Cosas del palacio, siempre despacio

I am slowly being absorbed by the department of "Filología Inglesa II" at the Complutense.

Who knew the mysterious "El Barto" made it all the way to university?

Today was one of those days when on the one hand I accomplished little, and on the other, various absolutely necessary things happened.  Basically, I went to the Complutense, and met with the head of the "Filología Inglesa II" department, and (even more importantly) with the department secretary who wrote a letter saying that I was a "profesora visitante" and kindly walked down with me to the personnel department where I filled out a "ficha" (having fortunately brought along my passport for photocopying) and the ladies there said they would "tramitar" everything after being reassured that this wasn't an actual appointment letter, which would involve paying me anything.  ("Será para el futuro," one of them assured me kindly.)  This is important (even though I'm not getting paid) because it will enable me to have a university ID, which will enable me to have a university email, but more importantly will enable me to connect to the university WiFi, and also to use said email and WiFi ID to connect to EduRoam networks anywhere in Spain, including presumably the Biblioteca Nacional.  (I tried connecting with my Columbia ID to the EduRoam network at the Complutense.  No dice.  The department secretary explained that this was because you have to download and install a specific program before you can connect to EduRoam.  Which you can't do unless you're connected as a regular user.)  In theory, I should have my email address by now, but I've received no mails, so I'm assuming that it will come tomorrow.  Or Monday.  Cosas de palacio, siempre despacio.

Trying a new angle

 

Rain and cool weather more typical of October blew me to the Complutense and into the Residencia de Estudiantes today

After heading to the Complutense in the morning for a really fascinating talk by the early modernist Luce López Baralt about the literatura aljamiada of the sixteenth century, I went to the Residencia de Estudiantes to follow up on the Gustavo Durán Martínez character I discovered earlier.

Briefly, so that the topic of Luce López Baralt's talk makes sense, because it was super interesting, aljamiada is the name given to work written by Spanish Muslims in a Romance language -- usually Castilian but also sometimes Portuguese or Valencià -- using Arabic characters.  It comes from an Arabic word meaning "foreign" or "not-Arabic."  There was quite a bit of this written in sixteenth century Spain, and it persisted up until the final expulsion of the moriscos in 1609.  Most of it was lost then, when people walled it up behind false partitions or buried it or similar because (don't I know it!) books are heavy and hard to carry when you're relocating, and there was the hope that you could come back for them soon.  Every so often another cache is found when an old wall falls down.  (I remember seeing an exhibit of books found in walls nearby at the Biblioteca Nacional, I think at the four hundredth anniversary of the expulsion.  Time flies.)  Professor López Baralt explained that the aljamiado texts have been relatively little studied because the first people to look at it recognized the writing as Arabic, and took it to Arabic speakers who read it phonetically and said "this is gibberish."  (Or rather, given a couple of funny 19th C quotes she used, "this must be some kind of North African dialect.  Or maybe Turkish.  Or maybe even from Iran, though it's hard to see how it got all the way to Spain.")  Spanish speakers can read sixteenth century Spanish pretty easily (more easily than English speakers read Shakespeare, even), so they would have recognized it, except that it wasn't transliterated, so they didn't know.  It wasn't until there were Spaniards who studied Arabic and looked at the manuscript that the nickel dropped.

(Rain)Fall

The weather finally changes (a little bit)

The weather report today predicted thunderstorms, so I dutifully brought my raincoat to the university.  And I was rewarded!

My neighbors across the way checked the weather this morning.  They did not approve.

Suburban weekend

A trip across the city to Tres Cantos.  Two hours and a different world.

A friend of mine sent me word recently that she had opened a bookstore in her home in Tres Cantos since the last time we saw each other.  She told me that it was generally quiet on Saturday mornings before the noon story hour for children, so I promised to drop by and visit.  Since Tres Cantos is quite a ways, and I was up late last night, I ended up getting there after instead of before, but as it was a long holiday weekend the store was quiet, and we had a lovely chat and mugs of tea and I got to see the very cool little neighborhood bookstore Serendipias.  (Check out their website for pretty pictures of the store interior, and also upcoming events there.)

National Holiday

What started as a quiet working at home day turned into much more...

I knew that October 12 was the Día de la Hispanidad in Spain (formerly, in the Franco years, the Día de la Raza) and it became clear over the course of this week that it was a rather larger holiday than I had imagined, or than its equivalent Columbus Day in the US.  One of my fellow Fulbrighters told me that a professor she was working with had told her that the disgusting display of air power that I assumed was the central government flexing its muscles the week before last was not courtesy of Catalunya but rather a practice for the parade today, and my Madrid friends said that they thought it was unusual tact on the part of the central government to not include tanks in the parade this year.  (Seriously, tanks?  In a holiday parade?  WTF, Spain?  I suppose it's better than giving them to their local police departments the way the US does, but it still strikes me as weird.)  The afternoon TV news over the last couple of days has covered "operación salida" for what is for many people a four day weekend here (schools are off Friday as well), complete with notices about the extra holiday trains, planes, and buses starting Wednesday evening, and interviews with extremely happy members of the hotel industry, who are practically salivating since the prolonged summer temperatures that are probably a herald of global doom also mean that the hotels on the beach in Cádiz and Alicante are at near 100% occupancy this year, while everyone takes advantage of the equivalent of Labor Day six weeks later, for a last long beach weekend.  There were also shocked and disapproving notices about how businesses and (even more scandalously) ayuntamientos in Catalunya were showing defiance by refusing to close today.  Since I find closed businesses annoying, and since everyone here is super aware of the way this holiday is tied to the dictatorship anyway (the war planes and tanks are kind of an obvious clue), my sympathies are with the Catalans on this one.  (Mind you "closed" here is a relative concept.  Schools and government buildings are.  To my surprise my local and much beloved Mercadona was tightly shuttered, but the Dia Maxi supermarket by my friends in Aluche was open.  Small family owned businesses run by Spaniards were shut, but run by immigrants were open.  Restaurants were open as a matter of course.  So it's complicated.)

In any case, archives were definitely closed, so I planned to spend the day writing, and possibly cleaning up a little.  That plan changed fairly early in the day, when my Aluche friends called and invited me to have lunch, and then go to a flamenco concert with them in the evening "if we can get tickets."

Things unseen

When you learn that a city is a little embarrassed by you.

This is the Avenida de los Poblados.  It has no street sign on it.  To the left is the Comisaría.  It has no sign on it saying that it is the Comisaría, and no address number. And no flags visible from the street. They would prefer you to consider it invisible.

I know that I am guilty of sometimes having an overactive imagination.  But I don't think I'm imagining that Madrid is trying to hide the place where foreigners go to receive tarjetas de identidad de extranjero (TIEs) and for that matter where ordinary madrileños go to get passports and similar.  It is technically the Comisaría of the Policía Nacional, but there are no signs saying so, even when you get to the end of the long wall in the picture, and turn left onto the side street, and go past the wall to a more cheerfully whimsical architecture of a guard house with blue glass bricks surmounted by a little cone shaped tower with swirls of red and blue and yellow that look like a child's playground castle, and that lead into a courtyard.  Inside the children's castle architecture there is a metal detector and a pair of bored policía nacionales directing people through it, and paper signs saying which line is for personnel and which for "visitors."  But it doesn't actually say anywhere why anyone might be visiting the place.  They might have just felt there weren't enough metal detectors in their life, and dropped in to buy a soda and make a photocopy at one of the vending machines (and coin operated copiers) in the courtyard.  But I am getting ahead of myself in the story.

Analyses in the Shower

Listening to totally nude strangers analyze today's Catalan excitement while shampooing makes as much sense as the speech they were analyzing.

I went swimming late today (partly because of my empadronamiento appointment), so when I left the pool it was nearly 9:30, and the only people in the showers were adults.  The absence of teenagers meant that everyone had cheerfully removed their bathingsuits, and had brought along shampoo, conditioner and in a couple of cases bath sponges.  Naturally everyone was very excited to hear about Carles Puigdemont's much-heralded speech in the Catalan Parlament, which a number of women had not heard about because of spending a fair amount of time in the pool.  (The speech was supposed to be at 6:00 and then was pushed to 7:00 and I imagine that he didn't get around to actually saying anything until nearly 7:30, so if you were working and then hurrying to swim you might have missed it.)  When I arrived in the showers one woman was explaining that she had heard on Twitter that Puigdemont had "declared independence but suspended it for several weeks."  The general reaction was shock, and uproarious amusement.  "No!"  Someone exclaimed.  "Declararla para suspenderla?  No puede ser!"  There were several comments about how "los suyos" must be very disappointed in Puigdemont, and a few sympathetic agreements that he was certainly a sinverguenza.  The general feeling I got was that while few people were in favor of Catalan independence, they all thought that at least up until this point Puigdemont had been a worthy opponent, and that he had now made himself ridiculous.  When told of the central government's reaction one woman simply laughed and said that she was going to "secede from this country, just like the Catalans, I want my own."