GUADALQUIBEAR…ES UNA COSA

and the basketball game, it was a strangely metaphysical experience, a demonstration of the (sometimes upsettingly) easy facility by which “the mind to quit the body is manifest” as virginia woolf once put it, to see my name on a envelope of tickets -- to which i had to struggle my way in spanish because i never would have expected it to be at the press entrance (although that’s now being done at least a petty justice) -- given to me by a friend of a sister, a woman married to a basketball player whom i’d known absolutely almost not at all -- and in an absolutely different context -- and who now plays for a basketball team in some other place in spain, and whom, on saturday, i watched play a game of basketball at a stadium somewhere in spain.

afterwards, i acceded to one (in so many words) because i felt i wasn’t in a position to be inhospitable after (having been so graciously guided to) my free tickets, and the jeers of disbelief that i got in response weren’t at all in jest. and, true, it didn’t even take those jeers to convince me past that first one, especially since the people watching on the alameda was so what it was, which was exactly what you would have expected from the posters advertising “guadalquibear*,” posters of that da vinci man in the circle with the radial lines and with his limbs splayed except that the “fit” man (it’s a question of body image and internet dating site deceit) had been replace with a bearded one with a full belly -- although without as much other hair as might have been expected.

and the bears were definitely on parade around – and in front of and everywhere else about -- the bars on the alameda, gay or not, that night, and, strangely, it was i who had to explain the phenomenon, and it gradually became the joke of the night that the bears were parading, because this halloween weekend, well, it was a thing. the thing itself became the next joke, because something being a thing wasn’t yet a thing in spain, and then it was as we made our way to the gay bars where guadalquibear was DEFINITELY a thing, even more so than usual -- or at least more so than usual outside of those couple of bars.

then, at one of the others, someone remarked on how many beards there were beyond what seemed to be the men participating in the weekend’s particularly special activities, and, since it had been where i’d been living, i had to explain that, well, “es una cosa,” which, by that point, could have been said about anything to elicit a round of laughs.

and if not for this year’s calendar i might have been damned. but, fortunately, the weekend was followed upon by a monday that wasn’t really a monday, being as it was both halloween and the one day before the national holiday of the feast of all saints. so i was able to endure the pain of the shave, knowing that i was essentially responsibility free until wednesday. so after half a day of compulsorialty, i quit. and it hurt, after nearly eight weeks this time, but i shaved. you get used to things, and, well, that’s what they become. just like the parade that one night of guadalquibear.

but now, for better or for worse, my beard is gone. and, well, it’s a thing.

*the guadalquivir is the river that runs through sevilla.

THE RAIN IN SPAIN, part 2

the season has now certainly changed. after one week of autumn gave us respite from the oppressiveness of late summer, the winter-- as it seems here -- seems here to stay. that’s what they told us would happen, and, sure enough, now the thermometers dip under fifty during the night (if the thermometers here work, which isn’t to be expected because none of the clocks do), and even the midday sun can’t raise temperatures much above eighty. but there are chills in the air (if exaggerated to justify a citywide change of wardrobe), and, even if they don’t ever manage to stick around for the entirety of a day, there are clouds, and those clouds, the winter clouds of which we were warned, make rain.

monday morning, it squalled until almost noon, and the sun wasn’t able to reassert itself until after two o’clock, at which time it had already had to resign itself to being the background image for the day’s entry in the weather tables. but the rain stayed away on tuesday -- perhaps because the home team had another late away game. on wednesday though, despite a clear and brisk morning that warmed into a perfect afternoon, the rains made a late evening appearance, and, since those rains weren’t of the southern spanish variety as we’d come to know them but rather more akin to an all too familiar lingering spray, we walked.

and on the way down calle san luis, a friend, and it was one of those nights on which you would have needed one; or i did, anyway, and this one, from paris, invited me into her nearby apartment for tea, tea and cookies, french ones flavored like orange flowers, which were the perfect compliment to her artistically rustic apartment, straight out of montmartre, at least as far as I knew from that movie, having never actually been inside an apartment in montmartre. But we did talk about movies, the spanish ones she’d bought that day along with some books of spanish poetry, although none by poets with whom i was familiar.

we did, however, get around to one I knew, or, rather, we’ll get around to him here, because in that conversation with that parisian friend i hadn’t the temperance (mind you, though, we were only drinking tea) to admit that i hadn’t much enjoyed paris the one time that i had been there, if only because on my self-guided the-life-and-times-of-andre gide reality tour i’d been so disappointed not to find any sort of commemoration in the rue de…medici?...where gide was born that I’d spent most of the rest of my time there reading (holding strong to a twenty-two year old’s prideful grudge) in the luxembourg gardens in (both the good and the bad kinds of) ironic protest.

and it happened this week that i spent a considerable amount of time looking for a book, a book called ocnos by an author named luis cernuda who was born in sevilla, had been a colleague of lorca’s and all the rest of those, had gone into exile after the beginning of the civil war and taught in the united states, but most applicably had been an avid admirer of gide’s and whose work, as a result, was typified by an undeniable frankness when it came to matters of desire. (i was assured by a friend after complaining that i hadn’t been able to find the book at any of the stores i’d visited that no bookstore in sevilla didn’t have a copy and that i all i needed to have done was ask. i did end up asking, and in fact there wasn’t a copy at the bookstore where i swallowed my pride and asked after book in spanish with demonstratedly poor communication skills in that language. the book wasn’t there, but i did manage to gather that cernuda was a poet and not a novelist -- as i’d assumed when whoever it was had made me the recommendation -- and then found ocnos -- granted, a collection of poems in prose -- at the next bookstore i tried.)

but it wasn’t until this morning that i realized what i hadn’t realized until then, that i’d known cernuda’s name before i’d known it, or had read it at least, when i’d happened on a commemorative plaque in calle acetres weeks before and stopped to attempt a read, if only out of respect for the city’s efforts to commemorate things with plaques. when i saw the same plaque today, having set out with an address specifically with a mind to laying eyes on the commemoration before writing anything about it, i recognized it, and the sign for the crystal dealer above it, and then nothing, i guess, nothing except for the ridiculously unprofound realization that i would have remained in the city to read my copy of ocnos had sevilla been proud of its significance or not -- and then a bit of embarrassment at my poor treatment of paris.

or maybe i won’t read my copy of ocnos, because in my excitement over having found one i bought it without much consideration, and the one that i bought is spectacularly white with luxuriously wide margins. for what it cost, i’d already decided not to mark it up, even for the sake of exercising my spanish education, and i’m at a complete loss as to how to keep myself from soiling that spectacular whiteness (the bad kind of ironic protest), especially since i’ve become accustomed to reading in parks, which, here, don’t provide any shelter from the rain.

somehow, though, (ironically?) the rains and the winter have brought the parrots back to town, parrots about which we were also warned, but weren’t prepared to be prepared for until april when they come back north and are said to occasionally drop lucky feathers from the trees. and the palm trees in the plaza de san lorenzo were full of them this afternoon, although they weren’t dropping any feathers. now, in the present season, they’re on their way out. the parrots have to leave. and if i wasn’t struck by any profundity other than that of my own silliness at seeing cernuda’s commemorative plaque earlier in the day, i did open my notebook to where i’d copied its inscription and thought about…something. “el poeta ejemplar de amor, el dolor y exilio.” what’s someone have to do to get remembered with words like those? And i thought…something, something much better than simpering about those stupid birds.

THE RAIN IN SPAIN

sevilla f.c. didn’t beat f.c. barcelona last night, but they didn’t lose, and that seemed to be victory enough for many of the fans watching the game on the television outside of the bar/restaurant next to the alameda cineplex. and sevilla certainly had a fantastic opportunity for losing: in the second of the four overage minutes of the second half, barcelona was awarded a penalty shot for a double foul on the striker responsible for most of its shots in that half, which for the most part saw sevilla on the defense. the shot was blocked, but only after a fight had broken out between the penalty box and midfield over the calling of the foul and one of sevilla’s was sent of the field with a red card. the shot was blocked in the fifth of four overage minutes, and the game was finally called in the seventh at a nil-nil tie. and that seemed to be victory enough for many of the fans. (sevilla, with one recent liga championship, is one of the few teams in seasonal competition to bust the monopoly of barcelona and real madrid over the league.) the forecast had been for rain all weekend, but that rain held off all of yesterday and let those sevilla fans cheer their team to a non-loss to barcelona (at barcelona) in front of an outdoor television for the entirety of the match, which ended just before yesterday did. but the forecast kept its promise for today, and the clouds that had been gathering throughout the morning started sprinkling in the early afternoon and then let it all out in torrents between three and four. by six there wasn’t left any trace of the storm – except that the air was fresher and crisper. and damn, had it needed the clearing.

AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 4; or, PAGAN SPAIN, part 3; or, HOW (TO) CHRISTOPHER GOT HIS GROOVE BACK…ONCE AGAIN

no more eta violence. that was yesterday’s big official news, and today’s diario de sevilla ran a political cartoon that featured a hooded caricature of an eta representative on a small deserted island throwing his gun into the ocean and reflecting that his surrender of his weapon was better than suicide. and what sage, sage advice for all of us, although there’s still much work to be done for peace as all of the papers and television news programs have recognized. last night, at the party, the party to which, incidentally, we wouldn’t have been extended an invitation had it not been for an acquaintance from the basque country, there wasn’t any talk of terrorism, but had there been it would surely have been about the various sevillanos lost to the violence and not about its implications for the legitimacy of the central government’s control of the various autonomous communities of spain. or so we can assume if my conversation with maría, a high school friend of the host’s, was of any significance. maría was a native and had spent some time in japan, so i remarked to her what i’d been thinking for a while about the similarities between the dispositions of the people of sevilla and the ones of kyoto. she didn’t disagree when i said that i respected the strong prides that both peoples held for their cities, not the most cosmopolitan or contemporarily savvy in their respective countries, but both of them their historic capitals and undeniable centers of certain “native” cultural traditions. i didn’t go on to voice my suspicion that those strong senses of pride were what had made the peoples of both cities so stubbornly insular, but maría supplied that point for me and (probably just for gracious sake of the conversation) warned me that i might not be so enamored of the local color after it had had a chance to put me at its disadvantage. and then there was talk of the church, which, with the top of the basilica just a block away and easily visible from the roof of the house where the party was being held, was probably inevitable in a conversation about basic sevillian values. just a day earlier a friend had responded to my challenge that i had no interest in getting married but that if i were to make a play for marriage i would insist on doing so in front of the virgin by saying that she had no plans to be married but that if she were she too would insist on having her wedding in a church because she believed more in god than she did in zapatero. touché. maría, for her part, didn’t think much either way, but assured me that even if the church (as it were at large) hadn’t found many official parts to play for homosexuals that for the most part spain in general and sevilla in particular didn’t bother to make distinctions because the tenacity of the church on both scales was more a point of the stubbornness of a folkloric tradition than a matter of dogma. (the pope might have something to say, but as for the virgin, as far as she was concerned you were a friend.) and so, appropriately, i left the party for a flamenco show (if ever there were a more fitting metaphor for the pageantry of the andalucian church…) at which i finally made acquaintance with lakshmi, whose workshops i hadn’t been able to take in portland but who easily offered up that she was doing her best to go back to give more. and if i can be permitted the sidebar i’ll say that i learned last night that there are in fact people in the world so beautiful that you can recognize them by reputation. she introduced me to her friend, an angolan woman who lived in portugal and in town visiting for the weekend, and maybe it was my familiarity with the two of them that launched the cavalcade, but for the rest of the night i was the uncomfortable beneficiary of more than my share of the venue’s female attention. a miraculous attempt at evangelical conversion? if so, then the holy spirit’s cupid’s arrow went astray. i could have named it a dozen better marks. but i’ll take it nonetheless. it’s a funny kind of stubbornness, but I’m throwing down my arms. it’s better than suicide, and we do know, those of us who know her, that the virgin hates that. and if not the rest of them, at least i can be a friend of mary’s.

PAGAN SPAIN, part 2

on saturdays, come mid-afternoon, the streets outside of the historic churches of the city overflow with wedding guests, the men dressed smartly in lightweight grey and blue woolen suits (this summer is poised to continue well into november) and the women, they’re dressed of course, but these weddings are much less about their dresses and their shoes (in which they do miraculously -- glory be! -- manage not to have to hobble over the cobblestones) as about their hats. they’re really, REALLY something. and the trails of them through the center of the city come mid-afternoon on any given saturday will almost invariably lead you to a set of studded doors in front of which a bride waits patiently with her father while, inside, a vaulted hall full of guests waits, turned towards the doors, less in expectation of the beginning of the familiar wedding march than in anticipation of the procession of latecomer hats that have yet to make their formal debuts in front of the virgin. accustomed to the ceremonial lack of ceremony (as such), some dozens of the guests mill under the umbrellas on the patios of the nearby bars even as the bride waits.

and such was the case at the church of san juan bautista (de palma is apparently his mor vulgar moniker) yesterday afternoon, where at half past noon a young wife to be waited patiently (her father probably wanting to be with his brothers and cousins at the bar across the street) for her friends or their wives or girlfriends to make their plays to show her up in front of the crowd. but at eleven o’clock mass this morning, the same grand church was occupied by only twenty or so of the devoted, at least a quarter of which were elderly and enfeebled and waited of their own volition, unacknowledged, to go to the end of the communion line so that they’d need to spend less time on their canes. there were neither a processional nor a recessional of the priest -- he had no attendants to escort him in any case -- and the luster of the church’s obvious historical and art historical importance was obscured by the motion of the four sputtering wall mounted oscillating fans that protruded from the below the red velvet that covered the top halves of the pillars located closest to the apse.

as soon as the mass was finished (and after the priest had retreated backstage and cut the brighter of the lights that had lit the altar), a crowd rushed in to take pictures of the statue of our father jesus del silencio (located in the alcove to the left of the altar, the right hand of the cross), have their pictures taken with the virgin and her attendant saint john and then to line up at the back of the church to be shown into the reliquary by the male parishioner who had so wholeheartedly appealed the devotions to the faithful few twenty minutes before. it’s difficult not to marvel only at the brilliance of the art in the church of san juan bautista in sevilla, and i was personally rapt by the statues of the two angels that guarded the stairs to the apse, symmetrically suspended by no apparent system of suspension as they themselves held pendant two giant lanterns -- the only two lighting fixtures in the church not to have been converted to electric. and those elderly who had struggled through the communion rite were probably the most disserviced by the catholic hierarchy of all of those who stood in line for the sacrament. but even so, as it was, caught between those wedding hats and the gaggles of tourists, i couldn’t help but feel for the parish of san juan bautista. even for all of the gold (and the apse of the church is glutted with it), i couldn’t help but pity the poor, meek catholic church. but then also to wonder, if by some cosmically beatific irony, it might not, after all, end up inheriting the world.

PAGAN SPAIN

sometimes the smoke turns out to have been coming from a chestnut roaster’s cart, which was the case the other night with the smoke cloud that was hovering below the tenting at the entrance to the pedestrian shopping promenade that begins at the zara store nearest el corte ingles. but sometimes the smoke isn’t floating the smell of charred chestnuts (which don’t seem to have a season here), but instead is carrying the unmistakable fragrance of frankincense, which was the case with the cloud that led me onto the crowd that filled the one narrow intersection on calle regina between the plaza mayor and the church of san juan de palma. and the smoke cloud was just a prelude to the chanting and the clanging of the baubles on top of the staffs that her attendants pounded against the ground to announce the resumption of the virgin’s procession through the intersection atop her seriously ornately gilded palanquin. i can’t say to which church the image belonged, but, probably, neither could most of the other people who had stumbled across the procession and were doing their best to snap photos of the image as she moved through the smoke. and for the smoke, it was difficult to tell if our lady of last night was decorated, under her outsized and resplendent crown, with the crystalline tears that appear on the faces of the virgins in the photographs advertising special viewings or the faded ones that decorate walls of the older cervecerias (or of any older retail establishment for that matter). the virgin passed, and the crowd closed around her attendants behind her. once before, i’d happened upon the carrying of the virgin de la esperanza (the second most celebrated in the city after the virgin de la macarena) back into the santa ana church in triana as a saturday night was turning into an early sunday morning. i’d no better idea of what feast (or whatever other event) she’d been brought out to celebrate that night than i did in regards to the virgin whose path i crossed on my way up calle regina towards home. but no bother. those things are better left to the krewes of parishioners who enjoy the image’s patronage. and they likely prefer it that way -- like those bearers of the portable shinto shrines that carry whichever of those deities through the crowds during festivals in japan -- to be the sole protectors of the gallant and dazzling rites that every so often take their virgin to the streets. i didn’t buy that copy of richard wright’s pagan spain when it was available at powell’s because it had been so severely marked up, and i never found another one. but i think i’ve gotten the gist of it by showing up. and it’s nice to be home.

AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 3

it seemed possible to easily quit the daily caffeine habit that i'd resumed here after a year and a half of abstinence and then just as much time on a more psychologically and metabolically manageable routine of two cups of coffee on each of three days a week. what the coffee in the pacific northwest had done to my nervous and endocrine systems over years couldn't possibly have been replicated by a month of daily single americanos outside the land of narcotic quality microroasts, could it? well, something happened. and after deciding yesterday to tighten my belt -- or for deciding that i should lower my profile in the cafes for the week, one of the two -- there's been hardly an unobligated hour that i haven't spent asleep. i'd have liked to replace my americanos (even if they should only be replaced temporarily) with some of the american beer that i found in the newly opened import bottle shop at 32ac calle jesus del gran poder (i stumbled into the grand opening reception after a wonderfully caffeinated afternoon walk), but paying twenty euro for a six pack of sierra nevada would hardly let me hide behind my belt tightening excuse. and so i've slept. run and slept and slept. and been told that i look tired when the obligated hours have come around. and with no hoppy consolation from the old country (although i definitely don't need any help getting to sleep). it would, however, have been some consolation. instead, all i have is my 750 gram tub of chocolate hazelnut spread, purchased last night, almost all gone, eaten in those short bursts of momentary motivation between naps, (coffee stirring) spoonful by spoonful. and, of course, off brand.

UN PASEO POR EL BRONX

it was actually on a morning run that i found all of the places that i later revisited in order to spend more to spend more time investigating them (and photojournalizing for the backhanded appeasement of some relations back in the old country) early this afternoon. and early this afternoon it was already too hot and too sunny (yes, portland, those are things) to really enjoy the walk. but i did get inside that cavernous shell of an abandoned edifice that stands -- not entirely bricked up, but almost -- just north of the macarena on the opposite side of the road that follows the western bank of the river through the city. it's full of trash. and lizards. but there was at least one man in there today who seemed to be living in the "room" with the tree in it at the northern end of the smaller of the two connected buildings. aside from rubble (i'll admit to having been a bit scared because i couldn't tell if what was left of the ceiling had done all of the falling it was going to do), most of the trash -- mattresses and plush toys and gutted home electronics -- looked like leftovers from previous squatters. on the old map i checked later in the day, the lines running away from the spot of what were now those ruins seemed to imply that they had once been a train station. on that map, there were also still train lines running away from the plaza de armas, which was replaced as sevilla's main train station after the completion of santa justa station, which was built, along with the the expansion to the airport, for the expected increase in visitors to the city for the celebration of the quincentennial of spain's opening of the americas to european exploration. i'd decided to run further in that direction that i ever had before because i'd spied the steeple of what i assumed to be an older church in the distance (and historic, monumental architecture isn't what you expect to see in el bronx). later, when i took more time to try to find access onto the grounds, i thought i'd seen a sun faded sign describing the rehabilitation of the monastery of some or another saint del buenavista; but the map said it was a cemetery, which i suppose wouldn't keep the building with the steeple from being a church or a monastery, but there was a security patrol along the outer wall with the only apparent access points to the building when i was back on my walk in the early afternoon, and i thought it better to do any more poking around at an odder hour. plus, it was still almost half of my walk to get back to that giant egg. i'd nearly laughed out loud when i'd first seen it earlier in the morning, and seeing it appear over the horizon was even more unexpected than the steeple. the probably hundred foot and hollowed out spheroid protects a huge statue of christopher columbus, who five-hundred and nineteen years ago came to sevilla to secure funds and three ships for his journey around the world to india from the monarchs of a recently united proto-spain (but only the name of the santa maria -- and the strange date of 12/X/1492 -- appear on the egg). and in the end, for the increasing intensity of the sun and the waning of my interest with the depletion of my water, i didn't end up walking all of the way back to it. of that, i didn't really need pictures. but the sevillian celebrations of 1492 were much more successful than the ones held in sevilla's sister city of columbus, ohio, u.s.a., and the continuing presence of the giant egg is testament to that, even if the central expedition site for the celebrations (located on the opposite side of the river and closer to the center of town) are now more scarcely frequented than even those ruins with their one remianing squatter. strangely, spain didn't get the day off today. there are certainly more publicly recognized religious holidays, but columbus day is not celebrated here. wednesday, however, is armed services day, and i've been told that absolutely nothing will be open. nothing other than ikea, that is, which in perfect american form is where (i've been told) the entire city of sevilla will be that day.

that's why we're going early. greetings from the new world.

AUSTERITY MEASURES, part 2

juan jose padillo got himself gored in the face yesterday after popping two banderillas into the back of a bull named marques during a fight between the two in zaragoza. i hadn't heard of the man before yesterday evening when the news of his goring topped all of the news bulletins: "Television images showed the moment when the bull’s left horn ripped into Juan Jose Padilla’s lower jaw to emerge beside his protruding eyeball." a picture of the same occupied the entire front page of this morning's diario de sevilla, and even for the closeness of the zoom, it was difficult to tell the tip of the protruding horn from the white bulge of the eye that it was pushing out of padilla's face. so the stage was set for a big sports news sunday, until i realized from checking the printed soccer stats that the game i'd seen on television yesterday evening between bulletins in which sevilla won two to one over barcelona had been a recording. oh well. i'm not taking all of the responsibility for the error, because, after all, i just don't work here. and that goring is more than enough to compete with this morning's cyclocross spectacle back in the old country, which could only triumph for sensationality if someone there were to in fact get gored. are unicorns still a thing? no. never mind. i don't care. here i am wasting time that i could be using to check on the success of padillo's surgery. and in deference to his courage and sacrifice, i won't buy el país like i'd planned, even if i've been told that the sunday culture supplement is a must have for my look this season. and who has the five (six?) euro to give to frivolity at a time like this. una. grande. viva. in solidarity, and out of battery.

AUSTERITY MEASURES

thanks to the group of twenty year old italian girls who stopped me on the street at two-thirty in the morning to ask me directions, with special kudos to the one of them who happily struggled with me in halting spanish back and forth to finally arrive at the mutual understanding that she and her friends were looking for a place on calle adriano and that i did not know where that was. her dress probably wasn't prada, but it's designer had definitely noticed all the brightly colored stripes in the 2011 spring collection. and then taken them once by mondrian and then by warhol. that's the kind of thing the kids are thinking these days between the bars. what sovereign debt crisis? we've got star power. it was the confidence inspired by that interaction that had me actually offering suggestions two hours later when a man from an early middle aged trio asked me where they should go for one more drink. luckily, it wasn't quite enough for me to grab the lapels of the man who screamed what i thought was a compliment in my face a bit later and toss him out of my way. although it felt like i should have as soon as i was home. the police were busy clearing out the alameda and breaking up the fight behind the fish market.

SUPER SAD, PROBABLY TRUE

the first several pages had me already suspicious that i’d missed the boat, but of course the boat was full anyway, as the american repatriation authority constantly reminds immigrants in the book and as its author is constantly intimating about the real life (as in outside his book) accessibility of lifestyle hub new york. all of the important media bits on super sad true love story (i.e. the ones that had any chance of getting noticed) went up or out last year (and the originators of the unnoticeable ones that circulated at the same time could console themselves that they’d been involved in the moment, if however insignificantly). but there are those people occupying [ref. my hesitation to put that in quotes] wall street and the streets of all those other cities in the states to protest the corporate ownership of the united states government; and maybe that means the beginning of a real life rupture, that we’re finally at a tipping point -- and maybe the spoils will topple down on the side of the low net worth individuals (unlike in the book), since (unlike in the book) they were the instigators of the conflict when things came to blows. dunno. i’m not there. for richer or poorer, i’ve put myself on another boat.

but, last week, super sad true love story was the only book left in the apartment in a language that i could read, in other words the last book immediately available to me that i wouldn’t have to pay for; the last book aside from that one on the development of the japanese new wave and the birth of the art theater guild by toshio matsumoto that i should have passed on to someone who would have read it after nearly a year of letting it sit face down, open to page three on the filing cabinet that was my nightstand at the apartment in the old country. the idea, however, of reading a book in japanese that described the histories of the french and italian new waves at a beach on the coast of spain -- and the idea of being able to talk about that idea -- was enough for me to accept the extra weight in my suitcase. it was enough, even for knowing beyond most foreseeable doubts that the book would probably stay unread, and that if the computer somehow found its way to the beach that there probably wouldn’t be a wireless signal for gloating. but i could still gloat at being in possession of such an erudite “media artifact” as the one(s) i had, and for that i could also sympathize with lenny abramov’s anachronistic fondness for his books in super sad true love story.

of course, super sad true love story, as a depiction of a near future (credit score and streaming media driven) dystopia, is supposed to make you smile and nod at how similar (if in some cases farcically so) the lives of its characters are to your own. (the copy i read went to italy early this morning, but i think i remember something on the jacket positioning the book as if nabokov had written 1984.) the problem is that the future gets old, or any one future does, as soon as the future comes to take its place, and once that happens (and i feared within the first several pages of super sad true love story that it might already have) a book like this one can’t hold on to its urgency and, without its timeliness, loses itself until the discussion on it is reopened a decade and a half later as a way of understanding the intellectual history of the past (which is actually how the unnecessarily sentimental epilogue to super sad true love story positions the story of the book). the future gets old, and the future gets old at the same speed as we canonize a fancifully nostalgic image of the past.

and so I put myself on that beach in hindsight, and it was a greater moment even that it ever could have been in anticipation. the protagonist of (the other) murakami’s almost transparent blue gets things on in that book with an american named lily, the woman who writes the protagonist the letter that comprises the final text of the novel. lily has gone off, and there’s something in her letter about a beach, or at least there’s something suggested in reference to something from earlier in the book, and that’s why murakami’s second novel is loosely considered a sequel to his first, because it begins with a description of a woman on a beach, a redhead like lily who’se thinking or reading or doing something pensive like lily would probably do (and i’m sure that there’s something more concrete to the connection, but neither of the books came with me, and we’re going to go with that there isn’t a wireless signal at the beach). but the exact connection isn’t all that important, because the woman at the beach isn’t all that important to the book except that hers is the perspective and imagination from which things start happening across the ocean in front of which she’s sitting. and there i was at the beach, a detached and pensive secondary character in my own story, reading my book on the japanese new wave and watching a war break out across the ocean (the title of murakami’s second book) just like lily had, in my case a rupture similar to the one in super sad true love story.

and from there? in murakami’s book, the perspective on the action jumps its way around to finally find lily back at the beach, which is where it finds us -- i suppose we never left me there -- still thinking about how to talk about a book that probably isn’t worth talking about anymore. except (except!) for about that yearning nostalgia for an intelligent america in which reading was valued and new york city was an unassailable beacon of honest ambition. even i shed a tear for that place i visited that one time only for how i imagine myself to have been feeling at the time that was that one only time. but who was i to judge, sitting on that spanish beach pondering the value of literary fiction for the here and now in the ugly -- and lengthening -- shadow of gertrude stein and ernest hemmingway.

so away from the beach. but there isn’t an open internet signal here at the metropol parasol in the plaza de la encarnacion either, and, as one of the self-inflicted casualties of the rupture in super sad true love story writes in his suicide note, without connectivity we’re stuck with just “walls and thoughts and faces.” lenny abramov tells his diary about the honest sympathy he felt for that sentiment, even as (or because of being?) a lover of introspection and media artifacts. too bad the feel good sentiments of the epilogue, which takes place after lenny’s diary has been published, have to rob that sympathy of its vulnerable dignity. or something like that, stark and poignant like the end of super sad true love story isn’t. but then who cares? that boat was already full, and i’d long since missed it anyway. better not to draw attention to my lateness in coming. better next time just to buy what i’d prefer to read, timely or not and shut up about it. so i take my headphones out of my ears to be able to put the computer in my bag with my notebooks and things (but not the copy of super sad true love story that i read, because it went to italy this morning). and i fucking shit you not: in the plaza, bruce springstein is singing “born in the u.s.a.”

(UNA SEMANA EN) MA VIE EN PISOS

inspirado en una historia verídica...

no recuerdo cuantos dueños yo llamé la semana pasada. demasiados. no recuerdo cuantos pisos yo fui a ver con mi compañera. no, sí Recuerdo, fueron siete. y había algo mal con todos. el primero piso era bonito y el precio por mes era más barato que la mayoría, pero cuando yo lo visité, el dueño dijo algo sobre una nómina. ¿qué fue? no entendí. despues de nuestra conversación, me preocupaba que mis documentos no fueran suficiente para ese dueño, y por eso yo no traté de alquilar su piso. (¡y qué pena! el dueño era guapo…) los otros pisos eran feos, o si eran bonitos no estaban amueblados, o en el caso de uno, estaba manejado por una mujer muy loca y glotona. y el vencimiento de mi arrendamiento se estaba acercando… Hasta con la ayuda de mi amiga – que llamaba a los dueños por teléfono y me servía de matona – no podía encontrar una situación ideal. en el fin, yo tomé el piso de algunos amigos de mi amiga. ellos pueden hablar inglés, y yo podría haber evitado todas las dificultades con los dueños y sus pisos si en el principio hubiese tomado ese piso. bueno. por lo menos, yo he podido practicar mi español. ¿dónde fue el dueño de ese primero piso?

HOW TO GRIN AND BEER IT -- OR WINE; or, CRUZCAMPO IS ONLY GOOD FOR BAD PUNS

the beer in spain would be awful. we knew that. unfortunately, knowing wasn't much of the battle when it came to experiencing and accepting the reality of the situation. and the reality of the situation is that spain only seems to have one beer, a "premium lager" of the quality that you'd expect from a beer with that written on the label. the labels sometimes say cruzcampo, but they sometimes also say alhambra or estrella del sur. dia even sells bottles of its own brand for significantly cheaper than the rest, and you might as well get your liters of that if you're buying beer at dia, because all of the brands taste the same: not great. there's probably just the one big beer factory somewhere that makes bottles and bottles of all of spain's premium lager and then ships them to the different labeling factories. there's a place on feria that has a few taps of somethings german, but if glasses (glasses!) of cruzcampo are one euro fifty, who knows what a place would charge for a pint of premium lager imported from two countries away. anyway, you can get a glass of house wine for a euro ten. it isn't much against the heat, but it does some kind of job. maybe not the best for enjoying the thursday garbage picnic at midday, but there's a dia right near the picnickers, only then you still have to do the chilling yourself.

those glasses of house wine have heard more than their share of sighs. it's not even their fault. and of course the old country is completely out of mind when we're walking back to stick those warm bottles in the freezer. the old country was nothing but strife. this new world of unemployment has everything more exciting to offer in the way of bohemian vogue. but if someone wants to send a bottle of super dog, i wouldn't consider it a backward step to drink it. we're moving to calle becquer. you can have the address as soon as i have it exact.