"Like"

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.

Desire and fulfilment

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.

rags to riches

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.

From a song by Ryuichi Sakamoto

Does a rose lose its colour in the rain?

Getting paid to be a student

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?

Unravel by Björk

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.

The language of American movie-goers

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.

Hollywood treatment for Spanish movies

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!

Translation and adaptation, 9 and last.

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.

Creationism

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.

Translation and adaptation 8

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.

Where is Spain?

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!

Translation and adaptation 7

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.

Adventures in the UK's welfare system

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.

Translation and adaptation 6

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.

A rose by any other name gets very annoyed

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.

Translation and adaptation 5

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.

Porn and hipocrisy

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”).

Translation and adaptation 4

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.

Acts of God?

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.