5”. Wrong! Bad! Okay, not bad. Just incomplete. My rules to write haiku are lax, and I will explain why with an example.

Sonnets. Petrarch invented (perfected?) the sonnet form in Italian. With a certain rhyme scheme, the famous “two quartets, two tercets” (4+4+3+3 = 14 lines) that Spanish readers will be familiar with. Later, when the sonnet was imported to England, after quite a lot of experimentation, the best English sonnetists figured out that a “three quartets, one couplet” (4+4+4+2 = 14 lines) structure fitted better into their language and thought. There is the Italian sonnet, and there’s the English sonnet. Not better, not worse.

That means that in Japanese a haiku is 5-7-5 and anything else is not a haiku, but in the Western world we have to make as good use as we can of languages that need more syllables to say anything (and Spanish words have on average twice as many syllables as English ones). So: first of all, a haiku in a Western language does not need to have 5-7-5 syllables. It can have more, it can have less. Say, between 14 and 21.

Now, the important bit: as a natural consequence of the Thereus Effect, a haiku in any language is NOT a haiku if it does not have some sort of natural division in syntax or meaning. At least one, maybe two, so that it can have between two and three lines.

Ezra Pound:
The apparition of those faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Two sentences. The image and the metaphor. One clear division.

Alan Spence:
First warmth of spring.
I feel as if
I have been asleep.

Two sentences. The cause and the feeling. One clear division. (I think lines 2 and 3 should be fused, but anyway).

An uncredited translation of a haiku by Issa:
Where there are humans
You’ll find flies
and Buddhas.

One sentence, but each line is one phrase, so there is no run-on effect. And each line in is violent thematic opposition with the other two.

Spanish writers of haiku, including excellent poets like Mario Benedetti, make a massacre of the form because they try so hard to fit into the 5-7-5 pattern that they sacrifice any other concern to it. A seventeen-syllable-long sentence broken into three chunks is as much as haiku as fourteen lines out of the phone book are a sonnet.

Without political literature there’d be no Iliad, Aristophanes, Plato, Milton or picaresque novel*. Denouncing injustice creatively (in fiction, in verse, in drama, in essays) is wonderful. But it’s probably the hardest genre of all because the risk of self-indulgence is higher than ever. Make sure that your ideals are not making up for bad writing. Boring, unoriginal, preachy, clichéd. Like Inga Muscio's A Declaracion of Independence, for example.

Some of the very worst poetry (and some writing, too) I’ve ever read was political, and a common mistake as big as plain bad writing is to tell how the poet feels towards an injustice. Who cares? Never assume that your reader shares your ideology. In fact, never assume that your reader is even familiar with the injustice you are reacting against. What all successful political creative writing does is either to describe the situation with a manipulative appearance of objectivity, or to give a call to action to people who haven’t realised yet of the urgency of the problem, or both. Think of “Blowing in the wind”.

*And without picaresque there would be no Fielding, and without Fielding no Jane Austen, and without Jane Austen the world would be a sad and dreary place.

If English is not your native language, you should know that "cunt" is the stronger swearword in the land and it means “a woman’s sexual organs” or “a person the speaker hates”. English, contrary to European Spanish, has some words so strong that very few people uses them, so no Spanish blasphemy can get close. Therefore, giving that word as a book's title, and including a brief explanation of why you prefer to use the word cunt instead of vagina, has a shock value that I cannot translate or understand.

I started reading Inga Muscio’s Cunt: A Declaration of Independence out of curiosity; I thought it would be a story of swearwords, of how perfectly ordinary words like huswyf (Old English for woman) degenerated into misogynistic ones like “hussy” (modern English to insult a woman). I forced myself to read it through because something so badly written, so full of stupid generalisations, of dangerous advice, and the occasional good joke, has a perverse appeal. Whatever you do, don’t read Cunt. It is a confused mix of opinions on issues such as contraception, abortion, prostitution, menstrual products, sex, rape and the like, that gives feminism a bad name.

Etiquetas: Muscio, feminism

I could have called the Pamphlet Effect “the Celaya effect”. I admire Celaya, his poetry and his ideas; the ones who make disasters are his disciples. He wrote this:

Maldigo la poesía concebida como un lujo
cultural por los neutrales
que, lavándose las manos, se desentienden y evaden.

I curse poetry understood as a luxury,
Culture in the hands of the neutrals,
Who look the other way, and get away, and flee.

He was defending the need of writing politically. Good for him.

Etiquetas: celaya, political, poetry

It was only a matter of time until the haikus blended with the culture shock and I started to write comedy of manners in verse. Wow.

Killed by your beauty,
Little tag hanging from my lips:
Coffee “or something”?

Tu belleza me ha matado.
Una etiquetita cuelga ahora de mis labios,
Y dice “Quedamos para tomar café, o algo?”

“Would you like us to go out some time?” is a date. “Would you like to go out for a coffee?” might be a date or might be friends going out together.

“D’you wanna g’ out for a coffee or s’mthin’?” is the last resource of the too shy to ask for a date, too impatient to wait to be asked, and too nervous to get a sentence straight without a tag hanging from it. I sincerely believe that asking people for a “coffee or something” brings bad luck.

I’d love to have an illustration for this one, something like a dead body lying on an autopsy table or a morgue with a sheet up to the shoulders and a tag hanging from the mouth instead of from a toe. Wow, I can be morbid sometimes.

Etiquetas: Coffee, commedy, of, manners

Well, I already knew (sorry, no sources that I remember) that Spain is the first country in the world for organ donations. We are a bunch of lovely generous people, we are. Today I have found out another surprising statistic: Spain is the second country in the world in international adoptions and foreign kids make up 80% of all our adoptions.

The first country in the world in the United States, which is a lot more multicultural than we are. An Asian-American family may adopt an Asian baby from Asia and go more or less unnoticed. International adoption in Spain means a couple of white people getting a darker baby. In my town, couples talking dark babies out for a walk are always received with coos and awwww and general praise. We think nothing can be cuter than that.

I wish people were equally open and friendly with the darker adults that ome to our country, but well, we'll get there eventually.

Etiquetas: Adoption, race

Spaniards mistrust their school system in general and in their higher education in particular. A Spanish man told me some time ago that “education isn’t appreciated in this country” (note to non-Spaniards: when we say “in this country” instead of “in Spain” we are implying that Spain compares badly with other Western, industrialised countries). Another Spanish man told me more recently “they’re your typical Spanish newly graduates, but they’re learning to do the job reasonably well”.

My impression after comparing the position of students in three countries is that Spanish education seems bad to us because it is so easily available. Getting an University education is cheap. Dirt cheap. All you need is to finish High School with reasonable grades and you are in. Being a public education system, it is the duty of the State to give a similar access to resources to all universities, so you have big and small colleges but you don’t have good and bad ones, prestigious and not prestigious. No one is going to employ Graduate A instead of Graduate B depending on the origin of their diploma. This means that people apply for the University that’s closest to home. Getting into some departments is occasionally hard, but that does not mean the department is prestigious, only that it is small.

I said that higher education is cheap. This is what I remember paying in my last years as an undergraduate; it’s just a memory so excuse mistakes and lack of sources.
-less than 600 euros a year in fees.
-probably 300 euros a year in textbooks.
-The scheduling makes it next to impossible to work and study at the same time, so I needed my family to support me economically.
-My fees for the first two years of graduate school add up to 400 euros.
Good. Sit down ‘cos there’s a sharp curve coming. Would you like to know the cost in fees (not the cost of living or books or anything: only the fees) of my year at Cornell?

30,000 dollars. Thirty thousand dollars. Si todavía estás contando en pesetas, cinco millones. You could get twelve and a half undergraduate degrees in Spain for the cost of one year at Cornell. Or seven and a half degrees plus textbooks

In Aberdeen University three years ago, fees cost 1,000 pounds a year, if I remember rightly. Considering the difference between the cost of living and the quality of life in Scotland and Spain, it meant that Aberdeen was about 30% more expensive that Seville, and the heaviest burden on the students were everyday expenses rather than the annual fees.

These are the words of Larry Chambers, director of financial aid at Ithaca College as quoted in Ithaca Times: “Families should begin to save for college costs as early as possible, literally when a child is born”.

Anyone who can afford to go to university in Spain gives it a try, including people who are just not meant to get higher education. I know girls in Social Sciences and Humanities who never read as a hobby. Students of History that call themselves atheists and give that as a reason not to learn the differences between different religions (but still wish to pass required courses on that material). Journalism students who do not read the newspapers. Foreign language students who have never travelled abroad. People with an aversion to speaking in public, getting trained to be teachers. Part of the reason for this is that we take for granted our right to start higher education, and that is fantastic; the problem is that some people misunderstand that with the right to get a degree. Laziness and apathy follow.

I don’t mean that people without resources make worse students, but that we cannot appreciate something that takes no effort at all to get. If you know since you are a wee child that going to University is a privilege that takes a lot of personal effort, you learn to value it. We like things that are hard to get, and we work hard to get them. I don’t want to suggest that it should be harder to get into our Universities: everyone should be able to do so, if that is what they really wish. Spaniards should understand that being able to get in does not mean being able to succeed: not by any stretch of the imagination.

Etiquetas: University, xenophilia