I can’t figure out this one, but I prefer to analyze the effect of a poem than trying to extract supposed “hidden meanings”. It reminds me of early flirting stages when an excuse to see and touch someone else’s skin is making a catalog of scars and domestic accidents. Hey, how did you get that one?

Birthday Hats

The day I began again to collect scars
we wore birthday hats purchased years ago,
their elastic bands squeezing the downy
fuzz we had collected on our faces.
Their spires went writing on the ceiling
What we said we mumbled.

Then rice cakes by candlelight;
I modeled where the oven rack had burned
through my knuckle. Next, you, stolid and
ingenious, cuffed your trousers,
exposing a cat scratch matted in curls.

When your stomach began to ache, I fed you
sugar and milk straight from my palm, which
you lapped musically, your choruses:
a terrible beauty. At bedtime, you
let me blow out the candles, my face glowing
auburn in their light and the room, now
suddenly dark, jotting placidly what I had said
in stitches.

I’m not going to write about how the nominations, the speeches and everything in general tried so hard to avoid politics it was embarrassing. And I’m not going to write about the actresses, so skinny it was painful to look at them. Human stomachs are not supposed to be convex. I’m not going to write a love song to Kate Winslet for looking bravely human among the stick insects. I’m not going to write about my dislike for black dresses on young blondes. And I’m not going to write about how acceptance speeches are blander every year. And I’m definitely not going to write about how one look of Imelda Staunton beats the whole of Hilary Swank’s career.

I just want to say that I love to be in a time zone that makes watching the Oscars easy!!!! In Spain it was a question of going to bed at ten and waking up at 3am on the years I had a morning shift, and staying up, going to bed at 7 am, on the years I had an afternoon shift.

La versión en español está al final.

1.
Flowing to the edge,
Water falls fearless.
It’s not gravity, it’s faith.
The riverbed and the sea
Catch it every time.

2.
Such simple beauty,
orange blossom, perfect scent.
your flavour’s subtle.
What a miracle it would be
to hear you sing!

3.
A kiss in the park.
Open-eyed, looking up.
The trees filtering sunlight.

4.
The musicality of the white clouds
Dancing on this friendly sky.

5.
Through the cracks in the clouds,
golden velvet rays.
God’s fingers.

Dios es el sol sobre la piel.

Al fluir hasta el borde,
el agua cae sin miedo.
No es la gravedad, es fe.
El cauce del río y el mar
siempre la cogen al vuelo.

Belleza simple,
azahar, perfecto aroma.
Tu sabor, sutil.
¡Qué milagro sería
que nos pudieras cantar!

Un beso en el parque.
Con los ojos abiertos, miro hacia arriba.
Los árboles filtran la luz.

La musicalidad de las nubes blancas
Bailando en este cielo amistoso.

Atravesando las grietas en las nubes,
rayos de terciopelo dorado.
Dedos de Dios.

Who would have thought that I would end up writing religious poetry? Only the last poem was religious in its initial conception. This is dedicated to Ann because she sees the beauty of the tiniest fungus and the grandest galaxy.

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Do I dance better if you watch?

¿Cómo distinguir el baile de la bailarina?
¿Bailo mejor cuando me miras?

Comedy of manners about dance and a poem about dancing too. Hey, it’s Saturday!

I stole the first line from William Butler Yeats. I hardly know anything about his work, but that line is important if you are crazy enough to study Paul de Man, which I did not once but twice. This is an odd one in the collection, because I very rarely compose from the looked-at, seductive perspective. Whoever speaks in my love poems would rather be the voyeur, the seduced.

This is an example of comedy of manners, rather than culture shock, because it’s universal. Well, it is universal as long as we’re talking about heterosexual people, which is close enough.

Women dance because they enjoy it. It is inexplicable, they like moving to the rhythm of music, that’s all. Men dance because it involves being near women. Some people don’t like to dance, and that’s okay. But beware: never, ever trust people who dance for the other gender's reason, the man who dances for fun or the woman who dances for company.

Arvind said that this blog is anti-American and I already explained it’s not. Now he says in his Arvindish way that I stereotype people. I don’t, I’m just starting to write comedy of manners, which is a genre that I love to read. Picky professors would say that I should be more specific: it’s either novels of manners, or comedy of manners when it’s in a play. Since there are “blogs of manners” and “films of manners”, better stick to a single label.

Whatever its name, it is the lovechild of poetry and culture shock (no, I didn’t realise initially, when I named the blog). It is the place where fiction meets Sociology. In a novel of manners, customs and habits are important because they are used for characterisation. It is often associated with 19th century novels about the upper-middle class, but it is practised still: if you read a book in which you can infer a character’s social background and personality by the brand of his car and the make of his clothes, that’s comedy of manners. The first example (as of so many things) is Don Quixote: the very first paragraph describes Alonso Quijano’s lifestyle, what he ate, what he enjoyed, his possessions, so nowadays we need an edition with footnotes to explain that when it says “his table had rather more beef than mutton” it meant he wasn’t poor but he was definitely not rich. The best writer ever in this genre, with Cervantes’s permission, was Jane Austen, who started a novel saying:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.

Is this true? Is it a universal truth? Well, my friend Jane goes to describe through three pages of dialogue a mother who thinks that her new single neighbour should be introduced to her daughters now. Is that stereotyping? Maybe. Is that true? Probably. Is it fun? Absolutely. The success of comedy of manners is that it can satirise without pain. Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, Arturo Pérez Reverte or Michael Moore (did I just name the Four Horsemen of Doomsday?) prefer satire. Taking a flamethrower and setting the monster on fire. Comedy of manners is more gentle, more delicate, and tickles the monster so that you laugh at him. Beats a flamethrower any day.

Forword is the literary magazine of the Women’s Resource Centre. It’s free and it’s published once each semester; I have only seen one issue, the most recent one. It publishes any format (fiction, poetry, essay, photography, drawings/paintings/etc.) and the themes are very loose: by women or about women.

I love the visual arts’ contributions to the issue I have, but there is something odd about them. Nine images: eight photos and one drawing. Two of them are female nudes (the cover is absolutely gorgeous and wonderful, although it is a big mistake of the editor that it is not credited) and four of them show cute-and-tasteful-but-explicit lesbian sex. Six out of nine. Not that I have anything against it, oh no, but it’s the lack of balance that feels strange. Forword is supposed to be a vehicle of expression for Cornellian women, right? Then why no one thought of submitting more pictures of interest to straight women: more non-nude portraits, more heterosexuality? Come on, people. The Spring issue deadline is April 1. Take that camera, go out and impress us.

Credit bit: the only photographer that takes non-nude portraits of women is Brian Stewart (Machinations is sweet) and Amy Newhouse makes the photographic equivalent of good free verse to erotic photos and to a view of the Commons. I’m so envious.

Silvio Rodriguez is a Cuban singer-songwriter that I know through my parents. Since I remember them playing his music to me when I was a wee child I guess he was popular in the early eighties. Then I forgot about him until I made friends with a huge fan of his.

Singer-songwriters in Spanish tend to adopt that confessional, intimate poetic style that I often dislike (as if having to study Bécquer in High School was not bad enough); and the only singer-songwriters that I like are the ones I grew up listening to, before I got so snobbish, and the ones I associate with people I love. I think that Silvio Rodríguez has both excellent and awful songs. This one here is the saddest song, even the saddest poem, that I know in any language. If I didn’t know it since I was a baby, if I heard it for the first time now, I would hate it (disliking sentimental poetry doesn’t mean I’m not sentimental, but don’t tell anyone). You can read it in Spanish here, if you want. This is my translation. The bad rhyme is intentional.

My blue unicorn, I lost it yesterday
I left it on the field and it went away.
Any information, I’d pay well.
the flowers it left behind refused to speak to me.

My blue unicorn went missing yesterday
Maybe it left me, maybe it got lost
And I only have one blue unicorn
If anyone has any clue, I’m begging
A hundred thousand, a million I’d pay
My blue unicorn went missing yesterday
It’s gone.

My unicorn and I made friends
partly with love and partly with truth
with its deep blue horn it fished for songs
knowing how to share them was its vocation

My blue unicorn went missing yesterday
and I might seem obsessed.
But I only have one blue unicorn
And even if I had two, I only want that one
Any information, I’ll pay
My blue unicorn went missing yesterday.
It’s gone.

Beaumont & Fletcher as quoted in Neil Gaiman's The Kindly Ones:

The fool that willingly provokes a woman
has made himself another evil angel ,
and new hell towhich all other torments
are but mere pastime...

I disagree, of course. But Fletcher is fun and over-the-top and I'm happy because the library found had for me at last the two last volumes of The Sandman. Yay!

Before you read me, click here if you can read in Spanish.

My trips to the supermarket include walking for 20 minutes with a backpack, so I have to be careful with the weight of what I carry and I never have my camera on me. I often regret it because there are so many things I would like to take pictures of. Like all this.

The bus slides down the slope and stops at a traffic sign that says “STOP war”; the second word is a graffiti. The tourist slogan is Ithaca is Gorges, but I’d get it changed to Ithaca is Hippie. The other bus riders are obese young men as if out of a documentary for the risks of fast food, and delicate Asian students that wear stiletto boots in the snow. I get down at the Commons, where the Christmas decorations are still on, and I swear as I pass by the Greek Orthodox Church: it is decorated with a biblical quote that says MY YOKE IS EASY AND MY BURDEN IS LIGHT. Jesus did not have to walk to the supermarket with a backpack.

My Discman screams Spanish rap at me as I walk past skinny black boys walking like pendulums in oversize clothes and old ladies that wrap their little dogs in little blankets to go for a walk in the middle of a snowfall. I laugh loudly at a sign that says JESUS HAS ALREADY COME, with a phone number and a biblical reference. Will Jesus help me with my bags, do you think?

Past the second-hand children’s clothes shop, painted bright yellow and decorated like a fairy tale house, there is the main road to cross and trucks pass by, as if out of a road movie, huge monsters, bigger than anything I’ve seen in Europe, that stop to let me cross. Thank you. I’ve survived the road and I’m at the supermarket.

The way back. A tiny Asian girl with a white father smiles at me as if she knew me, and I realise that she is just smiling back: the mood in my Discman is contagious. A teenager drags behind the steps of his father, frowning like only teens can. A graffiti on a street light remind us KNOW THYSELF: Ithaca has very learned hippies. There is a Pregnancy Center and a funeral parlour on opposite sidewalks of the same street. I pass by the Public Library just before the bus stop and cross a woman and a little girl. The mother has one very thick romance novel, the girl the complete works of J K Rowlings and a cookie.

And on the bus home, there is a dodgy type drinking something that does not smell like coffee out of a paper cup. I don’t know if he’s talking to me or to his invisible friend, but I’m not going to take off my Discman to ask.

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

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

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

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

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

This memory won’t change,
With him or alone.
He danced in an orange glow.

Este recuerdo no va a cambiar
Si estoy con él o sola.
Él bailaba en un aura naranja.

In the beginning my haikus were mental photographs of men. To be precise they were frozen images of people I had loved, dated or had crushes on even if by the time I started writing all I had was the memory of the feeling, and my love, my lust, and the men were long gone.

This poem is a revision of the second or third haiku I ever wrote, a couple of years ago. The Elusive Poet says the original, with the first line as “Perfect, new, happy”, is better, but I disagree. Since then, the club in which this man danced in an orange glow (literally: orange lights pointed at him) has burned to the ground. Which, I think, makes the point of the poem even more important.

I can’t believe I haven’t written anything about John Donne yet. Like some Spanish writers of Post-Renaissance literature (I cannot call them all Baroque) he wrote both love poetry and religious poetry. I prefer his love poetry, although there is a sonnet (ah, the religious sonnet, what a wonderful oxymoron) that compares his heart to a walled city and God to the army that has a siege on it, and faith with the ram that breaks the city walls. Have you seen The Return of the King, the third movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Can you see the leap of imagination needed to imagine that the love of God is like the Orcs and their catapults trying to conquer the city… for the city’s own good?

His love poetry can share that same intensity. No one in Spain knows who John Donne is; it’s unavoidable, perhaps. His violent metaphors are hard to understand in English, so translation is nightmarish at times. I cannot do John Donne justice, mostly because I have no ability to rhyme, so I’ve made an adaptation into free verse. No rhyme at all is better than bad rhyme. I have picked this poem because it is sentimental and the same time restrained (surprise, surprise). You can read it in English here.

El Funeral.

Vienes a amortajarme. No rompas,
no cuestiones
la pulsera de pelo que corona mi mano.
No toques el misterio,
el signo,
no lo toques.
Es mi alma, un alma externa,
para sustituir la que se ha ido.
Ahora controla mi cuerpo.
Ahora ya tiene un imperio.
Ahora me salvará.

Mi mente ya no existe,
los músculos no han muerto.
Los pelos será nervios
entrelazadamente
pues no en vano crecían en mejor cabeza.
Y me recompondrán.
Eso, si ella no buscaba
dejarme aún más claro su no,
mi dolor encadenado,
los grilletes de pelo de mi amor prisionero.

Qué importa su intención.
Qué más da ella. Enterradlo.
Si me hizo mártir de amor,
cualquiera que lo vea se hará hereje,
idólatra de estas reliquias.
Y si me dio la humildad
para darle el mérito de todo lo que hice,
tendré el coraje.
Nunca la poseí. Algo suyo poseerá mi tumba.

The Motorcycle Diaries has just been on Cornell’s cinema. It is a movie that looks foreign, oh yes, it is filmed in Spanish and all that, but it is produced by Robert Redford, and it follows a typically American comedy structure: humour in an episodic plot with a tragic moment two thirds into the movie, the ending rising up in mood, hopeful and sentimental. A bit of love, a bit of adventure. Nothing new. But it was an educational experience to see this movie in a movie theatre surrounded by a very homogeneous crowd of Cornell students. Very young, racially diverse, and I assume that politically they were all on the lefty side of things: hey, this is hippy Ithaca and they had come to watch a biography of Che Guevara.

It is a comedy, sure, but I didn’t find it as funny as the audience did. During the first hour, they were laughing all the time. Hhmm, this is not funny. I mean, yes, it is a good comedy, but it’s not spectacular. The problem was that these kids and I were not watching the same movie. These kids have learnt the codes of American cinema much better than I have, and when they see anything else, it’s like when I read in French: it is a foreign language and you interpret it through a filter. And the American cinema premise they were using was that anyone who does not look like Gwyneth Paltrow or her brother is laughable.

Let’s see. We are slowly overcoming the black comedian stereotype. There is the fat comic character, or even the woman who is not fat but plays fat roles. There is the invisibility of women who look older than 30. Very simply, the code says that the function of characters that aren’t white, thin, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class and intelligent but not __too__ intelligent is to give comic relief to the real protagonists (hey, Dickens worked on the same premise and here I am making a living out of his novels). I don’t think this necessarily shows racism or sexism from the audience or the producers. My problem is not with the Hollywood code; what I would hate is to wake up one morning and discover that the cinema of other parts of the world, including of course Spain, is happily exploiting the “different is laughable” rule. I'm afraid it is on its way.

Gapingvoid didn’t exist when Alan Spence wrote:

“You start off seeing yourself as this writer who also happens to be teaching for a living. Then you think you’re a teacher that does a bit of writing from time to time. Then finally.” He shrugged. “You realize”
“You mean you’ve given up writing altogether?”
“__It’s__ given __me__ up”.

Just when I think that people will scream at me if I mention this one more time, someone emails me to say that they found Gapingvoid through me and found it useful. So here it goes again: Hugh McLeod, the creator of the amazing Gapingvoid cartoons, has a PDF about How to Be Creative that you can download. It is not a manual about how to do what you do, but about how not to feel like that character in Alan Spence’s novel, so that you can juggle creativity with the rest of your life. Highly recommended.

For anyone interested in marketing and advertising there is the Hughtrain, too, another PDF.

Don’t worry, I’m not out of my head. I’m reading Tacitus’s Germany; in case you’re a bit lost, Tacitus was a Roman historian from the 1st century a.c. and Germany is a study of the peoples to the north of the Roman Empire. The very first page argues that the Germans must be a very pure race, indigenous to their country and not immigrants from anywhere else. Why? Because no one would go to Germany if they belonged anywhere else

Not to speak of the danger of a terrible and unknown sea, who would have left Asia or Africa or Italy and sought Germany, which is rough in terrain, bitter in climate, gloomy to live and to see, unless it be one’s native land?

I had to laugh when I read that. Tacitus could have been talking about Cornell! Tacitus wouldn't have believed that eventually people would come to these cold places for an education.

This is the second poem by Noah Grossman I post here. I took it from the Spring 2004 issue of Plug and I liked it so much that I translated it.

Cheated,
Because of
You
I fume.

Because of
Composure only,
I fume
Silently.

Composure only,
I repeat
Silently
On.

I repeatedly
Cheated
On
You.

Toda la Verdad y Nada.

Engañado
Por tu culpa
Yo
Me enfado.

Sólo por
Guardar las apariencias
Yo me enfado
En silencio.

Guardar las apariencias,
Una y otra vez
Me
Repito.

Una y otra vez,
Yo
te he
engañado.

Corazón en bandeja.

No,
no voy a poner mi corazón en un poema.
No,
No en un poema como en una bandeja.
Pues entonces
ese pedacito de mí –quizá tuyo
lo leerán otros,
y otros se lo contarán a alguien.
Mi corazón que empezó mío
y luego fue tuyo
acabará repartido.
Cortado con tenedor y cuchillo.
Todos podrán compararlo con los que ya conocen:
Los otros corazones puestos en bandejas,
Pinchados sobre un panel,
Intimidades que otros incautos (no yo)
Pusieron en un poema para compartirlo.
Yo no,
prefiero no ponerlo.
No.
En un poema, no.
No es en un poema donde puedo darte mi corazón.

Heart on a tray.
No,
I’m not going to put my heart into a poem.
No,
Not into a poem as if on a tray.
Because then
That piece of me –maybe yours
Will be read by others
And others will tell someone else.
My heart initially mine
And then yours
Will end up spread
Cut up in little pieces with knife and fork
Everyone will be able to compare it with others they know
The other hearts set on trays
Pinned onto a board
Innermost thoughts that the naïve (not me)
Put into a poem they would share.
Not me,
I’d rather not.
No.
Not in a poem.
It’s not through a poem that I will give you my heart.

This, my third poem in free verse, sums up my opinion on “intimate” poetry, the poems in a confessional tone that do nothing for me. Although it probably means something that when I decide to write a poem against confessional neo-Surrealism it ends up being neosurrealist.

Empezó a repetirse una pesadilla en la que viajaba en un avión que aterrizaba sin mí. Yo volaba, sentada en el asiento, dentro del avión, hasta que éste descendía dejándome atrás, atravesando las paredes, flotando en el aire frío. Así fue como cogí miedo a volar.

Qué tonta. No me di ni cuenta de que te estaba perdiendo, mi amor, hasta que me quedé sola. Agarrada al aire frío, y tú tan lejos.

I started to have a recurring dream in which I flew in an airplane that landed without me. I was flying, sitting on my seat, inside the airplane, until it came down leaving me behind, passing through the metal walls, floating on the cold air. That was how I got afraid of flying.

Silly me. I didn’t realise I was losing you, my love, until I was alone. Holding on to the cold air, and you so far away.

Phew. The half-decent first prose fiction I write since June 2004. Pats on the back very welcome.

I bought Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America thinking that it would resemble essays such as Fast Food Nation or No Logo, but it turns out to be a personal account: the writer took a succession of bad-paying jobs to see if it is possible to survive on them in the US. Surprise, surprise: it’s not. You can either buy food or pay rent, but not both.

My first reaction was that she was almost a century too late: George Orwell wrote a similar book, Down and Out in Paris and London, about his experiences when he was accidentally out of a job teaching English private lessons in Paris. So he worked as a cleaner in a fancy hotel’s restaurant kitchen, and then he had to live as a tramp in London for a few weeks. Highly recommended reading.

I have mixed feelings about the situation Nickel and Dimed describes, because at times I relate to it. I remember my summer as a counter assistant at a chip shop in Glasgow, on the minimum wage, my first attempt at being economically independent. I could afford rent in a shared flat, groceries and some luxuries like books, but I could not have afforded my own flat, paying a mortgage, or a baby, had I wanted to have them. Now I live on the local living wage; the difference between the living wage and the minimum wage is that minimum wage is arbitrarily fixed by the government and the living wage is an estimate of how much it costs to afford food, rent, health care, transportation and other necessities. Again, if I was in this country for more than a year I would resent the fact that I cannot afford luxuries like buying clothes without making a careful budget or buying a house, but the statistics that pepper the book suggest that Cornell University has done quite a lot of math to ensure that I’m at a very precise level of austere comfort.

I cannot stop comparing the situation on the book with the Spanish one. We are better off in Spain because in Europe, minimum wages are a little bit closer to a living wage. Public transport is generally better than what I have found here. Child care is more affordable. There are national health systems, which is more than you can say about this parody of a democracy I’m living in. Now the problems: rents in Spain are insanely high because the only people really willing to live in a rented place are students, so landlords are used to charge by the room. That means that you can forget about renting a house or flat for one person or family. Buying a house? For a couple of young professionals, paying the mortgage can easily swallow up one complete salary, and I’m taking long-term mortgages, of about 25 years. Babies? Until about five years ago when immigrants started to come in masse, Spain had the lowest natality rate in the world. The way Spaniards deal with low salaries and overpriced housing is by living with their parents until they find a job that pays enough to leave. It’s not the best solution but it’s the only one we’ve found.

If I talk about my town I have to talk about rivers, of course. This is what T S Eliot has to say about them. The first two lines made me buy the whole book

I do not know much about rivers; but I think that the river
is a strong brown god –sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

I have been told that this blog is anti-American, and it was not said as insult or praise, just as fact. I don’t intend it to be. If this was a political blog it would definitely be anti-American, but I’m trying to write comedy of manners, which is a lovely, mildly satirical genre that pokes fun at things instead of setting them on fire, so you see the absurdity of everyday life. It is only for fun after all. Anyway, to show that I am not particularly anti-American I’ll tell you of Seville’s most hated absurdity. (most hated by me, at least)

I know people from different cultures that think that theirs is the only one is the world to do something unpleasant. For example, many nationalities think they are the most unpunctual one. So, I don’t know if this will be characteristic of anyone else. I am talking about the inhabitants of Seville’s habit of saying “A ver si quedamos”: let’s meet some time. “Quedar” means “to meet, to go out, to make arrangements to meet in the future, to have a date”.

You know this person, someone who isn’t your friend. Maybe they used to be. You meet them by chance on the streets, or something like that, and just like anywhere else in the world you stop for a minute and catch up on how they are. And if you are in Seville, Spain, one of you will say goodbye by saying “well, we have to meet again some time soon”. No one makes a mention of when you’re free or makes sure of how you can be contacted.

When someone from Seville says they’d love to meet me again and they don’t immediately suggest a time, a place, a plan, and make sure my mobile is still the same number, I know they don’t have the least intention of calling. Everyone hates being told “let’s meet”. Everyone says it anyway. Dammmmm it, even I say it when I feel that not doing it would be rude and I can’t say “I’m glad to see you” with a straight face. Besides, I spend so much time away from Seville that indulging in very Seville-like vices reassures me that I still belong there.

Some people from the South with spontaneous, warm behaviour think that people from the North, who are apparently colder and more distant, are more sincere in their personal relationships. Less smiles, more real care. Seville’s art of the “oh, yes, we have to meet” hypocrisy seems to prove it. Does anyone disagree?

Using the simplest and most hostile of stereotypes, Spaniards think that Americans are extreme conservative worshippers of Mr. Money (hey, Mister Money sounds good, I’ll have to translate Quevedo’s Money Poem one day). The image is mostly correct, although they don’t get two details right. One, there is a reasonable minority of Americans that don’t fall in that category. Almost everyone in Ithaca, for example. Two, Spaniards have no idea of to what extent religion is important to American conservatives. That is, maybe, because we identify conservativism in religion with the historical oppression from the Catholic church. Since we know the majority of Americans are not Catholic and there is no established, visible, purely American religious hierarchy, we don’t put the two concepts together. It has surprised me greatly to see (never first hand, I repeat that Ithaca is a very liberal place so this is something I just hear about) that American conservatives are almost always religious fanatics. Religious here meaning normally Protestant.

The weirdest thing that they do is all the fuss about Creationism, that is, believing that life appeared on Earth all at once and that life forms don’t descend from more primitive ones. When I was at school, we learnt about Evolution when we were about 13 years old, from two different teachers: the Science teacher told us the basics and the History teacher put it in the context of other discoveries of the 19th century. There was a brief mention of the historical controversy over Genesis as a thing of the past, and that was all. No one, as far as I know, seriously doubts Evolution in Europe. No one knows that Creationism exists! So, sometimes news such as a Midwest State taking Evolution out of the High School textbooks is taken in Europe like a sort of Village of the Fools joke (like Irish jokes or Polish jokes or whoever plays the role of the Nation of Fools in your culture). Putting Creationism in textbooks is to us an equivalent to putting the Flat Earth theory or the existence of fairies.

I will never forgive my friend Danny for inventing the word “metarecuerdo” before I did. What is a meta-memory? It must be the memory of a memory. There are things I don’t exactly remember; what I remember is the story I have told myself and others about the way it happened. A photograph is a metamemory. “Your earliest childhood memory” is a metamemory. A haiku about my first love is (creates?) metamemory.

Danny gave me a book of his poetry. I don’t like the way he breaks lines and sentences and sprinkles words all over the page with no good reason sometimes, but the book has some beautiful moments. Like the word metamemory, and this poem, that he says was his first “real” one. Scroll down for my English translation. (Dani, ya sé que ilusión no significa illusion, pero déjame que traduzca un poco a mi bola)

Fantasmas en el límite del ojo.

Mi verdadero amor es una chica que encontré en un vagón de un metro.
Su pelo rojo le caía por la cara y se posaba en un libro.
Los ruidos se sobreponían a cualquier sonido, pero ella, impasible, detrás de sus
_______________________________gafas coloreadas, leía Cien Años de Soledad.
_______________________________Yo la miré sigiloso, y bajé en mi parada.
Me sentí perdido en mi propia habitación.

Mi verdadero amor es una chica que encontré en el Museo Pompidou.
Mirábamos una obra de Barceló.
Me siguió hasta la siguiente y la miré, ella también y pasé a la siguiente y también
Me siguió, le mandé una sonrisa y ella me la devolvió. Continué mi visita a la izquierda,
Pero
_______________________________Ella cogió el otro camino.
_______________________________La vi alejarse a través de los pasillos.
Me sentí perdido en mi propia ilusión.

Mi verdadero amor es una chica que encontré en un video-club.
Nuestras manos se encontraron en Carretera Perdida
Yo cogí Pulp Fiction para impresionarla, ella me contestó con Asesinos Natos,
Yo miré la carátula de La Noche de los Muertos Vivientes, ella me respondió con
_______________________________Cosas que nunca te dije.
_______________________________Y así me llevó al estante romántico. Yo alquilé una de miedo.
Me sentí perdido en mi propia ficción.

Mi verdadero amor es la chica con la que representé la Ópera de los cuatro cuartos.
Me dijo “te quiero”, me besó con ardor. Se apagaron los focos; los aplausos
Llenaron el
_______________________________Escenario mientras ella besaba esta vez a otro.

Me siento un personaje en busca de autor......


Ghosts on the eye’s edge.

My true love is a girl I met on the tube.
Her red hair fell own her face and on a book.
The noise drowned all sound, but she kept, behind her
_______________________________colour glasses, reading A Hundred Years of Solitude.
_______________________________I looked at her in silence, and got off at my stop.
I felt lost in my own room.

My true love is a girl I met on the Pompidou Museum.
We were looking at something by Barceló.
She followed to the next one and I looked at her, she looked back at me and I walked on
To the next one and she followed me too,
I sent her a smiled and she smiled back at me. I turned left
But
_______________________________She went some other way.
_______________________________I saw her walking away along the corridor.
I felt lost in my own illusion.

My true love is a girl I met at the videorental.
Our hands met on Lost Highway
I took Pulp Fiction to impress her and she replied with Natural Born Killers
I looked at the case of The Night of the Living Dead and she reacted with
_______________________________Things I never told you.
_______________________________That’s how she took me to the Romance shelf. I rented a scary one.
I felt lost in my own fiction.

My true love is the girl that performed The Threepenny Opera with me.
She said “I love you” and kissed me passionately. The lights went off, the applause
Filled the
_______________________________Scene as she kissed someone else.

I feel like a character in search of an author……

Like most Spaniards, I dislike St Valentine’s Day (not Valentine: SAINT Valentine) on principle. It has never been a tradition for us, and now that the Spanish shops make St. Valentine promotions we think it is just “very American”. And in Spain, “American” is a bad thing to be. Besides, celebrating love by buying bad quality jewelry and chocolates today of all days goes against what this day is supposed to be about.

In this world, young women don’t get jobs if they are married, and if they’re lucky enough to find one, they lose it if they have babies. In ancient Rome, soldiers were not allowed to get married; having a family is too distracting. Besides, a dead soldier is one less pension to worry about, but widows have nothing better to do than beg and complain. So everyone stays single until military service is over, right?

The problem was that a Christian convert called Valentine started to marry soldiers with their girlfriends. Christians were not terribly popular and one of them going about marrying people and talking about love was not going to last for long. So he became a martyr; I forget what hideous torture he had to go through. In any case, for Catholics or other Christians who believe in saints, St. Valentine’s Day should be a day with a certain amount of mourning added. It is not a celebration of love, but a remembrance in honour of a guy who did what he considered right to the point that he let others torture him for those ideals. It is a day of warning about what happens when some people want to love and others will not allow that.

And if you think that saints are a medieval superstition and all I’m saying is complete nonsense, I hope you’re coherent and you ignore that today is St Valentine’s Day, one of the tackiest moments of the whole calendar.

Yesterday I went to the theatre to see Five Women Wearing the Same Dress (not bad, very amusing) and during the intermission I saw a half-hidden notice that said something like:

WARNING
This play contains

-Mature Language and Content .

-Smoking. (herbal cigarettes)

I asked a native speaker who confirmed my impression that "herbal cigarettes" is a euphemism for joints. As if tobacco was a mineral or an animal!! And it really gets on my nerves that anything sexualis called "mature". They play did not have mature content. It contained five women talking in the shallowest possible way about men, sex, and relationships.

It was also strange that there was a mention of smoking but not of cocaine.Cool. Some women share a joint, warn the audience. A man and a woman make plans over a plastic bag of white powder, no problem. This is weird.

In Cadiz, a town in Southern Spain, people celebrate Carnival not only by going out in disguises but also by singing in groups satirical songs, often (but not always) humorous. The events commented are normaly very local. The winners of the "official" contest (although lots of groups are informal and just sing in the streets) this year had one song about the US. I won't translate the whole lyrics, they are just a sarchastic take on current political events.
Si entiendes español puedes escuchar una versión heavy metal buenísima aquí.

I write prose as well as poetry. It's mostly erotic, with a clear division between the interesting tales and the ones without a plot, which I tend to call "anatomy lessons". They were of course easier to write, and although they are absolutely worthless they are useful. They are good or practising technique (as in, figuring out how many synonyms of "kiss" I can put in one paragraph or how to incorporate dialogue into the action), and they were also excellent to make me keep in mind that writing is a craft that can be improved by the habit of finding a plot, pinning it down and holding it for three pages (I'm thinking Judo here). It's not mystical.

A couple of months ago I read The Sandman Companion, a very long interview with Neil Gaiman in which he said that he used exactly the same strategy: writing sex as a way to scare away the ghost of writer's block. Interesting, someone who has been writing for decades has the same little trick that this beginner.

My problem now is that I'm bored with anatomy lessons. Very bored. That is probably why I have not written prose since June 2004, and I haven't written one with a plot since November 2003 (the one in June was poetic prose, I might post it here one day). If the first three sentences of a tale don't grab me, I don't continue in anatomy lesson mode, I just give up. Maybe the problemis that I'm taking my prose too seriously!

I need to find a solution, something to make writing lighthearted again. Sheer discipline, using blog entries for the seeds of plots, nonfiction, I don't know. Paradoxically, I need to find the way to write really badly again if I want to compose anything good afterwards.

Sorry for getting confessional. I'll go back to the comedy of manners and the haikus very soon, I promise.

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

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

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

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

How people tried to keep their heads warm in the snow today:

-A guy on a Cornell baseball cap. His frozen ears matched the red cap.
-A girl on fluffy pink and white earmuffs. Bunny-shaped.
-A guy (I think) on a black cap and a neon orange balaclava.

Heh.

My brother the overachiever has just bought a house. I’m impatient to see photos. In the meantime, since both of us know a thing or two about leaving what we love behind, this is for him. Lyrics by Fairport Convention, translation mine as usual. Scroll down for the original version in English.

Who knows where the time goes/ A dónde se va el tiempo.

Cruzando el cielo de la tarde
Se marchan los pájaros.
Pero ¿Cómo saben
que ya es la hora?
Me quedaré soñando
junto a la chimenea
Paso del tiempo.
Porque cualquiera sabe a dónde va.
¿A dónde va
el tiempo?

Triste playa desierta
Se van los amigos inconstantes
¿cómo pueden saber que ya es hora?
Yo me quedo aquí
No me pienso ir
Me da igual el tiempo
porque nadie sabe a dónde va.
¿A dónde se va
el tiempo?

No estoy sola si mi amor está cerca
Dejadnos solos
Hasta que sea la hora
y llegue el invierno
y la primavera después
No le tengo miedo al tiempo
Porque nadie sabe qué grande es mi amor
ni a dónde se va el tiempo.

Across the evening sky
all the birds are leaving
well, how can they know
it’s time for them to go?
By the winter fire
I’ll be still dreaming
I have no thought of time
for who knows where the time goes?
who knows
where the time
goes.

Sad deserted shore
your fickle friends are leaving
how can they know it’s time for them to go?
I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving
I have no count of time
for who knows here the time goes

I’m not alone while my love is near
why not leave us all
til it’s time to go
so come the storms of winter
And the spring again
I have no fear of time
for who knows where my love goes
and who knows where the time goes.

When I was getting ready to come to Cornell, I believed one of the most established stereotypes about Americans: they cannot put any other country in the world on a map (well, to be fair they can place Canada and Mexico) and they think Spain is a Third World country, probably in South America.

Ithaca and Cornell aren’t representative because everyone is highly educated, but I’m glad to tell Spanish readers the following:

-Everyone knows where Spain is. At least they are certain that it is in Europe.

-No one thinks Spain is a Third World country but they often assume that it is very, very conservative from their knowledge of Catholic countries.

Everyone in Spain knows a friend of a friend who had to explain that Spain is not to the south of Mexico, so I thought you’d like to know that is a bit exaggerated.

When Spanish girls say “o sea” (that is, which means, therefore), “¿no?” (isn’t it?) and “¿sabes?” (you know), American ones say "like". Sometimes “like” means “kind of”, sometimes it means “approximately” and sometimes it means nothing at all. My blog is, like, thematic. I’ve been blogging for, like, three months and a friend asked me like, why I write in English instead of Spanish. See?

I want to dedicate the Hands Cycle (I have a habit of dedicating this cycle to women, I think it is friendly and cozy, if a poem can be cozy) to the girl that said “I was trying to keep down the ‘like’”, referring to making a comment aloud to the whole class. Won’t say her name or what class, in case she’s shy.

The Hand Cycle. / El Ciclo de las Manos.
1
Old feeling made new,
Hands firm on my back.
They show anything’s possible.
Un sentimiento antiguo, renovado.
Unas manos firmes sobre mi espalda.
Muestran que todo es posible.

2
Five rays of light shine,
Your fingers on my cream skin.
Too much of them stings.
Cinco rayos de luz brillan,
Tus dedos sobre mi piel de nata.
En exceso, queman

3
I look at your wrist.
Pink veins through transparent skin.
A road map to love.
Me fijo en tu muñeca.
Venas rosas a través de piel transparente.
Un mapa de carreteras del amor.

4
Cream on my coffee.
Silver on his hands.
Who could give him all those rings?
Nata en mi café
Plata en sus manos.
¿Quién le habrá regalado todos esos anillos

A few days ago, I said I’d talk about what happened with my UK social security number, so here’s the story. In the UK, like in most civilised countries, some money is taken from your salary as an insurance for when you are retired or unemployed. Unemployment is high and it is possible, but very hard, to survive when you’re on the dole. In Spain, fraud to this system is done by working without insurance and getting the dole at the same time. In the UK, fraud is a serious crime done by using several different identities and getting the dole for all on them. Since there isn’t a national ID card, just passports and driving licenses, adopting several identities was feasible a few years ago. Remember Trainspotting? The movie doesn’t make it very clear, but Renton and most of his friends lived on this fraud.

This means that nowadays, newborn babies are assigned a social security number automatically, and that if an adult requests one, like I did once, you have to go through an ordeal by paperwork. Getting a social security number is such a hassle that employers cannot refuse to give you a job because you don’t have one: they have to give you the job, and wait until you apply for the number. First you go to the Social Security office and someone fills a form for you. Then you get in the mail an appointment for an interview, asking you to bring every possible form of ID you have. I had: Passport, Spanish national ID card, My University’s student card, driving license, and a Spanish library card. They all had a photo on them. In the interview I was asked things like how many times I had ever been in the UK, what for, and if I could give contact details of several different people in town that could guarantee that the person there was actually Nia Andino and no one else. I know they checked the references because they called at my work on my free day. The interview lasted a couple of hours. Still, I found it less insulting that the most recent ordeal-by-paper, trying to get a student visa to come to Cornell.

My friend Arvind knows everyone at Cornell. Everyone. He’s a lot of fun, he takes us to concerts, and he organises DVD nights, so this is for him. It’s a traditional Irish song which I only know in The Pogues’ version.

Well, my name is Jock Stewart
I’m a canny gunman
and a roving young fellow I’ve been.
So be easy and free when you’re drinking with me,
I’m a man you don’t meet every day.
I have acres of land,
I have men at command
I have always a shilling to spare.
So be easy and free when you’re drinking with me,
I’m a man you don’t meet every day.
So come fill up your glasses of brandy and wine,
whatever it costs I will pay.
So be easy and free when you’re drinking with me,
I’m a man you don’t meet every day.

I know, I know, I'm off-topic, but this is important, ok? An association that defends the rights of raped women in Spain has just published a report that says that:

-10% of rapes are done by a group.
-40% of victims are underage.
-6% of aggressors are underage. The average age is falling down drastically.
-The most important statistic: 37% of rapes where done by someone the victim knew.

This report has been done analysis the cases of people who have askd for this association help. That means that of course, there are plenty of unreported cases. I think that a rape victim is more likely to seek help if she was raped by a stranger than by, say, her boyfriend. Which means that the 37% estimate is a very conservative one.

I do not believe in the "rapist behind a dark corner". Information like this should spread faster and better so that more peple are aware that "rape" actually means "someone you love abusing your trust" rather than "don't go out alone when it's dark".

When you go to school in Spain, sometime in your late (very late) teens the concept of free verse is introduced in the Spanish Literature or Spanish Linguistics class. Blank verse is not frequent in Spanish poetry, because rhyming is very easy, and rhyme has been part of both the popular and the High-Literature traditions almost since the birth of the Spanish language. So, the concept of free verse is a double jump: the loss of rhyme and the loss of syllable count. Besides, Spanish literary critics and professors often dislike free verse as if on principle and they transmit their prejudices very effectively. Some months ago I had to explain to a friend of mine that not all poetry has to rhyme, and he didn’t believe me when I said that some languages don’t use it at all.

So: Spanish critics have to add free verse to the syllabus, but they don’t want students to like it too much. What to they do? they delay teaching it as much as they can, they make it look like a peculiarity of certain schools and styles, and they only give examples that deal with unpleasant subject matters. Poems that the students cannot possibly like. Difficult ones, if possible. For example, Bécquer (oh, please, not again) is a favourite of teenage girls, but no teacher will ever say that he composed free verse occasionally. Oh, no. The lesson on free verse will have examples taken from Dámaso Alonso. Poor free verse, and poor Dámaso, and poor kids. I like Dámaso Alonso, but no one can like him when you’re 17.

This is one of the two poems that I remember were used to explain to me the concept of free verse (scroll down for my translation). The other is too depressing.

INSOMNIO

Madrid es una ciudad de más de un millón de cadáveres
(según las últimas estadísticas).
A veces en la noche yo me revuelvo y me incorporo
en este nicho en el que hace 45 años que me pudro,
y paso largas horas oyendo gemir al huracán, o ladrar los perros,
o fluir blandamente la luz de la luna.
Y paso largas horas gimiendo como el huracán,
ladrando como un perro enfurecido,
fluyendo como la leche de la ubre caliente de una gran vaca amarilla.
Y paso largas horas preguntándole a Dios,
preguntándole por qué se pudre lentamente mi alma,
por qué se pudren más de un millón de cadáveres en esta ciudad
de Madrid,
por qué mil millones de cadáveres se pudren lentamente en el mundo.
Dime, ¿qué huerto quieres abonar con nuestra podredumbre?
¿Temes que se te sequen los grandes rosales del día,
las tristes azucenas letales de tus noches?


INSOMNIA

Madrid is a city with more than a million corpses
(According to the latest statistics)
Sometimes in the nights when I toss and sit up
in this niche where for the last 45 years I’ve been rotting,
and I spend long hours hearing the storm’s moan, the dogs’ barks,
the soft flow of moonlight.
And I spend long hours moaning like the storm,
barking like a mad dog,
flowing like the milk from the warm udder of a great yellow cow.
And I spend long hours asking God why,
asking why my soul is slowly rotting,
why more than a million corpses rot in this city of Madrid,
why a thousand million corpses rot slowly worldwide.
Tell me, what garden do you want to compost with our rot?
Are you afraid of losing the great roses of day,
the sad lethal lilies of night?

The Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina often tells that during his first trip to New York, he was having dinner with American friends at a posh restaurant and one of those children that can’t sit still, so they run from table to table, went straight to him. In a perfectly natural impulse, Muñoz Molina ruffled the wee boy’s hair. That caused a bit of a riot in the restaurant, the indignant mother of the child went to drag him back and the American friends of the writer told him NEVER to do something like that again. Rule One: do not touch American kids in case you’re mistaken for a kidnapper or something worse.

Saving for that type of anomaly, I think there is an universal law that says that it is perfectly fine to talk to strangers under any circumstances if they have babies. Babies are a social magnet (hence the myth that says that men taking care of children are sexy: they are simply more approachable). Like this one, see. I was using my laptop in a place with a wireless connection and plenty of children’s toys and here comes a woman with a toddler. Toddler’s age: old enough to walk without help, but not much older. Ten minutes later, the mother and I where talking about the baby’s age, her nationality, her husband’s job, the baby’s bilingualism…

Are you lonely and want to make friends? Borrow a baby and take it wherever you go!

Elegía para una tortilla de patatas.

Para una niña, la tortilla es la cena,
comida caliente y barata,
tres personas y mucha mayonesa.
La niña crece y la tortilla es camping,
bocadillos enormes,
dos personas, el deseo de un beso.
Se deja de ser niña, y la tortilla es recuerdo,
querer volver a casa,
una mujer sola que habla por teléfono.

Fritattas: an elegy.
For a little girl, frittatas mean dinner.
Cheap homemade food,
three people, lots of mayonnaise.
For a bigger girl frittatas mean picnics,
big, thick sandwiches,
two people, the longing for a kiss.
No longer a girl and frittatas are a memory,
homesickness,
one woman alone talking on the phone.


I think this one doesn’t translate very well because there’s nothing in English to express the idea of the tortilla de patatas (potato omelette, nothing to do with tortilla chips). Italian frittatas and Swiss rösti (röti?) are similar but don’t “feel” the same When I have described them to Americans, they say the sounds like hash browns, but tortilla de patatas has eggs. Spanish does not have a word for the concept of “comfort food”, but tortilla is comfort food, unavoidable picnic fare, and the first plate to be emptied at finger-food parties. There isn’t a single Spaniard who doesn’t like it, not one, although then everyone argues about whether it should be dry or moist inside (dry! please!), with or without onion (with, green peppers optional), with potato chunks or dice (chunks).

Back to the poem; in the beginning I called it an Ode, but then I thought better. I think it expresses well how I feel about my family. I have never written a poem about my mother, this is the closest to date.

Yesterday there was quite a lot to blog about (I’m still affected about Martyn Bennett, but anyway) so I left this for later. I went to have brunch with the first-year women grad students from the English department, and of course the first little cultureshocking bit was that you can have lunch at 11. I mean, there’s two menus, the breakfast one and the lunch one, and at 11 you can order from either. It was very convenient for me, but eleven is not lunchtime by any civilised standard!

But the reason why I liked that there was the option of the lunch menu was that breakfast in the menu meant one thing. It meant eggs. Cooked in about four or five different ways. Spaniards associate eggs for breakfast with the English, and thing that habit is weird and wrong. I like eggs for breakfast as a treat, something for lazy Saturdays. I was cultureshocked for a third and fourth time when someone ordered three scrambled eggs, which is not a lot of food, but I have never, ever seen anyone eat more that two at a time. And then someone else had a white egg omelette. I thought only bodybuilders and the protagonists of Sex And The City did that.

In my part of Spain, breakfast also means one thing only. It means toast. And just to confuse everyone else, cafés call them “halves”. “One toast” is supposed to be a sort of bun or roll, so if you ask for “one toast” you get two pieces. “One half”, just like that, not “half a toast”, “one half”, is one piece. “Two halves” means that you and your friend will have a piece each. There’s a variety of things you can spread on them and I miss liver paté spreads madly. I will have to cook them myself before I wither and die of homesickness.

I love Martyn Bennet and his music. He mixes dance beats with traditional Celtic music. And he had a series of cancers, first testicles, then lymphoma. Even though he was too weak (and probably too depressed) to play instruments (pipes and violins among others) since 2000, in his two last albums (Glen Lyon, 2001 and Grit 2003) he just sampled.

Martyn Bennet died on Sunday, two weeks short of being 34 years old, leaving me crying and sobbing loudly in a public computer room. But I believe on looking for the positive and besides this is a poetry blog. In his last album, Martyn set Psalm 118 to music. Gorgeous dance, breakbeat-type music. Someone might find that making electronic music out of the Bible is disrespectful or weird. I like that song. And these are its lyrics: Psalm 118, lines 15 to 23.

Bye Martyn, see you in heaven.

The voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tabernacles of the righteous: the right hand of the LORD doeth valiantly.
The right hand of the LORD is exalted: the right hand of the LORD doeth valiantly.
I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD.
The LORD hath chastened me sore: but he hath not given me over unto death.
Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the LORD:
This gate of the LORD, into which the righteous shall enter.
I will praise thee: for thou hast heard me, and art become my salvation.
The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.
This is the LORD's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.

Initially I thought that I would post other people’s poetry just once in a while, but I keep finding things I want to share. Lynne Feeley gets her poetry published often in Cornell’s literary magazines. I really like her poem “Number One”, that I think is a year old, but she prefers her more recent stuff. So, I’m getting a preview of some of her poems, isn’t that nice? I’ll post them little by little and finish with Number One because I still like it a lot. To be honest (and, is there any other way to be?) I don’t share her love for enjambement (encabalgamientos, si lees esto en español), but sometimes a poem needs them.

Airplane

Even after airplane and everything else,
I would palms-up refuse the milk,
puddled in its bowl, cereal long enjoyed,
an empty white pool to be washed,
not by me, down the kitchen drain.
A kid crossing guard, I grew wasteful as
I grew weak.

Years later, a fly would die in your window sill
and a taxi would pass by underneath.

I would see neither, lying prone, morning
film running across my forehead,
a tightness to my lips, nearly but not saying aloud

I can see your heart beat
at different places all over your body:
in your throat, in the veins of
your upturned wrist, in the place
where your knees meet.

Instead, I am again a crossing guard,
pressing my palms into your mattress, getting out,
and sneaking down the stairs
to your kitchen, where I would,
in a moment of unspeakable weakness,
make breakfast.

Neil Gaiman’s blog is only a good read for hardcore fans because he writes about the minutiae of everyday work, plans for the near future like book-signing tours and being executive producer of a version of Beowulf (yay!), and answering fan mail. Sometimes, very rarely, he is fun to read for how he writes, not for who he is. Like yesterday.

Suddenly the air is filled with the little crunching crashing tinkling sounds of juggled deadlines hitting the floor and smashing into teeny tiny bits.

An Alan Spence poem from the book Glasgow Zen.

NOWHERE
NOW
____HERE

Three thoughts of mine, on sorting out digital photographs:

June 6th. If pleasure belongs to the instant and one second later it is memory, so they are always separate, and the thing is not the same as my enjoyment of it, if object, pleasure and memory are both simultaneous and separate, I cannot be sure of what exactly happened today, although I can be sure that it was a good thing.

July 20th: The preparation for the journey is part of the journey itself. If that is true, the memory of the journey would also be part of the journey, so maybe the journey is eternal.

December 11th: If the past is mine and cannot be taken away from me, and the future is yet to be seen and does not belong to me, I don’t have a right to feel bad at the end of something good, because when it ends I haven’t lost anything.

The Spanish Constitution says that we don’t have an official religion but that the government may take measures to acknowledge the social importance of individual religions. That is a lot more lax than the American First Amendment and in practice it means that the Catholic church is present in public life in a degree that many people find unacceptable. Since we are still a very homogeneous country racially and culturally, it is normally understood that the only alternative to Catholicism is laicism. Kids in school choose either Religion (meaning Catholicism) or a secular alternative. People elected for public office have a choice: swearing on the Bible or promising on the Constitution. One of these days there might be other books or religious objects on that table next to the other two books, but that will not happen soon. Not before a decade, is my guess.

That is why there is an office at Seville University, in MY building, with a sign that says: “Office of Religious Assistance to the University Community”. Guess what? According to that sign, “religious” only means Catholic. It makes me sore and itchy to pass by that door knowing that we have such a shortage of classrooms and that the biggest of the two cafés in the building closed down three years ago to make room for professors’ offices. And what’s worse: after having worked at that building for nine years, I haven’t seen them organise any activity. I have no idea of what they do and people who don’t study in the Humanities building don’t know this office exists.

In my year in Aberdeen, I saw that the Chaplaincy was different. The University chaplain belonged to the Church of Scotland (I think) but there were several multi-purpose rooms, there were services for different denominations and it worked as a referral service too. Nice. And here at Cornell there is the Annabel Taylor Building. I could not believe my eyes when I saw what was going on. About fifteen different religions, sharing a building, each one with one or more chaplains. On Sundays there is a mad rush as each Christian denomination takes turns to use the chapel. And everyone seems to get on well.

When I told my brother about it, he said Spaniards should see that sort of thing to stop thinking our culture is so important; and those are big words coming from my favourite atheist. Seeing the difference between this University, Seville University, and the very different roles religion has in them, I am even more convinced that the Office for Religious Assistance should be dissolved and make room for more useful things. A new café, for example.

(Titular de la Gaceta Universitaria, año 2015: El SARUS cierra para dejar espacio al nuevo bar de Filología. Obispo de turno: “La Decana ha declarado la guerra al bienestar espiritual de sus alumnos”.)

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

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

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

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

Oh, but you don’t know what the SARUS is… OK, I’ll tell you tomorrow.

For any readers out there who don’t speak English I’m going to translate a paragraph in Nacho Duato’s yesterday interview.

(Haikus) are wonderful. To talk about an insect or a water drop. It tells something without telling it. There is never an "I" in haiku, you never talk about the present, you always talk, and with great detachment, of things that are apparently unimportant. On the other hand, in our culture, I am the centre of the universe, I talk about myself and my problems.

The way I see the contrast between impersonal vs. confessional poetry is not east-west but Romantic vs. Modernist. A very fast summary of the history of western poetry: for about 5 centuries, poets adopted poses. Fashion and style dictated genres and even if poems could be lyrical and express emotions, they didn’t have to be autobiographical. They sometimes were. Then in comes Romanticism and for about 150 years poetry became intimate, personal, and sentimental. Late Romantic poetry is as bad as it gets (Spaniards will understand me if I say that I find Becquer embarrassing). Then at last we get to the 20th century, to Modernism (eh! que en inglés eso significa Vanguardismo! el Modernismo en inglés se llama Aestheticism). And a few people said that enough was enough. That feelings were fine, but please don’t rub my nose in them. Some of the people who defended a more impersonal, detached poetry loved Japanese verse, and so we get back to Nacho Duato, who has just discovered haiku and likes it because it is not as obvious as any form of Western poetry.

Duato choreographed Romeo and Juliet once, but rather than telling stories, his pieces and those of his disciples often try to communicate emotions instead of stories. White Darkness, the last one I saw, played with showering the dancers in white dust and it may have been an allegory of depression. I think the impersonality of classic haiku will suit his style very well.

Through the cracks in the clouds,
golden velvet rays.
God’s fingers.

Atravesando las grietas en las nubes,
rayos de terciopelo dorado.
Los dedos de Dios.

Save the "he won't love you back, he's gay" jokes.

I love ballet, and Nacho Duato is a Spanish choreographer. He's an amazing dancer (I had the immense luck to see him on the very last tour in which he danced in public, he considers himself too old to go on), and a wonderful choreographer. He makes a different show every year with two choreographies by other people and one by him, and this season's show includes a piece called Diecisiete. Seventeen. Because haikus have seventeen syllabes.

I hope he isn't finished with the tour by the time I go back to Spain. Nacho Duato inspired by haikus, come on. I need to see that. Yay!