If the following, from El País today, is true, then it means that there are less Brits and Americans living (or registered as living) in Madrid than I thought there were: “Uno de cada ocho vecinos de la capital es extranjero. En la actualidad son 403.532 los inmigrantes empadronados en el municipio de Madrid, un 24% más de los inscritos hace un año. La mayoría de estos ciudadanos procede de Ecuador (138.622), Colombia (44.386), Marruecos (22.786), Perú (22.508) y Rumania (17.687)." How high up the list are the English-speaking countries? Maybe I'll go and find out.

Wherever you’re from, though, remember not to breathe the air. The following, from l'Agence France-Presse, is good to know, especially when you’re out walking a six-month old baby every day: “Spanish environmental group Ecologistas en Accion (ecologists in action) Wednesday warned levels of ozone pollution in Madrid were at record levels and regularly surpassing the accepted summer norm of 180 micrograms per cubic metre (mg/m3)… With Madrid sweltering under its traditional summer heatwave ecologists are forecasting a 300 percent increase in cases rising above the threshold for 2003. Ecologistas en Accion slammed the quality of the capital's air as "deplorable" - something borne out by the Madrid authorities' own internet log of day-to-day ozone levels, which showed a peak value of 243 mg/m3 on June 18 and values surpassing 200 mg/m3 on an almost daily basis.”

So, having had a fine four days away in El Saler, near Valencia, sitting on terrazas, watching the sea, and breathing the clean, clean air, PdS Blog is now away again (to cool Santillana del Mar) through most of August (perhaps a couple of posts around mid-month). If you’ve stuck with me through the intermittent posts over the last couple of weeks, then thanks – and try to make sure the air you breathe is as clean as possible. Hasta pronto. (Cough...)
--------

BookCrossing is a new one on me, I must say – a peculiar combination of old and new technologies. (There are already close to 140,000 members, so once again I'm showing a distinct lack of cutting edge here.) It’s mighty wacky, and I like it. Bookcrossing (a new verb for the language there) involves (I think) leaving a book you’ve enjoyed in a public place, and then putting the location of the book on the website so that any interested parties can go and pick it up. Actually, you’re not just leaving the book, you’re “releasing” it, and participating in a “fascinating exercise in fate, karma, or whatever you want to call the chain of events that can occur between two or more lives and one piece of literature”. Is this a kind of old-tech P2P, subverting the publishing industry? Or is it empowering the consumer? There’s a mirror site in Spain, too, which is why I’m mentioning it here. It’s a fine idea, in principle – but they’re right to add the suggestion that “since 9/11, airports and airplanes make very poor book release locations”. If anyone’s interested, there’s a copy of the 1983 Big Daddy Annual in my toilet, waiting to be released.
--------

Seen recently: Elena Dimitrievna Diakonova, Gala, Spanish actress Silvia Munt’s documentary on the life and times of Elena Dimitrievna Diakonova, better known as Gala, the lover and muse of Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and later Dalí. The film takes us through Gala's early years in Russia, to the sanatorium where she met Éluard, to Paris, where she met Dalí, to New York, where she took young American lovers who now remember her as the key to their lives, and then to Spain, to Cadaqués, and to the little house on the beach which is now a Dalí museum. Famously, Gala is a mystery, and though the film is fascinating – what a wealth of material there is to go at – we feel that a lot of her mystery is still intact at the end, and that we don’t quite have a handle on just what it was that made all these special men go crazy for her – or indeed why she had a child by Éluard who she then abandoned (and who refused to be interviewed before the film.) She seems to have been a strange combination of chilly aloofness and animal passion – the film doesn’t shirk at talking about Gala’s sexual inquisitiveness – and part of her appeal for Éluard, Max Ernst, Dalí and the Americans must have been in trying to reconcile these two contradictory elements. In other words, perhaps the reason that Gala is still a “mystery woman” today is that she was a mystery even to the people who knew her – and a woman who liked to keep it that way. There’ve been some fine documentaries coming out of Spain recently – Cravan vs Cravan, El efecto Iguazú, and now this.

Today I also saw Brian Yuzna’s Beyond Re-Animator. Es lo que es. It was strange to see that one of the actors at the press conference had legs, since he’d just spent the last part of the film swinging round prison bars, after having had his legs ripped off. Not much mystery there, then: but there is a connection between this film and Gala, and the connection is – surrealism. Parts of Beyond Re-Animator look like Dalí’s bad dreams.

Listening to Radio Five Live five minutes ago. A chat show about soccer. A news flash interrupts the program to inform us that Saddam Hussein’s two sons have been shot dead in Iraq after a raid on a villa by 200 US soldiers. “All of which,” the presenter says when we return to the chat show, “makes the future of Plymouth Argyle seem pretty insignificant.”
--------

Found at the amazon.co.uk site, the following short review of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary:

"The full OED is widely and rightly regarded as the essential academic tool for all those who wish to study the English language. Expensive, yes but definately worth every penny."

At £3,750, are you definately sure it was worth it?
--------

Sorry about the lack of posts this week - my Internet connection is still down. Currently I'm busy preparing the next issue of Puerta del Sol. One of the features is an interview with José Luis Cebrián, the co-founder of El País, who's just published a novel, Francomoribundia, which deals with the period between Franco's death and the failed 1981 coup. It's well worth a look for its attempt to prise open the innermost thoughts of a dictator. Sometimes, annotating PdS is a challenge: how do you compress a note on "Franco" into a few short lines? This my first attempt:

Francisco Franco Francisco Paulino Hermengildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975). The most significant figure of 20th century Spanish politics, of whom Adolf Hitler, after meeting him at Hendaye, France, in October 1940, famously remarked: “Rather than go through that again, I’d prefer to have three or four teeth extracted”. Franco ruled Spain, employing a combination of dogged persistence – a persistence revealed in the fact that he apparently watched every televised game of the 1974 soccer World Cup - and great cruelty, for an unbelievable 36 years; he is brilliantly drawn in Paul Preston’s indispensable biography, Franco (HarperCollins, 1993), without which no library of Spanish history is complete, and before the publication of which Franco was the least-known of the 20th century’s great dictators. In a book 1,002 pages long, there is one reference (on P. 459) to Franco’s sense of humor.

More bloggery next week - Internet connection willing.
--------

Late on Friday night, the first two lines of the following poem about Spanish history and the recovery of the Spanish collective memory came into my mind as I was dozing in bed. I got out of bed and wrote the rest of the poem down. I'll be doing more work on this, and may post the final version later.

Fields

The difference between the streets and fields of Spain
Is that the streets at least have witnessed some rejoicing.
The fields, though, are places for hiding and catching.
On a treacherous dawn in 1941
A muted shot rolls across the snow
To disturb the sleep of a boy in a hillside village close by,
Who lies awake, bright-eyed, raggy-haired,
His breath showing on the crispy air,
Wondering who it might be this time
And whether it will one day be him.

For safety’s sake he decides not to speak or even think, unless
It’s for a perfumed reporter, sixty years later,
Who turns up with a Kodak, shooting memories.
Only then does the boy reveal
(Still in a half-voice, though he doesn’t know quite why,
And to a stranger too)
That the man whose bones the do-gooders are turning up,
To ease the conscience of the nation
Now it’s sixty years too late,
Are his grandfather’s bones, the last cheerless scraps of the man
Who showed him these fields as a child;
The man who put a finger to his questioning lips
One trembling dawn, sixty years before
To make a boy comprehend the secrets hidden
Behind the stillness and the silence of the vast expanses of Spain.

No blog last Friday, because my Internet connection is down (just when I need it most). PdS Blog is slowly winding down for the summer because of travel, work and excessive heat. Until the end of July, there’ll be maybe three posts a week. Throughout August, when most of Spain is on holiday, there’ll be just the occasional post.
--------

In the Cuadernos Cervantes, I come across an article by Ilan Stevens, perhaps best-known for his defense of Spanglish as a separate language. In the CC article, Stavans cites the somewhat violent hate mail he receives from defenders of the Spanish language orthodoxy. Stavans has already published a Spanglish dictionary, and Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language will be published in September 2003, but it’s his ongoing translation of Don Quixote into Spanglish which has provoked most ire. Get ready: “In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase…” This article, “El spanglish nace de la necesidad”, offers a good short introduction to the subject in the form of an interview with Stavans. “Hay puristas que dicen que el spanglish es una prostitución del idioma, una aberración. Pero para nosotros es algo habitual. En última instancia nace de la necesidad. No es otra cosa que el resultado de tratar de adaptar una cultura a la otra, como el jazz…” Well, he has impeccable credentials, and the to have the Cuadernos Cervantes backing you is worth something, but he’ll have his work cortado fuera to convince a skeptical linguistic establishmento.

This has very little to do with anything, least of all Spain, but I think it should be remembered: June 26, 2003 was the 40th anniversary of the composition, in a hotel room in Newcastle, of the Beatles' “She Loves You”. Things would never be quite the same again.
--------

I enjoy the el castellano website: how can you argue with a site which features an link called Notes on the Correct Use of the Comma? An article by Ovidio Cordero Rodríguez offers a good whirlwind introduction to some of Spain’s commoner borrowings from English. He uses the prescriptivist argument against their adoption when there’s a Spanish word already available. But some borrowings, of course, have slipped anchor, and we have English words used by Spanish-speakers which do not correspond to their English meanings: puenting (bungee jumping), lifting (facelift), mailing (mailing list), footing (jogging), aerobic instead of "aerobics", and, if it wasn't 02.35 am Spanish time, other examples. I also enjoy Miranda Stewart's observation, in The Spanish Language Today, that commercial establishments in Spain sometimes stick a genitive suffix on for that exotic effect - a beauty salon, say, called Paquita's. Ooh, sexy. On a slightly different note, there’s the fun of assimilation, where a borrowed word or expression is adapted to the host language. Cederrón is my favourite of the day.

Meanwhile, Gail Armstrong at openbrackets has been making a thought-provoking stand against (yuk) "International English".

(By the way, should that be "bungee", "bungy" or "bungi"? It’s troubling me.)
--------

Extracts from a winsome (and inspirational, why not) story from Brenda Loree of the L.A. Times, Ventura County edition (via LexisNexis): “Call them the mayores, the old ones. They are 25 students, ages 60 to 90, who never learned that they're too old to learn a foreign language. They've all attended the same advanced Spanish conversation class in Ventura's adult education program for up to 20 years. None of these students has ever graduated. None wants to. The class is too much fun... One student did in fact succumb to a stroke in class years ago. Her peers were devastated, but some were later philosophical: For them, there are worse ways to go than while translating Gabriel Garcia Marquez… “…I just like its usefulness,” said Martha Churchyard, one of the younger students at 67. “I like to understand people and talk to them. I like to understand signs, what's being said around me. It's everywhere.”.. California still wears its Spanish origins in everything from its very name to the names of many of its cities, the food in its cafes, its architecture, its art…Sam Povar was 60 when his wife dragged him to his first night class in Spanish in Woodland Hills 10 years ago… Povar even defines his moods to his wife in a new way. “I say I'm having a subjunctive moment ... or, 'Honey, I just feel like a false cognate today.' The classes have “become a love,” he said. “I'm even learning better English. Now I get excited about conjugations and the subjunctive. Our group is so eclectic, but Spanish is the glue.”

"Spanish is the Glue". Great. Someone please tell Sam Povar to make that the title of his first novel.
--------

La recuperación de la memoria continues: another hidden episode of Spanish history rises to the surface this evening at 20.30 (GMT) on BBC Radio 4's Starr's Spanish Heroes.

Sometimes, a sentence just takes your breath away. Here is one of those sentences, from Canongate Books' excellent site (a site which offers plenty of unusual reading and which is well worth a visit):

“A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us." (Franz Kafka)

And talking about book quotes, how's this:

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read." (Groucho Marx)

El País reports that several historians (apparently, they prefer not to be called “Hispanists”) have declared, in a conference at Madrid’s Casa de América, that Spain, despite the cliché “España es diferente”, is not different at all. “That,” says historian Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, “is a formula invented by the dictatorship to justify its resistance to change, to Spain’s becoming democratic.” The phrase, which emerged from the Ministro de Información y Turismo when it was headed by Manuel Fraga, has long been a bit of a joke, since Spain at the time (the 1960’s) was indeed different, but not in ways contemplated by those who invented it when they tried to come up with something catchy to entice tourism. Like all the best jokes, it has its serious side. “There is still the challenge,” Sánchez Albornoz continues, “of researching the history of repression which was unchained by those who won the war. There is still a lot to tell.” Perhaps it is only when it has been told that Spain will truly be “the same”. See here for a interesting and relevant letter, signed by Sánchez Albornoz and a long list of respectable others, to the New York Review of Books in 1969 - when Spain, apparently, was different.
--------

Has anybody seen the little red vehicles which drive along the bus lanes in Madrid, heroically making sure the lane is clear for buses? I think they have “Vigilante carril autobus” on the side, or some such phrase, and they’re probably funded by the Madrid Town Council (oops). Anyway, I wouldn’t have mentioned these vehicles if I hadn’t seen one parked on Alberto Aguilera today with his lights flashing while the driver dived into a bar. I waited, because the inevitable was going to happen, and the inevitable is always worth watching. And surely enough, after about a minute, along came a bus, which had to pull out into the regular traffic to get past the vehicle which was there to keep the bus lanes free. The kind of thing which, depending on your mood, is why you love or hate Madrid.

Pharmacy Dialogue:
Me: Two teats for a baby’s bottle, please.
Pharmacist: How old?
Me: Six months. And some multivitamins, please.
Pharmacist: For you, I suppose?
Me: (Am I looking tired or something?) For me, yes.

Oh, and this, from the Associated Press Worldstream, July 4th: “Forget Latin passion and spontaneity. Most Spanish couples schedule sex like appointments with the dentist, a study says. And the vast majority - 86 percent - are reasonably or very happy with their sex lives, the Spanish Federation of Sexology Societies said. Seventy-seven percent of Spaniards say they schedule what time of day to rendezvous intimately with their partner, and 52 percent plan which day of the week, according to a study by the federation. The study polled 1,202 Spaniards and was carried in Friday's edition of the newspaper El Mundo. "Iberian machos are a thing of the past, but we have gained ground in terms of tenderness and communication, which are key to satisfactory relations," sexologist Carlos San Martin told the paper.”

As the result of reply to a post, I've discovered Jeremy's MultiMadrid site. It's fun and it's very big - almost a virtual, online Madrid. I'll have a good look at it over the weekend.

My six month old son has typed out his first contribution to the PdS Blog:

-m vvxze nnb 3wse z,o- mokmm,++++++++ e+x++ ,,,, +-ñu… a llll x0- mqp g mn

Hope you enjoyed it. I’m off to buy a new keyboard.

--------

Last night, Matthew Bannister broadcast his late-night BBC Radio 5 Live programme from Madrid's Plaza Santa Ana, presumably in an attempt to help Brits understand the city to which David Beckham (media icon and former soccer player) will soon be moving. The guests discussed some of the things that struck me when I first came here – the friendly people; the tourist spots (some of which I haven’t visited for years – mañana); the habit of throwing cigarette butts, prawn heads, whatever you like, on the floors of the bars; the fact that Spaniards don’t get drunk in public very much; the (yawn, if you’re not a bull) bullfighting debate; the fact that the radio is full of English and American music; and the dubbed movies, and how green it is, and the spectacular view from the top of the Bellas Artes building, and the quality of Spanish driving, and the ease with which you can get a late-night drink (it used to be even easier, believe me - last Saturday morning at 5 am around the Plaza Dos de Mayo, it wasn't easy)… ah, memories. All these are things that struck me as exciting and strange when I first arrived in Spain and which, sadly, I had forgotten were ever exciting and strange. I’m habituated. I should set about getting defamiliarized. (Thank you, Viktor Shklovsky, for helping me to keep my eyes open.) The botellón, now banned, was mentioned, and the friendship between José María A. and Tony B, and Gibraltar (a word my wittier students sometimes write on my blackboard before I go into class, as though I strongly believed it should remain British or something), and the royal family, and Penélope Cruz, and Macarena, and los Ketchup, and Dover, who sing in English, and Spanish films, which the panel agreed are not seen by enough Spanish people. People called in: some loved Madrid, some hated it. One guy claimed that if you ask a Spaniard for directions, he or she will always be helpful. He’s wrong. Sometimes, a Spaniard doesn’t know the name of the street he’s on – feeling slightly twisted one day, I carried out that particular piece of research myself, a few years back. And I had a bad back once, and had to take a taxi from the Prado to Atocha, about a quarter of a mile away. The taxi driver didn’t know where Atocha was, and insisted on looking it up in his A-Z, even though my finger was pointing right at it as he did so.
--------

I’m sure they must exist in other countries - in fact I think I saw them years ago in Malaysia. Until now, in Spain, I’ve only seen them in Seville, but the job of standing in the street, and pointing out gaps in the lines of parked cars to drivers so they can park themselves, is spreading. For the last couple of months, I’ve been seeing immigrants doing the same thing in Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria, where the foreign universities and the halls of residence are, away from the police beat. They're Africans, mostly, though in Seville, which is a pioneer in the field, they seems to be mostly gitanos, and sometimes they wear uniforms and issue tickets, supplied by the town council a few years back when the local powers-that-be realized it might bring down the crime rate (the people doing it are often petty criminals). It’s a job caused by the lack of road space and the excess of cars – like being a traffic warden, except it benefits both drivers and the council. It looks like hard work, when the temperature’s up in the 40’s, because you have to wave your arm manically to attract the driver's attention. Frustrating work, too, because you never know which approaching drivers are looking for a place to park at all. Some questions: Does the job have a name? Where else does it happen? How much do you have to pay them? And what happens if you don’t?
--------

The fifth Congreso International de Historia de los Conceptos started yesterday in Vitoria, El País reports. The congress deals with the risk which lies behind the manipulation of political terms, which areoften given simplistic, manipulative definitions by politicians. Melvin Richter, a professor at New York University, considers close analysis of the true meanings of words to be a way of understanding the past and the present, as well as a way of encouraging political tolerance. Terms like “revolution”, “democracy”, and “civil society” are complex and controversial concepts and realities, Richter says, which politicians have to use whether they like it or not, and it’s important to study them so that the politicians themselves are aware that they don’t carry one single meaning – their meaning. Pueblo and ciudadanía are other examples he gives, but there are probably thousands. Any other words which politicians regularly use irresponsibly? Take your pick. For example, given the amount of press coverage given to the arrival in Madrid and medical check-up of DB (soccer player) today, one can imagine politicians of the future using the populist word “Beckham” instead of the fading term “God”. Incidentally: a Cadena Ser journalist called the Zarzuela hospital today, where Beckham was having the check-up, and pretended to have broken a leg to see whether medical help would be forthcoming at the time of DB’s check-up. The journalist was told it would be difficult, since the entry to the hospital's main building, where the emergency section is located, was blocked.
--------