An interview in El País (26th June) with political scientist Fernando Jiménez, an authority on political scandals, focuses mainly on the recent scandal of the fall of the new Madrid government. But more generally, Jiménez points us to Transparency International, an ONG which, in its own words, “works at both the national and international level to curb both the supply and demand of corruption”. TI records perceptions of corruption among a country’s elite and, Jiménez explains, offers no more than an estimate – but it’s an interesting one. Each year, TI produces an annual report (pdf file) which includes a “Corruption Perceptions Index”: in 2002, Finland is the cleanest country on the 102-strong list, with Bangladesh down at the bottom. Spain is 20th, along with Belgium and Japan, making it, in Jiménez's words, moderately corrupt; FYI, the UK.’s at No. 10, and the U.S. stands at No. 16. For Spain, this is an improvement on seven or eight years ago, when the spate of PSOE scandals pushed the country down, but Jiménez (speaking, remember, in El País) believes that things have not really changed since then – the only significant anti-corruption reform over that time has been the creation of an anti-corruption office, which has had only limited impact at local level. Jiménez points to party financing as the black hole of democracy, and assures us that it will eventually raise its head at the bottom of the Tamayo/Saéz affair, which is still keeping the commentators busy.
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The Word Spy is big fun – especially if you’re a word nerd. It’s going straight onto my links list. It’s apparently been around a while, but I’ve only just discovered it, and one of the things it proves is that the Internet is expanding the language in some wonderful ways. Are you a metrosexual? No? Then perhaps you’re a hasbian. Have you ever indulged in any scam-baiting? This is a slightly worrying post, because I’m thinking that maybe everyone knows these words and I only don’t because I’ve been living in a non-English speaking country for too long. These neologisms don’t seem to play such a big part in Spanish culture; the tendency is simply to use the English word. In fact, this very evening I was talking to a friend about TV soccer commentaries and how the commentators don’t pick up their own accidental puns. There used to be a Barcelona player called Amor, and whenever he'd to commit a foul (falta, which also means “lack”), you’d hear the commentator say “Falta de Amor” and expect some humorous comment to follow – but it never came. Anyway, may you never suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia. (The Word Spy discovered through Tudogs).

Luis del Val, a regular contributor to PdS, has won a literary award, the Premio Ateneo de Novela de Sevilla, for his novel Las amigas imperfectas. In the words of the jury, it’s "a story about friendship between women and the persistence of feelings down the years”.
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The Pfizer “Ageing Population” report into life expectancy in Europe, published 24 June, contains the following interesting information for Spaniards, some of which I hope applies to non-Spaniards living in Spain. (Information obtained via Business Wire).
1. Life expectancy is highest in Spain (82.31 years), lowest in Hungary (70.65 years).
2. The average European can expect to live in poor health for the last eight years of his/her life, with this figure rising to over 10 years in Poland, Spain.
3. The gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy (nice distinction!) is largest in Spain (11.71 years).
4. More people from Spain are smokers than any other European country, yet the mortality rates in Spain for cardiovascular disease (229 per 100,000) and respiratory diseases (60.8 per 100,000), are relatively low. Now that is interesting. CVD is the largest single cause of death in Europe, killing an average of 267 Europeans per 100,000 every year.

If you visit this site and scroll down about two-thirds of the page, you will discover what your hobby might be if you loved languages and walking in the woods. Lear Mundy was such a man. Lear Mundy, bless him, is my hero for today.
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An article by Joaquín Estefanía in El País refers to the recently-published Informe sobre el desarrollo de la Sociedad de la Información en España, eEspaña 2003 (Annual report on the development of the information society in Spain), published by the Auna Foundation. “However you look at it," Estefanía writes, "(total internet user population, security on the net, infrastructure, corporate internet penetration, wide band, public expenditure, the presence or otherwise of a culture of innovation, etc.), Spain brings up the rear of European countries. Only Greece has a lower information society penetration rate than ours. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom, Holland, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Luxembourg and Italy are all ahead of Spain. While this is bad enough, the trend is even worse, as our country is part of a handful of nations that have stagnated in 2002. During its transition to democracy, the report says, Spain managed to win a place in the first rank of Europe. It must now endeavor to find a place in the vanguard which has left the industrial revolution behind, and is rapidly moving ahead in the information society and tools of the new economy.” (Translation courtesy of the English language edition of El País). Well, the Internet revolution won’t start until after the summer, I’m afraid. People are too busy drinking out on the nation’s terrazas, away from their computers.
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History was on their side: the strategy of shock and awe was irresistible. They’ve made their mark on a politically volatile region. There were some losses, there were brief moments of doubt throughout the campaign, but, under the leadership of the B-Man, whose abilities many foolishly doubted, they finally turned out to have the wealth and the firepower, the sheer capability, to carry off what was, most people would agree, a foregone conclusion. They had millions of people all over the world urging them on to triumph, and duly they triumphed. Yes, Real Madrid (oops) has won the Spanish league once again. Just in case the soccer romantics were getting any big ideas. Atlético did their concerted best to prevent it happening, by losing 3-0 to San Sebastian’s Real Sociedad, but their efforts were all in vain. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy watching Ronaldo, Zidane, Raúl and the rest as much as any football fan. But please, not in the same team. P.S. Bush and del Bosque: what is it about people whose surnames have to do with vegetation? Although del Bosque, Spanish soccer being what it is, is already on the way out.
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After being asked to decide my five favorite Spanish films of the last 12 months for an International Film Guide, I realize with a shock that I haven’t seen two of them yet. This may sound paradoxical, but when buzz is strong – or when a film has won a prize at Cannes – it’s probably worth checking out to see whether, as it were, it’s one of my favorites, after all. So I quickly saw Isabel Coixet’s English-language My Life Without Me, about a young mother (Sarah Polley) who learns she’s going to die and makes a list of the things she wants to do before she goes. I snuffled (discreetly). Onto the list it goes. The other film is almost its pole opposite, emotionally – Jaime Rosales’ Las horas del día, about an inexpressive guy in Barcelona with a dull life who occasionally, and apparently out of nowhere, kills people. It’s oddly gripping, but the idea of it is better than the execution, which is probably why it won a critics prize at Cannes: critics like films where the idea is better than the execution. And I’m a critic, so on it goes. Here they are, then, in no particular order, the five favorites from the (seemingly) thousands (actually about 80) Spanish films I’ve seen over the last 12 months – remembering at all times that I don’t like lists. If any of the following are coming to a cinema near you... the Spanish cinema industry needs you.

My Life Without Me – Isabel Coixet
Les mains buides – Marc Recha
Las horas del día – Jaime Rosales
Soldados de Salamina – David Trueba
La vida mancha – Enrique Urbizu

The best bar none? Soldados de Salamina. Now, of course, I have that feeling that there must be one I’ve missed...
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We’re working on a special edition of Puerta del Sol called La historia olvidada. It deals with la recuperación de la memoria in Spain, or how the pacto del olvido [pact of silence] about some of the atrocities of Francoism, which many believe was necessary for the transition to democracy, is now finally being broken. It’s a question of increasing interest and concern. I see in today’s El País that the UN has added Spain to its list of countries with desaparecidos – people who have been “disappeared” by regimes; the list includes Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Iraq, El Salvador, Chile, Algeria and Argentina. Spain’s desaparecidos are those people who were assassinated by the Franco regime after the end of the Civil War and buried in common graves; only recently, with the foundation of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, are these crimes coming to light. The Asociación had presented 64 cases for consideration to the UN, but only two have been accepted for investigation as the UN will only investigate crimes committed after its foundation in 1945, and the majority of victims were disappeared in the years immediately following the end of the war. The Spanish government has not yet responded to the UN's request for an investigation. In an online chat for the newspaper today, historian Paul Preston wrote the following well-balanced words on the subject: “Yo creo que siempre hay que fomentar la memoria del pueblo. Evidentemente, durante una época era muy útil para consolidar la democarcia que hubiera el pacto del olvido a nivel de la vida pública. Sin embargo, los historiadores nunca dejaron de trabajar en esa historia. Creo que los familiares de las víctimas de la guerra, tanto de derechas como de izquierdas, tienen derecho a saber dónde están enterrados sus familiares, y tienen derecho a llorar sus muertos. Las víctimas de las atrocidades republicanas fueron identificadas en los años posteriores a la victoria de Franco, mientras las víctimas de la represiñon franquista muchas veces no han sido identificadas ni ubicadas. Creo que es el deber de los historiadores hablar para los muertos. Y ahora lo hace la Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica.”
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It’s your expression. Own it. It’s your culture. Live it. What’s protected thrives. What’s inside survives. No, this neat little poem is not some neo-colonialist rant, extolling the virtues of protection and possession. It’s marketing, taken from a packet of plastic CD covers I bought. So my “expression” and my “culture” amount to a small, square piece of plastic. If Operación Triunfo, Big Brother, Hotel Glam and the rest are anything to go by, they may be right. And talking about the language of branding, coincidentally Ibidem has a go at the subject today, where he discusses the abuse of the English language in Spanish press releases. These, and restaurant menus, and CD sleeves, and magazines, and everywhere, are often the butt of English speakers’ humour – and I myself quite enjoy a good menu error. Sometimes a slapdash approach to English by non-natives does annoy, as when newspapers get English spellings wrong – but I’m not annoyed because I’m a linguistically offended Brit, it’s because I expect newspapers to treat other languages with the same respect they treat their own. Also, language is a fact, and newspapers take facts seriously. It might be worth looking out for these - foreign language errors in Places That Should Know Better - and posting them (both English and Spanish errors, of course). Marketing people in Spain obviously feel it’s hip and attractive to use English to brand certain products, whereas their counterparts in England and the States don’t feel it’s hip and attractive to use Spanish – and one rather sad reason for this, among all the thousands of reasons, is that at least a little bit of English can be understood by a lot of people in Spain, where no Spanish at all is understood by practically everyone in the English-speaking world. Anyway – hasta mañana.
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My long-awaited Costa Brava trip has sadly been called off at the last minute. No reports of sunshine, cliffs and beaches just yet. So I thought "what's the opposite of sunshine, cliffs and beaches?" and, given that the vast majority of Spaniards – and this guiri too – live in apartments, not houses, I came up with this brief introduction to Elevator Protocol in the Hispanic World, in the form of a few rules:
1. As you are standing saying goodbye to your friend on the eleventh floor, with your foot in the door so the elevator doesn’t leave, remember the person who has been waiting on the ground floor for ten minutes. That clicking in your ears is not imaginary – it’s the person downstairs striking the door with her key, reminding you that she’s still there.
2. In the early evenings, the elevators of Spain are busy with people taking their daily rubbish out. If you’re waiting for the elevator and you someone emerges holding two bags of rubbish, do not assume that he’s going out for the evening with his rubbish and just jump in and go. Wait until he’s deposited his rubbish and come back to the elevator. Whether you wait or not says a lot about you as a person.
3. Always ask which floor the person waiting with you is getting out at. This prevents uncomfortable and possibly unwelcome intimacies as you shuffle round one another in a confined space.
4. If you are bored during your elevator journey and want to write graffiti, please make sure the graffiti you write will in some way enhance the lives of your readers.
5. Please remember to have a shower at some point within the 24 hours prior to your elevator journey, particularly between the months of April and October.
6. Please try to avoid breaking wind until you are in the vicinity of people who might appreciate your atmospheric contributions. Why waste them on strangers? There are pleasanter ways of leaving your small mark on history - blogging, for example.
If all this has whetted your appetite, you could visit the Revista del Ascensor, a visually breathtaking site dedicated to the world of elevators in Argentina. Any other contributions to my forthcoming treatise on Elevator Protocol in the Hispanic World?
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In the UK, they’re debating (at interminable length) whether they should start using the euro or not. Well, here are some statistics, relevant in a vague way to the issue, taken from an El País article published last Sunday. In 2001, 67,012 books were published in Spain, of which 25.4% were from other languages. In France, 54,415 books, of which 17.6% were translated. In Italy, the figures were 55,546 and 26%. In England, says the article, the figures were 125,000 books, of which a whopping 1.6% were translations. Impressive, I think you’ll agree. Barcelona-based agent Antonia Kerrigan calls the UK a punto negro as regards translations. That’s the UK: there’s an article about the situation in the United States here that I cited a couple of months ago, and that I now cite again. New York journalist K.A. Dilday finishes the article: “When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down and the US ascended, Francis Fukuyama speculated that it might mean “the end of history.” The phrase well describes the domesticity that has landlocked the U.S. publishing industry, and the intellectual and moral complacency that has allowed the American public to accept it.” Please, somebody, tell me that these figures - these commentators - are wrong. If you can’t, at least have a look at the newly-designed Babelguides and buy something from one of the seemingly few houses out there in the English-speaking world that are daring enough to take on foreign fiction. And while you’re visiting, please put my name forward to write the Babel Guide to Spanish Literature – it doesn’t seem to exist yet, but surely it should. This has been a totally disinterested public service announcement.
By the way: that antipático mechanic's invoice from a few days ago came to €118. The truth is that I’m so ignorant about the mechanics of automobiles that I don’t know whether I've been ripped off or not.
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“Atleti, Atleti, Atlético de Madrid/Jugando, ganando, peleas como el major/porque siempre la afición/se estremece con passion/cuando quedas entre todos campeón…” Expectations were high in the Vicente Calderón football stadium at 21.00 last night. It was the derby. Atlético (my team), though again having a poor season, now had it in their hands to snatch the coming title from the hands of their arch-rivals, Real Madrid. It was a full house, with 58,000 people. It was the last home game of the season. The weather was warm, even though there’d been showers in the afternoon. The talent on display was second to none – Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo, Raúl – most of it, unfortunately, on the other side. The atmosphere was humming at the kick off, and continued to hum for all of six minutes, when we saw Ronaldo’s smartly-taken first goal go in. The final score was 0-4 to Real Madrid, two goals apiece for Ronaldo and Raúl, with Atlético as good as gifting them the title and playing some truly horrific football into the bargain. Nobody cried: they’d seen it all before. (They did cry in Vigo, though, where Celta - with Atlético’s help - were putting paid to Real Sociedad’s chances of winning the title for the first time in more than 20 years.) The rain came down heavily and many scuttled for cover. When they came back, we all sung a couple of Atleti songs to seal our national reputation as the best supporters in Spain (the cliché has it that the team doesn’t deserve us) and then the final whistle blew. “0-4 against Real Madrid,” Abraham muttered glumly as we walked away from the ground. (Abraham hasn’t missed a home game all season.) “That’s a very serious result.” Gil, the flamboyantly corrupt president, is on the way out, with Enrique Cerezo in his shoes, for the time being at least; they’re desperate for cash; they play shocking football. 0-4. Bloody hell. Will I renew my season ticket next year? Probably: at least we’re back in the first division. I’ll be interested to see what the Atlético Rules blog, as far as I can see the only English-language site dedicated to matters rojiblanco, has to say about this sorry state of affairs.
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1. A bottle of Coronita beer, open, untouched and with a slice of lemon inside, in the toilets of the Complutense University's Literature department. Cautiously I sniffed, and indeed it smelt like Coronita. But I did not drink: I definitely did not drink.
2. How to get into a Spanish office outside closing hours. On the door of the Erasmus office (Complutense) it said that the opening hours were 10.00-13-30, Mon-Thur. I went to reception to leave the packet there, and they told me that if I ran a key noisily up and down the glass door of the Erasmus office, it would open for me. And indeed it did.
3. The following phrase, typed out by someone and stuck up on the bulletin board outside my office – not, I hope, with reference to me personally. “NO HAY COSA QUE MAS MIEDO ME DE QUE LOS FILOLOGOS HABLANDO DE LITERATURA” (Joaquín Aranda). Good hyperbole, and written like a true academic. And yes, academics may be doing literature no favors.
4. What it’s like to sweat, perspire and glow all at the same time. The brain starts to melt.
5. That the foundations of Spanish democracy are still somewhat wobbly (actually, this isn’t news at all). It’s been confirmed by the fascinating Eduardo Tamayo/María Teresa Sáez no-show vote scandal in Madrid - and a scandal it is. It’s currently filling the Spanish air with attacks and counter-attacks, worry, and even panic - and it looks to have put paid, unless they can spin their sorry excuses into fact, to the PSOE’s chances of government for some time to come.
6. The following thought: “…there is one intractable feature of our lives which roots us in the old boundaries that advanced capitalism, advanced science and technology, and advanced imperial dominance (American-style) find so encumbering. That is the fact that we speak so many different languages. Hence, the necessity of an international language. And what more plausible candidate than English?” This from Susan Sontag’s article, “Babel Now”, in this weeks TLS. Well: anyone for SPANISH as the new international language? Just for a change?
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Gracias: one of the few Spanish words used more (probably) by Brits than by Spaniards.

“Gracias, muy amable,” I said to the car mechanic who could be about to charge me the earth for repairing my car, and probably rightly so if I’m too mechanically stupid to do the job myself. When I got outside, I looked at the card he’d given me. His name is F. Amable. Will his invoice live up to his name, or will it be an antipático invoice?

“Gracias,” said the Man of Little Hygiene and Large Belly who always stands outside the VIPS near Plaza de España and hoarsely shouts “rubio!” at me whenever I walk past. You’ve seen him yourselves: he’s somewhere at the edge of your consciousness. I’ve been walking past him for years without ever giving him any of what he so obviously wants, so today I surprised us both by putting a euro in his plastic cup – my own humble contribution to his belly size.

Gracias to me for not mentioning by name a Certain Soccer Player who might soon be playing for either Barcelona or Real Madrid. But if he does come, he might find this handy.
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I love this story. Brooklyn-born Jason Scott Jones has been visiting Spain after winning the award, set up by New York-based, Asturian-born artist Paco Cao, to find the person who most looks like Juan de Pareja, the North African slave who became Velázquez’s studio assistant and a painter in his own right. The portrait is one of Velázquez’s finest works (and in the opinion of many, the finest piece of portrait painting ever). The lengthy process went through taking photos of lookalikes in the street, to an ad campaign “¿Te pareces a JP? - Do You Look Like JP?”, to a final February ceremony with 18 candidates at El Museo del Barrio's Teatro Heckscher. How truthful can a portrait really be? seems to be what Cao is asking, and his idea, is has to be said, has more substance than that of having thousands of people strip off in the Barcelona dawn. There’s a brief summary here, in Spanish, of the fascinating Velázquez/Pareja relationship; and for more, there’s always Jonathan Brown’s fine Velázquez biography. Are there any other subjects of paintings who should be, as it were, restored to life?
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It was all over the papers, all over the TV news. Even on the prudish La Primera. Spencer Tunick advertised for people to take off their clothes in Barcelona early last Sunday morning for an instalación and several thousand did so. Tunick then followed up on Monday with a smaller group of people whom he insisted must have long, dark hair. Once upon a distant time, this sort of occurrence would have been read as an indicator of democratic self-expression, since post-Franco Spain seemed to equate political freedom with sexual freedom (a view still incarnated in Intervíu). I remember reading once that many years ago there was a spontaneous undressing somewhere in Madrid, perhaps in the Plaza Santa Ana, but I’ve never found out any more about it. The people at the superbly spiky Iberian Notes site were irritated by Tunick’s event, calling him a “fraud calling himself an artist”, but I think they’re reacting to comments Tunick made, probably wrongly, about how his happening could never have happened in Central Park. It might not be art, and Tunick’s message might be banal, but it looks like fun, and no one gets hurt. So, inspired by Spencer, and like him using the power of the Internet, here goes: if anyone with long, dark hair (and ideally also breasts) wants to come round to my house this evening to take off all their clothes, I’ll be in. Not more than three people at a time, please.
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Across the road from the bar which I believe sells the worst coffee in Spain, I see that the “e” has fallen off the MERCADO sign on the wall of the Santa María de la Cabeza market (a great market, by the way). MRCADO, it says. It’s like an Oulipo novel writ large (and short), like Georges Perec’s La Disparition (1969) (translated, without “e’s”, by Gilbert Adair as A Void) or Ernest Vincent Wright’s Gadsby, written 30 years earlier. Lipogrammatic Works of Fiction tells us of Gadsby: “While no one claims that it's a great work of fiction, it's said to be decently well-written. Wright, who penned Gadsby in 165 days at the age of 67, apparently did it just to prove it could be done. To ensure that no errant "E" slipped by him, Wright tied down the E key on his typewriter. Alas, he died on the day of the book's publication - perhaps due to the stress and strain of its composition?” On my next visit to the market, I shall buy only carrots and onions in his honor. But no peas, cabbages or potatoes. (Well, just one potato, perhaps). And if it's multilingual word games you're after, try Clueword. Incidentally, I learned last night from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel just why it is that typewriter/word processor keyboards are organized the way they are.
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The great Mexican bolero singer Chavela Vargas (see the forthcoming issue of Puerta del Sol) was interviewed on Gemma Nierga’s radio programme on Cadena Ser yesterday. Shakira annoys her, the outspoken 84 year-old Chavela reveals, because moving your body around is one thing and singing should be something quite different: “No se mezclan la música y las nalgas” [you shouldn’t mix music and buttocks]. A candidate for sentence of the week.

Isonymy is a statistical method used to analyze the genetic structure of populations. Using the technique has led a team of researchers to the conclusion that, of all the Spanish regions, it is in the northwestern area of the country that inbreeding is most prevalent. Just in case you were wondering.

If there are any Madrid-based bloggers out there (in any language), are you aware of this, on June 18th? A fine idea - but unfortunately, I'm hoping to be Costa Brava bound around that time.

Today I came to the end of one of my courses and my students bloody applauded. That doesn't happen too often, and it says more about the kinds of people these students are than about the kind of classes I give. I must remember to thank the person who started it. Whenever I'm doubting Spain, I'll think back to that.

Some useful (English language) reflections on the world of Spanish blogs can be found at Microdoc News (found via Blogalization). The wide-ranging Blogalization site is a great and wonderful thing – a truly international project, maximizing Internet technology in the way it should be maximized, breaking down all sorts of barriers, in particular the linguistic ones. But if you're here, you may know about it already...

Every week seems to bring its share of Spanish tragedy at the moment. Now 19 people, possibly more, have died in Spain’s worst train crash for 25 years. Both this and the issue of who’s to blame for last week’s air disaster are still keeping the nation’s press busy.
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“Nationalism,” writes A.C. Grayling in Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age (published in the U.K. as The Meaning of Things, “is an evil. It causes wars, its roots lie in xenophobia and racism, it is a recent phenomenon – an invention of the last few centuries – which has been of immense service to demagogues and tyrants but to no one else.” So why then, (he complained tetchily), is “EXTRANJEROS” still the largest printed word on my recently-renewed Spanish resident’s permit? It’s printed, in fact, in about twice the size of the letters of my name. To be honest, the permit’s rather cool – miniature, covered in plastic, and very, very colorful. If you want one, it’ll set you back a tidy €6.19. Makes you proud to be a guiri.
Apropos of Nothing Section: I hate the grua – the truck which comes and tows your car away if you’re badly parked, leaving everyone else’s badly-parked car untouched. But even I felt a small shudder of pleasure earlier today, when I drew up at the lights next to a grua carrying somebody’s bright red Ferrari Testarossa.
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An exhibition of photos, by film maker Carlos Saura, at the Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid (do your best, acronym fans). 47 black and white Leica-shot photos were all taken of Madrid’s Rastro street market over a couple of days in 1961 for an edition of a book by Ramón Gómez de la Serna. The photos evoke a very different Madrid of gabardines and smoke, of vests, bellies, Homburgs and ties; there are photos of faces, of crowds, of things. One image features a copy of “Sports Illustrated”, with an article about legendary boxer Archie Moore. “El major purgante”, proclaims one photographed advertisement proudly, “aguas de Carabaña”. The Rastro, Gómez de la Serna writes, “is, more than a place of things, a place of images and associations of ideas…” , and that's still true today. It’s all a very different Saura from the sumptuous colors and fabulous grace of his musical features – Blood Wedding, Flamenco, Tango. But his next film, The Seventh Day, will signal a return to the gritty side of life. It will tell the story of the evening in August 1990 when the brothers Antonio and Emilio Izquierdo ran rife in the Extremaduran village of Puerto Hurraco, bringing to an end a lengthy history of family rivalries by shooting nine people dead and wounding twelve. El País reports that Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, the president of the regional government of Extremadura, doesn’t want Saura to make his film, fearful that it will simply reinforce the image of Extremadura as harsh, impoverished and backward – an image in part created by Tierra sin pan, Buñuel’s 1933 documentary on poverty in the La Hurdes region.
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Here are the e-mailed reactions to recent postings on (a) Spanish stamp bureaucracy, from Tom Spain, and (b) Spanish comedy films, from Dámaso López – many thanks to both.

(a) “It was incredibly efficient of the postal service to notice the mistake. Not to mention the fact that, albeit unintentionally, you were trying to defraud the taxpayer. I was once summonsed to the director’s office in the German factory where I was working at the time. Just the day before I had unwittingly sabotaged the entire Quality Control department causing hundreds of BMW car parts to be sent back to the smelter. The lack of a common language between myself and my appointed in-house trainer was probably a factor. As I stood there, waiting for a second Asterix-style dressing-down and my cards, the man himself looked up from his desk and informed me that a letter had arrived in my name without a stamp and that the Administration department had been obliged to furnish the postman with the correct amount (no fine). The letter would be given to me as soon as I reimbursed said department. Failing that, the 20p would be docked from my salary and I would receive the letter at the end of the month. I kept my job, paid for my letter and reflected on the merits of moving to the Mediterranean. (Tom Spain)

(b) Atraco a las tres [1962 heist comedy], yes, I think if it is not the Spanish comedy, I think it is close to that position. If I compare it with Bienvenido Mr. Marshall, I find its message, its contents, are more universal. Bienvenido... hits what I might call an easy target, idiosyncrasies of Spaniards, their shyness, their sense of inferiority, their naive picaresque. Of course it has tremendous appeal and grand moments. Pepe Isbert dreaming of himself as a hardened cowboy in the Far West... unforgettable, but, on the other hand, Atraco... is about the dreams ordinary people have about themselves, it is about their image and identity, and, at the same time, without declaring it so explicitly, it is undeniably Spanish. José Luis López Vázquez imitates, plainly, Groucho Marx, but he announces some of the sense of misadjustment of a Woody Allen. And the scene at the night club..., it's the Spain of the early sixties, and instead of making people look as though they’re out of a book by Richard Ford or George Borrow, it makes people look as if they intended to emigrate, say, not to New York, but to Paris. (Dámaso López)

Are there any other suggestions for best Spanish comedy film of all time?
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Fine exhibition at the Biblioteca Nacional, if anyone’s in Madrid between now and 22nd June and fancies a bit of history-hopping. It’s called “Un siglo de cambios”, and has been set up by historian Carmen Iglesias to commemorate the 100th anniversary of ABC newspaper. Whatever your opinion of ABC politically, it is at least older than El País, by about 73 years, and so its archives are more extensive. The exhibition combines paintings, drawings, moving images, words and photographs –and it is these last little slices of visual reality which really catch the eye. Culturally (and speaking in general terms), there were two rather jolting great leaps forward within the period – from 1903 to 1936 and from 1975 to the present, though the exhibition does amply reflect 60’s Spain’s first hesitant attempts to open up. Naturally the exhibition doesn’t go very deep, and what we get seems close to “official” versions of history – perhaps a hundred photographed faces of well-known cultural figures, for example, are not distinguished by comment about whether they were Civil War exiles or not, which would have been interesting – but there’s enough perspective to make for a fascinating hour or so. There are plenty of images of the great and good – the visit of Einstein in 1903, the signing of the Constitution – but as ever, it’s the views of life at the margins which are most interesting. For example: two group photos in neat juxtaposition of the students at the same school in a pueblo of Salamanca, one taken in 1900 (83 students) and the other in 2000 (12 students, rural Spain having been heavily depopulated in the meantime). What hasn’t changed is the bright intensity of the children’s gazes.
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