Year in review

It seemed appropriate that a hazy, flawed photograph, taken absently on one of my last days walking to the bus in Jaén, should head an attempt to survey what got written this year, before my amnesiac return.

The oddest thing about coming back hasn’t been anything I expected. It is very easy to put one foot in front of the other. I am not viscerally shocked. There is too-quick familiarity, there are easy lapses into old habit. I stuff myself with everything I missed – breakfast burritos, Thai food, peanut butter, craft beer, manhattans perfect. I haven’t forgotten how anything tastes. The weather is cloudy & raining in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Michigan – I don’t really remember Andalucían sun, if there was such a thing. Even my sentences slip into an eternal present tense. Odd differences, little things shifted, but if you asked I couldn’t tell you what it all meant. It’s a relief to speak Spanish with somebody who understands me, but I don’t have all that many opportunities, and I don’t seek them out.

What it feels like most of all is that the last year was a kind of waking dream, now interrupted, and I worry that instead of being able to reflect on Spain I’ll barely be able to write it at all. It feels odd, and it feels normal, to be home, and I don’t know which is more strange.

In the meantime, while I remember how to remember, here are things written when writing was as easy as looking out my window and listing the things I saw.

When things were still new & I was about as green as you could get, I wrote breathlessly about the smallest things, my prose riddled with casual errors & opacity: cultural differences, the féria, popular music.

I thought a lot about words, but in an uncertain manner, sweat my way through a Spanish translation of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye,  and wrote about Castro & buying bread, and the colloquial expressions in the Spanish-English dictionary published the year I was born.

I wrote about local festivals in Jaén – the bonfires of San Antón, the sardines of Santa Catalina. I wrote about breakfast, pomegranates, churros, hand gestures. About poppies, old photographs, afro-beat concerts, the word “oodles.”

I walked around with my mother’s 35mm camera & took pictures of Jaén. When I forgot my camera, I wrote pictures anyway. I drew maps of American music. I made lists.

Occasionally, I abandoned pointilism & wrote essays – about Obama & racism in Spain; feeling like a child abroad; an incomplete series about my teaching, two parts; Christmas & the New Year with my family. I wrote about reading the newspaper a lot, & sometimes it had to do with Stateside politics, and when it did I usually found some way to talk about The Wire.

The itemized retrospective done, we’ll move on tomorrow to ammendations & corrections, to thoughts about method & purpose, & to (finally) some honest-to-god new writing.

Spring light

Last December, I took a photograph of the blue & white checked plaza I walked through on the way to the bus station every morning, talked about the quality of the light. I carried my camera through again in early April. By now the sun is so bright in Andalucía it’s become impossible to walk outside at midday without dark glasses, & the heat transforms the air, & the white buildings are made brilliant by it. It becomes impossible to imagine that it was ever any other way – as now, in Boston, it is becoming impossible to imagine that I was ever in Spain.

Lists

Things I’ve done at school instead of working:

Danced sevillanas in the copy room.
Eaten jamón, neopolitanas, cherries, pastries from Baeza, drunk beer or red wine.
Sung villancicos.
Faked up a flamenco palo on the history teacher’s guitar.
Toured the primary school, where the children now all know my name.
 

 Things I should have written about but haven’t yet:

What it feels like to come to Sevilla from the provinces.
The collapse of the Spanish construction bubble & the homeless man I gave roast chicken to in Adra.
Said construction bubble’s effect on urban planning, & the way Jaén just ends, goes from high rise to empty field with nothing in between.
La comida & the mediodia – lunchtime in Spain & my salmorejo recipe.
How Spain can have legal gay marriage & still be less tolerant in many ways than the States.
The fallas in Valencia. Semana Santa, & why sometimes it rains flowers.
Féria in Sevilla. The time I drank manzanilla in the caseta of the Andalucían Communist Party in a Burberry tie & suit.
Teaching – where to even start?

Places I am traveling through over the next ten days or so.

Barcelona
Boston
Chatham
Chicago
Grand Rapids
Holland
Jaén
Los Angeles
Munich
Ojai
Sevilla

 

Going home

In Sevilla, rumor has it that disgruntled cab drivers are destroying city bicycles. Cloud cover & a muggy cool front this morning have ameliorated the city’s incredible heat. Salmorejo, cherries, & snails are in season, the roses are dying off, & strawberries have become expensive again. This weekend is Spain’s memorial day (literally translated, “day of the armed forces”); in what is probably a telling cultural distinction (as far as what constitutes national pride), I haven’t seen a single Spanish national flag. Barça is the best football team in the world, polls show the PP with a 4-point lead over the PSOE in next Sunday’s European Union elections, and the Real Madrid football team is having its own leadership shakeup. Front page of this morning’s Sunday El País has Florentino Pérez saying, “El Real Madrid necessita una revolución.” 

My last day of school was this past Thursday, the room I rented in Jaén is empty, white & scrubbed clean, & everything I own is in suitcases. I’m told unofficially that my contract has been renewed for next year, but that I won’t know my placement until the end of June.

Traveling again, dislocated & floating. Back to the States on Tuesday via Sevilla, Barcelona, & Munich. That’s me up there – I’m two years old, it’s early 1989, I think I’ve just been dropped off at my grandparents’ house while my mother goes to the hospital to give birth to my sister. That kid – I think I know how he feels.

Lots to think about when I’m sitting still again. Expect some of it to appear here, at length, over the next month.

Election year

The elections for the European Union parliament are being held this summer; they’re apportioned nationally, so that Spain votes for its Spanish representatives, and there are apparently E.U.-wide coalitions of national parties, on the general lines of right-conservative & social democrat.

Forests of placards, banners & posters are sprouting on busstops and alongside major roads, sponsored by  the two major Spanish national parties, the PP (Partido Popular) and the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obreros de España) – I just got up to have my morning coffee & neapolitana at the school café & heard a PP spot on the radio.

From my perspective on the streets of Jaén, the PSOE is everywhere – they have a series of posters modeled on the one pictured above at every other bus stop on my way to school in the morning. Two picture the leading parliamentary candidates – the other one is tagged, Trabajar por la paz VS. Sembrar el miedo - one has Zapatero & Rajoy facing off (Vencer la crisis VS. Approvecharse la crisis), and the rest are words on colored backgrounds, red for the PSOE, light blue for the PP. I particularly liked: Trabajadores VS. Especuladores. (they have a flikr photostream here, for those of you interested in critiquing graphic design)

“Este Partido Se Juega En Europa” is, as far as I can tell, a kind of pun – both, “This game is played in Europe” and “this party plays in Europe.” PSOE has been in national power since 2004, headed by Zapatero (literally, “Shoemaker”), though they took a hit in last fall’s regional elections, and it seems to me that Zapatero has become generally unpopular.

The PP’s tag is, Ahora soluciones, & their talking points since I’ve been in Spain have centered around opposition to an expansion of autonomous governance in Catalonia & to negotiations with the ETA in Basque country – they’re formulating themselves as a Spanish national party with a focus on Spanishness that had previously been avoided, I think, since Franco. Their ads feature the Spanish flag. They’ve been the opposition party since Aznar’s unflagging support of Bush’s foray into Iraq got him kicked out of office in 2004 (after 8 years in power; he also privatized, among other companies, Télefonica). A whole raft of regional PP figures have been indicted over the last year in a huge corruption scandal revolving around skimming millions off of  public works contracts – the indictment comes from the same Spanish judge, Garzón, that took down Pinochet, & has recently tried to indict members of the Bush administration for their role in authorizing the torture of Spanish citizens in Guántanamo.

Nationally, Rajoy (PP opposition leader) blames Zapatero for la crisis and for Spain’s record-high unemployment; he also accuses him of stealing the PP’s ideas to solve the crisis (this gets propagated a lot on talk radio), and of not having any plan of his own. Their leading EU parliamentary candidate’s first photograph on his personal campaign website is a meeting with the Pope; the second, of the candidate with a baby.

[disclaimer: I don't pretend to know much about Spanish politics aside from what I've picked up from the environment over the last 8 months; errors, misrepresentations, etc. are mine. I just look at posters every day when I take the bus.]

Staircase, con’t

 

Previously.

Man on horseback

José Martinez Rioboó
Third and last of the three photographs from the book I found over Christmas in a carmen house in the barrio Realejo-San Matías, the old Jewish quarter at the foot of the Alhambra.

I think I remember this as taken in Almería – it might be Granada, east, in the mountains. It brings me forcefully back to the backcountry trails  in Ojai valley, in California, where I rode horseback at 13 – the burnt crests of the hills, the boulders. Going over the ridge. Hobbling horses to graze in pasture while you set up camp & got the water boiling.

The railroad bridge & the white suit remind you that it was taken in the early 1900s, and also why spaghetti westerns were later filmed out here – essentially replicating what this photograph captures as contemporary.

_

I read today an A.V. Club interview with Jim Jarmusch, who just finished his most recent film in Spain, of all places. (His fractured western, Dead Man, was one of my birthday presents this March, & it’s the only American movie I have here). And not just in Spain, but Andalucía:

I’ve always been madly in love with the city of Seville, and always wanted to shoot something there. The place is incredibly magical and visual, and has a lot of Moorish influence in its architecture. It’s where all that tilework comes from in Spain. There are balconies everywhere that are tiled underneath just for the visual pleasure of someone walking in the street. The streets are very narrow, and it has that weird tower of gold that we have in the film, which was colonial Spain’s warehouse of gold. It doesn’t even have doors; you had to get in by pulling a sailing ship up alongside it, and enter way above the line of the ground. It’s just a really amazing place, sort of central to Andalusian culture, flamenco culture. And then the south of Spain, where we shot outside of Almería, is where a lot of the spaghetti Westerns were shot. So the landscape is oddly familiar to me, even sort of semi-consciously, from biblical Hollywood epics that were shot there, and all the Italian Westerns that were shot there. So those things were drawing me. Spain entered the film and then kept pulling on me, even though the story could have been set in South America, or in Turkey or Mexico.

The tower of gold he mentions is the Torre del Oro, on the river Guadalquivir; there is also a Torre de la Plata (tower of silver), where the other precious metal from the conquest of the Americas was offloaded & stored.

Of course, nobody in Jaén would say something like this about Sevilla, because that would just encourage the sevillanos, & they’re already puffed up enough about their city as it is.

Legacies

Advertisement, p. 10 of the Tuesday, May 19th El País.

Always fun to check up on the home front in a Spanish daily. This is a different angle from what I think is that January luncheon with all living presidents, photo taken in the Oval Office, Obama then still the president-elect. (Though if it is that photograph, Jimmy Carter, who was standing to the right of Clinton, has been cut out entirely). Each president conveniently labeled with his accomplishments, next to Obama’s as-yet blank yellow circle. The ad is for a daily political talk radio program. (Click for a larger view of the text.)

George Bush is remembered for signing the treaty that ended the Cold War – Él y Gorbachov firmaron un pacto de cooperación, poniendo fin a la guerra fría en 1991.

Clinton, for his popularity – Terminó su mandato con un 66% de aprobación. El más alto desde la 2ª guerra mundial.

Carter is, by Spaniards, not remembered at all.

And our most recent office-holder? Interestingly, he’s not even gifted with one of his legacies as president – the bubble remembers him as Governor of Texas: Como gobernador, tiene el record de ejecuciones – He holds the record in executions, highest in toda la historia de Estados Unidos.

Now, speaking of legacies, isn’t this an odd sort of thing to say? Everything else the man did or was during his presidency taken as a given, I mean – wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, one election decided by judges, torture instrumentalized as foreign policy, a major American city left to drown, etc, etc, etc, etc. The obvious stuff.

But what do you do with the obvious stuff when it’s almost unsayable? You can’t argue with the number of people executed during his term of governor, even as the number of Iraqi civilians we’ve killed continues to be debated in terms of orders of magnitude. All of which puts me to mind of these pieces at the excellent academic blog zunguzungu, and the exchange  he quotes from an English teacher in the Sudan:

“So,” I said at length. “I hesitate to ask this question, but what is America famous for?”

“Killing people,” said one young lad sitting at the back, without hesitation.

Obama & Bush are the only presidents in the photograph wearing flag pins.

Albaycín staircase

I took a second walk up the vertical staircase in the Albaycín covered in graffiti when I was in Granada two weeks ago, part of the circuit I’m running, in my free weekends, around Andalucía one last time before my flight leaves out of Sevilla on June 2. This time, I took a few more pictures.

The ancient hillside neighborhood – a village unto itself, really – is supposed to have received its name when Moorish refugees from reconquered Baeza encamped in the hills above Granada. Baeza being a small city a half hour north of Jaén, briefly wealthy when its local families were in favor with the royal court; they left, as spent carapaces, a number of lovely Renaissance buildings. Squint and, through a linguistic process I can hear but can’t describe, the Arabic prefix al- gets added to baeza or baezín or bayyasa or bayyasín, and ends up as albaycín or albaicín or albayzín. There are Albaicíns scattered throughout Grenadino pueblos & nearby cities, presumably all refugee neighborhoods, peopled & named by the same flight.

Small gestures

Photograph cut out of the El País Sunday magazine supplement.

Maybe it’s the big, structural differences in society that are its warp & weft; but how does someone arriving to a culture for the first time describe them without flat generalization and casual error? Not only is it easier to stick to the ants’-eye view (and what have I been doing here if not that?) – it hews closer to replicating the experience of someone who’s just arrived. The things that disorient and impress you are the little changes, the small gestures.

In Jaén, when a person wants you to come over (I’ve mentioned this, but didn’t do a good job of explaining what it looked like), they tell you with the palm down, facing the floor, & wave the back of their hand back & forth (try it at home), & it looks exactly like they’re shooing you away frantically.

The Andalucíans don’t have an entire vocabulary of gestures & hand movements like the Italians do, but one more comes to mind – sticking your first & pinkie finger out and clenching the rest of your fingers into a fist, (the fingers should be on top of the gesture, so that it looks like a bull’s head); this is calling someone a cuckold (giving them horns), and is a really easy way to start a fight.

There are a collection of small sibilant sounds made with your tongue at the front of your teeth that I hear in Andalucían speech quite a bit. One kind, a short tsk, is used as initial punctuation – you signal you’re about to speak,when you’re talking with a group of people, or you use the noise internally, in the pause between a phrase. There is the louder, longer hiss you make to get somebody’s attention across a room or for emphasis (and it is a sound that is unspeakably rude in the States; I used it once accidentally with my mother in Granada and she told me to stop it).

The open eh sound while you’re thinking of something instead the uh of an English speaker. (A lot of getting an accent right is making the correct noises between the words, pausing in the right places instead of importing English pauses & rhythm.) The noncommittal sound eh-ah (spelling gummed up for English phonetics), which you can make in response to just about anything, somewhere between mm-hm and yeah.

You can think you are starting to read Spanish pretty well and then get completely thrown by text & internet writing, which replaces certain sounds with one-letter equivalents – quiero becomes kiero, guapo is wapo, chico is xico. Laughter is spelled jajaja. The animals all make different noises.

And things as well as language: In Spain the clocks can strike thirteen, just as in Orwell’s 1984 (digital clocks & bus timetables are given in 24 hrs instead of 12). Paper is a different size – the height/width ratio of European paper is the square root of two, and if you put it into an American 8½x11 notebook a little piece sticks out & gets bent & creased. The water faucet marked “C” is for caliente, not cold. The stopsigns, impossibly, still say STOP in white capital letters.