Hazards of winter

A cat with static cling. Not happy.

Don't shoot the piano player

I love histories of words, and some friends gave me a great book for Christmas called Word Origins and How We Know Them by Anatoly Liberman. He also has a blog which looks like a lot of fun. It is hosted at Oxford University Press. I had no idea that university presses had blogs! As the kids would say, Duh.

I found this wonderful online etymological dictionary! Here's the entry for scapegoat. Sometimes this idea is closely connected with "shooting the messenger." Where did this phrase come from? Wikipedia tells us a version of it was used by Sophocles, and Shakespeare used it a few times as well. Tom Tomorrow gives us a contemporary update.

Ana Belen sings Joaquin Sabina

lyrics to "Peces de ciudad" here

Guillermo del Toro and Mexican directors in the news

This interview with Guillermo del Toro (in Spanish) explains a lot about how he made his film El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth). The film received a 22 minute ovation at Cannes, and has just been nominated for six Oscars. Opinions of Spanish critics were divided on how he portrayed elements of the Civil War. He also made Cronos, Hellboy, Blade II, and El espinazo del diablo (a film set during the Civil War itself). Bob Mondello talks on MPR about the three Mexican directors who have made important films this year: Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of Babel (following on Amores perros and 21 Grams; Alfonso Cuarón Children of Men (Director of Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) and Mondello points out that Babel, Children of Men, and Pan's Labyrinth are political films, that portray dystopian worlds, and that all three directors have used their Hollywood success to be able to make these more personal, less commercial movies. The three of them are also good friends, close collaborators, and incredibly talented and imaginative creators. UPDATE: Alfonso C. talks about being classified as "Mexican directors" in The Guardian

Terry Gross interviews Guillermo del Toro on Fresh Air on NPR. Del Toro points out that "fairy tales" were originally for adults, not children, and were ways for us to grapple with traumas, not entertain children. He is a very intelligent, articulate speaker on his own work, with fascinating stories about his life and work. He was interested in how long the resistance to Franco actually lasted, their role in supporting the Allies, and how they were forgotten when it was more convenient to see Franco as an ally in the Cold War. He grew up in Mexico, and compares his grandmother to Piper Laurie in Carrie, but then also says he learned from her how to love people for their defects. He no longer can live in Mexico in part because of the experience of having to negotiate with his two brothers to ransom his father from kidnappers. One of the kidnappers asked him what he did, and he replied "I write," and the kidnapper told him, "so go write every morning." He calls El laberinto "A parable of disobedience and choice." Some people love it madly, one person I saw it with hated it. I'd definitely going to rent his other films after listening to this fascinating interview.

Una voce poco fa X 2

Last time I tried to embed a YouTube video, it broke my blog! I've been frustrated with the new version of Blogger because I haven't been able to post YouTube videos or embed them; I get an html error message, but I haven't been able to figure out how to close the tags they said were open. After some scouting around I hope I have come up with the way to close the open html tags. Yes! It works!
So, here is my childhood vocal idol, Victoria de los Angeles
singing "Una voce poco fa" with her warm, lovely voice
"
And Maria Callas singing the same aria, with her incredible technical virtuosity andn charisma.

Syriana and the idea of "hyperlink films"

I finally rented the movie Syriana from Netflix. I watched half of it late at night before I fell asleep, then watched the rest the next day. As a result, I experienced the movie as a semi-dream. But that seems absolutely appropriate for this particular film. It's a movie with a complicated plot, multiple story lines, a lot of characters who looked similar, deliberatve confusions, no easy connect-the-dots resolution. Phillip Dhingra made this great page, with a map to help sort out the connections.
When I went to IMdb, as I usually do these days to learn more about a film, I came across Roger Ebert's review in which he calls this a "hypertext movie". A little more poking around led me to a post that explained that the term had been coined by a critic Alissa Quart in the journal Film Comment to describe a certain type of complex, multi-stranded film. Ebert says:
"The movie belongs to a genre that has been named "hyperlink cinema" by the critic Alissa Quart, in Film Comment. She suggests the structure was invented by Robert Altman, and Altman certainly brought it into modern times and made it particularly useful for showing interlocking stories in a world where lives seem to crash into each other heedlessly. "Crash," indeed, is an example of the genre, as are Altman's "The Player" and "Short Cuts," and such films as "Traffic," "Syriana," "City of God," "Amores Perros" and "Nine Lives." Ebert loved Syriana, and I thought it was interesting that he said he gave himself up to the pleasure of the unresolved connections because the film still made a different kind of sense to him; not the sense of narrative closure, where all the points are connected, but the sense that there is a set of connections that the characters themselves don't perceive, and that we can only glimpse in flashes even as the force of the movie sweeps us along.

Blogger Jason Kottke picked up on Ebert's review and the notion of hyperlink cinema. The comments to his post make some very good points: this type of structure is actually pretty much what a lot of modernist fiction pioneered: John Dos Passos USA for example, or even Charles Dickens: multiple plot lines, flashbacks and parallel stories, the kinds of "dissolves" in the discourse that propel us from one "reality" to another without the usual realist transitional signals.
And it was certainly what Rayuela by Julio Cortazar attempted to do in a much more self-conscious way: point out to the reader that jumping around from chapter to chapter, almost, but not quite, at random, was as valid a way to read as cover-to-cover. I need to follow up on this!

A chilly Sunday

My Christmas cactus has a bloom!
Yesterday was cold and sunny, so I took a walk with my camera.

The roses that bloomed so late into the fall are still on the bush, and the berries are feeding the birds.


Instead of being industrious and cleaning house, I am being industrious and fooling around with pictures and YouTube videos. Ever since Blogger moved us all over to "beta" I have not been able to post YouTube videos, just links, despite messing around with settings and reading "Known Problems" posts, etc. I'll keep trying, though, because I like being able to post the video itself and not just the link.
I may follow the example of some other folks and move over to Wordpress, though, if it doesn't improve soon, because I am being forced to log in over and over to comment or even just to edit, whereas before it would remember my settings, and the
Blogger help folks never got back to me, of course.

Last night I watched AFI on SNL (too bad the sound board crashed in their second number, messing up the vocal). Davey, the lead singer, reminds me quite a bit of Bryan Ferry, and the whole androgynous glam scene back in the day, so I looked for some old Bowie (did you know there is a Goblin King action figure?)Roxy Music vids; Do the Strand!.

More wedding pictures

Amy and Miriam made the party more fun!

Penelope and Pablo, very elegant!

Amparo and Jesus.

Marian and Blas had matching coats.

Loren and his niece Crystal who actually had to run out and bang on the door of the plane so she could make her connection! We're so glad she made it.

Sue and Andrew came from England; here they are getting ready to throw their rice at the grooms.

Loren's niece Jenny and her husband Dave also flew in from the States.

Gail took time off from work to be with Loren and Blas and helped so much with all the preparations.

Every story

I'm putting together some things on for a class on narrative, and I was so happy to find this old Sesame Street Classic. I didn't watch Sesame Street growing up; I watched it with my daughter. We taped a lot of episodes and watched them over and over. A couple of my favorite bits were animated by super talented Sally Cruikshank. She has put some of her videos up on YouTube. I think this one--"Every story has a beginning, middle and an end" is a great version of a lot of narrative theory--and you can dance to it! It sounds a lot like what the Talking Heads were doing at the time, which is probably one of the reasons I like it.

My buddy

Another one of those cat rule: always help make the bed.
My cat was SO glad to see me when I got back. My neighbor had been taking care of him, so he hadn't gotten any slimmer, but he sure craved attention. While we were in Spain, we acquired a new guinea pig, named Muffin. We've all been surprised at how fond we've become of these guys. Muffin is only about half the size of Louis, pictured here. I just love Louis' haircut!
I would love to have a guinea pig at my place, but I'm afraid the last thing it would see would be something like this:

Wedding pictures!

I want to write more about the wedding ceremony later, but for now here are some pictures for family and friends--just a few!


We gathered at the Hotel before setting out for the Juzgado. Make sure the camera is ready!
The ceremony was held on Friday, Jan 12 in the juzgado of Zaragoza, on the Plaza del Pilar. The wedding guests gathered outside a little before noon. Friends and family were there from Portalrubio, Valencia, Barcelona, Guadalajara, as well as the U.S, Belgium, Germany and England. The civil ceremony itself was not long. A judge read the appropriate parts of the law (we especially appreciated the section that said that both members of the couple had to share equally in domestic chores!!). She spoke warmly and personally, and an interpreter repeated her words in English for Loren. The two witnesses were Blas's mother and a dear friend, Maribel. Yes, I cried.




Outside we threw rice!

The grooms were very handsome. Blas said this was the first time he'd worn a tie since his first communion.

The sun was out for the gazillion pictures that were taken in front of the fountain. Here are Blas's parents Daniel and Primi.

Blas's family, with Angela, Florencio and Carmen.

Rosemary,her friends Andrea and Sara, and their families.

Dear friends from the University.

Two generations of cousins: Blas's cousins Isabel and Antonio with his wife Gema,and their children Araceli, Marina and Aitana, and Rosemary's cousins Alba and Ruben.

Some of the very wonderful people who work with Blas and who have been such dear friends.

Folks who came all the way from the States! Dave, Loren's nieces Jenny and Crystal, dear friends Gail, Amy and Miriam.


At the Hotel Hesperia, there was a less formal ceremony with poetry, slides, music and some jokes. Very not Spanish, but wonderful--I did read the Sabina song. There was more crying, but the good kind. Then we started the party with drinks and appetizers before going downstairs for lunch and dancing. The battery of my camera died before I could get pictures of the dancing--too bad, because Loren danced the paso doble!

Welcome! Felicidades to the new parents!

Ofelia and Sachin became parents yesterday! Their baby, Arun Adria, arrived safely and Ofelia is doing well. I can't wait to see the pictures, but for now, here is a "before" picture from my brief trip to see them in Barcelona last week.

Wedding preparations

It gets very foggy here in Zaragoza in the winter, sort of like San Francisco. Our first friend from out of town has arrived for the wedding on Friday. We took her to see the life-size Belen (Nativity Scene) on its last day in front of the Basilica del Pilar, then had chocolate con churros y porras at La Fama. After almost 12 years of coming to this city, there are certain rituals to be observed. Rosemary had fun taking pictures of some of the figures, aiming for the creepy zombie effect. I think she was quite successful with this one.

The wedding is on Friday. Friends are coming from England, Belgium, Germany, the US, as well as friends and relatives from Valencia, Guadalajara, and closer to Zaragoza. The Marrying Boys, as my friend Fernando has dubbed them, will be wed at the juzgado, then we will walk over to the Hotel Hesperia down the street from our place for the reception. There will be about 80-90 people in all, including kids. We'll have an aperitivo with readings, slides, and sentimental stuff (not typically Spanish as I understand it, but hey) and then a sit-down lunch. We chose the menu last week and the food will be fabulous. Then dancing, of course! and if the party continues, so be it.

Yesterday, I tromped over about a fourth of the territory of the city, along with all the other folks shopping the sales, and finally found the perfect pair of shoes. I needed to do this because I had neglected to pack any shoes that went with my wedding outfit. I mistakenly assumed it would be easy to find a decent pair of shoes, but didn't realized that this season "zapatos de vestir" all either have extremely pointy toes (which I find both ugly and unwearable) OR a little twee bow/buckle.tassle on them OR are brown (I'm wearing blue) OR were in the 200 euro range. The good old Corte Ingles finally came to my rescue and I found the perfect shoes. Definitely would not meet the approval of some folks I otherwise adore, but B* PhD and Hedonistic Pleasureseeker would approve, especially as they were discounted 40%.

I have not yet decided what I will read at the wedding, but I have found a poem by Sharon Olds that I really like called "The Wedding Vow". I think I'll read something in Spanish, though.
I like the singer-songwriter Joaquin Sabinas' "Noches de boda". Here are the lyrics. There will be a few other readings that will be more solemn, so I think a ranchera that a lot of the guests are likely to know will be good.

My daughter informs me almost daily that the 11th commandment is "Mom shalt not sing in public and mortify her daughter" so I'll probably just recite it.

News from Zaragoza

On New Year's Eve, we ate our twelve grapes in time with the bongs of the clock. I've gotten better at it--the first time I tried, I only managed to choke down five before I started laughing, but now I can speed-eat the grapes with the whole family.


An early Reyes present --we have a new friend, Muffin. He's only about half the size of Louis, but just as cute.

I took a quick trip to Barcelona to visit friends who are about to have a baby. We spent a little time in the sun at the Parc Guell,
On Friday evening, we went to the Cabalgata de Reyes, the big parade when the Three Kings and their entourage arrive in towns all over Spain (how do they do that?) and kids wave their letters hoping to give them to Gaspar, Melchor, and Baltasar in person. This year, the weather was mild and the parade route was mobbed.


Sus majestades left some cool presents by our shoes. Later, our friend Gail arrived from Minnesota, our first wedding guest from out of town, but not the last. We had these lovely fishies for lunch, and ate the Roscon for dessert.