On missing the cultural nuance that goes with language...a funny

Still working away at my thesis chapter...but here's a quick twitter joke in the meantime

Greetings on this unusually gray day, which looks more like what I think of winter as looking like, even if it still doesn't feel it.  (Last night I fell asleep to the unusual but comforting patter of rain on the roof.  I hope the reservoirs are filling up, though snow would be better than rain, maybe.)

I'm on deadline with my thesis chapter, but I have a couple of good long blog entries meditated, which I promise I will post as soon as possible.  In the meantime, here's a quick funny that I saw in El País this morning, which no doubt published it maliciously, and made sure to run the story in both Spanish and English, because everyone needs a good laugh after Christmas.

Dreidels "por encargo"

Oh dreidels, dreidels, dreidels, you are quite tough to find...

Some thoughts on shopping trips, and a new neighborhood.

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My menorah and candles

My quest to find a menorah in Madrid ended up being only a ten minute walk from my apartment, and as you can see above, the Aladdin's lamp is working nicely.  (It's on tin foil to prevent hot wax drips and sparks on the nice wooden furniture.)  As I now have the menorah in place, and one of the friendly medievalists I have met here has invited me for "nochevieja" I of course reciprocated by inviting her and her family for this weekend so they get to have a "traditional" (within the very loose sense of the word) Hanukkah.  As she has volunteered to bring her children so they can light candles, and as when it comes to tradition I draw the line at looking up prayers in Hebrew that I don't know and don't normally recite, I thought I should have dreidels for the kids to play with.  (If I have any European readers who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a dreidel.)  This turned out to be difficult, and may yet be impossible.

Storks and the City of Light

 

An interesting phrase I learned today

My Spanish is pretty good, but one of the nice things about being here is that I keep learning new idiomatic phrases, some of them somewhat dated, but which provide fascinating insights into the culture.  I may have mentioned the somber "hambre que sabe la hartura no es hambre" (literally "hunger which knows what it is to be full isn't hunger") which means that it's different being hungry when you know where your next meal is coming from and are looking forward to it and when you don't know when you'll eat again.  Obviously, this came up in the context of discussing the post-war period.

Today in class I learned a much lighter phrase, when discussing the gender theory of Judith Butler, a subject where sense of humor is generally severely lacking.  My Complutense mentor, in an explanation of how gender is a learned performance, told the story of overhearing a small child of three or four years old at a polideportivo being picked up from his swimming lesson and telling his father that "hoy aprendimos a nadar como señoras" ("today we learned to swim like ladies").  My mentor, emphasizing that the child was linking an inherently neutral action (a type of stroke) with being a "señora" added that this was clearly a child who was too small to have an adult conception of human sexuality and that he still "piensa que los niños vienen de París."

Festivals of Lights

Happy Hanukkah, everybody.  More to come soon....

Due to a small disaster involving my phone switching off accidentally while I was copying pictures from internal memory to an SD card (ironically in order to back them up and also create more space on my phone) I lost a bunch of pictures due to damaged sectors on the JPEGs.  Aside from providing some interesting internet reading about JPEG repair programs, I didn't get much from this experience, but I have been able to recover some of the few not backed up photos, which were mostly taken over the last week, as Madrid becomes more and more twinkly with holiday lights.  As tonight is technically the first night of Hanukkah (and I still forgot to buy matches, and therefore with gas heat am condemned to sit and look at my pretty new menorah with two unlit candles tonight), I thought it made sense to show what I can of the winter lights in this pretty city.  For those of you reading this on big screens, sorry the image are small and low-res.  I'll try to get more and better ones over the next month and replace them as much as possible.

Happy Constitution Day

 

A flurry of puentes ushers in the holiday season

My plan for staying quietly at home during today's "puente" (although being a Wednesday it can't really be a "bridge" to any particular weekend) was dynamited today by a call from New York friends who have been in Barcelona and are flying home from Barajas tomorrow morning, who suggested that I go out to dinner with them.  So I did end up going into the city center this evening, on El día de la constitución, which is celebrating its 39th birthday today.  As I had arranged to meet my friends in the Plaza Mayor, I managed to make my way through the Christmas market there, which was filled with more crowds than usual, many of them holding sparklers of the kind I fondly remember from my childhood on the Fourth of July, that are now mostly illegal at home.  My friends were stunned by the crowds and noise and sparklers, and remarked that they had had no idea it was Constitution Day (though they had seen the news about the rally in Barcelona).

A further note on Spanish custom and gender norms....

 

Having just watched "El Intermedio" I have a quick further thought

 

 In light of the current (and recurring) hysteria about sexual harassment by politicians and so on in the Anglosphere, I watched the final (absolutely funny and charming) segment of "El Intermedio" this evening with something like shock.  I think it's superb that the Spanish manage to be concerned about sexism while still managing a considerable sense of humor about what my Complutense mentor refers to as the "national characteristic of invading people's personal space."

On Ads and Aspirations....

Some speculative and unscientific hypotheses I have developed watching the "publicidad" on Spanish TV

 

Faithful readers who are practicing their Spanish may appreciate the clips below, as they are narrated nice and slowly and clearly.  Be warned, however, that while repeated viewings will lead to full comprehension, they may also lead to a strange desire to buy beverages and cleaning products.

I'm just back from a fun but exhausting weekend in Belgium, and feeling very happy to be back in my cozy city once more, where I can see the sun.  I've been given another good archive lead, which I will follow up shortly, as tomorrow and Friday are both puentes which I plan to use for rest, recuperation, and possibly some writing time.  In the meantime, here are a few thoughts about Spanish TV which have been kicking around my head for a while (I watch way too much TV here), and which being away for a few days brought into focus.

A Russian friend of mine this weekend, in the attempt to persuade me that the world was not falling apart, said that she traced social progress through Hollywood movies because they are mass, popular culture, so once an idea is there it is never radical or elitist, but by default mainstream, and said that she traced the rise of tolerance to the ways movies were made now as opposed to fifty years ago.  I see her point, but what I didn't say at the time is that even Hollywood movies are frequently aspirational: they don't so much reflect an actual social consensus as the social consensus that the people in Hollywood wish existed.  In that respect they may be more progressive than the US as a whole.  (My friend doesn't know the US at all except from the movies, so she has no way of realizing that.)  I assume that the same is true for Spanish TV advertisements, and perhaps even more so since the point of a TV ad is even more explicitly to get people to buy stuff, so obviously the ads present an aspirational lifestyle --- a world which doesn't exist but which could if you are willing to buy X product (or a dystopia which doesn't exist but which might if you don't buy X product).  Still, to the extent that ads reflect both the preoccupations and the dreams of their target demographics, I have made a few tentative hypotheses about Spain the present day.  These are unscientific and unsupported by any hard demographic data, but I bet they could be confirmed (because I bet the highly paid people who made the ads confirmed them).  Read on for my thoughts, and for some funny youtube clips.