Hunger

My beloved Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett once co-wrote a novel, Good Omens, in which the Four Horsemen of Doomsday were:

A young, very attractive war reporter.

Your average skeleton in a cloak. 

A young boy who seemed to atract disaster (Pollution took over when Pestilence had given up after the discovery of antibiotics)

A nouvelle cuisine chef and inventor of fad diets.

Hunger in this modern world is a very strange thing.  Many, many people die of hunger. Some people are even born hungry because a human body and a foetus inside it can survive a hungry pregnancy. Can you believe it? I don't, even though I am told it is true. Other people are not exactly hungry: they have enough amount of food to eat but it doesn't have enough iron (no meat, not enough beans), or enough protein (no meat, eggs, fish, or dairy; not enough beans), or enough vitamins (not enough of anything except rice, bread or potatoes). Hunger makes people tired, sick, weak, less resistant to disease, unable to concentrate, and in the case of children, it prevents mental and physical growth.

Other people curiously go willingly hungry and pay money for others to find creative ways of making them stay hungry. The last I have heard of this is something you can buy in drugstores; in Spain it is sold in pharmacies. So I go to the local pharmacy with my prescriptions and I see that they are selling "fit strips" (the name is in English!). This is the idea : you pay 15 euros and you get 72 thin strips of orange fiber, wrapped in loads of shiny plastic. You are told to stick one or two on yout tongue, allow to dissolve, drink a glass of water so that the fiber swells up in your stomach, repeat about 8 times a day. Which means a 15 euro packet will last for a week or so.

 Isn't it shocking that I live in a culture that thinks it is perfectly fine to pay 15 euros for 36 small portions of fiber?  What does it take for someone to invent un-food? And what sort of person does it take to buy it? I can't imagine someone with 15 euros in their hands and abso-fucking-lutely noting better to do with it than buying themselves... hunger.

Wow, and I didn't even make a feminist rant (I will leave that to someone who has her knickers in a knot).

Birds

I love birds,  especially urban ones.

This entry is dedicated to Luc , for cheering me up.

Birds for all seasons

Spring
Hush, it’s a concert:
The blackbird will sing
For those who don’t know his name!

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

Autumn
Hundreds of sparrows!
Dead ashes floating
in the evening’s burning sky.

Winter
Snow melts in the air.
Under her coat, she shivers.
Seagulls around us.

Pájaros para las cuatro estaciones.

Primavera
Sshh, es un concierto:
¡El mirlo va a cantar
para todos los que no saben su nombre!

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

Otoño
¡Cientos de golondrinas!
Cenizas muertas que flotan
En el cielo en llamas de la tarde.

Invierno
La nieve se funde en el aire.
Bajo su abrigo, ella tirita.
Gaviotas a nuestro alrededor.

Young people

Let’s see. The news today said that my town suffers the greatest amount of acts of juvenile crime per inhabitant in all of Spain, and it is second, only after Barcelona, in plain absolute juvenile crime figures. We are taking here about teens who have all basic needs covered; they beat up random strangers, and rob from supermarkets, cars and individuals. Sometimes they smash car’s windows, too. What they try to get from what they steal is certain expensive clothes from very specific brands, ditto cellphones, and "recreational" drugs (this is not a crime problem caused by drug addiction). Essentially, these boys and girls are bored.

In France, groups of about the same age are setting cars on fire, the easiest to explain reason being that they are fed up with being discriminated against. Rage accumulates until it explodes, like a pressure cooker.

And as usual, but this is no news, another 13 year-old has been murdered in Palestine because he was carrying a toy gun and some soldiers it was a real gun. Just another victim of a war that involves children from the day before they are born, only this time it has made the news with a name and a photo.

Days like these I wonder what’s the use of poetry, or of being in training to become a teacher, or of any of the things I like.

List Poems

Different cultures have different types of list poems. I have seen long series of verses, free verse, and even sonnets that were simply lists. The easiest list-poem is the imitation of Sei Shonagon’s lists: Sei Shonagon was a lady at the court of a Japanese emperor, and she wrote short sketches of court life, together with lists. For example,  “Things that always seem to be dirty”; “things that look better on a painting”. I have a few of those, and this is the only one that’s not erotic. It's not realy a poem, more like the seed of one.

Cosas que me causan una profunda sensación de nostalgia:
Que un hombre que conozco de toda la vida se afeite. De repente su piel tiene el mismo tacto que hace quince años.
Un parque con hiedra y helechos en vez de césped.
El rock español de los 80.
Un día gris, muy gris, sobre todo si no hace frío.

Things that make me feel very nostalgic:
A man that I have known all my life when he shaves. Suddenly his skin feels like it did fifteen years ago.
A park with ivy or ferns instead of grass.
Spanish rock music from the eighties.
A very grey day, especially if it’s not cold.

Patriot Watch

These are weird days. Spaniards have decided all of a sudden to celebrate Halloween, and I have discovered a blog that reveals ways in which American institutions and corporations invade people's privacy. It is an enlightening but scary read.

Because it\'s cloudy and I want a storm.

, here you have Shakespeare's King Lear, Act 2 scene 4, raging to the winds. The last two lines, in case they are not clear, are asking for all women to die and all men to become sterile. Isn't Lear a lovely man.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

Sopla, viento, desgarra! ¡Furia! ¡Sopla!
¡Cataratas, huracanes, derramad
hasta ahogar las torres: ahogad los gallos de las veletas!
Fuegos de azufre, que matan el pensamiento:
Mensajeros de truenos que parten en dos los robles,
¡Quemad mis blancos cabellos! Y tú, trueno estremecedor,
¡Aplasta, aplana la grosera rotundidad de este mundo!
¡Rompe los moldes de la naturaleza, destruye el germen
que crea a los hombres ingratos!

Shakespeare vs, Britney Spears?

I have discovered a philosophy site with a few interesting (and rather geeky) games. One of them teaches about the characteristics of art: it asks you to give rate six characteristics  art is supposed to have and then it checks how two artists or so-called artists compare according to your own criteria.

This is what I think of the six characteristics the site gives as elements of a work of art:

Great technical ability: Necessary but not essential. It depends on the degree of beauty, maybe.
The work is enjoyable: Again, necessary but not essential.
The work conveys the feelings of the artist: Absolutely unnecessary, of course.
The work conveys an important moral lesson or helps us to live better lives: Again unnecessary.
The formal features of the work are harmonious and/or beautiful: Necessary but not essential.
The work reveals an insight into reality: Essential. Art makes you see the world through different eyes. Having said that, to me language is part of reality,so a work that is very self-referential, a work that plays with language is also revealing an insight into reality.

What I find interesting, rather than the results the test gives to me, are the rates other people have given. Everyone else thinks that the most important value is that the work conveys the feelings of the artist (noooo, bleh, the world is too full of Bécquer fans, yuck), and that it is enjoyable. Beauty and moral lessons are not popular. Feeling and fun are.

You can check the game yourself here.
 

Wilma madness

Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me. Let's see.

Hurricane comes and flood New Orleans, and the authorities are not ready to organise an efficient evacuation, so the hurricane kills hundreds (thousands?). A big part of the problem is misinformation: people don't know how serious this will get, and they don't ant to leave their houses. So far, it's OK. Bad but understandable.

Scarcely twomonths later another hurricane which is just as strong and dangerous goes to Florida. The authorities are a tiny little bit better prepared for an efficient evacuation, but hundreds (thousands?) are stranded and incommunicated and we don't know if dead or alive because they refuse to leave their homes. Lack of informations or means for evacuation are not a problem now. What the hmpf is going on? Is it something about being American that makes them prefer to die at home rather than evacuate or what?

I cannot simply say that Americans (some Americans) are idiots, but the truth is that I have never heard of anyone else in the world ever refusing to be evacuated for their own safety.

Where have all the clocks gone?

Today I have had to face the bureaucratic system of the University of Seville. It has been relatively painless, because the mistakes in the computer system were minor, I only had to pay 5 euros more than the instructions said I had to, the photocopier worked on the second try, the line was very long but I was not in much of a hurry, and later, when I had to go to a second office and the desk person had decided to leave ten minutes before the hour she is supposed to, a kind person who passed by sorted out my problem. Ah, the joys of bureaucracy. 

I expected the system to be inefficient, but there was something I was used to in the States that I miss here: clocks. I don't remember ever being in an office that didn't have a very visible, big clock. It is not so here. 

In the States, the invasion of clocks is so great that I have a very distinct memory of the few times that I was unaware of what time it was exactly. Here in Spain, classrooms don't have clocks (I can hear American readers gasp),  and I know lots of Spaniards who dropped watches the minute they started to use mobile phones. Why have the hour twice?

Are we more laidback because we are not surrounded by clocks, or do we shun clocks because we want to stay laidback?

Death couplets by e. e. cummings

I don’t feel much of an impulse to write about death, the most inescapable of literary themes. I have two poems triggered by the death of Martyn Bennett , and one single little poem that looks as if it is about the death of the speaker, but it is a love declaration. Alan Spence and e. e. cummings seem to be obsessed with their own mortality; Spence has a novel all about it and cummings has lot of poems; both authors seem quite serene and calm about their respective ends. Cummings is no longer in this world, and I hope he is buried somewhere as beautiful as his poem wishes. Complete absence of rhyme in the translation; I wanted to keep the meaning so faithful that I didn’t even try the effect.

when god lets my body be

From each brave eye shall sprout a tree
fruit that dangles therefrom

the purpled world will dance upon
Between my lips which did sing

a rose shall beget the spring
that maidens whom passion wastes

will lay between their little breasts
My strong fingers beneath the snow

Into strenuous birds shall go
my love walking in the grass

their wings will touch with her face
and all the while shall my heart be

With the bulge and nuzzle of the sea

cuando dios deje mi cuerpo

De cada ojo valiente brotará un árbol
sobre la fruta que de él cuelgue

bailará el mundo apurpurado
Entre mis labios que cantaron

una rosa engendrará la primavera
que las doncellas que la pasión echa a perder

colocarán entre sus pechitos
Mis fuertes dedos bajo la nieve

entrarán en pájaros esforzados
mi amor caminando por la hierba

sus alas le tocarán la cara
y mientras tanto estará mi corazón

Con la subida y caricia del mar.

Terrible losses

Oh my. Eduardo Haro Tecglen and Ba Jin have died. Haro Tecglen, for those of you outside Spain, was a Spanish journalist who had had a column in a leading newspaper for as long as anyone could remember. And Ba Jin was a Chinese novelist, whose The Kao Family shaped my understanding of life when I was in my early teens.

I'm not in the mood to translate a chunk of the works of either.

Preferred and dispreferred responses

I have dedicated four separate entries to Grice's Maxims, which are very useful for the construction of dialogues. The maxims have to be seen in the context of preferred and dispreferred responses. The theory is very easy: If you ask someone to marry you, you hope a “yes” and you fear a “no”. Anything that is not a “yes”, including “maybe” (which is uninformative), extra information, being asked back something else (“Will you marry me?” “How long have to been waiting to ask?”), jokes, irony, anything, is a dispreferred response.

When you say a compliment, you expect a thank you. Sometimes you expect modesty: “What a lovely meal” “Oh, it’s nothing, it’s a very simple recipe”. That is a preferred response. Anything else is dispreferred.

When you ask for permission, you hope a yes and fear a no. You ask your boss if you can leave early on Thursday. Yes is preferred. “Yeah, right, and next week you’ll ask Thursday off, and the following week you’ll ask Thursday off and a rise”. That sentence is not a “no”. Still, it is a dispreferred response because it is delaying a real yes or a real no. It is breaking Maxims Three and Four. As answers to “Can I leave early on Thursday?”, the difference between “How are you doing with this week’s workload?” and “You can leave early on Thursday if you’re nearly finished with the week’s assigned work” is that the question is a dispreferred response; the conditional yes is not a good as a plain “Sure!”, but still, it is a preferred response because it is straightforward.

In short: the preferred response is what a person (or character) wishes or anticipates to get as a plain answer. Anything else is a dispreferred response.

The worst dispreferred response of them all is silence.

Bush Countdown!

Just the day I say I can't see anything culture-shoking, I find this I have to love a website with a countdown to know how many days until Bush leaves the White House.

Still 1189 days to go. As we say in Spanish, no evil lasts for a century.

Religion in schools, both sides of the Atlantic.

Since I came back to Spain three months ago (already!?), there is of course a lot less culture-shock to talk about. Seville can be a very quirky, culture-shocking place, but I don't really have my commedy-of-manners sensors in full operating mode. Also, my life is hectic these days so I don't really have time to reflect enough (hence the abundance of other people's poetry over the last month or so). So excuse me if I recycle something from when my blog had a different location. Anyway, it still applies.

For the last 10 to 15 years, the role that religion should have or not have at schools in Spain has made the news very often. This is so because of the political changes; the Constitution gives a wide margin of freedom to the government, and the only things that would be definitely anticonstitutional are to teach against any religion or to force children to take Religion classes against their parents’ wishes. Simplifying a lot, when the conservatives are in power they want Religion to be a school subject as important as Music or History, and non-Catholic kids can take a few bland alternatives like extra credit where needed, and the socialists (socialdemocrats? Anyway, the guys to the left of the conservatives and to the right of the communists) try to please everyone at the same time by keeping the Religion subject while reducing its weight in the curriculum (when I was a child the grade didn’t count towards my average grade) and giving some entity to the alternative for non-Catholics; some form of Education in Secular Moral Values. Every major change in the government over the last 20 years has altered the education system, or at least tried to.

The main argument used in favour of the Religion subject is that Catholicism is important to Spanish society; besides, conservatives have never taken seriously the secular alternative as a subject, which is not a fault of the principle but of the practice: in my school, there was a year or two when I and the other kids that didn’t want to take Religion were left alone and unsupervised in the school library, with a teacher coming to check on us if we were noisy.

The main arguments of the enemies of that course are: Spain does not have an official religion, Catholicism is unfairly privileged, and the time and the resources spent on it should go to teach “real” subjects. Leaving aside that they dislike Catholicism, of course, as a doctrine of oppression and misery (and anticonstitutional principles such as sexual discrimination, but that’s another rant for another day).

I think that the conservatives are missing the point. Their main motive is obviously that they would like to retain as much public presence as they can get. While they are in schools they can make an effort to keep children and maybe even teens under their influence. They are so shortsighted… no, excuse me. They are so fucking blind. Just go and compare with the American situation. In this country, as far as I know, the First Amendment forces schools to behave as if religions didn’t exist. All religions. If Evolution is out of the school curriculum in some States it is because it was judged to be against the beliefs of some Christians, not because the schools of that State are officially Christian. And still it is the developed country with the highest percentage of people going to church regularly (I mean church, temple, mosque, synagogue, place of worship in general). And the highest percent of people calling themselves Christian too. Why? Because you cannot make believers at school. Children believe first their parents, then their peers. You cannot inspire religion by teaching it, not beyond age five, not to people who live in a secular world the other 23 hours of the day.

The most the Spanish conservatives would get would be stealing one or two hours a week away from the real courses. Have children and teens study for Religion exams when they should be studying Literature and Science. Pay the salary of the Religion teacher with the money that should pay a new computer or books for the library. And then all those children would become atheists, as they so often do, as soon as they hit sixteen years-old. Because it is in the air they breathe. Simple as that.

Thomas Middleton

I may have been too ambitious today; I felt like translating something very difficult, passages from a play by an English playwright of Shakespeare's time. I find Middleton irregular, and without some of Shakespeare impossible-to-grasp sparkle. But his play The Changeling is fascinating, a dark story of blackmail with the right amount of comic relief. De Flores, servant to Vermandero, wants to seduce his employer's daughter, Beatrice, who is engaged to a man against her will to marry another.

I have blended two fragments of two soliloquys by De Flores, by far Middleton's best character. There's something special about these tragedy villains. The translation takes too many liberties; the language is very hard and I was aiming too high.

I, I She had rather wear my pelt tann’d in a pair
of dancing pumps, than I should thrust my fingers
into her sockets here; I know she hates me,
yet cannot choose but love her;
no matter, if but to vex her, I’ll haunt her still;
though I get nothing else, I’ll have my will.

II,I Wrangling has prov’d the mistress of good pastime;
as children cry themselves asleep, I ha’seen
Women have chid themselves abed to men.

I, I Más quisiera ella usar mi piel para forrar
sus zapatitos, que dejarme meter los dedos
en su guante; sé que me odia,
y no hay nada que hacer, la quiero.
Da igual. La perseguiré, por fastidiarla,
la tenga o no, pues ese es mi capricho.

II, I Las peleas son las criadas del mejor pasatiempo;
igual que los niños que se duermen llorando, he visto
mujeres que refunfuñan camino de la cama.


After reading such brilliant, strong, rich, merciless, rhythmic poetry, do you have any doubt that De Flores will do exactly what he wants with Beatrice?

Saudade

Saudade is a Portuguese term which means, roughly, "homesickness of what never was; longing for what never will be". I find it very fitting because it's odd to say that I'm homesick of places that were never home.

The first haiku is Alan Spence's. The second is mine. It's a work in progress, I'm not completely happy with the rhythm nor with the Spanish translation. It's a true anecdote, and I composed it while stuck in a traffic jam.

400 miles from my friends
the apples they gave me
for the journey

A 500 kilómetros de mis amigos,
las manzanas que me dieron
para el viaje.

Morning e-mail!
Photos of red leaves
from an American friend.

El e-mail de hoy:
fotos de hojas rojas
de un amigo americano.

Singing in the rain

It's raining heavily in my area because hurricane Vince is dangerously close to the Spanish southwest coast. Thankfully, it is losing strenght as it comes closer to us (as a bad lover would do). We had been waiting eagerly for this rain to come, and how happy it makes me reminds me of the classic, Singing in the Rain.

Gene Kelly was the best actor in the world ever, The Actor, because I never found Frank Sinatra or Fred Astaire physically attractive, and as far as I know neither Robert Redford, Paul Newman, or Brad Pitt can sing or dance (Ewan McGregor comes a close second to Gene Kelly, but loses points on lousy dress sense).

These lyrics are interesting because they were calculated to be sung by actors who didn't have exceptional voices, and so the lyrics compliment the natural pattern of the spoken sentence, to make themeasier to sing. Reciting this song as if it was a poem leads you almost naturally to the melody. But no, they are not particularly good lyrics. In this blog entry, the body of Gene Kelly is the poem. Dance on.

I'm singing in the rain
Just singing in the rain
What a glorious feeling
I'm happy again
I'm laughing at clouds
So dark up above
The sun's in my heart
And I'm ready for love

Let the stormy clouds chase
Everyone from the place
Come on with the rain
I've a smile on my face
I'll walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
Singing, singing in the rain

I'm singing in the rain
Just singing in the rain
What a glorious feeling
I'm happy again
I walk down the lane
With a happy refrain
I'm singing, singing in the rain
singing in the rain

Delirium

One my my favourite Neil Gaiman characters is Delirium. Something like the eternal core and ideal representation of Madness in the shape of a young girl in rags with a passing resemblance to Tori Amos. She used to be Delight, until she realised that things can (and do) change. When you are happy, you don’t want the world to change, right? The shock made the poor little thing go crazy and that is why she became Delirium. And she asks these questions to her older brother, Dream:

What’s the nAME OF the WORD for the precise MOment when you realize that you’VE ACTUALLY forgotten HOW it felt to make LOVE to somebODY you really Liked a long TIME AGO?

Is THERE a word FOR forgettinG the name OF Someone when YOu want to introduce them TO Someone else At the same TIME you realize YOU’ve forgoTTEN The name of tHE PERSON you’RE INTRODucing them to as well?

What’s THE NAME of The word for thinGS NOT Being the same always. You know. I’m sure theRE IS one. Isn’t there? there MUST BE a WORD for it… the thiNG that LETS YOU Know time is happening. IS there a WORD?

Three years later.

I rescued a feeling from three years ago to compose this one. Writing haiku in Spanish is becoming easier and easier; I cannot judge if they are better than the ones in English, if the rhythm is bad, if the syllabic count is less correct. I used to think that haiku in Spanish would be bad, flat poetry because the language and the form are simply incompatible. Maybe when I said that I wanted my poems to follow too many rules.

Sigo buscando.
Al fondo de tus ojos,
sólo hay tristeza.

I keep on searching
deep into your eyes,
there’s only sadness.

·

Schedules (because stereotypes are sometimes true)

It infuriates me when Spaniards who have never lived abroad make generalisations about the national character. Among one of the self-propagated myths is that we are not practical, responsible or professional, and that everyone to the North of us is. I have already talked a bit about that before.

There is an aspect in which the stereotype is true: class schedules at University.

Why can’t classes in Spain officially last 50 minutes and leave ten or fifteen minutes between them, like they do in Aberdeen and Cornell? In the two foreign universities that I know, that happens so that students have time to go to classes that are not in the same building. In Spain, at least at Seville University (which I think is the rule rather than the exception), people take all their classes in one building. No need to run all over campus, well, maybe run down one corridor or two. The thing is, instead of having classes scattered through the week, we have between four and eight hours of classes on a row. Imagine having classes from 2 pm to 9 pm four days a week, no breaks (I’ve done it for four years, and it’s not nice). At some point, you will need to get a coffee, get a snack, use a toilet, or simply walk a bit to ease the back pain. Right? OK, in the Spanish system nothing says that classes have to last any less than sixty minutes. It is at the discretion of the professors to start at o’clock, or five or ten minutes later. Of course, professors can have three classes in a row too, which I guess has its own disadvantages.

By the second week of classes you have learnt which professors start the class ten minutes later, which ones start punctually but don’t mind if you come in late, and which ones put you down in front of the other students if you walk in after them, even though they should know perfectly well that you had to run to do something very personal and embarrassing between the previous class and theirs. That is just not right. When I’m the Head of the Languages Department (hey, why stop at that? when I’m the Decana of the University, I mean) classes will officially last 50 minutes and give people a little time to breathe. Besides, after I put a café in place of the chapel people will have another reason to take coffee breaks.