unemployment as abstraction

The other day I was reading the New York Times and I spotted an article about Spain’s unemployment. Seeing it was like noticing an acquaintance mentioned in the newspaper – I wanted to show somebody, and point to it, shouting “I know that country! I’m living there right now!” – but I was alone. The article explains that “Joblessness has climbed to 19 percent in Spain, the highest in the euro zone,” and is up to 29 percent in Cádiz, the city in the south of Spain where the story was written.

There is a lot of threat implied in economic statistics. Numbers are cold and discreet, and it’s easy to see them as a report card on a country.

I remember my first long stint in Europe – a semester studying abroad in southern France – and how the numbers began to seem a little more more abstract. The study abroad program took us to a center for the unemployed, where we sat in on a lunch whose main person, it seemed, was to foster even more solidarité, which already seemed abundant. In France, unemployment seemed like just another thing, more like an inconvenience than a death sentence. It was almost as though you could do something about your employment status by just sitting around and communing.

It all seemed a little alien to me at the time, but since then, I've realized that when something about a culture strikes you as strange, it means you're understanding "cultural difference" on a whole visceral level that you can't get by just chanting to the word.

Anyway, after having seen and experiencing all that, unemployment numbers began to seem a bit more unreal. I couldn’t pick the statistics up with my hands or hold them; they were more like an abstract notion I could take or leave.

According to the article:

Elsewhere in Europe, such high numbers would lead to deep social unrest. Not so in Cádiz. Here, as across the Mediterranean, life remains puzzlingly comfortable behind the dramatic figures, thanks to a complex safety net in which the underground economy, family support and government subsidies ensure a relatively high quality of life.

at least it's not his trigger finger

Last week, José María Aznar, the former President of Spain and a conservative, flipped the bird to a group of protestors who had been shouting at him. I can’t help but think this never would have happened in the U.S., but then, in the U.S. people bring guns to presidential appearances, which makes the finger almost seem quaint. Still, it’s a hateful gesture, and the kind of thing you probably wouldn’t do if you thought your mother were watching, but there he is, smiling smugly.

I think when you smile and flip your target off simultaneously, it’s kind of like saying, “Not only do I hate you, hating you doesn’t even put me in a bad mood.” It’s saying that you can hate them without even really being affected. It’s a sort of cheap pose, but, then, you’re already giving them the finger. (Strangely, in El País, they refer to his middle finger as his dedo corazón, “heart finger”.)

There are two ways I can give the middle finger, one with a kind of fist and one with the fingers tightly curled at the knuckle. I’ve been sitting at my desk making the two, trying to see if there’s some kind of psychological difference, and I realize that the fisted-finger is the first one I learned as a kid when it was all a new idea. The second middle finger, the curled-knuckle, looks distinctly cooler, and I learned it later, from the kids at school. Our ideas of cruelty were almost all limited to making people feel bad, and I don’t think we realized what real hate was and what real damage it could do. The spiritual peril of trying to look cool and hating someone at the same time was lost on us.

Anyway, Aznar is doing that second finger, the curled-knuckle one.

It wasn't enough for this post to be possible.

Yesterday morning, for the first time in many months, I flipped through the first Spanish book I bought, back before I knew how to conjugate the verbs in Spanish for be. It was a collection of “stories” by Jorge Luis Borges. I put “stories” in quotes because it doesn’t seem like the right word. They are short, yes, and they are fictional, yes, but they read more like essays from an alternative reality.

The first story I read was La lotería en Babilonia, a kind of reminiscence of a narrator who lives in a world where everyone plays a lottery whose consequences are all-consuming. Among others, “For one lunar year, I was declared invisible: I screamed and no one responded, I stole bread and they didn’t decapitate me.” In other pieces, Borges reviews works by non-existent authors and invents other fictional worlds.

These kinds of conceits could be terribly cutesy in another author, but Borges is really good at tossing off little lines that seem to say so much. “It is enough for a book to be possible for it to exist,” he writes in a story about an infinite library. And that’s in a footnote.

These kinds of perfectly crafted little epigrams are why I don't mind all the looking-up and the confusion. When I tell people that I started reading Spanish with Borges, they usually tell me I’m crazy, but I think they don't realize how patient I can be with a text if I think there's some reason to get there. Admittedly, though, I don't know if I could summon this kind of patience again:

Benefit concert tonight

Tonight there’s a benefit concert called Buena Chen whose proceeds will go in part to developing an office of Derechos Sociales (Social Rights) in conjunction with the Red de Apoyo a Sin Papeles de Aragón (“Network of Support for People with Papers in Aragón”). The other day I met José Luis Martinez, who has been helping to coordinate volunteers for the concert. He explained that the economic crisis has been especially hard on sin papeles, people without official papers to live or work in Spain. The traditional left and sin papeles aren’t necessarily always well-connected, he said, even though they have common interests.

The concert is the second in what is planned to be a yearly event. José Luis was involved last year, as well, and he remembers it very fondly. “It was an absolute success,” he said. “There were no problems,” and no graffiti, which is very common at shows here. “People showed a lot of solidarity and engagement,” he said.

The acts this year are very diverse, including the local band Lurte, who play traditional music from Aragón (the communidad Zaragoza is in) and who totally look the part.

My dirty laundry

I only host one of my private students at my house, and she came by this morning for a lesson. When you are a man living with other men, the imminent arrival of a woman on the scene forces you to look around and size up things that might normally go unnoticed. Will the clothes drying on the heaters be acceptable? Is the table a wee bit too dirty?

I noticed, in the bathroom, a towel I had bought about four months ago which had started out pure white and was now half grey. When you are assessing your own stuff, a hand towel that is merely gross becomes the most wretched hand towel that has ever existed.

I have been meaning to wash it for awhile, but clothes-washing here in Spain is more of a production than at home. (Notice my limber somersault into blog-relevant content.) What I was doing at home already seemed taxing, and now I have moved to an apartment with no dryer, which requires me to hang up all my clothes on a make-shift rack I have made out of the thing that used to go under my mattress. There’s limited room on it, so I need schedule two days (estimated) of drying for every load, and that means I can’t do two loads on the weekends, and, well, it’s just a shit show.

It seems that not only is there no dryer in this apartment, nor is there a dryer anywhere. The clothes dryer is a convenience that has passed the country by, for better or worse. The positive points here are that a) it saves energy, and don’t we all want to do that and b) apparently, according to an ex-girlfriend, air-drying your clothes keeps them looking better longer.

Whatever the energy savings, us do-gooders, in our little hearts, really just want to stick the clothes in the dryer, and just take our lumps guilt-wise. I’m beginning to find, though, that I’m getting used to not having a dryer, and I’m even fantasizing about doing this at home. I’ll save energy! My clothes will stay looking new! It’s a pleasant flight of fancy, this idea of going native and never going back, and it will end as soon as I get back, probably, but let me sit in my little bubble for now.

Language and the law

On February 1^st, many of the theaters in Barcelona went on “strike” for a day. According to Variety.com:

Cinema loops are protesting Article 18 of a wide-ranging Catalan Audiovisual Bill that obliges half a film's print-run to be dubbed or sub-titled into Catalan for their release in Catalonia. Ruling does not apply to small print runs of 16 copies or below on European movies.

The new law would be “catastrófica y apocalíptica”, said Camilo Tarrazón, the president of a group of cinema businesses, the Gremio de Empresarios de Cine de Catalunya. (Perhaps apocalíptica is a somewhat more staid adjective in Spanish.) Mostly because of the economics: Josep Maria Gay, profesor de Economía Financiera y Contabilidad de la Universidad de Barcelona, suggested that with the cinema industry already weak, “such as the sector is, this law would be a death sentence.” A major Catalonian newspaper, El Periódico, cites figures that suggest audiences would be cut in half if half of all films were in Catalan.

On the other side, people supporting the law seem to be suggesting that the demand is actually there for this change, since in other media Catalan-language material has larger slices of the market. (Currently, the films released that are dubbed or subtitled in Catalan are a small slice of the market, something below 3% of foreign films.)

I have to admit, when I first heard about this I was skeptical. As an American, even a liberal American, my default position is to keep government out of business. It seems to me, though, that Catalan is worth preserving – I have a tendency to favor the local culture, and Catalan is already a language that has profound support and is used widely. For Catalan, duking it out with Spanish and globalized culture might keep it more marginalized for years, when it could be developing and becoming an ever-more articulated trove of literature and culture. So why not dig in now and reinforce the language?

Unidentifiable old men and elevator etiquette (say it three times fast)

I’m the proud father of a massive bicycle, a fancy-pants deal that does not fit into my elevator (I live on the sixth floor) without some creative geometry and a lot of hoisting. The other day I took ten minute trying to see if I could get the bike in with the kickstand down to save some time.

When I finally got out with the bike on the bottom floor, an old man was coming down the stairs just in time to chew me out for hogging the elevator. He did it in stride, as he was walking by, like really good players do in first person shooters – firing in one direction and moving in another. I think I stammered something in my defense, but I felt bad about it even though he was being a jerk, and it was all over in seconds.

You might think I would remember this guy, but I couldn’t quite recall his face or whether he had glasses, so over the past week I’ve had to size up every old man I see in the elevator, trying to remember if we have a contentious relationship or not. It’s a situation worthy of Seinfeld.

Elevator etiquette is different here, so you have more potential interactions with the people in your building than you would in Boston, where I was living before I moved here. In my building, every time someone gets off the elevator, we say hasta luego, even when we haven’t looked at each other over the entire ride. That little hasta luego can carry a lot of meaning, if you’re the kind of person who analyzes these things, and I am and I do. They can say it slowly or quick, clearly or indistinctly, late or early. There’s one older man I can only think of as a gentleman, because he dresses sharply and his hasta luego is always a little late, as though he were obliged to say it but didn’t want to deign to acknowledge my existence. Other people say it loudly and clearly and early, and it seems like they’re really saying “goodbye”, even if they’re not looking you in the face, which they often don’t.

I’ve been trying to figure out what these two little words mean when you say nothing else to someone. It probably means nothing to anybody else, but to me, it’s kind of a verbal acknowledgment that whenever we share space we are actually communicating and interacting, even if only through a lack of explicit communication. It’s like saying, “I know you’re there, I just didn’t have anything to say today.”

Where do you go when there's no such thing as a Starbucks?

I asked a group of my adult students yesterday about what they do when they want to read a book in public, and they all seemed nonplussed by this idea, not having gotten much into the idea of coffee shopping. I didn’t either, until a friend suggested it so many times that it seemed like he must be on to something, and I noticed how much more stimulating it was being intelligent in public. It’s easier to feel as though you are in a thriving center of thought when you sit among a bunch of other people quietly polishing some thought or trying to suck up some idea.

But people don’t do that here, at least not in cafés. You can find people in the local bar reading newspapers, but, as one of my students explained, this is just a way to pass the time, and you can’t just replace the newspaper with a book, because a book takes real concentration. As for laptops, I’ve never seen one in a café here.

For that kind of serious public concentration, you need to go to the public library. The Biblioteca Pública de Zaragoza is the kind of building where you can tell that, when they were designing it, somebody mentioned at some point a concern about “using the space”. The big room with arched ceilings is broken into two levels: the lounge area, where the chairs are designed for semi-inclined napping, and the reading room, where ample light is provided and people look serious about the rules forbidding noise.

I went in the reading room this evening for the first time, just to check if the silence wasn’t just a product of my imagination, but when I opened the door, the fear crossed my mind that everybody would know that I was entering with nefarious purposes, to observe people reading rather than actually get work done myself. I briefly strode up the aisle and made cursory glances at books to present the illusion that I was there in the sacred room on legitimate business, but people looked up from their reading anyway, they looked right at me, and I wondered if they had pierced my illusion or they were simply bored. David Foster Wallace, in an essay about the problem of being a fiction writer, “E Unibus Plurum”, has a dim view of the writer:

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow.

I don’t do fiction, but I know the feeling.

(A note: the hemeroteca in a library in Spain is not, in fact, the homoerotica section, as some (me) had speculated, but the newspaper archives.)