On Poetry and Culture Shock

Some time ago, I complained here because the most important theatre in my town looked old and neglected. I´m happy to say that in the time I have been away from Seville, the theatre has been painted and cleaned, and it looks great. It was about time!

I will continue with the series on how to use conversation rules as studied by linguistics,when writing dialogues in fiction.

THREE: Be relevant; be informative. I think this rule is the one we break most often. We change the subject when we want to talk about something different, or when we don’t want to answer a question. People who seem too talkative are often simply irrelevant: you get bored of listening to them, because what they say is not appropriate to the occasion.

In fiction that is not absolutely masterly, everyone gives straight answers,but we don’t do that in real life. If you use any instant messenger system, save and reread any longish conversation you have with a friend, and you’ll see what I mean. The uses of this maxim in fictional dialogue are endless. These are a few:

-Understatement: A person who doesn’t want to say something bad of someone else may point at an irrelevant good feature of that person. “Oh, but she has a beautiful smile”. You just don’t want to say she’s skinny and flat as an ironing board.

-Withholding information, like our ironic man of Maxim One (Be truthful). “What did you do today?” “Why do you want to know?”

-Characters that relate everything that happens to other people to themselves. Imagine three characters talking about a fourth person, who is sick, and one in the trio insists on describing his last illness, to get sympathy.

Swaying in the breeze,
Feather-leaved jacaranda:
it dreams it’s a bird.

La jacaranda de hojas plumosas
se mece en la brisa:
sueña que es un pájaro.

The Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina often tells that during his first trip to New York, he was having dinner with American friends at a posh restaurant and one of those children that can’t sit still, so they run from table to table, went straight to him. In a perfectly natural impulse, Muñoz Molina ruffled the wee boy’s hair. That caused a bit of a riot in the restaurant, the indignant mother of the child went to drag him back and the American friends of the writer told him NEVER to do something like that again. Rule One: do not touch American kids in case you’re mistaken for a kidnapper or something worse. I saw that rule being very true in Washington DC, but not in Ithaca.

Saving for that type of anomaly, I think there is an universal law that says that it is perfectly fine to talk to strangers under any circumstances if they have babies. Babies are a social magnet (hence the myth that men taking care of children are sexy: they seem more approachable). Like this one, see. I was using my laptop in a place with a wireless connection and plenty of children’s toys and here comes a woman with a toddler. Toddler’s age: old enough to walk without help, but not much older. Ten minutes later, the mother and I where talking about the baby’s age, her nationality, her husband’s job, the baby’s bilingualism…

Are you lonely and want to make friends? Borrow a baby and take it wherever you go!

I have been away all these days because my friend Martin has come to visit me all the way from Glasgow. These days, there has been time to face the so-called absence of real season of the South's climate , the joys of Javier Ruibal songs, and everything he finds culture-shocking about Spanish food (he'll eat squid but not tomatoes because he prefers food hot). He's going to be here for a few more days so we'll go back to the usual amount of poetry and culture shock in a week or so.

Specially for Martin, a poem out of the Glasgow Cycle, another one from Birds for all Seasons and another one from the Song for a River North to South. I will post the first two cycles sometime soon.

Sun coming through my eyelids,
Glaswegian kiss
As I lie on the grass.

El sol me atraviesa los párpados,
beso en Glasgow
tumbada en la hierba.


Swallows flying high.
Summer trickles down my back.
No one cools me down.

Las golondrinas vuelan alto.
El verano me gotea espalda abajo.
Nadie me relaja.

Los siete puentes
abrazando la ciudad,
a todos nosotros.

Our seven bridges
Hugging the city,
hugging us all.

Yesterday, after a couple of hours of wrestling through Spanish small-town traffic, I went to the beach. What I like best about the beach is people-watching. The one I went to is just outside the city of Cádiz, so there are more people from town on a day off than tourists, and everyone behaves as if they were in their living-room. Plenty of mobile phone conversations, the juicy gossip that you'd normally whisper amplified for the benefit of the neighbours. And everyone happily walking about in their underwear.

A month ago I went with some friends to Lake Owasco, and I was the only one out of four women with a bikini. Of course! I don't even own any one-piece swimsuits. One of my friends said, "In Europe the fashion police arrests people who wear one-pieces". A little bit exaggerated, but nearly true. Yesterday, all women except the very obese or pathologically shy were happily showing off tanned bellies.

The most surprising thing was not the absence of one-pieces in this family-oriented beach. What I would like to know is, why all the little girls, babies even, wear bikinis while so many women go topless?

The design of the jewelry site is as plain and simple as it's always been, but now the items are divided in categories according to colour availability (not all models come in all colours). And everything is numbered so that picking is easy.

If the prices seem surprisingly low, read this. Or simply, it's just that I like to keep them that way.

The Belly Dance Blog in Spanish has a few minor changes; all old posts will be recycled with more links, photos when available and more colour.

This is not exactly a case of comedy of manners, but I can’t resist the temptation to tell it.

There are fashion trends in the area that I live, that identify kids that are dangerous or want to appear to be so. Some time ago, “cani” (pronounce just like canny) just meant “a particular way of being tacky”; right now, a small group of people dressing as “canis” might beat up a stranger or set fire to a car for a laugh.

The other day, my cousin-and-friend Irene was waiting for the bus and she was approached by a little juvenile nightmare who couldn’t be more than ten. It doesn’t matter, knives don’t ask how old the owner is. Picture her trying to look the other way, and the little one asks her, “where are you going?”

“I’m going to work”

“Oh. I´m going to the swimming-pool”.

End of the small talk. A couple days later, they meet again, and the boy seems very happy to see her.

“Hi!”

“Hi”.

“Are you going to work again?”

“Sure”.

Big smile. “I see. Look, I don’t think I want to grow up, grown-ups are always going to work, they never take the bus to the swimming-pool”.

Leonard Cohen’s songs are sometimes cryptic, sometimes plain bad, and glorious the rest of the time. I think Suzanne from the song is a prostitute; there’s nothing in the lyrics that really says so, but that’s the impression I get. The original can be read here if you like; this is my translation, which fits the syllable count of the original if you want to sing it.

Susana te lleva
a su casa, en el río
Oyes los barcos pasar,
pasas la noche con ella.
Y aunque sabes que está loca
Nunca te querrías marchar
y te invita a té y naranjas
que han traído desde China.
Y cuando vas a decirle
que no tienes ná que darle
te coge por la cintura
y es el río el que contesta
que ella siempre te ha querido
Y quieres viajar con ella,
y quieres viajar cegado,
y sabes que en ti confía,
porque tú si la conoces
de verdad.

Y Jesús era un marino
Caminando sobre el agua
Y paso un tiempo mirando
En su torre solitaria
y cuando supo seguro
que le ven los que se ahogan
Dijo todos sois marinos,
navegando entre las olas
Pero él no duró mucho
Y el cielo se cayó encima
Perdido, casi humano,
Hundido bajo el peso
Del saber.
Y quieres viajar con él,
y quieres viajar cegado,
y sabes que en ti confía
porque tú si lo conoces de verdad.

The news today say that Andalucian people (that is the region that takes up the southern third of Spain) broke last year all records of family acceptance of organ donations. (link in Spanish) Only 14% of families say no to donations. The poem of the day, by e.e. cummings should be taken with lots of love a a bit of humour and it is dedicated to those families.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Llevo tu corazón conmigo (lo llevo en
mi corazón) nunca estoy sin él (a donde
yo vaya, vas tú, mi amor; y lo que sea que
yo haga sólo es gracias a ti, cariño)

Miedo
al destino no tengo (porque tú eres mi destino, dulzura) no necesito
el mundo (porque eres hermosa, mi mundo, mi fiel)
y es que tú eres lo que siempre ha significado la luna
y lo que siempre canta el sol eres tú.

Este es el secreto más profundo que nadie conoce
(esta es la raíz de la raíz y el brote del brote
y el cielo del cielo de un árbol llamado vida; que crece
más alto de lo que el alma pueda esperar o la mente esconder)
y esta es la maravilla que mantiene las estrellas separadas
Llevo tu corazón conmigo (lo llevo en mi corazón)

Snowflakes on your eyelashes.
Precious, wet diamonds.
Not at all like tears.

Copos de nieve en tus ojos.
Diamantes húmedos,
En nada se parecen a lágrimas.

Excusatio non petita, inculpatio manifesta is Latin for “Unasked apology, evident self-accusation”. I have a few poems or stories that are ironic because they work on that principle: if you need to say you are not in love, hey, I never asked you. I'm too deep inside this one to judge if I was successful, but the intention here was to show that the speaker is trying to ignore the pain of the person with snowy eyes.

When I was maybe eighteen or so, I saw a documentary called “When I’m 21”. It showed a handful of homeless Glaswegian teens telling why they were homeless, how was their life before, and what they would like to do either for their 21st birthday, or with their adult life. I knew that homeless children existed, but it was something I associated with the Third World and with much bigger towns. I had more surprises; most of the children were out in the streets because their parents had split up, and the parent with whom they had stayed had taken a new partner that didn’t get on with the kid, so the children either ran away or were thrown out (Spain is no paradise, but we still keep such tight concept of family that I’ve never heard of such a situation here). I also remember the documentary because the teenagers did their own voiceover and it was my first contact with any variety of English other than Standard British English or Standard American.

This is just an introduction to a poem by Langston Hughes.

Beggar Boy

What is there within this beggar lad
That I can neither hear nor feel nor see,
that I can neither know nor understand
And still calls to me?

Is not he but a shadow in the sun –
A bit of clay, brown, ugly, given life?
And yet he plays upon his flute a wild free tune
As if Fate had not bled him with her knife!


¿Qué tiene este niño mendigo
Que ni lo oigo, ni lo toco, ni lo veo,
que ni lo conozco ni lo entiendo
y aún así me llama?

¿Es que no es él más que una sombra al sol -
un cachito de arcilla, marrón, feo, dotado de vida?
Y aún así toca en su flauta una canción salvaje y libre,
¡como si el Destino no lo hubiera desangrado con su cuchillo!

One of my favourite bloggers (the link is in Spanish) is being naughty; he mentions anal sex in a blog entry just to say that he isn't going to be around much in the next few days. A bit of search engine magic later, he will have masses of people visiting his blog. Not that he needs them, but anyway. I discovered the power of porn words when I did a merciless review of Inga Muscio's Cunt and my readers tripled in a few days.

Well, now that I have lured you here with promises of free sex, porn and dirty words I'll give you something to read. This is one of my earliest poems; I had it printed on a red tank top and whenI'm at home, in Spain, no one realy notices what it says even though it is bilingual. A few weeks ago, when I was still living in the States, I wore it often and it made my male friends giggle.

I chew the brightness of pain with pleasure.
My body is full of you now.

Mastico la luminosidad del dolor con placer.
Ahora mi cuerpo está lleno de ti.

I was interviewed a few weeks ago by the great journalist Francisco Correal, whose commedy-of-manners style I admire so much that I've sometimes imitated it. We talked about my research on Dickens and gender violence, although haikus and belly dance get a mention.

If you want to read the interview (sorry foreign readers, it's in Spanish) you can find it here.

I have let too much time pass between each of my posts about the Maxims. Here you have the other three.

Grice Maxim number Four: Be brief; be informative. This does not mean “use few words”, it means “make all words mean something”. There are two extremes to break the rule: one is not providing information:

-“What did you do today?” “oh, nothing, the usual”.

And the extreme of giving lots of words and no information: tags, fillers. “Coletillas”. This is an easy way of making your characters sound different from each other and it was a favourite technique of Charles Dickens. Repetitions fall here too. Consider the difference between: “I can’t” and “I can’t, seriously, I just can’t”. Remember that we are talking about fiction: the one that talks like that is a character, not the narrator. Characters can do all sorts of things that the narrator isn’t supposed to do, like using the most trite phrases. Have a narrator saying: “As a matter of fact,” and you’ll kill the flow. Have a character say “As a matter of fact,” and you’ll be building up their personality.

Someone (I don't know who, and excuse the laziness) has deided that August 31st is Blog Day; If you type 3108 it looks vaguely like BlOg, I guess that's why. The initiative includes doing a blog entry on five new, small blogs, preferably out of our usual range of interests. I've done a quick search for blogs to which all the above applied; it's hard, because I wanted them to be good, interesting blogs, and there are far too many "private journal/rant" badly written blogs out there.

These are my picks.

Poetry on Demand is a very new site. I don't know if it will become a blog with regular entries or if the owner just thought that filling in blanks in blogspot.com was easier than building a traditional website. The blogger writes good poetry (rhymes and everything) and she has very reasonable prices for poetry for special occasions.

Clip Tip reviews music videoclips, and links you to sites where you can watch or download them.

I will go on with links in Spanish:

El País de Lancre está dedicado a la narrativa de su autora. No es nuevo (lleva escribiendo año y medio) y como no tiene contador no sé si tiene poco tráfico. No me gusta que escriba en beige-sobre-negro, pero los enlaces son puramente prácticos (no son los treinta blogs de sus amigas), y me gusta cómo escribe.

Laberinto Posmoderno parece uno de esos blogs que aunque sean "personales" y no "temáticos", están dedicados a que el autor proteste, un poco como el de Carboanión (aunque carboanion habla de muchas cosas). Está bien redactado, que para lo que hay ya es mucho, y no tiene demasiados colorines.

No puedo resistir la tentación de recordar que tengo un bebé blog, Sólo Cuando Bailo, que es, que yo sepa, el único blog en español sobre danza del vientre (o danza oriental), y la única web de cualquier clase en español informativa y no comercial sobre el tema.

So: poetry, music, fiction, rants, dance. I hope you enjoy the selection!