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

 

Time capsule

One year ago today, I was in Cape Cod; it was raining; I was in an armchair sat in front of the fireplace, taking breaks to get more wood or add newspaper or kindling, move the embers around, build & rebuild it while it burned.

In that chair, over three days, I wrote or revised 165-odd pages of academia, illustrated performance art notes, my BFA thesis in fiction, etc. – undergraduate flotsam. (I owe my being spirited out of Boston in the dead of night & placed in front of that fire to this man, who probably saved my degree.) I was so close to not finishing that I actually figured out the number of words I’d have to write per hour to make all of my page counts & tacked up an unsteadily markered list of hourly targets, which I proceeded to cross off, with wholly uncharacteristic thoroughness. It was an odd, concentrated sort of time to be alive, & to the extent I remember it it’s with a distant kind of disbelief.

Surviving as evidence of my state of mind are a series of increasingly fragmented & desperate facebook statuses posted in late April & the first week of May.

I present them here, in narrative chronological order, for your edification & for the sake of posterity.

Status updates, April-May ‘08

18 April - Jim is facing between two and five administrative obstacles to graduation.

22 April - Jim is reading about Alaskan telegraph operators, the NKVD, Lear, dementia, jazz, & Chilean mountains.

23 April - Jim is reading about Brooklyn, street musicians covering Dylan, the Dunkirk evacuation, and polka dots.

28 April – Jim is writing about dead jazz saxophonists, speaking the Spanish, drinking rye & bitters, and dying of jaundice & terror.

29 April - Jim is writing about South American tin mining, rock gardens, sudden rainstorms, shipwrights, laurel leaves, and demolished brick buildings.

30 April - Jim is writing/reading about catalogues, Greek warfare, overalls, swallowtails, James Agee, invisible cities, yams, Borges, groves of trees, & marble.

1 May – Jim is writing about Eastie, museum guards, the long view, Trojan ships, old pump organs, Mason jars, Chinese Imperial encyclopedias, endings.

 

3 May – Jim is breakfasting on english muffins spread with red rasberry preserves, fried Vermont ham, eggs over easy, and endless cups of coffee.

- Jim is lunching on homemade chili, strogonoff, & garlic bread. Endless, endless cups of cofffee. Writing to save his own life.

- Jim has 23,000 words to write in the next 36 hours.

- Jim is simultaneously imbibing Corona, homemade steak & egg burritos, coffee, and a waffle with ice cream & hot fudge. 45 pages down. 56 to go.

4 May - Jim is walking dripping from a sea-journey on a highway across American in tears to the door of a cottage in the Western night.

- Jim is 19,804 words down; 8,000 to go.

- Jim is 22,890 words down. 5,650 to go.

5 May – Jim is 24,926 words down. 2,000 to go.

- Jim is writing about Italian futurists, mimesis, lotus-eaters, Polyphemus, Aztec priests, tattoo artists, American Spirit cigarettes,and the end of all things.

- Jim is writing about majordomos, snake eaters, Italian watercooled machine-guns, Norse ravens, green apples, & postage stamps.

- Jim is writing typewriter choruses, endless lists of four-numeral numbers, clementine peels, hieroglyphs, bronze masks, augury, Delphic tripods, and yes, endings.

- Jim is 25,796 words down. 1,345 to go.

- Jim is I WILL WRITE MY WAY OUT OF THESE WALLS & CARVE MY NAME UPON THE SUN.

6 May – Jim is 28,791 words & this shit is DOWN.

7 May - Jim is whiskeyed into accomplishment.

EL PAÍS, domingo 8 de marzo

Above, the Sunday, 8 March El País boiled down to the size of two postcards.

Pérez Roque is named by the epithet, “talibán fidelista,” a Madrid designer coins the plural adjective “sexys” in an interview in order to make it line up with Spanish grammar, & the Spanish title of There Will Be Blood is Pozos de ambición.

An article in the peach-colored economics section uses a giant panoramic photograph of the olive groves outisde of Martos to illustrate its article on rural agriculture – Martos being the pueblo outside of Jaén where I was nine days ago, in a pleasant tiled courtyard with tables set with cups of different oil varieties, bread, water, & cubed apples, touring a traditional olive oil plantation.

I took notes again this week on the English loanwords italicized & used – this being the Sunday edition, I thought I’d net an even a bigger catch.

There were the usual suspects: Words for technology (web, online, banner [ad], blog, wi-fi), for celebrity & music (fan, celebrity, tour manager, memorabilia, shows).

Words filling up the business section – bonus, broker, cash flow, freelance, headhunters, hedge fund, marketing, outsourcing, rating, stock, subprime.

Words for consumption, fashion, nightlife – after hours, blazer, chaqueta de bomber, duty free, fitness manager, gentleman, glamour, grunge, indie, “it girl”, jeans, light [as in diet], “look”, outlets, play rate, pub, sexy, skate, sponsor, videoclip, video de aerobic, vintage.

Words for media – country, western, folk [music], thriller, “making of”, noir [instead of estilo negro], porno.

And the occasional outliers: “bloguero” [for blogger], dominatrix, doping, noodles, porridge, sheriff.

The blandest homesickness

Foods impossible to acquire in Spain that I wanted all at once after my stomach illness:

bagel with cream cheese
green, seedless grapes
ginger ale
apple juice
annie’s macaroni & white cheddar
whole-fat vanilla yogurt
frozen peas
cheerios
life cereal
applesauce
real peanut butter

I caught a stomach virus this weekend, & spent about 24 hours unable to keep water down, or food. After the bad part stopped, I stumbled around my kitchen, woozy, reaching for calories – and, in the irony of stomach illnesses, could find nothing I wanted to eat.

In my mind’s eye, my knotted stomach, visions of a whole host of foods: foods too bland to offend or perturb, foods to fill & recuperate. Comfort foods, though not in the usual sense. (The requirements were different – simpler, in some ways, stricter than others). The list I made, lying flat on my back on the couch in a kind of limp paralysis, became a map of familiar things, things left behind. Invariably from home, from childhood, or from the Co-op down the street from my last apartment in Central Sq. 

Of all of them, you can find not a one in Spain. An odd kind of ill homesickness – empty, barely able to move, not able to imagine anything in the entire country that can feed you.

Paper trail

A partial list of handouts I have made for my students:

·  bilingual version of Barack Obama’s presidential victory speech in Chicago.
·  brass family of instruments
·  fake newspaper, The Boston Post, with banner headlines, editorial cartoons, the score of the Real Madrid game, & a weather report.
·  lyrics to Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”
·  lyrics to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, “Silent Night”, and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
·  mix & match descriptions of people including John McCain, Veronica Mars, & James Bond.
·  New York Times weather reports for Boston, Michigan, Ojai, & Bedmar.
·  questionnaire (place travelled, favorite bands, career aspirations, preferred food for special occasions)
·  states of matter: “Is a chair liquid?”
·  story of first Thanksgiving (featuring: Mayflower etching, cartoon turkeys, graph of Pilgrim deaths during first winter)
·  the 8 planets. (match the picture to the description)
·  two mixed-up stories, “Charlie the Astronaut Goes to the Zoo” & “The Adventure of Charlie the Outdoorsman”
·  weekly English news headlines, such as: “Somali Pirates Continue Attacks.”

EL PAÍS, sábado 14 febrero

Reading El País, Saturday edition, 14th February -

El mundo es un pañuelo.

The world is a handkerchief? What does this mean? Why does the back page columnist use it as his first sentence? It may be an expression, but I can’t imagine its meaning, not even from context. The declaration is too blank, too absolute – taken as a given.

It reminds me of the first & last sentences of Erik Fosnes Hansen’s Tales of Protection (I looked for the originals in Norwegian, couldn’t find them) - “Life is a bird.” Eventually, he elaborates:

Life is a bird. And you are the branch that sways back and forth.

Actor de doblaje. Constatino Romano, still unwell; but his condition improves.

Who is Constatino Romano? “Como actor de doblaje, está considerado uno de los profesionales más prestigiosos. Es la voz de Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger en la trilogía de Terminator, y Roger Moore.”

Dubbed movies & television are omnipresent in Spain (& one of the reasons why English pedagogy is more difficult than in northern Europe). Spaniards speak with pride of their actores de doblaje as the best in the world, particularly during the 70s. I distinctly remember an Almodóvar film (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown]?) where the principal action took place in a dubbing studio.

Imagine a world where Roger Moore and Clint Eastwood speak with the same voice.

Spanish friends tell me that when they get pirated DVDs from South America they’re distracted because all of the voices of the actors have changed; different dubbing studios.

Multilingual films are whitewashed beyond recognition; in Babel, even the Mexican voices (I’ve been told) are dubbed over with Spanish accents. In Vicky Christina Barcelona, Penelope Cruz speaks in Spanish over her own voice speaking in English; it goes from a bilingual movie to a monolingual one, & Javier Bardem shouting, “English! Speak English!” loses . . . everything.

A list of all English loanwords used, in italics, in the 14 February El País:

blog – chat – dixie – establishment – ferry – glamour – golden boy – hippy – kosher – lobby [as in lobbyist] – lounge – marines – mass media – marketing – merchandising – performer – online – resort – rhythm and blues – road movies – rock and roll – singular food [culinary movement] – spa – stand [as in booth] – vintage

Little things

I was in a good mood this afternoon for no particular reason, so in the spirit of Jackie’s admonition the last time I went listmaking, here’s a list of little things that have been making me happy recently:

A stack of blue & red checked airmail envelopes I bought for just ,50 céntimos.

Getting my first roll of 35mm developed, & having some of the pictures come out, even though I didn’t rewind it correctly & I exposed half of the roll.

The box of Navidad dulces, cookies, & miniature pastries flavored with almond slivers or orange peel that my school’s jefe de estudios bought & left out in the teacher’s lounge.

This sublime & ridiculous vermouth commercial, aired nonstop for the last month or so, in which George Clooney – in my Andalucían television? – inexplicably appears with a pencil-thin sevillano mustache to say a single word in Spanish.

My weekly bag of clementines.

The music that the local talk radio station plays during my early-morning car ride to school to start the news break, sung by what sounds like muppets backed by a syncopated juke joint piano & handclaps, the words to which are basically, Hoy es martes! Son . . . las ocho! and there are some handclaps & more Spanish and then the littlest muppet asks, “En Canarias?” and a basso-voiced news announcer replies, “En Canarias: las siete,” & the muppet replies, “Ah, vale.”

The sevillano hip-hop playing at a pretty sweet bar off the Plaza de Los Batalles last night, the flow of which was reminiscent of old-school N.W.A.

Getting away with singing this song with my 7th graders while I played the guitar, to teach long & short vowel sounds.

Having an excuse to play Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” for the same reason. And: Not being able to explain the meaning of the word “saspirella.”

Fresh bread.

Cheap espresso.

Sunlight.

Tapeo

In Jaén, as in Granada, they still practice tapeo as it should be practiced: the little plates come free of charge with each caña or glass of wine, in a preset order, primero, segundo, tercero, and you do not know what is coming until it is brought to you, though you can get an idea by paying attention to what the other people at the bar are eating.

In Spain I have been given little plates that range from small pieces of bread with olives, cured cheese & loops of breadstick, or a small sampler of jámon ibérico, to albóndigas (meatballs), chunks of pork in a sauce with peas & red peppers, & pincho of tortilla español, which is a kind of omelette made with potato & cheese.

I have had uninspiring plates of oily chicken, fried croquettes, & red-hot little sausages in a bun. I have had prawns in sea salt, & olive tapanade served warm on a little baguette, & chicken in coconut milk with sweet cooked onions, & many iterations of ensalada rusa, often with peas & tomatoes or white asparagus, always with potatoes, & mayonnaise.

The beer is a light, pale lager called rubio (blonde), and each city has its own mark, although in Jaén as in Sevilla & Córdoba, Cruzcampo (today an owned subsidiary of Heineken) dominates. There is indifferent red wine, often served over ice with fanta, & sherry from Jerez, & a type of sweet, super-concentrated alcoholic wine made from dried grapes whose name starts with an “M” but which I can’t remember.

Tapa, I’m told, means “cover”, and was originally a plater or a piece of stale bread put over the glass to keep the flies away, &, eventually, to keep the punters upright. More lists of tapas to come.

Things I miss in october

Raisin bread – autumn – pumpkin pie – sam adams’ octoberfest – apple cider – print editions of the new york times – bagels with lox, capers & cream cheese – my french press – music at home – french toast – burritos, salsa, plaintains, hot sauce, rice in coconut milk, yuca – cherries – undubbed films – walking the esplanade – brownstones – bookstores – used bookstores – libraries – the bars & coffeehouses & juke joints I have made home – the pushmower for my front yard – fallen leaves – free admission to the ica – regular internet access – being able to make jokes.