Me dedique a perderte

"Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it's like juggling a thousand crystal balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever."
Francisco Goldman Say Her Name

This morning I was channel surfing for the Speed Network so that I could watch the replay of the Shanghai Grand Prix -- my favorite driver, Mark Webber, came in 3rd -- when I ended up in the 1000's and found that FIOS includes hundreds of radio stations with a great variety of music. As luck would have it, I was on the station that plays Mexican romantic ballads, most muy triste. This fit my mood perfectly as I finished Say Her Name this morning, and the weather out here is chilly and foggy, and I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon which promises to be somewhat nerve-wracking, and I'm still feeling the post-trip nostalgia for New Orleans.

So I'm finding Luis Miguel, Marisela, Emmanuel and Alejandro Fernandez very soothing.

Sports and Politics

I often travel overseas alone. This predilection started when I was in college and my Dad worked for Pan Am. I used to schedule all of my classes on Tues/Thurs so that I could take long weekend trips on our family's employee pass. Since this was just before airline deregulation in 1978, very few people flew anywhere as prices were high, so I almost always traveled alone.

I became very spoiled in the sense that I now prefer to travel alone and do what I want to do when I want to do it. Not many of my friends ever wanted to follow me to Yorkshire to visit the Bronte shrine in Haworth or out to Sussex to see Charleston Farmhouse, not to mention spend time in Venice visiting the Fortuny house. I am very lucky now to be married to someone who is happy to go wherever I want to go, so I still get the joy of planning and navigating all to myself with the pleasure of an amenable travel companion!

But the first trips were difficult for me. I used to be pathologically shy around strangers and only overwhelming curiosity (and hunger) got me interacting on my first trips to France and Italy. But I discovered early on that there are two things that almost everyone is interested in no matter where you travel: sports and politics. By learning a little bit about both, I found an easy entree into conversations with classmates, hotel maids, waiters, bus drivers, and the man on the street.

Outside the United States, soccer (futbol)is the sport that almost everyone has an opinion about whether they hate it or love it. Unlike the US -- where intellectuals often consider sports fanatacism beneath them -- undying love of the local soccer team crosses social, educational and economic boundaries in other countries. I can't think of a country I've visited that isn't crazy about soccer.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, beisbol is the second most popular sport, and in some countries -- Puerto Rico, Cuba and DR, for example -- it's more popular than soccer. Mexico in particular has Triple AAA affiliated teams sponsored by Major League Baseball (MLB) here in the US.

In Oaxaca, the AAA team is the Guerreros. In the early '90's, the Venezualan player Oscar Azocar played in Oaxaca before being called up by the Yankees and the Padres. Sadly, if you check the standings, Oaxaca is almost dead last in their division this year after being in first place in 2008. That could be a good thing if you want tickets, though, and their schedule shows them playing many home games in Eduardo Vasconcelos Stadium in July. I'm hoping that some of my NEH colleagues will be interested in attending a couple of these games!

For their Spanish language site, check out the Guerreros home page.

Te quiero aun mas hoy que ayer

image via amazon.com

I never made it to any of the films that were being sponsored by the Mexican Cultural Institute. This was due partly to the fact that I've been writing on weekdays when I don't have class, and if I know that I'll be leaving the house to go somewhere, I talk myself out of sitting down at my desk and "just doing it" because I'm distracted by my imminent departure or I won't have enough time anyway or I need to check the train schedule again and again or ascertain what time the film is starting or figure out where to have tea and cake or Indian food or hamburgers (Shake Shack?) or BBQ or . . . . Well, you get the idea. When I'm writing, Neurotic Crazed DBG takes over from calm, cool and collected DBG, and I have to fight the urge to use any excuse to run screaming from the keyboard. Add to this the general malaise the last two weeks' bad weather has instilled, and I'm lucky to get out of my pj's by 4pm when The Husband returns home from school.

But the main reason I didn't leave the house unless I absolutely had to last week was that I picked up Francisco Goldman's new novel Say Her Name after I saw it reviewed in last week's NYT, and I haven't been able to put it down.

Although it's billed as fiction, much of it reads as a memoir of his marriage. I have friends who knew his wife, a young woman from Mexico City, as a student in Columbia's Spanish program as well as a student in Hunter's MFA program (she was doing both simultaneously), and they were all very grieved when she died tragically in a surfing accident off the beaches of Oaxaca in 2007. I'm guessing he called his story fiction so that her mother and uncle don't sue him. Goldman's story is overshadowed by the mother's hovering omnipresence, not exactly malevolent, but suffocating. She wanted to have him arrested and prosecuted after her daughter's accident, so he's definitely getting his own back, and she comes off as truly god-awful.

But the focus of the book isn't vengeance but Goldman's struggle to clarify and sharpen his memories of Aura even as they inevitably recede. The writing is soul-stirring and inspiring, much of it so painful that I can't read more than 20 or 30 pages at a time. But memoir or novel, it's the most compelling book I've read in years, and I'll be sorry to come to the end of it.

I'm off to New Orleans by Amtrak Monday and won't be posting again until I return after Easter, but I'll be listening to my Spanish tapes and whipping through my flashcards. Buena Pascua/Passover!

Why, yes, I do know what ch*&#ado means in Spanish

image via savagechickens.com


I began my quest to become more fluent in Spanish as spoken in Mexico by surfing the Net using the phrase "Mexican Spanish." I found a funny blog entry from which I learned that it's impolite to say, "Que?" if you don't understand something and better to say, "Mande?". I'm sure I'll be needing that one a lot.

Next I found a site that gives Nahuatl Borrowings in Mexican Spanish Vocabulary, so I promptly printed it out and made notecards to study while I'm on the train to New Orleans next week.

But I think the most useful site will be The Alternative Spanish Dictionary. Because even if you don't use language like that yourself, it's always fun to know what everyone around you is saying! ;-)

Empire of the Sun-We Are the People

A highly stylized, surreal video with some beautiful shots of the desert near Monterrey, Mexico. A friend of mine finds the use Mexico's cultural icons in the service of fashion and entertainment distasteful, but I didn't see it that way. For an interesting take on the video and lyrics -- that just happens to be in agreement with my perceptions :-) -- read Who's Got the Power?.

Albondigas -- no te dije?

Photo via Flickr

In the 1950's, ALM -- the Audio Lingual Method -- was a popular theory of language instruction. Despite the fact that it was "discredited" by linguists like Noam Chomsky as early as 1959, it was still the method of choice at Slidell High School when I was a student there in the 1970's. My quest to learn Spanish began in 9th grade by memorizing a dialog I still remember today:

Hola, Isabel, como estas?
Estoy bien, gracias, y tu?
Bien gracias. Oye, quien es ese chico?
Es un amigo mio.
Como se llama?
Se llama Juan. Ven y te lo presento.

This was accomplished by Mrs. S presenting bits of phrases for us to repeat over and over the first week of class. We were not given a book nor allowed to see any of this in writing. The second week, we threaded the phrases into still-unintelligible sentences. The third week we repeated these sentences in unison with an LP that played through our antiquated headphones. If all this wasn't funny enough, the headphones were not synchronized, and some were off by as much as five seconds, resulting in mayhem dressed up in very bad Spanish accents.

One of the dialogs we memorized those first weeks took place in a school cafeteria and had one student declare to another, "Albondigas! No te dije?" Even then, we all knew that there would never come a time when we would have occasion to say, "Meatballs! Didn't I tell you?" It soon became a secret shorthand outside of class. Whenever an adult did something we thought silly or asinine, one of us would shake our heads sadly and sigh, "Albondigas! No te dije?" and the rest of us would laugh our heads off. This continued until a new student from Puerto Rico smirkingly informed us that we were screaming out a word that was slang for "testicles" in Spanish!

Before ALM, I'd always liked hearing foreign languages and often listened to Spanish and French language radio shows or broadcasts of Saturday evening mass in Latin. I even thought I wanted to major in languages in college and become a language professor, so you can imagine my dismay with the Spanish language. I couldn't understand why I hated it so much. If this was what majoring in a foreign language would be like, I wasn't having any of it. I decided I'd major in English Lit and become a writer instead. It wasn't until I became obsessed with Italy and all things Italian a few years later that I overcame my language phobia and changed my major to Comp Lit, but since then, my reading skills have always far surpassed my speaking skills whenever I've studied a language.

Last summer, people told me not to bother learning Spanish before I went to Mexico because if I spoke Italian, everyone would understand me. So I stumbled along and, thanks to the good will of the people I encountered, I was able to function on a very basic level. This summer, I'd like to do better, so I'm listening to CD's, watching Spanish-language tv, and taping notecards labeling everyday objects all over my house. But because I watch the news in Italian every night and follow several telenovellas, I'm now thoroughly confused with vocabulary. And to make matters worse, the few words I remember from high school are Castilian Spanish. I had a conversation with a Spanish-speaking friend today, and my end of it was an odd gibberish of half Spanish, half Italian. I said pee-shee-na but corrected myself to pee-see-na only to be told that in Mexico, a swimming pool is "alberca" anyway.

Albondigas, dammit!

If you want to worry about me . . .

A friend called me from London this morning.

Friend: Oh, my god, I heard on the BBC that there's a serial killer in Oak Beach! How far is that from your house?

Me: Uhm, about five miles.

F: Damn, and I was worried about you going to Mexico!

Me: Yes, you see, I'd be safer in Mexico!

F: Hmmm. Well, you don't really fit the killer's demographic.

Me: Because I'm not advertising on Craigslist?

F: Nah, because you're too old!

Three More Sets of Remains adds to LI Mystery.