Culture Shock (Comedy of manners)

Sauces (culture-shocking food series)

A man with a taste for comedy of manners once said that France had one religion and a thousand sauces, while England had a thousand religions and one sauce (by which he meant melted butter). I wish I remembered who that person was, and what he would think of Thai peanut butter dip, sour cream, ketchup, bright yellow sweet mustard, and such American favourites.

Spaniards prefer stews, casseroles, and similar dishes that are cooked in its own sauce. And when you serve something that cannot be cooked in sauce, like fries with spicy tomato sauce, the sauce goes normally on top. When you are sharing a platter with a group of friends, the one that pours the sauce on top of everything else is received with a chorus of “HEEEYYYY, not __that__ much!”.

I knew that Americans prefer to dip things. It makes sense for shared platters. But it doesn’t make sense for “proper” meals. Here I order a salad, or a fish-with-rice-and-veggies, and the sauce comes on a little pot on the side. The food looks unfinished that way! Besides, I have been told that the sauce goes on the side because of the calories, the fat, and such, so that I don’t eat it if I don’t want to. But it’s useless, because a spoonful of sauce stirred on food looks like quite a lot, and a spoonful of sauce on a little tray looks as if it’s next to nothing, so sauce on the side is four or five times the amount it would be if served the Spanish way.

Culture-shocking food 4: Scotland

I’ve spent one year in Aberdeen University and one summer living in Glasgow. There is not a lot in Scottish/British ingredients that would be interesting to tell here. Nevertheless, the way Scottish people eat, their meals, are unbelievable. I promise to talk about nice Scottish food on another day, to compensate for this.

The first thing that surprised me was the Friday-night routine. All over the world, people go out, get drunk, then go dancing. Right? Well, in Scotland, since they have dinner at six, by the time the last club closes at two or three in the morning, they suddenly realise they are hungry. So, every junk-food place is open all night, with the workers getting sleepy and bored from nine pm to 2am, when there is a mad rush of very drunk students getting a refill of greasy food to guarantee they’ll be sick in the morning.

Chip shops (also called chippies) serve everything deep-fried: everything is covered in a thick mixture of flour and water (si estás leyendo esto en español, un rebozado como masa de churros pero más líquida, un engrudo, vaya) and then fried in grease or oil. I promise you don’t want to know the oil’s origin. The oil is never, ever changed and the inside of the fryer is never cleaned, because the starch of frying potatoes absorbs the dirt that greasier food leaves behind. And what do they deep-fry? Fish of course, but also sausages, meat pies, and burgers. Yes, burgers. The outside goes very crunchy and I think the inside stays moist and not completely cooked through. I never tasted them to make sure.

I heard the legend of the deep-fried Mars bar and the deep-fried pizza (called pizza crunch), but I never found a place that served them. I think deep-fried chocolate is an excellent idea, as long as you don’t use fat that has had pork pies in it.

That’s not all. The first time I heard someone ask for a “roll and chips” (a roll is bigger than American dinner rolls and chips are fried potatoes, French fries), I thought they meant they wanted a piece of bread and a portion of potatoes. OK, no problem. I was wrong. They meant what Americans would call a French fries sandwich. I knew people who had that for lunch every day.

And many people know that the British put vinegar on their chips. What they don’t know is that in fast food places like chippies, it is not really vinegar. It is pure acetic acid that comes in a gallon container, diluted in water until it has the colour the customers expect. Like other synthetic foods, the smell is stronger than the flavour. The purity of the raw material makes it corrosive and toxic; the fumes, even of a few drops spilled on the floor, can make you ill.

And there is something so peculiar about smells. Chip shops smell of grease and vinegar; some streets in Aberdeen and Glasgow smell like that at all times. There seemed to be no way of getting the stink out of my hair and clothes. Sometimes I pass by a Cornell cafeteria at mealtimes, and the smell of greasy beef brings me two years back.

More culture-shocking food: Spain.

There are Spanish foods that some people, mostly foreigners, find disgusting. What I’m going to catalogue next are not the controversial ones that many Spaniards hate because of prejudice or texture (brain fritters, anyone?), but things that most of us see as perfectly normal.

Fish heads. For some reason, an Irish friend of mine freaked out when I said I had bought head-on mackerel. We don’t usually eat fish’s heads, but at the fishmonger’s you see it with the head still on, since it has the best signs of freshness or staleness. Some heads are often eaten, it depends on the type of fish. I never eat the heads, but I hate having to choose already clean fish in the shop. It is enough of a reason not to buy fish at all.

Shrimp heads. Spanish treat: Shrimp or prawns (the bigger the better), lightly boiled, whole, shell on, heads on, and then cooled and served just like that, as an appetiser, in a big tray. Everyone takes their shrimp from the big tray, each person peels their own, and you can dip them in a bit (just a little bit) of mayonnaise. Headless shrimp is impossible to find in Spain except as cocktail shrimp (the very small, frozen variety). When eating boiled prawns, most people suck the heads. They contain a lot of flavour. I only do so when they are extraordinarily good and fresh, and when I don’t someone is always ready to jump and tell me “You’re wasting them! The head’s the best part!”.

Squid. There are two things you can do with squid: deep-fry them in batter, and then they are absolutely delicious, or cook them in a sauce, and then the sauce is delicious but the squid itself not so much. One of the possible sauces contains some squid ink and it gives a lovely salty flavour. “Black rice” is a cousin of paella, coloured with squid ink.

Octopus: It was a huge surprise for me when I was told that foreign people found this weird. I wish I could eat octopus every day. It’s expensive, and tricky to cook properly (meaning: soft, not gummy).

Serrano ham: ham that is first salted for a few days, then hung to dry in a place that has to be cold, dry, and with plenty of air flowing through. The pigs’ diet is extremely important. The diet gives the flavour, the breed gives the meat-to-fat proportion and the marbled appearance, and the curing method gives the texture and degree of saltiness. It’s served in very thin slivers. Foreigners like it, but they commit a sin: they separate the fat and eat only the meat. That is absolutely ridiculous, because it is much lower in cholesterol than ordinary pork, the fat has most of the flavour, and besides, you never eat a big amount of ham anyway. Someone who eats enough ham for the fat to be bad for them is a brute that doesn’t truly appreciate the delicacy.

New York food

The fact that I have done one New York chronicle doesn’t mean I’m finished with the town. This is the food report. I could have survived for four days on fruit and bagels and save a ton of money, but food was a part of the experience and I would have considered it half a holiday if it didn’t include exotic food.

-You can buy great breakfast on the streets in the morning! The little stalls don’t have just bagels (Spaniards: a bagel is a piece of bread shaped like a doughnut. It’s hard and compact, like Andalusian bollos de masadura). They also have tea and several different types of coffee. In Spanish terms this would be as if a churros shop (non-Spaniards: churros are finger-thick sticks of deep-fried batter, that Spaniards have for breakfast on weekends) also had coffee and toast, all to take away. It is wonderfully practical.

-Spaniards know that some foreigners, like the British and the Americans, have eggs for breakfast. What I discovered in New York is that eggs seem to be a strictly breakfast food and that diners and delis that give you a varied menu in the mornings don’t serve any of their egg dishes and toasts after 11 am. I found that weird not because I’m Spanish, but because I have lived in Britain, where the traditional food has so little variety that the nicest meal you can have in most cheap eateries (and probably people’s houses too) is the all-day breakfast.

-There are as many little stalls out in the streets selling fruit and sometimes juices as there are stalls with junk food, and even if much of it is out of season, it’s not expensive. I wonder why.

-I ate in several different Chinese restaurants and I had dumplings in all. One of them had the most delicious, fresh-tasting cabbage dumplings I’ve ever had. When the meal was over I looked behind me and saw four people were wrapping little bits of greens… on top of a newspaper. Newspapers are printed with poisonous ink. Lo que no mata engorda.

-It is humanly possible to eat noodles with chopsticks! Actually, it’s easier than eating bite-sized chunks! I ordered a noodle dish and the waiter told me after the order was sent that it was a soup. Fine. And here comes my soup, with julienne-cut vegetables and noodles like thick spaghetti. I was tempted to ask for a fork, but I gave it a try. It makes you slurp sometimes, of course, but it is possible.

-There are very easy rules to find a cheap(er) place to eat. Avenues are more expensive than streets. Corners are more expensive than the middle of the streets. If you are unlucky enough to be in the Upper East Side at lunchtime, food will be cheaper the further east you go (because you are heading away from Central Park). And when in doubt, eat ethnic (Italian or Asian, but not Japanese).

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).

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.

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.

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?

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)

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

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.

Knitters

There are a lot rares now that it's sunny, although I still see them occasionally. The knitters, sitting on benches, or waiting for the bus, or at the doors of professors on office hours. Filling dead time knitting. No, they are not little old ladies. They are Cornell students, young girls, making the most of the empty minutes between two classes.

Isn't that a great idea? I like to do things with my hands (embroidery, cooking, jewelry) but I never carry anything on me that I can do while waiting. My discman or a novel fills in that function. The first time I saw a knitting girl, I as suprised but then I thought it makes perfect sense. Let's see. It is a cheap hobby, it is portable, you choose for how long you want to do it (you cannot read three lines of a novel, stop, then read fine lines, stop...) and at the end you have something useful (you definitely need those hats and scarves in Ithaca).

Considering that a huge number of students at my home university are commuters, the surprising thing is that they don't do anything at all with their waiting time (up to three hours a day in my own experience). Oh, yes, they do something to keep their hands busy, sure. They smoke. Bleh.

Queer Studies, Gender Studies

Something that I envy of American Universities is that they have flexibility in designing departments and courses. In Spain, the contents of a course’s syllabus are up to the professor or the department, but the names of the courses themselves and the University’s division in departments is fixed and can only be changed through a very slow and complex bureaucratic process. That's why most of the courses I took as an undergrad had empty names, for example “English Literary Texts 1 (2, 3, …)”, so that the professors had more freedom in choosing the content. A consequence of that rigidity is that in Spain there aren’t Gender Studies departments. We work on Gender Studies, sure, but no one even thinks of starting the process that would officially create a department under that name (I suspect that by the time the bureaucracy was over, Gender Studies would be out of fashion). Professors associate in official “research groups”, but those remain invisible from the point of view of the students.

And now there is this new concept (new for me), Queer Studies. (Warning: I use "queer" in its technical sense of "people who are not heterosexual": I don't mean only "gay" and I am not using it as an insult)

Is the label “Queer Studies” useful? I once wrote a paper defending that Renaissance women poets should be studied alongside their male contemporaries, instead of keeping the token “Women Poets” lesson on the syllabus. I still think so, and it applies to queer artists. We study Michelangelo as the sculptor and painter of the best nudes of the post-Classic world, not as a predecessor of Mapplethorpe. We study Shakespeare’s sonnets because they are excellent, not because they were dedicated to both a man and a woman. It doesn’t change the value of one comma in the Jane Austen canon to speculate that she may have been a lesbian.

Of course there are authors that are better understood in the context of their sexual orientation, or in the context of everyone else’s attitudes towards it. But I’m not sure there is really enough yet to establish courses on queer literature. Besides, undergraduates (and everyone outside academia) would get the impression that we aren’t interested in poet A or B because they are good, but because they are queer. And that isn’t doing any favours to the poet or academia.

Having said that, I think that in a generation or so there will be very clearly established queer genres, of which we have the seeds today. A love story is a love story, no matter the gender of the protagonists. But there are some things that are inherently queer. The coming out story, for example. There is a novel genre, the Bildungsroman, in which someone goes from youth to adulthood, maturing in the process, and the coming out story is a subgenre of it. For example, Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson.

A second genre would be the “gay-man-knows-he-has-AIDS-and-has-just-about-enough-time-to-say-goodbye-properly”. All the examples I can thiink of are movies, not books. A connection to “straight literature” is the death haiku: classic composers of haiku could write detached, elegant compositions about facing death calmly, peacefully. Facing the perspective of your own death without fear and drama is not a very Western thing to do.

It will take about one more generation of very talented authors to make sense of these new tendencies. And it will be important that there are good, very good authors, so good that people without the least interest in queerness are interested in their works.

Ai sh'teruu (ai shiteru?)

In a campus as multicultural as Cornell, these sweet, small, amusing things must happen all the time, although we rush so much thinking of our own worlds, looking down to the ground, that we miss nearly all of them. This is what I saw this morning:

Two Asian girls, one of them vocalising to teach the other, who repeated tentatively, how to say "I love you" in Japanese.

I have no idea if they were flirting, or on a date. I hope so. Maybe I found it so touching and fun because it remindd me of two drastically diferent people, one who trusted my love teaching me to say exactly that, and another one who hd no idea of my feelings teaching me to say "i love you" in Russian. A very nerdy seduction strategy, isn't it?

Men and Middle Eastern dance.

Since lately I have been even more enthusiastic than usual on the topic of Middle Eastern dance ("belly dance", if you wish), a few people from the real world have asked me if there is any place in it for men. My experience with flamenco, instinct and common sense told me yes, and an article by Tarik Sultan in Morocco's website tells the surprising truth.

Come on guys, dancing is fun. And last time I checked men had two hips and two shoulders. Go on and do something with them more interesting than jogging.

On libraries both sides of the ocean, Part One

I found out y chance that there is an excellent collection of children’s literature and a good collection of comics in Uris Library. I quickly borrowed everything by Neil Gaiman,little by little, since they were often taken. The discovery was a big surprise, since our University libraries are more technical, and what I wonder, do we have those books in the library for the Popular Culture Studies types or simply because it is good that I can take Roald Dahl’s Matilda or Gaiman’s Preludes and Nocturnes as comfort reading after a hard day of Derrida?

(Mental picture of Cultural Studies clever one doing a dissertation on the influence of French Deconstructionism in contemporary comic writers).