Observation

It´s either that children´s schooldesks are poorly designed or pencils are, I don´t know which.  One is flat, the other is round.  With children this invariably means that the pencil rolls off the desk and onto the ground.  But it isn´t only pencils; everything on a child´s desk will at some point find its way onto the floor.  How much time is wasted when children gleefully scramble under the desk and spelunk for their erasers and papers?  A lot.  I propose that someone redesign the child´s desk.  My own contribution is pretty straightforward: a net running around the circumfrence of the desk that would simply catch the objects as they slid or rolled to the ground.  Or perhaps a desk shaped more like a futbolín table, that curved in at all four corners? Nah - that would only spell trouble.  On second thought, let´s just take away their things and send them home.

Moscatas

Been thinking a lot about children recently.  Maybe it´s due to the fact that i "teach" a hundred or so each day, or that Pontevedra has the highest number of children under the age of eleven in one city per capita in all of Spain.  Seriously.  No wonder I´ve been stumbling over infants and toddlers on razor scooters for the last month.   They´re everywhere.  Fortunately they´re really cute, and well dressed.  People in this city love to shop for their kids.  It´s what they do when they´re not stuffing them with refined sugar or forgiving them for throwing tantrums. You´re luckiest if you end up with twins or, god willing, triplets, because you get to buy disgustingly cute outfits that match.  Sometimes parents buy the matching outfits anyways.  They like to dress their children as though Franco were still calling the shots.  Many parents are slobs, yet their kids look like they´re about to recieve breadpudding for helping grandmother skin the rabbit for dinner.   It gets to be a bit much at times.  Like when I sit in the Plaza Ferreira and watch six thousand pristine two-year olds in britches, maryjanes and handwoven sweaters gag on handfuls of roasted nuts, made of course by grisly looking yokels in berets with portable ovens that looks like old locomotives.   Now if only children under the age of eleven were a form of currency . . then maybe Pontevedra could help the country settle some of its debts.

Muros y ventanas

So far the language barrier has seemed just that: a wall: a nonporous obstruction.  Activities like ordering food or asking directions often turn into disappointments and embarrasments. More complicated tasks like articulating complex philosophical thoughts in a bar or processing paperwork with the police have ended in near heartbreak.  I won´t lie; I miss the verbal flexibility I had in the states.  I long for the subtleties of a sense of humor which friends who speak in the same idiom develop over time.  However, while waiting for the bus just the other day I realized something: I´m far less annoyed here in public than I ever was at home.  Why? Because I get to tune everything out - not even that I get to but that I don´t have a choice.  A garrulous crone shouting into her mobile on the bus?  I wouldn´t know.  Sounds like music to me.  The uninspired dribble of a poetaster at the bar or a pundit on TV?  No clue.  As far as I´m concerned, everyone here knows exactly what they´re talking about and no one´s any better at wording it than anyone else.  A blessing in disguise, I guess.  So until I vault I´ll relish my ignorance, which, though I wouldn´t call it blissful, is, at least, sort of peaceful. 

Journal of my other shelf

Well, my search for a room is over . . I now have my own place: a lightly furnished and humble flat on the Paseo do Colón.  Although it´s nothing to call home about, there´s hot water, lights (not all work, of course), and very little black mold.  The furniture is a puzzling mix of Chinese restaurant foyer and medieval Galecian buttery.    A small wedge formed by neighboring apartment buildings teases with its vista of a healthier world, the world across the Lerez, where druids sing lullabies to romantic poets, cats nap in flowerpots festooned with grapeleaves, and old women pause by the cistern to stare unconcernedly into the essence of truth.  The last tenant - I´m imagining one of the thugs from Tintin and the Blue Lotus - generously left behind a kilo of rice, loose, and a two centimeter thick layer of grease on every surface in the kitchen.  Thanks, pal.

Listen . . through the open window the sound of a man retching, a fruit truck climbing the hill, a dog wimpering, a woman scolding her husband, then a muffled voice above, a strange scraping below, chipbags being popped, spoons mixing sugar into coffee, my pulse tapping out a rhythm on the headboard, the patter of umbrella tips in the alleyway, eucalyptus bark igniting in Marín . .

I hear everything.  Even you.

Kind of Azul

Hola todos,

I write to you from the staff room of Alfonso Septimo, the little collegio beside the quaint graveyard, in Caldas de Reis, Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain, the earth, our galaxy, the universe . .

Two weeks, a new moon and a sizeable wad of euros have come and gone. My spanish improves poco a poco, and the children in my school, besides being intelligent and kind, are just so doggone cute!  They come to the english language with total abandon, wriggling, moaning or shouting, desperate to communicate their thoughts and dreams in the dulce idiom of their beloved professor. 

And it seems the Inquisitors of the Tribunal of the Holy Office left residues in the soil of the Rias Baixas; for the children probe relentlessly into the depths of my soul with the poleaxe of their lesson books.  Such questions as "What is your favorite food?" (pizza, of course) "Does your sister have a dog, and, if so, how big is it?" and "What is your absolute favorite day of the week?" have forced me time and time again to bear my nervous system to these insatiable surveyors. 

But if I really get going about all my interactions with the children thus far I´ll never stop.  Can´t give it all away at once - I mean, this blog isn´t the modern American movie preview.  So more at another time.  For now I digress with an observation about time in Spain:

Taking lunch this afternoon with the professors, I found myself distracted by a gameshow playing on the television above the bar.  The contestants had to answer word puzzles, and were given a certain amount of time in which to do it.  Nothing unusual about this format, except that they seemed to have all the time in the world.  The couple up to bat scratched their heads for more than a few minutes.  The gameshow host left the stage, presumably to go down the street for a cup of coffee spiked with 1000 Pipers scotch whisky.  The Spanish lunch likewise happens at a geological pace, with entire epochs elapsing from bit to bite.  When we finally payed the tab, the couple was still staring blankly at their jumble of letters, in no hurry at all to find an answer.  In Spain, neither am I.

Buena Suerte!

Je dus voyager, distraire les enchantements assemblés dans mon cerveau . . .

Like Rimbaud at nineteen, I am done with art and on my way to capitalistic adventures outland.  I will be in Spain, in the city of Pontevedra, teaching English “language and culture” for a pittance to a gaggle of hyperactive nine-year-old country bumpkins.  The program, which operates out of the shadowy Kafkaesque backrooms of the Spanish Ministry of Education, awards its grants to only the most highly decorated idlers. If you want in, simply show up, online, on time.  Like a breadline.  No actual teaching qualifications necessary.  Way I see it is if you can navigate the application process – I’m reminded of the labyrinthine genitals of a female duck – you’re qualified to face morbid loneliness, and financial and emotional ruin overseas.  Just what will I be doing in Calda de Reis?  The Administration is not about to tell me.  I have a Petrarchan sonnet’s worth of Spanish at my disposal, most of it vocabulary I picked up reading The Captain’s Verses; so unless I somehow end up naked in a wheat field with a goddess I don’t have much going for me.  And what, exactly, do They mean by American Culture?  Will I teach the kids about the procession of canon from Fort Ticonderoga to the heights of Dorchester? Charlie Parker? Nickelodeon?  If anything, perhaps this trip will give me some insight into the culture I’m supposed to be representing.  All in all, though, I like the not knowing, and consider being utterly lost in the world of purpose my métier.  When I arrive in three weeks I will have hardly any contacts and nowhere to lay my head, not to mention the usual host of undisciplined neuroses.  Good thing I’ve spent the last year living on couches.  Let the fates do what they wilt. For now the tea leaves are mute.  I am keeping this blog to alert friends and family to my whereabouts and activities.  Letters addressed to my parents from summer camp prove that I'm an inadequate or otherwise perverse correspondent.  But I promise here to give more than mere diagnostics of my bowel movements. When the program finishes up (that is, of course, if the world doesn’t end), the hunter will be giving chase to the bears around the pole star, & I will be in tails in the Adirondacks, drinking champagne, describing the girls and views, and hopefully not, like Rimbaud, a syphilitic amputee.

God bless you all.