On Poetry and Culture Shock

Ah, the ambiguities of American law. I bought a portable CD and the warranty said: “This warranty does not cover … damage due to acts of God, accident, misuse, negligence, commercial use, or modification of…”

Since warranties are interpreted to mean fabrication defects and nothing else, and the are no mentions of terrorist attacks or natural disasters on the warranty, I take it that “acts of God” refers to that. What a quaint expression to find in a legal context!! In Law School we talked of caso fortuito (what cannot be foreseen) and fuerza mayor(what cannot be prevented), which are very dry, but certainly more descriptive and accurate. I wonder if in American law schools it is taught that “Acts of God” is just a metaphor for natural disasters, or whether someone could argue in court the literal interpretation that there is no God, and therefore whatever happened to the machine should be covered by the warranty.

Cream on my coffee.
Silver on his hands.
Who could give him all those rings?

Nata en mi café
Plata en sus manos.
¿Quién le habrá regalado todos esos anillos?

Venga, dímelo,
¿quién te regaló
todos esos anillos?

I’ll tell you a secret. I knew this guy that I didn’t fancy, the typical one that makes you think, yes, he IS cute, but he’s just not your style. He was very suntanned (not naturally dark: tanned) and he wore chunky silver rings. His hands were my muse for a while for poems that had nothing to do with my real feelings for him. At first flirty, I had to make the second Spanish version angry to fit into the cycle.

OK, this is a rant. Be warned. There it goes.

I hate porn. No, actually, hate is not the word. I find porn disgusting. Revolting.

I might be wrong thinking that the word would be a better place if the porn industry disappeared tomorrow (not, I’m not wrong, but this is just for the sake of argument). But things get to record peaks of hypocrisy when the local video rental calls its porn section “ADULT”. I’m copying an ad from the newspaper, and the caps were in the original: “Foreign, ADULT, Cult Classics, New Releases”.

Excuse me? If ADULT films are porn, what do we call the non-porn movies that are not suitable for kids? Besides, emphasizing its adult audience tries to deny both the fact that porn is ridiculously easy for teenagers to get and the existence of childhood pornography.

I would be less offended if the video rental announced a porn section. In capitals and red ink. At least that would be more honest, and truer to its meaning (after all, “pornography” means “description or depiction of prostitution”).

This September love is warm but rainy.
Your actions betray your words.

Este amor de Septiembre es cálido, pero lluvioso.
Tus acciones traicionan tus palabras.

Eres Septiembre,
La lluvia tras el calor.
¡Qué traicionero!

This is biographical, but not AUTObiographical. It sums up the feelings of a friend of mine for someone she used to date; she prefers the second Spanish version, I prefer the English one. Written on an unusually warm October.

I'm reciclyng the blog's oldest posts now that I'm leaving the country to get an extra, final dose of American culture shock. So if you've been here for long enough, this will sound familiar. There it goes.

Sometimes it is a bureaucratic nightmare out of Asterix’s Maddening House to be a Spaniard in the US because the person behind the counter, who is supposed to give you money or an ID card or permission for something important, cannot take the concept of the Spanish double surname.

My name is Eugenia Andino Lucas. You would have thought that means Nia A. Lucas, right? Wrong. It’s more like Nia Andino (L). Everyone in Spain has two last names. If your father is called Juan Pérez Casas and your mother is called María López Nevado, you will be called José Pérez López. As you see women never, ever, take their husbands names. And that is exactly the way it should be in the rest of the world.

So. Since having so many names is a bit long, most people drop the second (the mother’s) especially if the first one is not very common. Like, if you were called Anna Morningstar Smith you’d informally forget about the Smith. If it was the other way around, you’d always be Anna Smith Morningstar, because there are too many Anna Smiths. In normal conditions, I would drop the Lucas like I always do in Spain. But here, I have to fill in so much official paperwork that asks very clearly that I don’t drop a name or put a hyphen where there isn’t one, that I end up confusing every bank clerk and University administrative.

The immigration papers. The student card. The discount cards at the supermarkets. The bank. The credit card. Social security. Each time I have to use them someone goes “no, you’re not in the list”. I sigh and say that maybe they have filed me under one of the other two or three possible combinations.

It isn’t as bad as trying to get a Social Security number in the UK… no that I think about it, I’ll tell that story some other day.

I learnt your kisses by heart.
The memory of flowers on an empty vase.

Me aprendí de memoria tus besos.
El recuerdo de las flores en un jarrón vacío.

Memoricé tus besos.
Flores fantasmas,
Jarrón vacío.

Written during the same warm October as “September love”. An exercise on writing about feelings that I was very familiar with, but that I did not have at the moment.

Recycling posts in infernal bureaucracies together.... no one can say that I'm attacking America specifically, right?

In the UK, like in most civilised countries, some money is taken from your salary as an insurance for when you are retired or unemployed. Unemployment is high, and it is possible, but very hard, to survive when you’re on the dole. In Spain, fraud to this system is done by working without insurance and getting the dole at the same time. In the UK, fraud is a serious crime done by using several different identities and getting the dole for all on them. Since there isn’t a national ID card, just passports and driving licenses, adopting several identities was feasible a few years ago. Remember Trainspotting? The movie doesn’t make it very clear, but Renton and most of his friends lived on this fraud.

This means that nowadays, newborn babies are assigned a social security number automatically, and that if an adult requests one, like I did once, you have to go through an ordeal-by-paperwork. Getting a social security number is such a hassle that employers cannot refuse to give you a job because you don’t have one: they have to give you the job, and wait until you apply for the number. First you go to the Social Security office and someone fills a form for you. Then you get in the mail an appointment for an interview, asking you to bring every possible form of ID you have. I had: Passport, Spanish national ID card, My University’s student card, driving license, and a Spanish library card. They all had a photo on them. In the interview I was asked things like how many times I had ever been in the UK, what for, and if I could give contact details of several different people in town that could guarantee that the person there was actually Nia Andino and no one else. The interview lasted a couple of hours, and I know they checked the references because they called at my work on my free day. Wow.

The world spins around hot metal,
Not around the ice crystals inside me.

El mundo gira alrededor de metal al rojo,
Y no alrededor de los cristales de hielo dentro de mí.

El mundo gira.
El centro hierve.
Y yo soy fría.

I wanted to write a poem that said something like “the world doesn’t spin around me”. I fought with it for days. There was a song by the Spanish pop band Amaral that you could not avoid then, because it was on TV and on every radio station, and I was doing a class project with Amaral’s biggest fan. Amaral sucks, and I couldn’t escape the raspy voice of the singer whimpering She Was Nothing Without Me. But she sang that her world was small and there were little ice crystals in her heart. I tweaked a bit her words here and there, and they fitted. Voila. No one has spotted the allusion yet, which surprises me.

When I was getting ready to come to Cornell, I believed one of the most established Spanish stereotypes about Americans: they cannot put any other country in the world on a map (well, to be fair they can place Canada and Mexico) and they think Spain is a Third World country, probably in South America.

Ithaca and Cornell aren’t representative because everyone is highly educated, but I’m glad to tell Spanish readers the following:

-Everyone knows where Spain is. At least they are certain that it is in Europe.

-No one thinks Spain is a Third World country but they often assume that it is very, very conservative from their knowledge of Catholic countries.

Everyone in Spain knows a friend of a friend who had to explain that Spain is not to the south of Mexico, so I thought you’d like to know that is a bit exaggerated. What is true is that nearly everyone I have met had the assumption that Spain is a deeply Catholic country. Spain is a culturally catholic country, but hardly anyone at all goes to church, or believes in anything beyond a vague idea of God. Hardly no one takes reliion seriously. Many Americans are surprised when they find out that things like contraceptives and divorce are legal in Spain!

She has forgotten patience,
Her voice has a jagged edge.
It will make her bleed.

Se ha olvidado de tener paciencia.
Su voz tiene un borde de sierra.
La hará sangrar.

Si te recuerdo,
mi voz es tan cortante,
que me hace sangrar.

I have often written poems that were very obviously about me, simply changing all pronouns to She or Us. I have noticed in Cornell’s literary magazines that the tendency is the opposite: whatever these poets say, I don’t care if autobiographical or not, is in the first person about 80% of the time. It just doesn’t work for me that way.

So, I wrote the first poem, the one in English, in the spring. No romance there, just talking about trying unsuccessfully to be calmer. To finish the Spanish haiku cycle, I again put the love component into a poem that had nothing to do with it.

Using the simplest and most hostile of stereotypes, Spaniards think that Americans are extreme conservative worshippers of Mr. Money. The image is mostly correct, although they don’t get two details right. One, there is a reasonable minority of Americans that don’t fall in that category. Almost everyone in Ithaca, for example. Two, Spaniards have no idea of to what extent religion is important to American conservatives. That is, maybe, because we identify conservativism in religion with the historical oppression from the Catholic church. Since we know the majority of Americans are not Catholic and there is no established, visible, purely American religious hierarchy, we don’t put the two concepts together. It has surprised me greatly to see (never first hand, I repeat that Ithaca is a very liberal place so this is something I just hear about) that American conservatives are almost always religious fanatics. Religious here meaning normally Protestant.

The weirdest thing that they do is all the fuss about Creationism, that is, believing that life appeared on Earth all at once and that life forms don’t descend from more primitive ones. When I was at school, we learnt about Evolution when we were about 13 years old, from two different teachers: the Science teacher told us the basics and the History teacher put it in the context of other discoveries of the 19th century. There was a brief mention of the historical controversy over Genesis as a thing of the past, and that was all. No one, as far as I know, seriously doubts Evolution in Europe. No one knows that Creationism exists! So, sometimes news such as a Midwest State taking Evolution out of the High School textbooks is taken in Europe like a sort of Village of the Fools joke (like Irish jokes or Polish jokes or whoever plays the role of the Nation of Fools in your culture). Putting Creationism in textbooks is to us an equivalent to putting the Flat Earth theory or the existence of fairies.

No English translation this time, since the English original of these poems don't make sense as a history. You will find a paraphrase in English at the end.

Historia de un desamor en diez haikus:

Era un nadador,
Se convirtió en piraña.
Fue culpa mía.

La ternura ya ha muerto.
Cuerpos feroces,
Puro deseo.

Nieve y cielo azul.
Las rosas se han quemado.
No las cuidaste.

Venga, dímelo,
¿quién te regaló
todos esos anillos?

¿Me necesitas?
Sí, como el tigre;
Necesitas tu presa.

Eres Septiembre,
La lluvia tras el calor.
¡Qué traicionero!

Memoricé tus besos.
Flores fantasmas,
Jarrón vacío.

Beso a escondidas.
Cualquier hombre servía.
Yo lo negaba.

El mundo gira.
El centro hierve.
Y yo soy fría.

Si te recuerdo,
mi voz es tan cortante,
que me hace sangrar.

It's all the woman's voice or point of view. Guilt, loveless sex, four reproaches to the man, longing after it's definitely over, promiscuity with others, loneliness, hatred. The actual break-up doesn't have a haiku all for itself; it happens between haikus 6 and 7.

Yesterday I saw Mar Adentro (the Sea Inside) at last. Its structure, its rhythm, is very Hollywood-like. Not surprising, since more and more movies everywhere follow American mainstream conventions in other to be more commercial. The happy endings, the timing of the emotional scenes, and the like. But still, this one is in some aspects recognisable non-Hollywood. Beware: here be spoilers, but in any case Mar Adentro is not the sort of film in which you care what happens next.

If Mar Adentro was an American film....

- The protagonist would be played by Tom Hanks. The character would have spent in bed 20 years at the most, 7 less than the Spanish one, so that he can look attractively in his early forties. There would be plenty of flashbacks to his fully-clothed younger self.

- The three female leads would be impossibly attractive and they would all look as if they were in their late twenties.

- The fantasy scenes would be much longer and they would include female nudity.

- The protagonist's main caretaker would be his wife or a friend, NOT a family member, and her love for the protagonist would be sexual or at least ambiguous in nature (when the Spanish actress says "I love him like a son" there is zero ambiguity).

- The female lawyer would have a long scene for a nervous breakdown, with tears and plenty of close-ups of her face. She would be single, not married, and definitely not married to a guy who adores her.

In one word: if Mar Adentro was an American film, the female characters would be little puppets!

Some time ago, I went to see The Motorcycle Diaries at Cornell’s cinema. It is a movie that looks foreign, oh yes, it is filmed in Spanish and all that, but it is produced by Robert Redford, and it follows a typically American comedy structure: humour in an episodic plot with a tragic moment two thirds into the movie, the ending rising up in mood, hopeful and sentimental. A bit of love, a bit of adventure. Nothing new. But it was an educational experience to see this movie in a movie theatre surrounded by a very homogeneous crowd of Cornell students. Very young, racially diverse, and I assume that politically they were all on the lefty side of things: hey, this is hippy Ithaca and they had come to watch a biography of Che Guevara.

It is a comedy, sure, but I didn’t find it as funny as the audience did. During the first hour, they were laughing all the time. Hhmm, this is not funny. I mean, yes, it is a good comedy, but it’s not spectacular. The problem was that these kids and I were not watching the same movie. These kids have learnt the codes of American cinema much better than I have, and when they see anything else, it’s like when I read in French: it is a foreign language and you interpret it through a filter. And the American cinema premise they were using was that anyone who does not look like Gwyneth Paltrow or her brother is laughable, and the characters of this movie look definitely un-gwyneth-like.

Let’s see. We are slowly overcoming the black comedian stereotype. There is the fat comic character, or even the woman who is not fat but plays fat roles. There is the invisibility of women who look older than 30. Very simply, the code says that the function of characters that aren’t white, thin, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class and intelligent but not too intelligent is to give comic relief to the real protagonists (hey, Dickens worked on the same premise and here I am making a living out of his novels). I don’t think this necessarily shows racism or sexism from the audience or the producers. My problem is not with the Hollywood code; what I would hate is to wake up one morning and discover that the cinema of other parts of the world, including of course Spain, is happily exploiting the “different is laughable” rule. I'm afraid it is on its way.

This is my favourite poem or song about long-distance relationships.

While you are away,
my heart comes undone
Slowly unravels
in a ball of yarn
Devil collects it, with a grin
Our love in a ball of yarn
He’ll never return it,
So when you come back,
We’ll have to make new love.

Cuando te vas,
Mi corazón se deshace.
Se desenrolla,
Hecho un ovillo.
El Diablo lo coge con una sonrisa
Nuestro amor, hecho un ovillo.
No me lo va a devolver,
Así que cuando vuelvas,
Vamos a tener que hacer más amor.

This school year that I have passed at Cornell has been possible because I have received a fellowship, a salary, for the simple fact of being here. Being paid to be a student is partly great and partly really bad. I don't know if it is the same everywhere, but I was cultureshocked when knew that in this country, PhD students get paid. At last I could see come true my dream of being a professional student. Isn't that cool?

Well, not really. Because students gets paid in exchange of being "teaching assistants". That is, for teaching. So: undergrads pay ridiculous amounts of money to get to University. Here they are taught by people who are juggling doing courses, teaching courses, and their own research (which is the reason they went to grad school in the first place). And the PhD students are paid just about enough money to survive, to do what should be the professors' job.

I'm not part of that system because I'm here on an exchange program. Let's see. The students who are here to learn, not for research (undergrads, vets, architects, law students) came to Cornell because it is good and prestigious and they are willing to pay more than if they went to ABC State University. But I am one of the reasons why Cornell is expensive: those students are paying MY salary. As much as it benefits me, I don't think it's fair.

It would be different in a public education system: my fellowship would be paid by taxes, and at the same time, I would teach for little pay the kids of the people that pay taxes, not the kids of the people who can afford to pay a private education. A few years after that, when I get my PhD, I can get jobs with a much better pay, which means I have to start paying taxes. Hey, this sounds like something. Would it be so hard to establish in Spain a system for funding researchers that was halfway between the American and the Spanish ones?

Americans seem to love rags-to-riches stories: the stereotypical kid-from-a-trailer-park who conquers Hollywood or Manhattan turns on the colective American imagination.

I hate rags-to-riches stories because they focus on the luck on one individual instead of questioning what made them in rags in the first place. Hard as I try, I cannot think of any European celebrity ever explaining how they came out of the gutter. How they came from absolute obscurity, yes. But that’s it. Why is that so? Because of course there is desperate poverty on Europe, but:

one, not in American proportions (according to Barbara Ehrenreich, a third of workers here are below the poverty line, and that’s just the workers, then there’s their families, and then there's the unemployed),

and two, not in the same degree of defencelessness as Americans. Europeans have free or next to free healthcare. Much better public education than there is in the US. Free, next to free, or reasonably affordable (depends on the country) higher education; scholarships.

Europeans also have their stories of epic success. It’s just that statistically, people hardly ever start their way up the ladder as far down as Americans do. An American that comes out of the gutter has every reason to be proud, but her country has every reason to be ashamed.

(*) Europe is not paradise on earth, and to my knowledge there are four categories of people for whom life can be very tough: foreign immigrants, the elderly poor, the long-term unemployed especially if over 45-50, and university-level first-time job seekers.

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.

It is easier to write about desire than about its opposite. Peace of mind. Fulfilment. Happiness. There is nothing left to say after “And they lived happily for ever after”.

The classic Japanese haiku comes from Zen thought, and much of it takes the absence of desire as a premise. Years ago, when I had just started to write poems, the Elusive Poet (*) recited to me from memory one that was something close to “I chew the brightness of plain boiled rice”. I forgot the author, but I liked the synaesthesia. "Chew" corresponds to one sense and brightness to another; outside poetry, feelings aren’t sweet and flavours aren’t bright: that is synaesthesia. I thought the image was very powerful so I stole it for a haiku about fulfilment of desire, rather than its absence.

(*) The Elusive Poet talks about the fact that he writes but he hardly ever shows his work to anyone, hence the nick.

I should not blog about this, because the longer Spaniards don't know about it, the better.

The use of fillers or tags, that is, words or expressions that don't mean anything at all but act as a verbal tic, is a sign of poor vocabulary and a lazy mind. Fillers should be avoided like the plague. Even so, they are a necessity for the foreign language learner because when we are not perfectly fluent, the occasional tag gives us time to remember the next word. Many years ago, when my English started to be good enough to have a stuttering conversation, I even had a few lessons on hesitation tecniques. Back then, we knew nothing about the American "like"; I don't know if that "like" didn't exist yet, or if my teachers werre ignoring American English.

The American "like" reminds me a bit of the Spanish “o sea”. In normal conditions, "o sea" means "that is, which means, therefore". But now, together with “¿no?” (isn’t it?) and “¿sabes?” (you know), it is a very distinctive sign of posh young women's speech. If you're reading this from Spain, that's the closest comparison: las niñas pijas americanas meten "like" cada tres palabras.

Sometimes “like” means “kind of”, sometimes it means “approximately”, "around", "about", and sometimes, it means nothing at all. It is a grammatically wrong but semantically correct substitution of "as if". It often introduces someone else's reported speech. It looks clearer with an example: This blog is, like, thematic. I’ve been blogging for, like, seven months. A friend asked me, like, why I write in English instead of Spanish. See?

The worst and more dangerous thing about this very irritating verbal tic is that it is contagious! Spending too much time with like-abusers makes you talk like them even when you're making a conscious effort to speak properly.

Mi amor, tan bella,
No está hecha de versos.
Es imperfecta.

My lovely lady
Is not made out of verses.
And she’s not perfect.

The Spanish version goes first, because I composed it first. Exceptionally, both of them scan (if I’m maiming Shakespeare, I might as well do it with care).

No, it's not "I love Google". It's I google love. Let's sing the praises of Google, and its glorious incorporation into postmodern love.

Tien Tran from Cornell's MFA program in Creative Writing wrote this tiny beauty last autumn:

So I googled you.
I'm not obsessed I swear.

And a bit more than a year ago, I wrote:

Feeling fresh and new.
She thought she'd never need him.
Now she googles his name.

Un sentimiento nuevo.
Ella pensó que nunca lo necesitaría.
Y ahora busca en Google el nombre de él

No, it's not autobiographical. I've no idea if Tien's poem is or not, and I don't care. The point is not whether Tien or I are stalkers, but the fact that we could be if we wanted to, and also, that two poets with drastically different cultural backgrounds wrote such similar poems.

Google is here to change the way we deal with the end of any relationship. No ex-lover will ever be really, truly, definitely over and gone, because you know that if you wanted, you could just google for him (or her). And they never have to know about it, which is the best part.

Confess. You are dying to google someone's name right now. Go ahead.

This is just out of a cartoon, seriously. I bought a blender, and the box had a small sticker that said AN AMERICAN COMPANY. There is of course a little American flag on the sticker, too. I look in disbelief, turn the box upside down, and see something a lot more familiar, next to a New Jersey address:
Made and printed in China.

Heh heh. Is the average US shopper supposed to feel better by knowing that their grocery shopping is making someone from New Jersey a millionaire, while the actual work is done in the other side of the world?

On seconds thoughts, the blender's brand has a French-sounding name, and the fact that it is a sticker and not actually part of the box’s design makes me think that the company needed to clarify that they were not French at the time that France decided not to take part in the invasion of Irak, and some people threatened to boycott French products. Still, ridiculous.

Ginkgoes are beautiful trees. I love them since I was surprised by one in Aberdeen’s botanical gardens. They have perfectly elegant leaves, but the branches grow anarchically. A lot like free verse.

There are many ginkgoes in Collegetown and in the Cornell campus. There is also one in my garden at home, in Spain.

And this is dedicated to Stephanie; thank you for a beautiful day.

Along my streets,
The ginkgoes spread their branches.
They greet me, my friends,
Elegant ladies with fans.
Children throwing arms for hugs.

En estas calles mías
los ginkgos extienden sus ramas.
me saludan, estos amigos míos,
elegantes damas con abanicos,
niños que quieren abrazos.

I am still recycling the oldest posts, among other resons because in my last days in Ithaca I want to give extra doses of culture shock posts.

In Spain most hairdresser’s are called like the owner. A last name tends to indicate a man, while women use their first names. There are very few exceptions. Here in Ithaca there is another ongoing theme.

Hair A’ffayre (or some other horrible spelling). The Mane Event. Hair It Is.

Is there an end to the amount of very bad puns you can do about hair? And, does this happen in the whole country or just here?

I am still recycling the oldest posts, among other resons because in my last days in Ithaca I want to give extra doses of culture shock posts.

In Spain most hairdresser’s are called like the owner. A last name tends to indicate a man, while women use their first names. There are very few exceptions. Here in Ithaca there is another ongoing theme.

Hair A’ffayre (or some other horrible spelling). The Mane Event. Hair It Is.

Knickers told me that she knew of another one called Curl Up and Dye. Is there an end to the amount of very bad puns you can do about hair?

A very quick review: I have said before that all artists that stop to write a guide to creativity say “Art should be what I do”. And then I made my own manifesto, in negative form: things that any poet/writer should not do. This is my first try at positive, constructive theory, and it’s not “Art should be what I do” because I’m talking about dialogue, which isn’t a strong point with me. What I’m going to say is indebted to Juan Pablo Mora, professor at the University of Seville, and Robert Millar, professor at the University of Aberdeen, who made the very dry subject of Linguistics relevant to me.

When they teach you grammar in school, they teach you how to analyse isolated sentences. Grice and others realised that sentences are in connection with each other, and developed the analysis of those relations. That part of Linguistics is called Pragmatics. On the sentence level, when you write dialogue you may consider “Do people speak like this?” But then, you have to think of how they relate to each other. Example: Oliver Twist says “Please, sir, I want some more”. And because he is not supposed to ask for more, the action of the novel starts. Don Quijote is funny because he talks to ordinary people as if he was a character in one of his favourite novels. Here is where Grice comes in: he devised four rules that we all follow when we talk, unless we break them with a purpose. These maxims mean that your characters don’t need to talk straight and help you advance plot, but talk differently to help you show their personality. I’ll make one entry for each maxim so that you don’t fall asleep.

ONE: Be truthful. In human speech, lies can happen because the listener assumes the speaker is truthful, but this rule isn't only about lies. This rule means “Say what you mean”. Irony, exaggeration, and understatement break this rule. When a character ignores this rule in a coherent way, you can make them seem dry, detached but still with a sense of humour. “This guy knows more than he says he does”. Even if it’s just mild irony, your character is powerful because s/he knows the truth, but doesn’t say it.

Leaving Ithaca is a contradiction, we don’t leave Ithaca, we come back to it. But the truth is that I’m leaving Ithaca to go back home! It will necessarily bring changes to this blog, since there will probably be few chances for culture shock. I will pay more attention to my surroundings, and write comedy of manners about University life, and about Seville. And there’s always the poetry, of course.

So. I came to an Ivy League school to do research on domestic violence, and these are some of the things I ended up doing:

- I’ve learnt to bellydance. I have danced in public for a couple hundred people (not including the massive crowd that watched the Ithaca Parade).
- I have learnt tai-chi (although I gave up)
- I have gone vegan for weeks and months, and stayed healthy.
- I’ve eaten blue potatoes.
- I can make my own sushi.
- I’ve used the word “queer” in class and in an exam.
- I’ve used my knowledge of (Catholic) Canon Law in a term paper seven years after dropping out of Law School.
- I’ve studied Socio-Psychology.
- I’ve seen a Bollywood film, a Norwegian one, and a handful of African ones.
- I have visited Niagara Falls, Washington DC and New York City.
- It must have been love, but it’s over now.
- I have seen performances by Michel Camilo, Paul Winter, Eugene Friesen, Jessica Lange, Christian Slater, Balinese dances, a Filipino vaudeville show, a madman that performed (not recited: performed) Finnegans Wake, and also more bellydancers that I can remember.
- I’ve had my head shaved.
- I’ve survived Ithacan weather, including walking from East Hill to Greenstar during a snowstorm (that would take 50 minutes in good weather).
- I’ve taken a massage class (Swedish, Shiatsu and Thai).
- I’ve been a extra (an actress with one line, heh!) in a student film.
- I’ve gone tubing (because waterski looked too difficult).

Isn’t it a miracle that I also had time to do the work I came here for!?

I´m still reclycing old posts.

I have been told that this blog is anti-American, and it was not said as insult or praise, just as fact. I don’t intend it to be. If this was a political blog it would definitely be anti-American, but I’m trying to write comedy of manners, which is a lovely, mildly satirical genre that pokes fun at things instead of setting them on fire, so you see the absurdity of everyday life. It is only for fun after all. Anyway, to show that I am not particularly anti-American I’ll tell you of Seville’s most hated absurdity (most hated by me, at least)

I know people from different cultures that think that theirs is the only one is the world to do something unpleasant. For example, many nationalities think they are the most unpunctual one. So, I don’t know if this will be characteristic of anyone else. I am talking about the inhabitants of Seville’s habit of saying “A ver si quedamos”: let’s meet some time. “Quedar” means “to meet, to go out, to make arrangements to meet in the future, to have a date”.

You know this person, someone who isn’t your friend. Maybe they used to be. You meet them by chance on the streets, or something like that, and just like anywhere else in the world you stop for a minute and catch up on how they are. And if you are in Seville, Spain, one of you will say goodbye by saying “well, we have to meet again some time soon”. No one makes a mention of when you’re free or makes sure of how you can be contacted.

When someone from Seville says they’d love to meet me again and they don’t immediately suggest a time, a place, a plan, and make sure my mobile is still the same number, I know they don’t have the least intention of calling. Everyone hates being told “let’s meet”. Everyone says it anyway. Dammmmm it, even I say it, whenever I can’t say “I’m glad to see you” with a straight face. Besides, I spend so much time away from Seville that indulging in very Seville-like vices reassures me that I still belong there.

Some people from the South with spontaneous, warm behaviour think that people from the North, who are apparently colder and more distant, are more sincere in their personal relationships. Less smiles, more real care. Seville’s art of the “oh, yes, we have to meet” hypocrisy seems to prove it. Does anyone disagree?

Arvind said that this blog is anti-American and I already explained it's not. Then he said, in his teasing, Arvindish way, that I stereotype people. I don’t, I just like to write comedy of manners, which is a genre that I love to read. Picky professors would say that I should be more specific: it’s either novels of manners, or comedy of manners when it’s in a play. Since there are “blogs of manners” and “films of manners”, better stick to a single label.

Whatever its name, it is the lovechild of poetry and culture shock (I didn’t realise initially, when I named the blog). It is the place where fiction meets Sociology. In a novel of manners, customs and habits are important because they are used for characterisation. It is often associated with 19th century novels about the upper-middle class, but it is practised still: if you read a book in which you can infer a character’s social background and personality by the brand of his car and the make of his clothes, that’s comedy of manners. The first example (as of so many things) is Don Quixote: the very first paragraph describes Alonso Quijano’s lifestyle, what he ate, what he enjoyed, his possessions, so nowadays we need an edition with footnotes to explain that when it says “his table had rather more beef than mutton” it meant he wasn’t poor but he was definitely not rich. The best writer ever in this genre, with Cervantes’s permission, was Jane Austen, who started a novel saying:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.

Is this true? Is it a universal truth? Well, my friend Jane goes to describe through three pages of dialogue a mother who thinks that her new single neighbour should be introduced to her daughters, now. Is that stereotyping? Maybe. Is that true? Probably. Is it fun? Absolutely. The success of comedy of manners is that it can satirise without pain. Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, Arturo Pérez Reverte or Michael Moore (did I just name the Four Horsemen of Doomsday?) prefer satire: to take a flamethrower and setting the monster on fire. Comedy of manners is more gentle, more delicate, and tickles the monster so that you laugh at him. Beats a flamethrower any day.

I willcontinue with the series of recommendations on how to apply Grice´s Maxims to the composition of dialogues in fiction. Grie's Maxims are four rules that we all follow (and expect others to follow!) in conversation.

Maxim 2 is: Be polite. This is culture-bound. For example, Americans say “Have a nice day” as a standard form of goodbye and it sounds terribly phoney to foreigners (it is impossible to translate into Spanish, it just doesn’t sound credible). Your characters can skip courtesy formulas, or overdo them. In Jane Austen’s Emma there’s a spinster that Emma considers an awful bore, and you get the impression that the poor old lady never stops speaking, but her problem is that she is overpolite, thanking people over and over again. At the other end, consider the power of someone walking in a room and starting to talk without saying hello: there will be a hostility plain to your reader. Agressiveness can be communicated like that, discreetly.

Politeness includes not interrupting people, and letting them speak. If you want a character to be overenthusiastic, rude, violent, anxious, or something like that, they can cut everyone else in the middle of a sentence.

When I´m away from home for a long period, I miss terribly my copy of Alan Spence's Seasons of the heart, a collection of haikus that goes through the seasons of the year. The weather and the constant references to the beach and the sea make me think it was composed in Aberdeen. Maybe that is why it has very few summer poems, and not a single one of them is dedicated to really warm weather. It is never hot in Aberdeen.

Looking carefully through the volume, I´ve selected two summery poems. Enjoy.

summer evening -
through the open window,
an old song.

A sweet peach
but the last bite
is bitter.

Noche de verano -
por la ventana abierta,
una vieja canción.

Un melocotón dulce
pero el último mordisco
es amargo.

No poetry today. This is not a personal, diary-type blog, but this questionnaire in Suskiin's blog is amusing.

If I was....

* A month, I'd be December. Because my birthday, and my favourite Holiday, which is Christmas, are near the end of the month.
* A day, I´d be Tuesday, or the day two days after a holiday. Full of energy and activity, but without the slowness and sadness of Mondays.
* A time of day, I´d be lunchtime. No doubt about it.
* A planet, I´d be Jupiter. A failed star.
* an animal, I´de be a tiger when I want to be alone and a penguin when I need lots of people around me.
* a piece of furniture, I´de be a bed. The bed of someone who likes to read and eat and talk on the phone in bed, a bed that doubles as sofa in the rare occasions noone lies down under the covers.
* a liquid I´d be... tea. Darjeeling, preferably.
* a musical instrument, I'd be hopefully a tabla or similar. A North-African percussion instrument.
* a feeling I'd be impatience.
* a food or meal I'd be curry with fruit in it. So much chili it makes you cry but enough sweetness to be nice. I hope.
* a number, I'd be 17. the number of syllables in a haiku.
* a body part, I´d be the tongue.
* a scent, I´d be cinammon.
* a geometrical shape, I'd be an oval.
* a country, I'd be... phew, no idea. Spain most likely.
* A poet, I'd be... I am a poet already.
* a movie, I'd be The Age of Innocence. I have never been in a love triangle like that, but my life feels a lot like that movie.
* somebody else I'd be... who knows?
* a plant or flower I'd be... something with red flowers. Hibiscus, maybe.

I have reorganised my library to set apart the poetry. I have about thirty books of poetry that are only mine (meaning that they don’t belong, even nominally, to other members of the family). They are a mixture of the bought-for-class, gifts, and my own choices, but the collection seems coherent as a carefully curated museum exhibition; a curious time traveller from the 31th Century could see my collection and have a have a very good idea of what sort of poetry mattered a millennia before.

I have a preference for complete works in a single volume (one third of my books are like that). It’s easy to see things are divided in three clear groups: English classics with a preference for Shakespeare and Romanticism (the Muses spent too much talent inspiring Keats, and then Spanish Romanticism was stuck with the awful, lousy, embarrassing Bécquer: it’s NOT fair). Modernism and free verse in any language (Spanish anthologies, Pedro Salinas, Adrienne Rich, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, e. e. cummings, Edwin Morgan, Alan Spence, T. S. Eliot, Bukowski). Haikus and other Japanese or Chinese poetry (Issa, Shiki, Zhang Kejiu, Li Po, Alan Spence, Sei Shonagon, anthologies without end)

I don’t particularly enjoy that my poetic vocabulary and artistic loves are so far away from my own culture. Sometimes I wish I could express myself fully in one language and one mode, instead of groping my way in the darkness of two different languages. But that would mean to choose Spanish only, and Spanish has very little excellent free verse so it is not enough for inspiration. And as I have said before, unrhymed poetry in Spanish that is not free verse is extremely rare. Unrhymed, non-free verse being my favourite metric pattern, I will have to keep finding my way in two languages and borrowing stanzas from any other that catches my attention.

The Deconstructionist critic Barbara Johnson has the theory of “the difference within”. She suggests that when Group A assigns characteristics to a Group B as defines itself as different to it, as it happens in racism or sexism, Group A is trying to exorcise its own fears about not being always coherent and unchangeable. Unable to accept “the difference within”, Group A constructs “the difference with”. That is how stereotypes are born; for example, if a society wants to see itself as controlling over its feelings, calm, responsible and hardworking, it tries to see itself in the mirror on another culture to which the opposite features can be attributed.

“Passionate” is shorthand for the stereotyping of, erm, people who speak Spanish as a first language, either South American or Spaniards (I’ll say it again: Spaniards are not Latinos). I don’t like stereotypes, and I don’t like things that belong in different categories to be put together, and I don’t like the current American stereotype on “Latinos”.

What the hell does passionate mean? Sometimes it applies to love, and we are back at the Latin Lover myth, which is every bit as racist as the Asian-woman-as-pleasure-giving-submissive-geisha myth. Sometimes it means we get very easily carried away by our feelings, and then it is extremely condescending. Besides, it shows poor vocabulary and a lazy train of thought. Say that I am enthusiastic, opinionated, extrovert, expressive, emotional, quick-tempered. Just by a lucky coincidence, I am all those things. I am not “passionate”. That label is so overused it doesn’t mean anything any more.

There is also the idea that Spanish-speakers share one culture. We don’t really, no more than English or French speakers worldwide do. Someone from León shares with someone from Venezuela as much as someone from Yorkshire would have in common with someone from Seattle.

And the funniest thing of all is that when I was living in the US, and to a lesser extent when I was living in Scotland, the locals tried to see in me the features they expect in their idea of a Spaniard/Latina. But when I am at home, I don't really fit in easily. A number of personal traits I won't go into make me very different from the Southern-Spanish stereotype on ourselves!

It is a relief that after one week at home, shuffling my books and reading half a page out of at least ten or fifteen of them in five days, I’ve composed my first back-home poem.

Hojas caídas,
se parecen a lápidas.
La acera llora.

The fallen leaves,
resembling tombstones.
the sidewalk weeps.

It is my first haiku in three months! It wasn’t a real, scary writer’s block, only the need to be in familiar surroundings so that I could process a feeling that had been sitting there for very long.

For anybody interested in the gossipy, autobiographical bit: I’m thinking of dull brown autumn leaves in Seville, not bright red Ithacan leaves. The tombstones are the ones in St Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen (North Campus), whose grounds weren’t very well kept. The feeling is not simply sadness, but mourning.

I have just seen an Irish short film on Sonnie Murphy, an Irish athlete from the early 20th century. He died young, but inspired other Irish men to practise long-distance running. The movie made evident a point in which American and British-style filmmaking are different.

Everyone loves a story of personal achievement. We all love to see Scrooge reformed, the underdog vindicated, or the Ugly Duckling transformed. In American-style movies, the achiever is some sort of Chosen One. I’m thinking of Jerry Maguire, Shine, Good Will Hunting, Finding Rochester, Save the Last Dance. Sometimes there is a godlike figure, a mentor. Sometimes there is a blindly worshipping wife/girlfriend (mind you, no blindly worshipping boyfriend or husband, ever). What is always clear is that the protagonist has to fight alone against The System, against society, although the same people that scorned him will quickly become his fans as soon as it is clear that he is A Winner. The Chosen One transcends earthly limitations. The alternative is failure, being labelled as A Loser (booo, baaaad).

The British-style movie is a bit different. In it, the protagonist will have community support; the fight is partly against The System and partly against the protagonist’s own limitations. I’m thinking of The Commitments, The Van, Brassed Off, Billy Elliot (only to an extent), Little Voice, and superhero movies. The British-style achievement movie will include a scene in which the whole community sides with the hero in making some sort of collective effort to help him (for example, collecting money so that s/he can go to a far away competition). And someone will always tell the hero, “we need you to do this so that we feel special, so that we have a reason to be excited”. The hero’s community transcends mediocrity through him. The alternative is not being a loser: it is boredom, predictability. Eventual success is irrelevant; the important thing is to have tried.

Some British movies are done in the American mould. Bend It Like Beckham is one: the protagonist is a Chosen One, in need to fight against The System symbolised by her parents, who give in when she proves to be a star. Billy Elliot is halfway between the two schools: Billy is The Chosen One, even from birth, and he has to fight against the system, symbolised by his family, ad there is a mentor-figure, but his success is important for the community that eventually gives him support, and the problem is not Success vs. Failure, but the satisfaction of following one's true calling vs. apathy. Neither model is superior to the other (they are like all formulas: good if used skilfully) but I think moviegoers benefit from the existence of as many ways as possible of constructing stories.

Hugh has had a sudden attack of niceguyness and he has created a wiki for bloggers to advertise whatever they please. Isn´t he great? He sees it as a way of letting the little bloggers (example: me) be known without the need of being linked by the bigger bloggers. I don´t see it like that; if people connect through Hugh's wiki they still need him. Anyway.

I cannot let the opportunity go to remind the world that I make really cute, original, good quality, colourful jewelry, using primarily coloured glass, Murano glass, and semiprecious stones. And now that I have moved back to Spain, I face again the conflict about the prices. It´s simple: the sort of stuff I do, exact same quality, can easily cost three times as much, if you are stupid enough to look in the wrong shop. But in my town there is a tradition of independent, occasional designers who maybe go to a crafts market once a year and spend the rest of the time selling just to friends, and the competition keeps the prices low. In the year that I have lived in Ithaca, NY, I took a look at the local shops and I saw that the only sensible thing to do was to double my prices. Now that I am back at home, I have to cut them in half again. My American prices are too high for my town.

I still have the online shop. So, what do I do? Do I keep an online price and a lower real-world price? What if an online price that's too low discourages prospective buyers? Even so, I think that having two prices isn't fair. So, it´s going to be a single price for everyone, reasonable low for my area and wonderfully cheap for everyone else.

Now that you know everything there is to know about the pricing, you can go to the jewelry website and choose a pair of earrings, or two, or three.

This is a perfect example of the attitude towards traffic regulations in the small towns of Southern Spain. It happened to me yesterday just as I tell it, I swear it’s true.

I ask a small group of old women for directions.

ME: Can you tell me the way to F Street?
Old Woman 1: You have to turn right, and then….
Me: (seeing the Must Turn Left sign): I can’t turn to the right.
Old Woman 1: But you have to, if you want to go to F Street!
Me: Have you seen the sign?
Old Woman 1: But everyone ignores that sign!
Old Woman 2 to Old Woman 1: Yeah, but she (meaning me) is new in town.

Who does Knickers think she is!? She has given me homework! What a nerve!

"List ten songs that you are currently digging...it doesn't matter what genre they are from, whether they have words, or even if they're no good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying right now. Post these instructions, the artists, and the ten songs in your blog. Then tag five other people to see what they're listening to."

I´ve been listening to three types of music lately: driving music, African music, and bellydancing music. So there we go:

Shukran Bamba - Youssou N'Dour.
Mupepe - Zap Mama
When you're gone -The Cranberries. Yes, it´s embarrasing. But I need to sing along when I drive, right?
Nil Si i Gra - Capercaillie.
Drive - R.E.M. I experiment, I go to Africa and China and anywhere in between, I learn new things but R.E.M. and Automatic For The People are home, and I like to come back home after exploring.
Nar- Hakim. Hip-drops forever!
The Wild Goose - Kate Rusby. I need to write a short story based on its lyrics.
Oran Marseille- Khaled.
How it Got There -Martyn Bennet.

Yesterday I told my friend Lino about the existence of Queer Studies and Gender Studies departments in American Universities. He was culture-shocked, which is unsurprising. Not to repeat myself more than necessary, my opinion on the existence of Queer Studies is on a very difficult balance between two dilemmas:

=>One: The difference between studying someone because they are excellent (and they also happen to be queer), or to study someone because they are queer (who the hell cares if Mary Dorcey is a lesbian? her poems are unoriginal and mediocre).

=> Two: Giving too much importance to the reflection that an artist's sexual orientation has on their work (Michelangelo was inspired by the gods, period), or ignoring it when it's actually relevant.

In any case, dedicated to Lino, here is a photo from Robert Mapplethorpe and an extract from Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. The translation, as usual, is mine.

THE SKIN IS COMPOSED OF TWO MAIN PARTS: THE DERMIS AND THE EPIDERMIS.

Odd to think that the piece of you that I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palm of your hands and the soles of your feet. Your sepulchral body, offered to me in the past tense, protects your soft centre from the intrusions of the outside world. I am one such intrusion, stroking you with necrophiliac obsession, loving the shell laid out before me.

LA PIEL SE COMPONE DE DOS PARTES PRINCIPALES: LA DERMIS Y LA EPIDERMIS.

Qué raro es que la parte de ti que mejor conozco ya esté muerta. Las células en la superficie de la piel son finas y planas, y no tienen vasos sanguíneos ni terminaciones nerviosas. Células muertas, en una capa más gruesa en la palma de las manos y en la planta de los pies. Tu cuerpo sepulcral, que me ofreces en pretérito, protege tu centro blando de las invasiones del mundo exterior. Yo soy una de esas invasiones, acariciándote con obsesión necrofílica, amando la concha que se extiende ante mí.

The Spanish Constitution says that we don’t have an official religion but that the government may take measures to acknowledge the social importance of individual religions (read the Spanish original of the 16 article here). That is a lot more lax, and also a lot easier to interpret, than the American First Amendment, but in practice it means that the Catholic church is present in public life in a degree that many people find unacceptable. Since we are still a very homogeneous country racially and culturally, it is normally understood that the only alternative to Catholicism is laicism or atheism. Since religion is still present in the national school system, kids in school choose either Religion (meaning Catholicism) or a secular alternative. People elected for public office have a choice: swearing on the Bible or promising on the Constitution. One of these days there might be other books or religious objects on that table next to the other two books, but that will not happen soon. Not before a decade, is my guess.

That is why there is an office at Seville University, in the same building as my department, with a sign that says: “Department of Religious Assistance to the University Community”. Guess what? According to that sign, “religious” only means Catholic. It makes me itchy, sore and angry to pass by that door knowing that we have such a shortage of classrooms and that the biggest of the two cafés in the building closed down three years ago to make room for professors’ offices. And what’s worse: after having worked at that building for nine years, I haven’t seen them organise any activity apart from daily mass at lunchtime. I have no idea of what else they do, and people who don’t study in the Humanities building don’t know this office exists.

In my year in Aberdeen, I saw that the Chaplaincy was different. The University chaplain belonged to the Church of Scotland (I think) but there were several multi-purpose rooms, there were services for different denominations and it worked as a referral service too. Nice. And here at Cornell there is the Annabel Taylor Building. I could not believe my eyes when I saw what was going on. About fifteen different religions, sharing a building, each one with one or more chaplains. On Sundays there is a mad rush as each Christian denomination takes turns to use the chapel; the building houses other activities on other days of the week, including AA meetings and zen meditation. And everyone seems to get on well.

When I told my brother about it, he said Spaniards should see that sort of thing to stop thinking our culture is the centre of the universe; and those are big words coming from my favourite atheist. Seeing the difference between the universities of Aberdeen, Cornell and Seville, and the very different roles religion has in them, I am even more convinced that the Office for Religious Assistance should be dissolved and make room for more useful things. A new café, for example. I wouldn't mind being the Dean to do so, heh heh.

(Titular de la Gaceta Universitaria, año 2015: El SARUS cierra para dejar espacio al nuevo bar de Filología. Obispo de turno: “La Decana ha declarado la guerra al bienestar espiritual de sus alumnos”.)

This is an announcement of my new blog on belly dance, which will be fully in Spanish, so I will go on in that language.

Hace algunos meses asistí a un curso intensivo de danza oriental. 15 horas de talleres y dos espectáculos de más de dos horas, en dos días. Allí conocí a una chica que llevaba aprendiendo danza del vientre un poco más de tiempo que yo, y que me dijo que era profesora de principiantes en una academia. También me contó que su nivel no era lo bastante bueno como para actuar en público, especialmente delante de gente tan experta como algunas de las asistentes al curso. Aquello me escandalizó, porque me di cuenta de que cualquiera puede poner un cartel en la puerta y autoproclamarse profesora de danza oriental. En Occidente, las estudiantes novatas no tienen con qué comparar a su profesora. En España, al meos en las partes del país donde se baila flamenco, alguien interesado sí puede comparar, pero con la danza oriental hay un desconocimiento peligroso. Una mala profesora te puede transmitir sus defectos, hacerte pensar que no se te da bien cuando se trate de un problema de método o de estilo, y lo peor de todo, puede provocarte lesiones serias de espalda o de rodillas.

Por otra parte, está la reputación de la mal llamada danza del vientre y de quienes la practican. Por ejemplo, una búsqueda Google de las palabras "danza del vientre" y el nombre de mi ciudad (no voy a dar los datos exactos para no dar publicidad a esta persona) conduce al anuncio de alguien que practica strip-teases en despedidas de soltero. No tengo por qué dudar de la calidad técnica de esa bailarina, pero no me da la gana de limitar a eso este baile, que puede ser un arte tan digno y expresivo como el ballet clásico en las manos adecuadas.

Lo que quiero es que la próxima vez que alguien meta en Google "danza del vientre", no se encuentren el horario de una academia que no explica si la profesora practica baile turco, egipcio, a la americana, folk o cabaré, o un poco de todo. Ni un anuncio de striptease. Quiero que se encuentren información. Así que como nadie está dando información sin intentar vender algo, daré esa información yo. Se admiten co-escritor@s.

Señoras y señores, bienvenidos a Sólo Cuando Bailo, la única bitacora informativa sobre danza oriental.