The obligatory New York chronicle

New York, New York's a wonderful town./The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down.-On the Town

This is not a journal-style blog. This is not The Life and Opinions of La Guiri. I’m not attracted to that sort of blog, and I hope this is not perceived as Welcome to La Guiri’s Private Thoughts. That was why when I went to Washington I didn’t write a chronicle, but a series of very shot anecdotes that fitted in the Culture Shock section, one at a time. New York is different. On the one hand, I don’t want to do an individual NYC chronicle for each one of those interested, and on the other hand, NYC is nor an orderly, well-behaved, one-anecdote-at-a-time place like Washington was.

So, there we go. A little chronicle of my New York holiday. An acclaration first: I live in Ithaca, New York State, five to six hours and 90$ away from New York City. New York State is nearly as big as Spain.

I like the island Manhattan, Smoke on your pipe and put that in –West Side Story

When people say New York, they mean Manhattan. Manhattan is weird because it is divided in neighbourhoods, but it is so densely populated that they are all cramped together. Walk a couple blocks and everything around you: architecture, looks of the people, shops, and the like, is changed. The most drastic change I walked by was the transformation of the poshest bit in Manhattan, the Upper East Side, into East Harlem. Look front, and people are a mix of black and Latino, the buildings are low and in red brick and the shops sell mostly junk food. Look back and the buildings are twice as tall, white, the people are white women with exquisite hairdos, and the shops sell handbags. It is like jumping channels on TV from Sex and the City to some scary movie about drugs and inner-city kids. The subway doesn’t charge you in zones, so it is wonderful to just take any train, go to the other end of town and enjoy the different landscape. In that sense, New York is a wonderfully democratic city, unlike London, where the underground is divided in zones. Since everyone everywhere always wants to go towards the centre, a zone system punishes the people who live outside, which are precisely the ones that (one would guess) have less money to spend. Can anyone tell me if I am wrong about London?

I want to wake up in that city that doesn't sleep -Frank Sinatra

So, on my first day I explored Chinatown and the Lower East Side, a hippie area in the Spanish sense of the word. In Spain, there are people, mostly young women, who are in horror of anything that looks too clean, too polished, too bourgeois, because they perceive that as politically conservative. We call that sort of people "hippies"; they are fiercely snob and they hardly ever are politically active like English-speaking hippies. Spanish hippies would adore the Lower East Side, an area of old houses that look neglected, where the shops are trendy and original. It blends with Chinatown; that part mixes the shops that sell junk to tourists with supermarkets and other food shops with weird things that you wouldn’t see in normal shops, like strange dried fish, or Asian sweeties. That area had so much to see, just walking, you cold spend days just looking at the people and the shops. Don’t go there at night; if Times Square looks like Blade Runner, Chinatown by night looks like the dodgy bits from Blade Runner. Dirty, dark and depressing.

Some people had recommended me a couple of jazz clubs, and one of them is where Woody Allen plays occasionally. That’s the one I chose; of course he wasn’t there, but the music was nice. It was the bar in a luxury hotel, the sort of place where waiters call you “Ma’am” and say “of course” instead of “sure”. I thought they’d kick me out considering my looks; there’s something special in a place that calls me Madam when I’m wearing frayed jeans and my hair in a bandanna. And the wine was delicious.

Ese sitio que le dicen Nueva York, donde inentan las cosas que después me compro yo -Pedro Guerra.

I thought I wouldn’t go to the theatre because as much as I love musicals, they are prefabricated and I might as well see them in Europe. But then I saw the choices of plays, not musicals, and I couldn’t resist. It was a tough choice between A Streetcar Named Desire with Natasha Richardson and John C Reilly (the wonderful, unforgettable policeman that falls in love with a cocaine junkie in Magnolia); The Glass Menagerie with Jessica Lange and my teenage crush Christian Slater; or Hurlyburly with my other teenage crush Ethan Hawke (who am I trying to fool? I haven’t been a teenager in a long time and my crush on Hawke is still alive and well). In the end I went to see The Glass Menagerie because I have already seen one version of Streetcar, and I was too afraid of Ethan Hawke disappointing me. The actors were great, and the play was splendid. I don’t have any intentions to let my research switch continents, but this one reconciled me with American literature. Read it if you cannot see a performance, it’s gorgeous in a faded, sad way.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin -Leonard Cohen.

I went to see a whole bunch of museums: the Metropolitan, the Frick Collection, the Guggenheim, and the Jewish Museum. At the Metropolitan I was very conservative, going straight to see a lovely Chanel temporary exhibition and the European and modern paintings. I made a discovery about the great swindle that in Abstract Expressionism (huge paintings like his, like children’s doodles): one painting by Rothko or Jackson Pollock makes no sense. Only the cumulative effect is worth the try. So if a museum has ten or twenty pieces in this style put together in one or two rooms, the effect can be majestic, instead of making me thing that they wasted the canvas and they are making me waste my time.

The selection from gods such as Vermeer, Goya, Monet, Degas and such would make you dizzy. That’s the Stendhal syndrome: seeing too many beauty things in one go can make you think you have the flu if you have that sort of Romantic disposition. There is one room with eleven Monets that would make happiness ooze out of your pores. I went to the Frick to see the Vermeers, but the whole thing was small and manageable. They don’t let children in this one so that they can keep the security measures very lax, isn’t that weird?

The Guggenheim is… the Guggenheim. I though the permanent collection would take a lot more space, but the building outshines any painting (well, not all paintings maybe, but it has to be one very special Picasso to make you forget the building for a couple minutes). I didn’t get to see the Mapplethorpes because that area is being reformed now, shame.

The Jewish Museum doesn’t contain any major works of art. It's more a history museum. The Holocaust section is tiny and it’s an inner room so that people can choose to ignore it; that’s a good idea and it certainly goes against the racist stereotype that Jewish people play the role of victims, either because they are weak or because they want to get material gain from other people's sympathy. That section has a concentration camp uniform jacket; it doesn’t look much like a uniform, it’s an ordinary, functional jacket that looks modern, but of course you can recognise the grey and navy stripes if you have seen any film or documentary on the subject. The jacket was a donation from a former prisoner, done a few decades ago; who would’ve wanted to keep that cursed thing with them for one minute after the liberation? Maybe whoever preserved always thought of its value as proof of the genocide. The sad, strange thing about this museum is that although it is educational for non-Jews, and it doesn’t assume any knowledge of Jewish culture and history, most of the visitors I saw looked very obviously Jewish (men wearing skullcaps and that type of thing). If you would like to give me a gift some time, get me a Maurice Sendak book. I should have bought one in the museum shop but I had a sudden attack of prudence. How unlike me.

I live in New York New York, the city that never shuts up -Ani di Franco

What else? Oh, yeah, the Empire State. Yes, it is very tall and all that, but the Chrysler is a lot more beautiful! I took photographs of the Chrysler at all hours and from all perspectives. And the same about the cathedrals: St Patrick is more famous, but the inside is nothing special, while St John the Divine is lovely inside and out. St Patrick has little chapels dedicated to a few saints, and each one had a summary of that saint’s life and a suggestion of an appropriate prayer. I hated those, because they were nearly all asking for things. It was such a polytheistic attitude! “Dear Saint of the sick, heal me”. “Dear saint of desperate situations, help me”. You get the idea. It was all like that.

I didn’t get to see the Financial District or Brooklyn Bridge by night; I saw them from the Staten Island Ferry, but I guess that by night they’ll be a completely different thing. I didn’t visit anything outside Manhattan, and I missed a Museum that has a bunch of Klimt paintings because it doesn’t open on weekdays. All that, and of course watching a musical, is left for another visit.

Leaving New York never easy, I saw the life fading out. - R. E. M.

I don’t think I could live in New York; at least not in Manhattan. Someone told me about two weeks ago that he was surprised I hadn’t gone there yet because I seem so suited for the place: what he meant was that I was so hyper. New York is tough and hyperactive like me, but then, I need surroundings that calm me down. I need to be able to jump all over the place, unwind, relax and start over. It’s hard to do that in Manhattan. And it’s very, very noisy. Even in the middle of Central Park you can still hear the traffic.

Still, it has the three essentials that I need in a town. Plenty of trees, a river, and a café (a million of them) where I could become a regular. Plus a church that plays Bach for free at lunchtime on weekdays (Broadway with 10th, if you are ever around).

The Glory of Manhattan

Tomorrow I'm cooking a seven-course dinner for thirty people, next day I'm going to a picnic in LAke Owasco and then I'm going to New York City, so don't expect any updates in a week or so. I could have chosen any typically newyorkish poem, something from Lorca, or Leonard Cohen's First We Take Manhattan, but I wil leave you in the company of Javier Ruibal. By the way, I've found a German website on Spanish singer-songwriters, and I that the world is a better place for every new Ruibal fan, so today I'm happier than usual.

I don't have time for an English translation today, so a summary will have to do.

It all would've been different, my friend,
if someone had warned me,
the glory of Manhattan
goes from the fifth floor up.

Airoso como los cabales
bajaba la 42 con un vasito de cerveza
y un cantecito echao a media voz.
A la hora de los miserables
entre el ocaso y el neón
hay un sin casa y un don nadie
montando un trullo de cartón.
Y qué me estas contando,
my friend”, a mí de tu bahía
si yo soy de la isla.
Mira tú qué arte y qué alegría
si a mí no me faltara
mi hembra y sus lunares
sabrían en el Madison
que el cante grande es lo que vale.
Ella se defendía el baile
él nunca había sido “El Caracol”
pero decía bien el cante
con una pataíta y un farol.
Llegaron con aquellos barcos
y con su cara de media ración
no pudo hacer su flamenquito
contra las torres de oro y hormigón.
Después de casi un año tiraos
no me queda un garito
y ella se fue en un barco
que iba pa la isla derechito.
Y otro gallo cantara, “my friend”,
si me lo hubieran dicho
la gloria de Manhattan
empieza a partir del quinto piso.
Y en la venta de Vargas dijo
que no pisaba la calle real
pa mendigar un sueldo fijo
pa terminar comido por la sal.
Yo he nacido para la gloria,
yo reinaré por soleás y bailará por bulerías
hasta la estatua de la libertad.
No vayas a joderme “my friend”
yo duermo en esta esquina
si me haces un laíto
voy a echarme un cante de Porrinas.
Si a mí no me faltara
Lucía y sus lunares
sabrían en el Madison
que el cante grande es lo que vale.
Y qué me estás contando,
my friend”, a mí de tu bahía
si yo soy de la isla.
Mira tú que arte y que alegría
y otro gallo cantara
si me lo hubieran dicho
la gloria de Manhattan, “brothers”,
empieza a partir del quinto piso.

Culture-shocking food 1

It was about time I talked about the most important source of culture shock: foreign food.

I adapt easily, although I have a major limitation: I only eat animal products (dairy, eggs, meat) if they are organic. Not because I’m a health freak or a hippie or anything, it’s just that I have heard enough horror stories about the American meat industry. I like my milk and my meat without antibiotics, hormones and not from sick animals if possible, thank you very much.

Still, there are lots of new things to surprise me. These are some the best discoveries I have made here:

-Peanut butter. Americans do something weird: they take something perfectly delicious, like 99% peanut butter, and they mix it with salt, loads of sugar, and vegetable oils (up to 40% oil). The commercial stuff is yucky, truly disgusting. The “natural” one is addictive. I have culture-shocked Americans because I’ve invented the peanut-butter-and-tahini sandwich. Yummy. I will miss this one a lot in Spain.

-Almond butter: I had tasted almond cream, heavily sugared, delicious: it has the texture of nut butters and the flavour of marzipan. Almond butter has nothing to do with it, and I haven’t made up my mind about which one I prefer.

-Cookies are a failure. Someone tried to make cookies with cake dough and felt too guilty to throw away the result. Too greasy for cake and too soft for cookies. BUT: Smarties cookies are a great invention! Look! It’s a cookie with Smarties in it! It’s the funniest-looking food in the world! The problem is that Smarties is the British word for those multicoloured chocolate rounds and when I ask for the cookies at a counter, I never remember the American word for them. Actually, I prefer oatmeal-and-raisin cookies, but they’re less culture-shocking. And most important: shut up and don’t remind me that cookies contain non-organic dairy. I don’t need to know.

-Carrot cake. American carrot cake is the real thing, flour, oil, eggs, grated carrots, sugar, etc. and then you bake a proper cake. Spanish carrot cake is a layering of lightly boiled, grated carrots with readymade, white sponge cake. It’s too sweet. The American one is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

-Kale!! Oh! If we had had this weird sort of crunchy spinach when I was a child my mother would have saved herself a lot of lunch arguments over soggy greens.

-Portobello mushrooms: Oh! oh! oh! I could eat mushrooms every day for the rest of my life and be happy. Portobellos are huge, flat, dark brown mushrooms. Big as a hand. If you are vegetarian you can grill them, put them in a burger roll and pretend they’re a burger (beats veggie burgers any day). You can also stuff them with any bits and pieces. Some supermarkets sell them sliced, but I don’t get it: the whole point of Portobellos is that they are an edible plate!

-Garam Masala spices: OK, this is not American at all, it’s an Indian spice mix like curry, and it contains cardamom, cloves, cumin, cinnamon, nutmeg and a handful other things. It is a bit like curry’s quiet brother, without the turmeric (that is the yellow stuff) and with cinnamon. It sounds sweet, but isn’t really. It makes vegan white bean stew seem like something.

-Lavender flowers: cooking with flowers is weird and cool. They sell these with the spices. It goes gorgeous with tea (mint and lavender tea, mmhhh…. excuse me while I go get the teapot). A vegan bakery puts them on top of their carrot cake. There is lavender chocolate bars too, and they don’t taste like lavender at all. My friend Susan makes lavender truffles, chocolate for grownups.

Everyone thinks there’s no place like home and no kitchen like mama’s. Spaniards abroad complain as much as everyone else about the absence of their favourite dishes. I adapt easily. Sometimes I miss fish, and going out for tapas with friends, the ritual as well as the food. But that’s all.

Theatres on both sides of the Atlantic

In the US, anything older than one century is very old. And Ithaca has one theatre from the 19th century, which in American terms is a venerable piece of antiquity like the Roman amphitheatre of Itálica, northwest of my town, a mere 1900 years old. Ithaca’s State Theatre was a derelict building until relatively recently and it is being restored with help from all quarters: there are private donations, and corporate sponsors (I have been asked to give applause to a bank: not in a million years), and Cornell university and maybe even public help **hears screams of “what are they doing with our taxes?”**.

The theatre must have been a complete mess to start with and the people who had the idea in the first place must have been crazy. Mental. Completely out of their minds. The current plumbing system is still from the 1920’s and I’m scared even to think about the electrical system. But someone thought one day that what little history Ithaca has, should be preserved. Good luck to them.

Let’s move six time zones away. We are in Seville, a city that has turned navel-gazing into a passion. Something like the New York City of the 16th century, although sadly for some, we do not live in the 16th century any more. Seville’s old, traditional theatre is the Lope de Vega, after the playwright. The seats are the most uncomfortable on the planet, and the paint outside the building is peeling. No, this one was not built in the 16th century! It’s from 1929. It is not derelict, and it’s not going to be anytime soon, but the outside does look as if it was.

One of the local commonplaces is that Spain in general and Seville in particular badly neglect the care and conservation of the local art and heritage. I hate seeing stereotypes confirmed.

Villains

To keep up with today’s theme, here you have a bit of Shakespeare. I leave you in the very dark company of Richard III and Iago. Richard III enjoys his evil actions, and he can be witty and funny, and you like him even though you’re not supposed to. And in most cases, he’s evil because that brings him material gain. Iago is bitter and sombre and you don’t know or care why he’s evil. He’s scary as hell, among other things because making others suffer brings him no real relief. Sometimes I think that all villains in Western literature are nothing more than copies of one or the other. the translations, as usual, are mine.

Richard III, Act I scene 2, 241-251
Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I nothing to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing! Ha! (...)

¿Quién sedujo a una mujer de esta manera?
¿Quién conquistó a una mujer de esta manera?
Será mía, pero no por mucho tiempo.
Yo, que maté a su padre y a su hermano,
la he hecho mía cuando más me odiaba,
boca injuriosa, ojos llorosos,
testigos sangrantes de su odio pasado.
Con Dios, su conciencia, y mis fallos contra mí,
y yo sin nada que me diese apoyo,
simple diablo de mirada esquiva,
¡y aún así ganarla, a doble o nada! ¡Ja!

Othello, Act I scene 3 406-423
But for my sport and profit. I hate the Moor:
And it is thought abroad, that 'twixt my sheets
He has done my office: I know not if't be true;
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety. He holds me well;
The better shall my purpose work on him.
Cassio's a proper man: let me see now:
To get his place and to plume up my will
In double knavery--How, how? Let's see:--
After some time, to abuse Othello's ear
That he is too familiar with his wife.
He hath a person and a smooth dispose
To be suspected, framed to make women false.
The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by the nose
As asses are. I have't. It is engender'd. Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.

Queerness in commercial movies

I cannot remember where I read that a staple of commercial fictions (mind the plural: I don’t mean only novels) is the death of everyone who is not white, middle class and straight, so that the very white, middle class, and straight protagonists can be left alone in a wonderfully homogeneous world and the audience can feel good about themselves because their pity for the dead characters tells them they don’t discriminate. I thought that was a bit silly and simple, but life is silly and simple sometimes.

I have seen two movies in a row about homosexuals in a hostile environment. The first one was Fresa y Chocolate (1994) because I needed a feel-good movie and the other was The Children’s Hour (1961) because Audrey Hepburn is the protagonist and that’s more than enough for me.

You would’ve thought that the world changed enough in the thirty years between these two movies. The earlier one has two women friends, one straight, the other a closeted lesbian. Rumours about them destroy their lives. Eventually the lesbian commits suicide and the other leaves the town. The second movie is about two men, one straight, the other gay and as out of the closet as the clothes you have on. Rumours about them destroy the life of the gay one and put in serious danger the life of the other. Eventually the gay one is kicked out of the country against his will.

What a coincide, isn’t it? So, not much difference in thirty years. Just two things have improved: Diego (the gay man) is not ashamed of being gay, and he doesn’t have to be seen dead on screen. Yep, a beginning. Can anybody tell me a 100% mainstream movie with any gay character in a dramatic role than isn’t troubled by his or her sexuality and that survives the end of the movie? Being exiled counts as death, I don’t accept “comic relief” characters, and Almodóvar doesn’t count.

Is it possible to teach Creative Writing?

This post belongs both in this category and in Culture Shock, but anyway.

In some American Universities, it is possible to study Creative Writing as a degree, sometimes as a minor, or as an MFA (Master in Fine Arts) program. I first knew about that through the opinion of an English Literature professor in Spain; he said that those programs teach people how to write according to rules. He made it sound like a terribly uncreative process.

There is an MFA program here at Cornell. I attended the final reading a couple days ago, where five people read fragments of their novels (or very short stories), and four people read poems. I only really enjoyed one poet (I won't give names in case any of the others ever reads this), and all the fiction writers were enjoyable. They didn't sound like bestsellers writers at all. Misty Urban has published a short story abou a little boy dying of cancer, told from the point of view of his very unlikeable mother, how commercial is that?

I have no idea of what people do in a creative writing group. I can imagine that from the outside they look as if they try to fit all writers into one mould, and that individual styles are sacrificed to some abstract notion of "this is what works". But you know what? nearly all amateurs writers I have read, either poets or storytellers (and believe me, I've read dozens) don't have a personal, unmistakable style. And besides, programs of creative writing are not an evil invention of American universities: historically, poets have got together in coteries, groups,clubs, associations, "schools". There is nothing wrong with commenting on each other's mistakes.

And besides, writing is a craft like any other. In my home university, Fine Arts is a degree (in visual arts: painting, scultpture, that sort of thing), and no one thinks that prevents the artists from finding their own voice. Why not the same for word-artists?

Beer on vending machines

One of the distinctions between barbarians and civilisations is the preference between wine and beer: our friend Tacitus said that the Germanic tribes made wine out of fermented barley or wheat, as he could only think of alcohol in terms of wine. Another distinction is the view of alcohol as something that you are supposed or not supposed to get drunk on. There are countries in which people think the purpose of alcohol is to have one glass of wine every day, and there are others where the expectation is that if you drink at all, it’s several litres at one go. Only the first are civilised countries (even if people do get drunk, the majority still believes that is a deviation).

Americans make a big fuss about alcohol, Spaniards don’t. I have a friend here who went to Spain and had her picture taken standing by a beer vending machine. She showed it to a few of us, feeling part shocked part naughty. And I joked, “of course! I mean, that is what you find in civilised countries!” I meant alcohol in public places. But to another person the idea was so weird that she thought “inappropriate stuff on vending machines”, and she said, “they say that in Japan you can buy underwear on vending machines. Is that civilised?”

To me, underwear in a vending machine is only a little bit weirder that a place that serves food and not alcohol. And that is something that Americans just cannot understand.

On Libraries again

I still haven't found out why some elevators, like the ones in Mann Library, have electricity sockets inside. I mean, we do need as many sockets as the library can give us, because so many of us bring our laptops to the library. But who needs to plug anything in an elevator?

Trees

The only shade of green Cornell misses:
Dull silver of olive trees.

El único tono de verde que falta en Cornell:
Plata mate de los olivos.

I haven’t written enough haiku about trees, considering how much I identify the landscape of towns with the local trees (or their absence). I can’t like a town that doesn’t have plenty of trees.

This was the first poem I wrote in Ithaca. It took me many weeks to let the impressions of the new place rest for long enough to write poems about them, and then I started writing frantically about people instead of landscapes.

Anacreon

To fit into the day's theme, here is a greek poem, anonymous but in Anacreon's style. Anacreon is one of the earliest authors of lyrical poetry in Western literature and he specialised in poems to erotism, partying and drinking. Sex 'n drugs 'n rock'n'roll indeed. I stle the Spanish translation, and the english one is mine.

Entretejía una vez una guirnalda
y hallé a Amor entre las rosas.
Por las alas lo atrapé,
lo eché en mi vino
y con él me lo bebí.

Y ahora en mi cuerpo aquí por dentro
siento las cosquillas de sus alas.
¿Por qué me enseñas tantas leyes
y argumentaciones de retórica?
¿Qué se me da de tanta verborrea
sin beneficio alguno?

Más bien enséñame a beber
el licor suave de Dionisio,
más bien enséñame a jugar
con Afrodita la dorada.

I weaved a garland once
and found Love among the roses.
I caught him by his wings,
threw him in my wine and drank him.

And now, deep inside me
I feel His tickling wings.
Why do you teach the the Law
and rhetorical argumentation?
What do I care for so many words
that I don't profit from?

I'd rather be taught how to drink
Dyonisus's gentle liquor,
I'd rather be taught how to play
with golden Aphrodite.

Slope Day (tangarse clases a la americana)

Slope Day is the last day of classes in the Spring semester at Cornell. In New York State, it is illegal to carry an open container of alcohol (not drinking: having an open bottle, which eliminates the excuse "but I am NOT drinking!") in open public spaces, and it is also illegal to give alcohol to people under the age of 21. Not to sell it: to give it. If I was giving a party, one of my friends was 20, and she drank alcohol, I'd be committing an offense.

So, for Slope Day a section of campus is fenced in so that it is legal for one day to drink in the street (in the area inside the fence). Classes are not suspended, but people skip them anyway. Any Spanish readers should be comforted to know that foreign students, even in an elite university, skip class to drink in the streets in the early spring. And professors here also say, like Spanish ones: "I will be coming on Friday because that is what I get paid for. If none of you is here, then I'll have to leave". (everyone giggles and looks guilty and amused)

The Hansel and Gretel Effect (How Not to Write Part 9)

Easy. Very easy. Love and respect punctuation rules. Of course we are supposed to take liberties with punctuation as much as with everything else: writing three pages (or a whole chapter or a whole novel) without full stops, or a telegraphic style with extremely short sentences, all of that is perfectly fine. What is not fine is to use punctuation signs for things that were never meant to be: the most abused punctuation mark is probably the ellipsis, the “…”, which is Spain has the quaint name of “puntos suspensivos”, “suspense full stops”.

This marker can indicate a pause in speech, not in narration, or that a thought or sentence is going to be left unfinished or interrupted. Three dots, like three little crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel, are not a substitute for an “etc” or for a slow reading rhythm. If you want reading to be slow, write long sentences, long paragraphs, and use repetitions, or parallelisms in the syntax. In dialogues, three dots are very useful to indicate pauses, interruptions, and the speech of characters that leave sentences trailing. The worst misuse of the ellipsis is probably the amateur writer’s tendency to suggest the effect of a first-person narrator’s stream of thought by finishing many sentences with dots, especially the ones that are not merely narrative, wishing to give (I imagine) the impression that there are other, deeper thoughts, too subtle for speech, slipping away from the mind or the pen, between those damned three dots. These writers take too seriously the suspense-creating function of the “suspense stop” and think that they can actually convey meaning with them at the expense of writing. The effect is actually repetitive, unpolished, and very unoriginal. In prose, if a sentence can stay meaningful without ellipsis at the end, or if a comma in that position does not change the meaning of the sentence, the dots are not necessary: give the three crumbs back to Hansel, who needs them more than you do.

On librarians

The Cornell Library Website is an overprotective mother and codependent girlfriend all in one. “Call me! Email me! Ask me! I can help you! Do you need more? If I don’t have anything I can get it for you from some other library”. When Kroch closes for technical reasons I get an email way in advance. The staff at the library is helpful. When the first semester started, I had a choice of several orientation sessions about where to find and how to use library materials. When I send an email to a librarian, I get a reply in one day at the most.

I have asked very technical questions about searches in journals to staff that, of course, doesn’t have any training in my field of study. They don’t need to: they know where the information is or how to look for it, and they have guided me towards it as I groped in the dark. And something important: they are courteous and patient.

Now let’s take a look at the other side of the ocean. The job of Spanish librarians, or should I say Seville librarians to keep it to my own experience, consists on checking out books. Basically, they do the job of a receptionist or janitor. Conserjes, eso es lo que son, los bibliotecarios españoles. There is a Librarianship degree that people study at University, with the evocative name of “Biblioteconomy”, but I don’t have a clue of what those students are taught. They are certainly not told that they are supposed to be helpful. Leaving aside that they often have no idea about the content of the books they keep.

Example one: Seville University Online Catalogue does not contain a clearly visible Help function. The Main page doesn't have the Main Library's phone number (you have to explore quite a bit to find it). A careful search leads you to a fill-in-the-blanks form for questions that, says the website, can take a couple of days to get answered, and a page with a list of phone numbers for some, but not all, the individual libraries. This is a disgrace.

Example Two: Librarians in Seville University don’t know the opening hours of any branch but their own. The only way of finding out is going there yourself, since there is no unified information leaflet or flyer or anything of the sort (Some of them keep weird hours with very long lunch breaks, so there is no definite time at which you’re sure they must be open).

Example Three: This doesn’t happen officially, but depending on the library branch, professors take out books without checking them out, which in practice means that the librarian does not remember where the book is when someone goes to get it.

Example four: In most libraries at Seville University, students are not allowed to look at the shelves. We have to give the librarian the reference numbers of the books we want. I find this particularly irritating because I like to look at volumes before I choose. Besides, sometimes you start a search not knowing exactly what you are looking for (leaving aside the fetishist pleasure of walking down aisles upon aisles of books).

Example five: Spanish universities have “Facultades”, the fields of study, departments, or majors, and Departamentos, smaller study areas inside a Facultad: for example, Contemporary History would be a Departamento in the Facultad of History. All Facultades have a library and Many Departamentos have their own too. All students can check out books from any Facultad library but they can only borrow from Departamentos inside the Facultad they belong to. As if at Cornell, an English grad student doing research on 17th century descriptions of the City could not consult old maps of London because they belong to the Engineering department.

Example six: Seville Public Library. I need to read one Borges short story. Everyone in the Spanish-speaking world should know that Borges wrote short stories, compiled under many different titles. I go to the information desk and I ask where would my story be. The woman at the desk types in the computer BORGES. STORIES, because she was too stupid to add two and two and remember that there is an aisle clearly marked “Fiction, alphabetical order by Author, Letter B”. But that was not all! When the computer gave zero results to the search, it meant that there was no book by Borges called just “Stories”, but this librarian told me that the library did not have any book of stories by Borges. It is as if an English library said it didn't have any books by Shakespeare at all, because a search said that no books by Shakespeare were called "A Play".

Imagine my culture shock when I came to Cornell and I saw that the library staff is supposed to help me do my job! *gasp

Moon River

Today would be Audrey Hepburn's birthday, had she been alive. I looooove her movies. Since this is a poetry blog and I'd rather stay on track, until I write an Ode to Audrey Hepburn, Moon River's lyrics will have to do.

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I'm crossing you in style some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
wherever you're going I'm going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world.
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end--
waiting 'round the bend,
my huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.

Six months later (a microstory)

The micro-short story is a very demanding genre. A microstory should not seem a chunk from a bigger thing. It should not have a “suspense end” as if it was missing one sentence. It is acceptable to begin as if something was missing from the beginning of the story, but ideally, the beginning should not be abrupt. When I wrote prose fiction, I wrote little vignettes to work on interesting sentences that I couldn’t weave into proper stories, but I never tried to compose real microstories back then. This is my second one. According to my own rules, it’s not very good; ¿do you think it needs a couple of sentences in the beginning to explain “This man and woman had an affair and then broke up”?

It is dedicated to a friend of mine, who often writes about infidelity, absence, and break-ups. I think he’d rather stay anonymous, but he knows who he is.

Six months later, he said “I wrote a poem about you, back then”.
She answered, “oh, that’s alright. I also write about people I know”.
It was exactly then that he decided that what he felt for her was not tenderness for an old lover, but despise. What a relief.

Seis meses más tarde, él le dijo: “Escribí un poema sobre ti, aquellos días.”
Ella contestó: “Ya, yo también escribo sobre gente que conozco”.
Fue justo entonces cuando él decidió que lo que sentía por ella no era ternura por una antigua amante, sino desprecio. Qué alivio.

On the horrors of "cosmetic" surgery

Last weekend I was watching a videotape, not a DVD, and since I had to stop and rewind occasionally, I saw bits and pieces of a TV reality show. It had the general feel and look of a “makeover show”, those in which people (normally women) get an image change that involves shorter hair and more colourful clothes. But this one was about unusual cosmetic surgery. I was outraged and saddened, rather than culture-shocked, by what I saw.

Section One was about a young woman called Tiffany, who wanted to get her labia minora reduced. Yep. The labia minora and the clitoral hood: just about the second most sensitive bits of skin in a woman’s body after the clitoris. She thought they were too big. Let me say that again: a woman submitted voluntarily to have her genitalia mutilated, living in a free country and for aesthetic reasons. She was willing to pay for it and someone was willing to do the job. The butcher…, I mean, the surgeon, said “the area is kind of soft”. KIND OF!?

Section Two did not belong in such a frivolous show. Let’s see, this seemed to be a program about extreme cosmetic surgery, right? Would you say that breast augmentation belonged in a show like this? Not really, right? Section two was about a woman-to-man transsexual who wanted his breasts removed. He had something between the small, flabby breasts that fat men often have, and ordinary female breasts. The portrayal made me sad; I think it’s sad that some people are born with mismatched genders in their body and their brains. And it is also sad that this guy didn’t like his body the way it was; having to choose between losing sensitivity and looks, I wouldn’t t a knife anywhere near me (but then, I don't know how it feels to be born with the wrong sex). Still, I don’t think he belonged in that show. People that don’t want to have breasts should not be paraded like freaks.

And another thing: the surgeon never stopped saying “This guy is a man to me and I’m making his chest match that. He’s a guy, end of the question”. But then, the shots of this **man’s** chest were blurred, because you can’t show **women’s** nipples on TV. ¿En qué quedamos? Was he a man only as long as he didn’t take off his shirt?

The so-called crisis of the Spanish university system

Spaniards mistrust their school system in general and in their higher education in particular. A Spanish man told me some time ago that “education isn’t appreciated in this country” (note to non-Spaniards: when we say “in this country” instead of “in Spain” we are implying that Spain compares badly with other Western, industrialised countries). Another Spanish man told me more recently “they’re your typical Spanish newly graduates, but they’re learning to do the job reasonably well”.

My impression after comparing the position of students in three countries is that Spanish education seems bad to us because it is so easily available. Getting an University education is cheap. Dirt cheap. All you need is to finish High School with reasonable grades and you are in. Being a public education system, it is the duty of the State to give a similar access to resources to all universities, so you have big and small colleges but you don’t have good and bad ones, prestigious and not prestigious. No one is going to employ Graduate A instead of Graduate B depending on the origin of their diploma. This means that people apply for the University that’s closest to home. Getting into some departments is occasionally hard, but that does not mean the department is prestigious, only that it is small.

I said that higher education is cheap. This is what I remember paying in my last years as an undergraduate; it’s just a memory so excuse mistakes and lack of sources.
-less than 600 euros a year in fees.
-probably 300 euros a year in textbooks.
-The scheduling makes it next to impossible to work and study at the same time, so I needed my family to support me economically.
-My fees for the first two years of graduate school add up to 400 euros.
Good. Sit down ‘cos there’s a sharp curve coming. Would you like to know the cost in fees (not the cost of living or books or anything: only the fees) of my year at Cornell?

30,000 dollars. Thirty thousand dollars. Si todavía estás contando en pesetas, cinco millones. You could get twelve and a half undergraduate degrees in Spain for the cost of one year at Cornell. Or seven and a half degrees plus textbooks

In Aberdeen University three years ago, fees cost 1,000 pounds a year, if I remember rightly. Considering the difference between the cost of living and the quality of life in Scotland and Spain, it meant that Aberdeen was about 30% more expensive that Seville, and the heaviest burden on the students were everyday expenses rather than the annual fees.

These are the words of Larry Chambers, director of financial aid at Ithaca College as quoted in Ithaca Times: “Families should begin to save for college costs as early as possible, literally when a child is born”.

Anyone who can afford to go to university in Spain gives it a try, including people who are just not meant to get higher education. I know girls in Social Sciences and Humanities who never read as a hobby. Students of History that call themselves atheists and give that as a reason not to learn the differences between different religions (but still wish to pass required courses on that material). Journalism students who do not read the newspapers. Foreign language students who have never travelled abroad. People with an aversion to speaking in public, getting trained to be teachers. Part of the reason for this is that we take for granted our right to start higher education, and that is fantastic; the problem is that some people misunderstand that with the right to get a degree. Laziness and apathy follow.

I don’t mean that people without resources make worse students, but that we cannot appreciate something that takes no effort at all to get. If you know since you are a wee child that going to University is a privilege that takes a lot of personal effort, you learn to value it. We like things that are hard to get, and we work hard to get them. I don’t want to suggest that it should be harder to get into our Universities: everyone should be able to do so, if that is what they really wish. Spaniards should understand that being able to get in does not mean being able to succeed: not by any stretch of the imagination.

Spanish Statistics of the day

Well, I already knew (sorry, no sources that I remember) that Spain is the first country in the world for organ donations. We are a bunch of lovely generous people, we are. Today I have found out another surprising statistic: Spain is the second country in the world in international adoptions and foreign kids make up 80% of all our adoptions.

The first country in the world in the United States, which is a lot more multicultural than we are. An Asian-American family may adopt an Asian baby from Asia and go more or less unnoticed. International adoption in Spain means a couple of white people getting a darker baby. In my town, couples talking dark babies out for a walk are always received with coos and awwww and general praise. We think nothing can be cuter than that.

I wish people were equally open and friendly with the darker adults that ome to our country, but well, we'll get there eventually.

Coffee or something

It was only a matter of time until the haikus blended with the culture shock and I started to write comedy of manners in verse. Wow.

Killed by your beauty,
Little tag hanging from my lips:
Coffee “or something”?

Tu belleza me ha matado.
Una etiquetita cuelga ahora de mis labios,
Y dice “Quedamos para tomar café, o algo?”

“Would you like us to go out some time?” is a date. “Would you like to go out for a coffee?” might be a date or might be friends going out together.

“D’you wanna g’ out for a coffee or s’mthin’?” is the last resource of the too shy to ask for a date, too impatient to wait to be asked, and too nervous to get a sentence straight without a tag hanging from it. I sincerely believe that asking people for a “coffee or something” brings bad luck.

I’d love to have an illustration for this one, something like a dead body lying on an autopsy table or a morgue with a sheet up to the shoulders and a tag hanging from the mouth instead of from a toe. Wow, I can be morbid sometimes.