Culture Shock (Comedy of manners)

The North African dance conference

In case you wanted to know how many hours of dancing I can accumulate in these two hips before they collapse: 15. I have done about 15 hours of dancing in three days. First shock: many people organise this sort of thing, it happens very often. It is a wonderful way of getting first-hand knowledge of other people’s techniques, but I wouldn’t want to do this sort of demanding physical work more than once or twice a year. But then, I’m not a professional dancer, and I guess that for people like June, three to ten hours of dance a day are just like my three to ten hours a day at the library.

It was wonderful to see dancers of all abilities, shapes and sizes have fun and learn new things. It was, in a way, a very geeky atmosphere: like a convention of extremely dedicated fans of a very obscure sci-fi series, although instead of talking of characters, actors, and whether the original comic book was better, we talked about the advantages of coin belts over hip scarves or about belly roll techniques (I want to be Émiline when I grow up). There may be a few divas, but the professionals have all the time in the world to talk to the newbies.

In spite of all the fun, something that I find very sad about Middle Eastern dance now is that even though there are many things I cannot do yet, I hardly ever watch a belly dancer and think “How the did she do that!?”; I know the theory behind nearly everything. Now it gives a different level of enjoyment, but there isn’t any mystery and that’s sad. I need to see the “How the did she do that!?” look in other people’s faces to remember that there is magic in it.

White and black

This Seen in Washington: a shop that only sells clothes in black and white. Their website says they do sizes 0 to 14,so it's not just for stik insect-shaped women. Yay. Even if it _is_ expensive, this brand should have shops in Spain! Pleeeeease!!!!!!!!

On the other hand, it shouldn't. Because then all I'd wear would be their clothes with brightly coloured scarfs and shoes.

Vietnam Women's Memorial

The Vietnam Memorial is very abstract so a few people were not too happy with it, and years after its construction they erected a statue of three soldiers, one black, two white, all men. Then, many years later, as the usual afterthought, they made a separate statue for the women. Instead of considering that they were sufficiently well represented by the abstract, original memorial, they thought it best to underline the differences between men and women (bleh) giving females a separate statue.

From an artistic point of view, I think it is a military version of the Renaissance "Pietà" theme. I've seen much better ones.

Terrorists

This is an image I found through Google of another poster on sale at those little stalls near the Vietnam and Korean war memorials in Washigton D. C. I think it's creepy.

The equivalent that comes to mind is someone selling stuff with svastikas or with the Spanish fascist flag (it used to be a little different than it is now, when we were not a democracy) right next to the Bosque de los Ausentes. Creepy and sad.

The darkest what??

In Washington D.C. a guided tour took us to see the Lincoln Memorial, and the Korean War and Vietnam War memorials that are very close to it. In the short stretch between the two war memorials there are a few stalls selling not exactly souvenirs, but badges and replicas and posters ad such, either military, "patriotic", or xenophobic. I was shocked, not culture-shocked but raged-shocked, when I saw that poster there. The photos are not very clear; they are the Twin Towers.

I would have thought that the genocide of Native Americans was the darkest page of American History. No, maybe slavery was. No, maybe the Civil War was (the guide told us that more people died in that war that in all the others put together). Even maybe, the Vietnam War was (sixteen years of war, were they crazy or what?), considering what a wreck they did of the place.

Oh, no. The darkest page in American History is not Americans being senselessly cruel to other people or to each other. It is other people being cruel to them. I see.

The Canon as interpreted by the Library of Congress

I went to the Library of Congress on a guided tour, so I didn’t have time to see much, really. Something must be said about Americans: our guide said that the Library is such an ornate, beautiful building because when it was built, this was a very young country and the Congressmen wanted an splendid building that Americans could be proud of. The Pharaohs built tombs, European kings built castles, and early Americans built a library.

So. There is a ceiling decorated with names that represent what the builders of this paradise considered the peak of Literature. Nowadays, to that we add Western Literature, because we are aware of the existence of The Monkey’s Journey to the West, or Issa Kobayashi’s haikus, and other masterpieces not from Europe or North America. When the Library was built, they didn’t know or care much about those things.

It was fascinating to see the designer’s version of the Canon (the Canon is the list of works or authors that an expert considers classic). A few names are lined up together without a heading, so the watcher has to guess that each wall is dedicated to a genre. This is what they have:

Novel: Miguel de Cervantes, Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, James Fennimore Cooper.
Poetry: Henry Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson.
Epic: Dante, Homer, John Milton.
Drama: Goethe, Shakespeare, Molière
Philosophy: Bacon, Aristotle.
History: Moses, Herodotus. Edward Gibbon and George Bancroft are put next to Longfellow and Tennyson.

In the choice of genres, I’m surprised there is no lyrical poetry. Where are Catullus and Petrarch? (Someone mention Bécquer and I’ll puke). Now about the choice of authors. First, the inventor of novels and someone American are a given. Cervantes is definitely in, but then, what about the American? Who cares about Cooper these days? That’s not a rhetorical question. Herman Melville is a lot more relevant nowadays, and Hawthorne… well, I have a soft spot for Nathaniel Hawthorne. So, if the designer was trying to see the future, he failed a bit there. Or maybe he had a preference for historical novels.

I cannot say anything about Victor Hugo. The idea is to take novelists from different countries, good idea, but then, what is Walter Scott doing up there? Representing Britain? Where is Jane Austen? Where is George Elliot? Americans in the 19th century had mixed feelings about Charles Dickens because he satirised them very harshly, so I understand his absence. Maybe is just my feminism (or my love of novels of manners), but Scott up there instead of Elliot or Austen, oh please.

The poetry one is funny because although Longfellow and Tennyson were wildly popular a bit more than a century ago, no one reads them anymore outside universities. And again, Petrach and Catullus??

Of course, the only thing I have to say about Epic is that if there were four columns instead of three, Ovid should’ve been in there. And Drama… what the heck were they thinking of when they left Sophocles out? Come on, Oedipus Rex, guys!

The Philosophy wall is too presumptuous. How can anybody pretend to choose just two philosophers to represent the best of human knowledge? Why not Kant and Plato? And History… Moses is just stuck up there in the ridiculous assumption that he’s the author of the Pentateuch (should I say, the Torah), and only the fact that he’s next to Herodotus suggests that he is considered an historian. Smash down that mosaic and put Caesar or Herodotus instead. And who are Bancroft and Gibbon? I don’t think I had ever heard of them before! The whims of fame and time are very cruel to some people.

So that’s it. Rather than just giving my opinion, I wanted to show how arbitrary the Canon can be, and how anyone that takes up the task of devising one is often doomed to (partial) failure. Blogs are very ethereal things, just bytes on a plane outside space, but if my entries were preserved somehow for someone to read in a century or two, I wonder if they will think me naïve and presumptuous.

No, actually, no “if”. I wonder in what aspects they will consider me naïve and presumptuous.

Back from Washington D.C.

Hello again! I'm back! And I have a lot to comment on in the culture-shock department. Since I have been defending lately that a blog is not a journal, and that this is definitely not a journal, instead of writing a chronicle of my trip to Washington D. C. I will write the usual very short pieces on individual, surprising things I have seen. This is just for starters...

If you have been in Ithaca for too long, when you travel...

- you are surprised and annoyed when restaurants have hardly any vegetarian options and no vegan ones.
- You keep looking in vain for recycling bins.
- Parents with small children don't smile back at you and touch their kids nervously.
- You suddenly find yourself the lightest-skinned person around. Then you realise that blacks and occasional Latinos make up 90% of security staff, police, receptionists, and similar jobs that involve zero power and little decision-making, but which are very visible from the outside (I did not see one black person in a suit). The Black Receptionist Syndrome does not happen at Cornell, since the admin staff is white, although to tell the truth there aren't many black students.

Shoes

Marian Keyes, a writer of excellent comedy of manners, says that there are three types of women: handbag-and-shoes women, pretty underwear women and cosmetics-and-bath-stuff women. I belong firmly in the last category, and I hate to go shoe-shopping. I need summer shoes right now (why I do is another story), so I went to the Mall thinking that I would get the first pair of black strappy sandals I saw and get the ordeal out of the way quickly.

There are three or four places to buy shoes, not counting sports shoes, at the Mall. And I had two surprises: one, sizes. In Spain, women’s clothes come in erratic sizes: you’re never sure of what is yours, because there is no standardisation among manufacturers. I have two jackets from the same “good”, relatively fancy and expensive brand, the fit is good, and one is a 42 and the other a 44. But shoes are not like that: my size is always and ever the same. I thought I would scream in despair when I realised that American shoes are like Spanish clothes! I am anything between a 6 and a 9, depending on the model! I thought I had died and gone to a hell designed especially for women who hate to buy shoes.

The second surprise was that every single shoe was made of plastic, never leather. All of them. And they weren’t even pretty shoes, the type of shoe that makes you think the design is so good you’ll buy them any way. I can’t wear plastic shoes. So, then I went to the Commons, to drown my sorrows in books. I had gone out shopping and rather that come home empty-handed, I might as well buy a novel and not consider the morning wasted (can you see my impeccable logic?)

There was a shop with cute clothes at the window and I took a look. And there I saw Camper shoes. Camper shoes!? In Ithaca!? Now, this is sophisticated. I have seen Camper shoes in two places: Spain, and British fashion mags. As I told the shop-assistant, I felt like an American would feel if they found peanut butter cookies in a café in Italy.

Its easy to just say that in Spain, there is a tradition of good quality shoes. You only realise the full extent of that when you try to buy shoes abroad. It also means that in Spain, Camper has hundreds of competitors for quality and dozens of competitors for design, and they are a little bit overpriced. But here in Ithaca, it fills me with a weird sort of patriotic pride to see that my choices for shoes are limited to junk and Camper.

Massage and boundaries

So, the massage course is over. I came to Cornell to do research and I’ve ended up learning how to give massage (shiatsu, Thai, and your standard kneading-rubbing massage). The instructors were great and the other students were amazing too: I have received professional massage four times in my life, and in two of them I felt worse the morning after. Here at Cornell I’ve been massaged six times by six beginners like me and my back is still in one piece.

The culture-shocking bit about the class was that the instructors seemed easygoing and at the same time very concerned about the possibility of students feeling uncomfortable about being touched by other people. There were many things, too visual or too technical to tell here, that we were supposed to do or not to do (mostly about how to touch or avoid the thighs). One of them said more than once that an advantage of shiatsu over Western massage is that you’re not be uncomfortable about taking off your clothes (Eastern massage is received while fully dressed). Is it really so awkward to be touched? Are people really so prudish?

Maybe. Or maybe it is a question of perspective. We were taught how to massage the face; it was my turn to work on another person. As the teacher dictated the instructions, I massaged my partner’s head. Weird if you want, I’m comfortable about everything else including the partial nudity, but touching a stranger’s face is way too intimate.

Come on, let's cut us all into pieces

OK, this is not culture shock as in "Americans are weird" but as in "Some people don't have any feelings at all". I don't think it has anything to do with nationality.

Preventive removal of both breasts reduces chance of breast cancer in women at elevated risk. Women with a moderately elevated risk of breast cancer who underwent surgery to have both breasts removed reduced their risk of getting the disease by about 95 percent, a recent study concludes.

Fine. Just damn fine. And also, people whose legs are cut off do not run any risks of tripping over. I cannot understand who would even think that anyone would go through major, very invasive surgery, that leaves permanent scars for life in a sensitive and emotionally charged part of the body, for prevention.

Are they going to recommend preventive hysterectomy to teenagers? After all, they are at risk of unwanted pregnancy. And, are they going to recommend preventive castration to men who are at high risk of testicle or prosthatic cancer? Yeah. Right. No, I didn't think so either. But one of the side effects of being born with breasts and ovaries, worse than the risk of cancer, is that medicine just does not take you, your needs or your feelings seriously.

The marriage of true minds

I have lived in three countries with drastically different customs about the beginning of adult life. In Spain, no one moves away from their parents without having a steady job, yep, a full-time job, or even not until you can afford buying a house. Considering the unemployment rates, the cost of housing, and the fact that you need two salaries (one for the mortgage, one to live on), the average age of becoming completely independent is somewhere around the early thirties. Earlier than 25 is very unusual; some people even think it is perfectly normal to stay with your parents indefinitely if you’re single.

I knew that other countries do it differently and you leave your parents when you’re eighteen. What baffles me is that in the US, people not only leave their parents sooner than we do. I understand that, it doesn’t shock me, after all Universities have this annoying habit of being in the middle of nowhere, so independence (even if not always complete economical self-reliance) comes early. And I have seen it happen in Scotland. The culture-shocking bit is that (gasp) students get married.

If I knew one or two married couples, I would be a bit surprised. But no, it seems relatively normal. Married students are a minority, and I don’t know any married undergrads, it’s something more characteristic of grad students. Some of them met in the real world, got married, and then one of them came to grad school and the other followed; some others met and got married while both were in grad school.

From my perspective, personally and culturally, it is scary as hell to take that step before securing a future economically. Or maybe it’s that I’m more used to see long engagements. But it is probably a better option than the ten-year (and more) long engagements that some Spaniards go through while they wait for the perfect home and the perfect jobs.

Weather with you

Four seasons in one day, said the song. Americans that like Ithaca and don’t like warm countries always make the same remark: “Ithaca has seasons”. I knew a Californian who loves this place and she said “I have always wanted to live in a place that had seasons”. Yeah, right. In the immortal words of Sandra Bem, Ithaca has two seasons: winter and July. That Californian would say that Seville has two seasons, summer and January.

In southern Spain, the spring is warm and lovely, like summers here. Summer has a different heat; it's so hot that going out would make you ill. In the autumn it rains. In winter, it doesn’t, and it is normally as cold as Ithaca in November (minus the snow). From my perspective, Ithaca’s autumn lasted a month, and then came a winter that threatens to last for exactly half a year. Autumn is like winter without snow. Summer will be, I imagine, spring with less rain.

Whether we don’t have seasons here, Southern Spain doesn’t have seasons, or we all do, is just a matter of perspective. This is just a long way to say that I’m tired of snow and I need sunshine. Badly.

Weather with you

Four seasons in one day, said the song. Americans that like Ithaca and don’t like warm countries always make the same remark: “Ithaca has seasons”. I knew a Californian who loves this place and she said “I have always wanted to live in a place that had seasons”. Yeah, right. In the immortal words of Sandra Bem, Ithaca has two seasons: winter and July. That Californian would say that Seville has two seasons, summer and January.

In southern Spain, the spring is warm and lovely, like summers here. Summer has a different heat; it's so hot that going out would make you ill. In the autumn it rains. In winter, it doesn’t, and it is normally as cold as Ithaca in November (minus the snow). From my perspective, Ithaca’s autumn lasted a month, and then came a winter that threatens to last for exactly half a year. Autumn is like winter without snow. Summer will be, I imagine, spring with less rain.

Whether we don’t have seasons here, Southern Spain doesn’t have seasons, or we all do, is just a matter of perspective. This is just a long way to say that I’m tired of snow and I need sunshine. Badly.