On Poetry and Culture Shock

I don't read much poetry lately. Real life is getting in the way. So I take my volume of "25 Young Spanish Poets" (edited in 2003) and I open it at random until I find a very short poem. I don´t especifically look for a haiku but that's what I find. The author is called Carmen Jodra.

¿Por qué sonríes?
Porque hay sol en las hojas.
¿Por qué sonríes?

Why do you smile?
Because there's sun on the leaves.
Why do you smile?

I don’t have the least idea of who this guy McGrath is. I bought a second-hand anthology of Scottish poetry just because it was Scottish, cheap, and it had a few Edwin Morgan poems. It has a card from the Finger Lakes Library System Central Library (that would be a quite big area in the north of New York State), showing that no one had ever borrowed the book; the card was stamped DISCARDED. Isn’t that a pity? There’s no way of saying whether anyone ever read the book, but still, never borrowed!

Tom McGrath, Night Songs. The small letters, including the “i”, are not typos.

I
to make poems
from bricks
cities
from words

either

a conversation
with a gutter
or a song
to sweep
the streets

i continue
to eat a lot
and sleep
too little

II
yes the madwoman screams
racialism
past my window

the drunk man shouts
that the bastard o'reilly
will tonight
be knifed

yes

the city sickens the heart

gutters do talk

contraceptives and rats

I should have read Mumford
or travelled more

III
the gutters of suburbia
say no more than whispers
behind curtains

the poetry of keyholes

IV
being in the city
i am a junkyard

V
i can continue
because
the night does

regardless

No, I don't mean the bridges that join two shores. I mean the excellent Spanish tradition of building bridges that join two holidays.

In Spain, if a holiday takes place on a Tuesday, people will do whatever they can to skip work on Monday. If Thursday is a holiday, people will avoid work on Friday. So: Thursday's a holiday, but Friday is a bridge. A bridge between Thursday and Saturday, of course. And we call that "building (or making) bridges".

It's not as bad as it sounds. Number one bridge builders are students at all levels, then teachers, then civil servants, and then everyone else. If you're not a teacher, your only way of making a bridge is to keep a few days out of your holidays to make yourself a long weekend here and there.

The best brigde of the year takes place this week. December 6th is Constitution Day, the anniversary of our Constitution. December 8th is a Catholic holiday. December 5th, 7th, and 9th may become bridges. And since this one is so long, some people don't call it a bridge: it's an aqueduct!

Two culture shock entries in a row, one about holidays and another about inefficiency. And then I will expect foreign people not to believe stereotypes about Southern Spain!

As I must have said before, Seville University doesn't have a library, but dozens. There are School Libraries, one for each different school of course, and then there are department libraries. A department is a section in a school: for example, the Medieval History dept in the History School, the Civil Law dept in the Law School, and so on. Not all departments have libraries. All university students can borrow books from all the school libraries, but you need to belong to a certain school to borrow books from department libraries. For example, that means that the books in the English dept library are for Languages students only. I could borrow books from the Psychology School library but not from any Psych department library.

This alone would be enough reason to be mad at the system. There's more. The English Dept Library catalog is online, but that's the only thing that is. I need a special library card that is useless in the rest of the university system. The books appear on the online catalog always as "available", because when they are borrowed, filing is manual. Yes. Little paper library cards on a cardboard box.

So. If you need a book from that library, you will have to go at an inconvenient hour (the library opeens three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, at times when the students are busiest). Wait to use the only computer that students are allowed to use. Find out the code of the book you already know you need: the online catalog doesn't have a keyword search AND students are not allowed to browse shelves. Once you know the code, the librarian will look for the book for you, if it hasn't been already taken. Then he will give you a slip of paper for each book, in which you will have to write the book's internal code, the number next to the barcode (even if the barcode system is a decoration until they get a barcode scanner), AND the book's title and author. Even though they have a file with your name and data and a library number, you have to write you name and phone number and Student ID number too. One slip per book.

Then, if you are an undergrad, you can borrow two books for a week, maximum (back in my last year as an undergrad, I had to work for professors that demanded three times as many sources quoted in an essay). I, as a grad student, can borrow the tremendous amount of five books for two weeks. And two weeks before Christmas holidays start, the librarian does not know if the holidays will automatically extend all late December borrowing until January 10th, or not.

Can someone remind me what was it that I liked about being a student at this University?

The first time I read this Mario Benedetti poem I was 18 or maybe 19, and I was very surprised to see a poem dedicated to someone who was specifically 28 years old. It is not a symbolic age for anything, as far as I know. At that point in my life, 28 sounded like a young age, but still, very far away from me. But of course, all birthdays (hopefully) come, and now I am 28, like the intriguing protagonist of this lovely poem.

COMO SIEMPRE 

Aunque hoy cumplas
trescientos treinta y seis meses
la matusalénica edad no se te nota cuando
en el instante en que vencen los crueles
entrás a averiguar la alegría del mundo
y mucho menos todavía se te nota
cuando volás gaviotamente sobre las fobias
o desarbolás los nudosos rencores

buena edad para cambiar estatutos y horóscopos
para que tu manantial mane amor sin miseria
para que te enfrentes al espejo que exige
y pienses que estás linda
y estés linda

casi no vale la pena desearte júbilos
y lealtades
ya que te van a rodear como ángeles o veleros

es obvio y comprensible
que las manzanas y los jazmines y
los cuidadores de autos y los ciclistas
y las hijas de los villeros
y los cachorros extraviados
y los bichitos de san antonio
y las cajas de fósforo
te consideren una de los suyos

de modo que desearte un feliz cumpleaños
podría ser tan injusto con tus felices
cumpledías

acordate de esta ley de tu vida

si hace algún tiempo fuiste desgraciada
eso también ayuda a que hoy se afirme
tu bienaventuranza

de todos modos para vos no es novedad
que el mundo
y yo
te queremos de veras

pero yo siempre un poquito más que el mundo.

AS USUAL

Even though today you are
three hundred and thirty months old
this venerable age is unnoticeable when
the instant cruel ones win
you go and discover the happiness of the world
and it is even less noticeable when
you fly seagully over phobias
or undo knotty grudges.

Good age to change laws and horoscopes
for your fountains to flow love without measure
for you to face the demanding mirror
and think you’re pretty
and be pretty.

It’s hardly worth it to wish you joys
and loyalties
because they are going to surround you like angels or ships

It is obvious and understandable
that apples and jasmine
and car-minders, and cyclers
and the daughter of farmers
and stray puppies
and ladybugs
and the boxes of matches
consider you one of them.

so to wish you a happy birthday
could be so unfair to your happy
everydays

Remember this law of your life

If you ever were miserable
that also helps to affirm 
your bliss

Anyway it’s not new to you that the world
and I
really love you

but I always love you a little bit more than the world.

I think this melancholic little thing still counts as haiku, even though it has four lines.

So free.
Not a poem in weeks.
Not a lover in months.
So empty.

Qué libre.
Semanas sin componer.
Meses sin un amante.
Qué vacío.

 For those of you who cares about the biographical, gossipy bit, I have many poem beginnings around the idea of how long ago I last wrote something I found satisfying. Those little poem seeds rarely grow into real poems. Everything in this one was written around the second line.

I don’t know if this is clever or creepy. Or both. I have been told a bit about a way in which Americans go into housing complexes for old people (whatever the politically correct denomination may be). I’m not sure I’m getting the details right, but this is the idea:

Old people sell their house to (or through) an insurance company, and that money is used to pay that type of housing for them, with assistance if needed. Like all insurance policies, it’s risky on both sides. If the old person takes many years to die, the insurance company invested more than it gets back. If they don’t take many years to die, the old people’s heirs have lost their claim on the house.

 
Elderly Spaniards rarely go into housing. It’s not part of our tradition because we rely more on the extended family, and it is very hard to find housing you can trust. In Europe, the idea is that the Government is responsible, either to provide housing or to watch private providers very closely, and every year you get the occasional horror story in the news about bad food or hygiene. Considering that the real estate market in Spain keeps putting up the prices and that young people are desperate to buy houses, this American scheme isn’t colder or more calculating than ordinary life insurance and it might be one possible solution to two Spanish problems. However, I don't see Spaniards trusting the idea. 

Grrrr. Blogia has destroyed my edited copy of a post in Zifra's blog with Christmas greetings and happy New Year wishes in several dozen languages. Anyway.

 I hope you don't have to be anywhere near a computer in the next three or four days. Celebrate whatever you feel like (I remember that curious little American Academese expression, "have a nice Winter Break" with lots of food and with everyone you love, and see you some time next week with more poetry (and occasional culture shock).

Today is Saint Stephen, which is an occasion as good as any other to talk about Stephen Dedalu, a self-parody of James Joyce with a starring role in his novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The Portrait tells Stephen's life from early childhood until he decides that, if he wants to be  An Artist, he needs to leave Ireland and go to Paris where all the cool Bohemian kids are.

Stephen's problem is that he tries too hard to be cool. The chronological end of his adventures, as far as Joyce wants to tell us, is that after he has gone back to Dublin and can barely survive on his teaching salary, he meets a truly nice and generous man, Leopold Bloom. Optimist readers may think that after this encounter, Stephen will go and live for free in Bloom's home, sorting out the older man's loneliness (Bloom lives with his wife, but to say they have a communication problem would be the understatement of the year), and the young man's housing problem.

What of Stephen as a poet? The narrator likes to be ambiguous and never tells us if Stephen is a good artist. All you get of his style is that he is or wants to be very complex. The only poem of Stephen's in the books is this one, included near the end of the Portrait. Critics say that with it, James Joyce wants to tease readers: we are predisposed to like or dislike the poem according to our like or dislike of Stephen and we always need someone to tell us that it is OK to like something. The professor that introduced me into the Portrait said that the poem is there to show that Stephen wants to be a rebel but will not succeed because he has chosen a poetic form, the villanelle, that is formally very demanding: putting form so far above content is not a good sign. I think the poem is just like Stephen: too complex, and it takes too long to say too little. But the most interesting thing about it, as I say, is not whether I like it or not, but the way it is placed near the end of a novel whose ongoing enigma, its tiny plot, is the question, "Will Stephen ever manage to be A Great Artist as he wishes to be?". Instead of having qa comfortable narrator that tells you yes or no, all you have is Stephen's poetry so that you have to make up your own mind about poor Stephen's artistic ability.

Ok, now, judge for yourselves.
 

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

What I'm going to say today is so commonplace I was doubting about posting it. Anyway, here it goes.

My computer,  a relatively new HP laptop,  is currently being repaired. For the year or so that I have had it, it has given me a great number of minor problems. Stuff that any PC user will be familiar with: programs that refuse to work today and work perfectly well tomorrow, a need to restart once in a while, mysterious error messages, and the like.

Yesterday I was telling the friend of a friend about this and about the relative pros and cons of the alternatives to Microsoft, which as far as I know, are Macintosh and Linux. Both have good and bad points. My acquaintance had used Linux, and he only knew about Macs what the average non-user knows. He disagreed with me on everything, because his PC hadn't suffered any major crashes in the last year or so (someone reminded him of a virus scare this summer). The end of the conversation was when I said this:

"I don't need anything special and I'm not asking much. All I want is a computer that works like my car."

Isn't that easy? My car stops when I brake. It turns when I turn the wheel. I don't understand how the motor works, but there is always a clear cause for anything that breaks. All buttons and pedals do what they are supposed to when I push them. My car is predictable.

Well, this guy's reaction was laughter. He started laughing and couldn't stop. The naïveté! The audacity! Someone who wants a reliable computer!  

Why does the average Microsoft user think that this guy's attitude is normal and mine isn't?