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.

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.

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.

Popsicle stands

My father comments, via email, in regards to this:

Did I ever tell you this? Pre-school my lunches consisted of either a peanut butter & jelly sandwich or a peanut butter & mayonnaise sandwich. I liked both and would switch for variety. Figured other kids did the same. Got to kindergarten and found out that most other kids did indeed eat peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. But peanut butter & mayonnaise? No one else did that nor did they want to! That was a surprise. Yesterday I read “Oodles” (your March 13 blog) [...] In it you mention “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.” When I was a teen we picked up tongue-in-cheek what we thought was a 1950s colloquialism; “Let’s blow this pop stand”. In family talk your mom and I took to saying “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.” I don’t remember hearing anyone outside of our family say it that way. Interestingly a Google search suggests that “Let’s blow this popsicle stand” is just as common as “Let’s blow this pop stand”. And the usages may go back to the 1920s. So perhaps “Oodles” was not a peanut butter and mayonnaise faux pas after all.

My father’s forgotten that his parents also introduced the grandchildren to the strange, piquant world of the peanut butter & mayonnaise sandwich – we were fed them while we were small as a matter of course. I associate it as much with that white house on Lake Macatawa as I do Vernors ginger ale.

I like the phrase “in family talk,” though right now I lack the words to describe how or why without just restating it.

I went back & followed the google search, and found the same paragraph cut-pasted into a lot of different question pages (many more than I expected – I had no  either that this went beyond our family) dating it to post-1924, citing the year that the San Francisco Chronicle coined the term “Popsicle,” and suggesting it’s just an update of “blow this joint,” with the most common joint being a soda fountain or pop stand.

But the cites are pretty slim on the ground, and it doesn’t explain why my dad would have thought it a pretty 50’s thing to say, or why Midwestern teenagers in the late 60’s were using outdated expressions in high irony – although I suspect that it has something to do with the whole American Graffiti-hoop skirts counterrevolution that followed.

I’ve decided that when I get home I’m doing an ultra-pijo renovation of the pb&m sandwich, with homemade mayonnaise, real peanut butter, raisin bread from the farmer’s market, maybe some kind of garnish or additional condiment. Suggestions for variations are welcome. Pictures promised.

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.

The game is the game

State senator Clay Davis, Baltimore, MD.

Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich, via wiretap:

“I know Obama wants Quinn for it, but they’re not willing to give me anything but appreciation. Fuck them.”

“I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and I’m not going to give it away for fucking nothing. I’m not going to do it. And fuck, I can always use it. I can parachute me in there.”

From the text of the complaint [bowdlerized]:

p. 58 I learn via civics teacher Bob Greenlee, deputy governor of Illinois, that Secretary of Energy is the one that “makes the most money” – talking about trying to get Blagojevich into a cabinet post. Though “it’s hard not to give it to a Texan.”

p. 59 On November 6, 2008, Blagojevich tells his spokesman to leak to a particular columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times that a candidate is in the running for the Senate seat. Blagojevich wanted “to send a message to Obama’s people,” but didn’t want it known that the message was from him. “The two discussed specific language that should be used in the Sun-Times column and arguments as to why Senate Candidate 2 made sense for the vacant Senate seat. A review of this particular Sun-Times column on November 7, 2008, indicates references to the specific language and arguments regarding the candidate, as discussed by Blagojevich & [spokesman].” The Fourth Estate continues to serve as a valuable & intelligent addition to the discourse.

p. 37 Contemplating punitive measures against a children’s hospital because the chief executive of the hospital hasn’t thrown him a $50,000 campaign contribution, Greenlee & Blagojevich have the following exchange:

BLAGOJEVICH: The pediatric doctors – the reimbursement. Has that gone out yet, or is that still on hold?

GREENLEE: The rate increase?

BLAGOJEVICH: Yeah.

GREENLEE: It’s January 1.

BLAGOJEVICH: And we have total discretion over it?

GREENLEE: Yep.

BLAGOJEVICH: We could pull it back if we needed to – budgetary concerns – right?

GREENLEE: We sure could, yep.

BLAGOJEVICH: Ok. That’s good to know.

The game is the game.

p. 45 Other odds and ends from the case include a scheme to play around with withholding $100 million in tax breaks to Wrigley Field, owned by the Tribune Co. in order to sweeten Chicago Herald Tribune owner Sam Zell into firing his top editor after articles critical of Blagojevich were published. Blagojevich: You say to him, “We’re doing this stuff for you, we believe it’s right for the state of Illinois, this is a bill deal to you financially . . .”

p. 45 Greenlee picks up the ball & runs with it: “You say, I’m not sure we can do this anymore because we’ve been getting a ton of these editorials that say look, we’re going around the legislature, we . . . “

p. 43 Greenlee gives a few vague examples. Better, from a footnote in the complaint: Endorsing a State Rep on Oct. 25th, the Tribune writes, “House Speaker Michael Madigan resists Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s worst impulses. Actually, he resists all of Blagojevich’s impulses. Now it’s time for Madigan to create a House committee to study if there are valid grounds to impeach the governor.” And in a separate State Rep endorsement on the same day: “David Miller is a quality legislator, well-versed in education, health care and human services issues. (He’s also the only dentist in the legislator. Can he extract a governor?)”

p. 45 Blagojevich clarifies Greenlee’s mealy-mouthedness: “You tell him, Maybe we can’t do this now. Fire the fuckers.”

The $100 million in tax breaks went through. The top editor was fired. The whole thing puts me to mind of season 5 of The Wire. How different is pay to play from the game is the game? My favorite thing about the news reports, amidst a lot of the handwringing and professed outrage you would expect from national political figures, is the pull quotes from the Chicago people, the ones without much of a public profile.

A professor of political science at U. Chicago can only be induced to say, “It’s over the top, even for the governor.” Another city figure: “This is a Senate seat, not an alderman election or a liquor license.” As in: It’s not that this isn’t how the game is played, but a Senate seat? When the man knew he was under federal investigation? Shit, man, no wonder he got caught.”

Washington, D.C. criminal defense attorney Robert S. Bennett, quoted in The New York Times, 16 December:

“This town is full of people who call themselves ambassadors, and all they did was pay $200,000 or $300,000 to the Republican or Democratic Party,” said Mr. Bennett, referring to a passage in the criminal complaint filed against the governor suggesting that Mr. Blagojevich was interested in an ambassadorial appointment in return for the Senate seat. “You have to wonder, How much of this guy’s problem was his language, rather than what he really did?”

This is, incidentally, more or less Blagojevich’s defense. And you and I can call bullshit & string him up, but for me the interesting question afterwards isn’t whether Blagojevich was an asshole — just look at his hair — but rather the extent to which his conduct is the everyday couched in unacceptable terms. The lesson is that people, it seems, really do use journalists as mouthpieces to float notions in the press so that they can play strategy, & that media corporations aren’t exactly the free press, and if this doesn’t seem revelatory, maybe it’s just that I’ve been keeping a naive distinction between received wisdom (these things happen) and ocular proof (look, these things are happening).

Final thoughts, State Senator Clay Davis, Baltimore MD:

“If some federal motherfucker comes walking through the door, I say, ‘It’s all in the game.’ But a city police? Baltimore city? Hell, no, can’t be happening – because I know I done raised too much god-damn money for the mayor and his ticket. Naw, ain’t no soul in the world that fucking ungrateful.

“Money laundering? They’re gonna come talk to me about money laundering? In West Baltimore? Shit, where do you think I’m gonna get cash for the whole damn ticket? From laundromats and shit? From some tiny ass Korean groceries? You think I got time to ask a man why he giving me money? Or were he get his money from? I’ll take any motherfucker’s money if he giving it away.”

On the eve of the elections

A week ago I came across these passages in both of my editions of García Marquez. I couldn’t think of a better way to commemorate the elections at a distance of 12.000 km. The first part is in Spanish; the second picks it up from the last sentence & continues in English. Banning public gatherings & prohibiting the sale of alcohol appears to be a common feature of international democracy – at the least, not just fictional South American elections in an indeterminate past, but those in Thailand a few weeks ago as well. Needless to say, Americans, in our infinite wisdom, don’t abide by this. I myself plan to be soused out of anticipation & worry, waiting for the results, & hoping perhaps that García Marquez’ gypsies will come back to town in an uproar of pipes & kettledrums, returning at last with their miraculous inventions: telescopes, flying carpets, magnetism, alchemy, whiskey, & just governance.

Seis soldados armados con fusiles, al mando de un sargento, llegaron y sino que fueron de casa en casa decomisando armas de cacería, machetes y hasta cuchillos de cocina, antes de repartir entre los hombres mayores de veintiún años las papeletas azules con los nombres de los candidatos conservadores, y las papelitas rojas con las nombres de los candidatos liberales. La víspera de las elecciones el propio don Apolinar Moscote leyó un bando que prohibía desde la medianoche del sábado, y por cuarenta y ocho horas, la venta de bebidas alcohólicas y la reunión de más de tres personas que no fueron de la misma familia.

Gabriel García Marquez, Cien años de soledad, p. 121-2

On the eve of the elections Don Apolinar Moscote himself read a decree that prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages and the gathering together of more than three people who were not of the same family. The elections took place without incident. At eight o’clock on Sunday morning a wooden ballot box was set up in the square, which was watched over by the six soldiers. The voting was absolutely free, as Aureliano himself was able to attest since he spent almost the entire day with his father-in-law seeing that no one voted more than once. At four in the afternoon a roll of drums in the square announced the closing of the polls and Don Apolinar Moscote sealed the ballot box with a label crossed by his signature. That night, while he played dominoes with Aureliano, he ordered the sergeant to break the seal in order to count the votes. There were almost as many red ballots as blue, but the sergeant left only ten red ones and made up the difference with blue ones. Then they sealed the box again with a new label and the first thing on the following day it was taken to the capital of the province.

“The liberals will go to war,” Aureliano said. Don Apolinar concentrated on his dominoes. “If you’re saying that because of the switch in ballots, they won’t,” he said. “We left a few red ones in so there won’t be any complaints.” Aureliano understood then the disadvantages of being in the opposition. “If I were a Liberal,” he said, “I’d go to war over those ballots.” His father-in-law looked at him over his glasses.

“Come now, Aurelito,” he said. “If you were a Liberal, son-in-law or no, you wouldn’t have seen us switch them.”

García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 99-100