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

 

Mixtape

 

A typewriter lends an odd kind of official cast to anything you label with it – and more things than you think can be spooled into the carriage: post-it notes, pieces of cardpaper, envelopes, stationary of varieties & thicknesses impossible for a commercial laser printer.

This is yet another version of my History of American Music mix, made for the music teacher at my school. I taught a lesson in American traditional & folk music that I made up to complement the unit in the textbook, which was all about Spanish traditional music (and so virtually impossible to translate usefully – all of the teachable vocabulary were loanwords); this mixtape I made after the fact, because the teacher asked me what some of the songs were, which is why most of it is outliers. Because I don’t have access to a lot of music out here, most of the track choices are less carefully weighed exemplars & more of a scramble to give a general impression of the sweep of things.

I have no ready explanation as to why the cover is Marvin Gaye in a sailor hat, but it was the only usefully American musical image I could find in last week’s El País Sunday magazine.

Rioboó

José Martinez Rioboó
Another one of the photographs digitized by my sister in Granada.
No record of the caption, title, or year in frame; let’s say ca. 1910s.

_

I wonder how the value of this photograph changes without a caption, without context. I don’t even know what city it was in anymore; who the woman was. Which season, what year. She is wearing black, as her daughter will – there is a certain type of older woman in Spain who is always in a black dress & loose shawl or cape. Especially still in the pueblos. Potted plants, the terrace – something about the black bleeding around the edges gives the impression it is an actual memory surfacing out of darkness, or that it is a POV shot from a silent film.

I am in Granada, now. It’s a little overcast. I’m on my second cup of coffee. Let’s say she was standing on a terrace in Granada.

Mapping

The internet was down at school yesterday, & so I had about a half hour to figure out how I’d illustrate the entire history of American music to my 3º de ESO on their handout. This is the map that I drew.

UPDATE: Track lists for my two-volume History of American Music.

History of American Music Vo: 1 – Folk

1. “No Headstone on My Grave,” Esther Phillips
2. “I Was Born,” Natalie Merchant
3. “Comin’ Round the Mountain” [sung]
4. “Run on for a Long Time,” The Blind Boys of Alabama
5. “Old Brown’s Daughter,” Great Big Sea
6. “Free & Easy,” Muireann NicAmhlaoibit
7. “Goin’ Down Slow,” Howlin’ Wolf
8. “Travellin’ Riverside Blues,” Robert Johnson
9.  “My Home Is the Delta,” Muddy Waters
10. “High On a Mountain,” Loretta Lynn
11. “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” Duke Ellington & Ivie Anderson
12. “Move,” Miles Davis
13. “You’ve Got to Move,” Two Gospel Keys

History of American Music Vo: 2 – Pop

 

1. “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” Big Joe Turner
2. “Hit the Road Jack,” Ray Charles
3. “I’m Gonna Hold On As Long As I Can,” The Marvelettes
4. “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” The Dells
5. “Rag Mama Rag,” The Band
6. “Shelter From the Storm,” Bob Dylan
7. “Purple Haze,” Jimi Hendrix
8. “Soul Power,” Derek Martin
9. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” The Beach Boys
10. “Search & Destroy,” Iggy Pop & the Stooges
11. “Don’t Feel Right,” The Roots
12. “Girl Wants Rock & Roll,” Christina Aguilera & The Velvet Underground [mash-up]

Poppies

In the olive-filled country outside of Jaén, the empty riverbeds are full now from spring rain & snowmelt in the Sierra Máginas. Between the rows of trees, & amidst the other wildflowers – lavender, pale yellow (1) - that cover the sides of the hills, & in the weedfilled ditches on the side of the narrow highway, poppies are growing singly or in little groups, their big blossoms a shock of red, as though somebody had taken a brush & daubed the landscape with the pigment.

In Spain, poppies are amapolas. My American counterpart at the primary school next to the instituto in Bedmar told me in the bus the other day that back home in Puerto Rico amapolas are a different flower entirely – red, still, but with the petals splayed out around a tall, bright yellow stamen. She’d gotten into an argument with a Spanish friend about it.

Conquistadores – this is what I’ve supposed – saw flowers that looked close enough to those they knew, called them by the same name. I’d read this somewhere (a practice in English, too, I believe. Someone more learned than I will have to confirm other examples). Surrounded by a world new in entirety, bird & bush, you try to find likenesses, maybe especially at first – surely God in his wisdom only created so many plants, only so many animals survived the Flood.

Two contradictory, yet complementary linguistic practices: You give old names to new things.  (There are many Jaéns in South America, in the Eastern U.S. many English villages.) But at the same time, you find yourself unable to name everything, there aren’t old words enough, & you have to beg & borrow words from the people you are displacing or enslaving or ammalgamating (2), create a new language entire (3).

I’m thinking about this on the bus, falling asleep between the pueblos with my head against the window. Poppies – amapolas - on the roadside, slipping by.

-

1. (For as much as I write about plants, seasonal fruits, the countryside, I’d be a much better & more specific writer if I had a background in botany or farming – as it is, I’m reduced to vague descriptions of colors – no names, no details. The empty aesthetic of the gaze.)

2. (Who is the “you” in the sentence above? I found it slipping as I wrote, trying to account not just for death & depopulation but for mestizo & creole, appropriation, assimilation, mutual recognizance. The “you” itself changes – not just the language, but the people speaking it.)

3. (Isn’t this notion of a new language necessary to confront the endless American landscape a constant feature of American [both Americas] & letters? Whitman, say.)

Absence

Sometimes, after having been traveling & then sick, not having written enough in either condition, it’s hard to start again on the big things you’ve charged yourself to write, and their incompletion stops up your throat & leaves you unable to write anything at all.

So it helps to start with the small stuff. Do you know that the way someone will wave you closer in Jaén looks almost exactly like a shooing-away gesture? It is the damndest thing.

A week ago, Semana Santa: I stood underneath a rain of flower petals – a shower of them, rose petals, carnations, others innumerable, flowers I did not know the names for, red or stained white or yellow, in ankle-high heaps, children clutching them out of the sky or scooping them into bags, old men throwing them by handfuls at women, flower petals in my hair, my mouth, between my neck and my collar.

Then they went into José Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

- One Hundred Years of Solitude
(Cien años de soledad), p. 144

I thought to myself then that I understood better García Marquez when he said he did not set out to write magical realism, that he’d intended instead to render the world in writing as accurately as he could, exactly how it was.

Room with a view

I have the luck to be in Spain for the new Almodóvar film, Los abrazos rotos. This is the view from the desk in the hotel room where he wrote the first complete draft of the script.

A friend of mine wrote me in a letter a few months ago, “[Writers] aren’t as dependent on good light as painters, but it can help.”

Pomegranates

The symbol of Granada is the fruit of the same name, the pomegranate, la granada, from which comes the liquor grenadino. Ensalada granada, a specialty of the city, is made with pomegranate seeds, walnuts, and a bitter four-leafed green, and I ate it for the first time the day before la Nochevieja, when I was there with my family, and ate as well pork in mozárabe sauce, thick & medieval, made with raisins & sesame seeds, and tortilla sacromonte, named after the famous clifftop barrio where gypsys live in swank caves and flamenco shows are filled to bursting with busloads of tourists; the tortilla is made with red peppers, sweetbreads, & brain.

Granada was the last Moorish kingdom in Al-Andalus to fall; the Alhambra, that red palace built upon ruins of itself, Romans entombed in the mountains, poetry inscribed in loops on the walls and ceilings, endlessly proclaiming the glory of God, was surrendered to the Reyes Cathólicos on the 2nd of January, 1492 by Boabdil, the boy king, who is reported to have wept upon leaving the city as his world fell down around him.

“Boabdil was a crybaby,” said an old, parchment-white man in a cream suit to me in English, in Boston, in the Central Sq. station on the Red Line, two months before I knew I’d be in Andalucía. He was blind; he stared at a point above my left shoulder, spoke in a dry, precise Castillan accent. “His uncle despised him.”

And indeed, popular legend has Boabdil’s mother rebuking him on the hill above his surrendered city, a refrain as apocryphal as the Spartan mother reported in Plutarch: “No llores como una mujer lo que no supiste defender como un hombre.” Don’t cry like a woman for what you didn’t know how to defend like a man.

Hacer buenas migas

Migas, as I think I’ve written here before, are rainy day food – stale bread soaked under a damp towel with herbs & spices, fried up in a pan with egg & bits & pieces of whatever you have left in the cupboard. Hacer buenas migas means, “to go well together,” even if it’s whatever you happen to have thrown in.

It’s raining again in Jaén, after a brief snowfall last Thursday. And so here are some things I have lying around, to throw into the pot with the stale bread:

i.

Andrew Bird writes about making & remaking a song(s), music as opposed to songmaking, & an old barn. Includes audio from his new album, Nobles Beast, & the instrumental companion Useless Creatures.

ii.

148: . . . the white blooms of flowering yuccas moved in the wind and in the night bats came from some nether part of the world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds to feed at the mouths of these flowers. (Sean McCarthy)

Via John B., a series of illustrations by six different artists of lines taken from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. They’re captioned by the quotations, which, taken in isolation, reminded me of the force of McCarthy’s prose. I am starved here for literary English. I see again his habit of using archaic, single words as the most precise variety of seasoning, never more pronounced than in the otherwise unadorned repetition of The Road, but still notable here: “He sees a parricide hung in a crossroads hamlet . . . “

There is intentional vagueness to the gestures (“some nether part of the world,” above), and the constant reference to sight, to things just becoming clear in new light, which reminds me of Milton’s lines describing Death that Edmond Burke famously cites in “On the Sublime and Beautiful”:

—The other shape,
	If shape it might be called that shape had none
	Distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb;
	Or substance might be called that shadow seemed;
	For each seemed either; black he stood as night;
	Fierce as ten furies; terrible as hell;
	And shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head
	The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

Now see McCarthy: ” …the four of them all clutched to the snapping cloth were towed mutely from sight beyond the reach of the firelight and into the howling desert like supplicants at the skirts of some wild and irate goddess.”

Click through for more.

iii.

Digging up the picture I took, above, of my favorite piece of graffiti in Jaén, I’ve been thinking a little bit about the charm or value of clumsiness in photography, how flaws can produce a kind of sublimity. It put me to mind of my abiding affection for defunct Polaroids, eulogized here just after Christmas in the New York Times. The way the limitation of the image is made plain, as fragment, as imperfection, makes necessary a kind of grappling that is like the clumsy translation Conrad Roth advocates – the purposeful, or accidental roughness, the seams showing, forces a kind of doubled contemplation, an awareness of the act of seeing. Roth himself doesn’t quite see it this way.

Polaroids carry their frames with them; we never forget we are looking at an image; we are not seduced into thinking that pictures are a window onto absolute reality (although it does look a little like a windowpane, doesn’t it?). Polaroids look more like other polaroids than they do the real world.

I prefer analog machines because the flaws they produce are characteristic & comprehensible; they are integrated into a piece of work in a way that, say, the pixelation of an inadequate digital image doesn’t seem to be, at least for me. The analog machine, as Roberto Calasso writes [in translation!], contains within it “the physical reality of the varying values, which is a last palpable memory of the outside world.” Not that film is an fragment of Truth, free from manipulation, the digital a degenerate fraud. But a photograph, held in your hand, is a fragment of something; it bears the marks of its creation.

Above: My disfigured snapshot, lightstained, poorly framed. We are exhorted: Cambio vino don Simon X coctel MOLOTOV!!!* A crudely drawn bottle of the cheapest, most vile industrial wine in Spain, manufactured by a company famous for its shitty orange juice, explodes next to ragged letters.

*[Convert wine of Don Simon into cocktail of Molotov!]

Below: From the New York Times article, a gallery of found polaroids. The one on the right – this struck me – is, of all things, from Holland, Michigan; from my hometown.

Finally: An internet collection by Mauricio Sapata of constraint photography taken with a series of “lo-fi cameras” – polaroid, plastic, box, pinhole.

“

Taken with a 35-mm Lubitel plastic camera. (Credit: Maurice Sapata)

Fumar puede matar

Still-life of a dinner eaten by my compañero de piso. I have altered nothing.