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My mother says that about the time my uncle was born (that must have been the late fifties) single mothers were sent to a special wing of the Maternity Hospital when they were still pregnant. They were not allowed to go out and they were forced to clean the place for free. When their babies were born, these women were forced to be wet nurses of the babies of married women. I do not know if they were ever made free or if they were allowed to keep their own babies.

Joni Mitchell has a song about the Magdalene Laundries. Today is International Working Woman’s Day, so here is a song for anyone who has been forced to work against her will, or has seen her work demeaned only because it was done by a woman. Do you think I’m talking about things that happened a very long time ago? Hah. About three years ago, I overheard this conversation:

Doctor: What did the other doctor told you?
Young man: Well, “doctor”, it’s not a doctor, it was a girl.

The man didn’t mean someone unqualified. He meant a woman doctor. So here is Joni Mitchell.

I was an unmarried girl
I'd just turned twenty-seven
When they sent me to the sisters
For the way men looked at me
Branded as a jezebel
I knew I was not bound for Heaven
I'd be cast in shame
Into the Magdalene Laundries

Most girls come here pregnant
Some by their own fathers
Bridget got that belly
By her parish priest
We're trying to get things white as snow
All of us woe-begotten-daughters
In the streaming stains
Of the Magdalene laundries

Prostitutes and destitutes
And temptresses like me--
Fallen women--
Sentenced into dreamless drudgery ...
Why do they call this heartless place
Our Lady of Charity?
Oh charity!

These bloodless brides of Jesus
If they had just once glimpsed their groom
Then they'd know, and they'd drop the stones
Concealed behind their rosaries
They wilt the grass they walk upon
They leech the light out of a room
They'd like to drive us down the drain
At the Magdalene laundries

Peg O'Connell died today
She was a cheeky girl
A flirt
They just stuffed her in a hole!
Surely to God you'd think at least some bells should ring!
One day I'm going to die here too
And they'll plant me in the dirt
Like some lame bulb
That never blooms come any spring
Not any spring
No, not any spring
Not any spring]]>

I've got a little black book with my poems in.
Got a bag with a toothbrush and a comb in.
When I'm a good dog, they sometimes throw me a bone in.

I got elastic bands keeping my shoes on.
Got those swollen hand blues.
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from.
I've got electric light.
And I've got second sight!
And amazing powers of observation.
And that is how I know
When I try to get through
On the telephone to you
There'll be nobody home.

I've got the obligatory Hendrix perm.
And the inevitable pinhole burns
All down the front of my favourite satin shirt.
I've got nicotine stains on my fingers.
I've got a silver spoon on a chain.
I've got a grand piano to prop up my mortal remains.

I've got wild staring eyes.
And I've got a strong urge to fly.
But I got nowhere to fly to.
Ooooh, Babe
when I pick up the phone
There's still nobody home.
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the role that religion takes in Cornell. I have had the immense luck of learning a little bit over this weekend about the Jewish practice of the Sabbath. It was a brilliant culture-shocking experience.

I knew about the Sabbath only from watching American movies with Jews in them. So far I had thought that the motivation behind it was that God rested for one day so you have to rest too; God ordered people to worship him one day a week so it is a sin to do anything else. I have learned this weekend that the motivation I knew was not completely correct, because God didn’t simply work for six days and rested on the seventh. He made things for six days and on the seventh blessed what he had created, giving it life and meaning. The idea is that, contrary to most people’s belief, you don’t rest in order to get energy for work: you stop for the sake of stopping itself. The week leads up to Sabbath, not the other way around. Or even, as Robert Esformes puts it, the week has three days of getting ready for Sabbath and three days of Sabbath afterglow. I can’t help giggling at the thought, since “afterglow” to me is a particularly sensuous word (that would mean that the three pre-Sabbath days are foreplay days).

So. Sabbath is a gift, a day in which you receive the wonderful gift of being outside everyday concerns. In Christian terms it is like being in Heaven a whole day a week! Wow! Or like a cathedral, a temple build with time instead of marble. You could say that “working on the Sabbath is sinful” but it would be more appropriate to say that if you even think about the work that you will do when the Sabbath is over, you are missing the point, you’re wasting a chance of escaping from it! Besides, to keep Catholics, Pagans and feminists happy, God has a female manifestation during the Sabbath, Sechinah. A male God six days a week and a “bride of Sabbath” or “Queen of Sabbath” that comes to visit on the day that really matters.

The way I understood it, the day is divided in three parts. Friday night is for being together with friends and family, celebrate light, love, joy, and food in that order (blessing candles, the people, wine and bread, in that order). This is where restrictions on not working, etc. make more sense: you wouldn’t bring work to a party, would you? Saturday morning is for direct worship of God, meditation, study, church/synagogue, you get the idea. Saturday afternoon is to just stop. Take a walk, do something for pure pleasure, and now if you really have to, you can think peacefully, relaxed, about the week that is over and your plans for the week that is going to start. Just think, not making anything.

We live in a world that consists on getting things done, or just getting more things. We need to rest more. I would recommend the practice of the Sabbath to anyone interested in spirituality, even if they don’t believe in any God or any organised religion. Give yourself a day, starting and finishing at sunset, to three things: inactivity, good company and thinking of whatever you would like to call God. Their order of importance is up to you. It can have a surprisingly liberating effect to take off your watch for a while and tell yourself it is fine not to do anything at all.

I had no idea I would come all the way to Cornell to learn Jewish mysticism…

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Precious, wet diamonds.
Not at all like tears.

Copos de nieve en tus ojos.
Diamantes húmedos,
En nada se parecen a lágrimas.

Excusatio non petita, inculpatio manifesta is Latin for “Unasked apology, evident self-accusation”. I have a few poems or stories that are ironic because they work on that principle: if you need to say you are not in love, hey, I never asked you. I’m too inside it to judge if I was successful, but the intention here was to show that the speaker is trying to ignore the pain of the person with snowy eyes.
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“Passionate” is shorthand for the stereotyping of, erm, people who speak Spanish as a first language, either South American or Spaniards (I’ll say it again: Spaniards are not Latinos). I don’t like stereotypes, and I don’t like things that belong in different categories to be put together, and I don’t like the current stereotype on “Latinos”.

What the hell does passionate mean? Sometimes it applies to love, and we are back at the Latin Lover myth, which is every bit as racist as the Asian-woman-as-pleasure-giving-submissive-geisha myth. Sometimes it means we get very easily carried away by our feelings, and then it is extremely condescending. Besides, it shows poor vocabulary and a lazy train of thought. Say that I am enthusiastic, opinionated, extrovert, expressive, emotional, temperamental. Just by a lucky coincidence, I am all those things. I am not “passionate”. That label is so overused it doesn’t mean anything any more.

There is also the idea that Spanish-speakers share one culture. We don’t, really, no more than English or French speakers worldwide do. Someone from León shares with someone from Venezuela as much as someone from Yorkshire would have in common with someone from Seattle.

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You sit on the other one,
We’re drawing an L.
L for “leather”, “love”, or “lust”.
Maybe for “lonely”, instead?

Sofás en ángulo recto.
Te sientas en el otro,
Y formamos una L.
Nos une el cuero, el amor y la lujuria,
O tal vez la soledad.

I admit that the Spanish translation of this tanka is very weak. But tell me when you find Spanish equivalents of “love” and “loneliness” that start with and L.
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Aurora, who feels the electrecity in the air and is in the mood for a good long storm, here you have Shakespeare's King Lear, Act 2 scene 4, raging to the winds. The last two lines, in case they are not clear, are asking for all women to die and all men to become sterile. Isn't Lear a lovely man.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

¡Sopla, viento, desgarra! ¡Furia! ¡Sopla!
¡Cataratas, huracanes, derramad
hasta ahogar las torres: ahogad los gallos de las veletas!
Fuegos de azufre, que matan el pensamiento:
Mensajeros de truenos que parten en dos los robles,
¡Quemad mis blancos cabellos! Y tú, trueno estremecedor,
¡Aplasta, aplana la grosera rotundidad de este mundo!
¡Rompe los moldes de la naturaleza, destruye el germen
que crea a los hombres ingratos!]]>

Anyway, here you have some African-American poetry. Langston Hughes wrote much and well about the oppression of black people in this country, and about atheism, and other political stuff. I have ranted enough about politics already, so here you have one of his softest poems. Enjoy.

There a new young moon
riding the hills tonight.

There’s a sprightly young moon
Exploring the clouds.

There’s a half-shy young moon
veiling her face like a virgin
waiting for a lover.

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“I don’t know what I have done to deserve all this, I’m just a girl from a trailer park…..”

I hate rags-to-riches stories because they focus on the luck on one individual instead of questioning what made them in rags in the first place. Hard as I try, I cannot think of any European celebrity ever explaining how they came out of the gutter. How they came from absolute obscurity, yes. But that’s it. Why is that so? Because of course there is desperate poverty on Europe, but: one, not in American proportions (According to Barbara Ehrenreich, a third of workers here are below the poverty line, and that’s just the __workers__, then there’s their families), and two, not in the same degree of defencelessness of Americans. Free or next to free healthcare. Much better public education than there is here. Free, next to free or reasonably affordable (depends on the country) higher education; scholarships.

Europeans also have their stories of epic success. It’s just that statistically, people hardly ever start their way up the ladder as far down as Americans do. Hilary Swank has every reason to be proud, but her country has every reason to be ashamed.

(*) Europe is not paradise on earth, and to my knowledge there are four categories of people for whom life can be very tough: foreign immigrants, the elderly poor, the long-term unemployed especially if over 45-50, and university-level first-time job seekers.
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