Reflections on "The Pale King"

I finished The Pale King a few days ago. I'm pleased to report that the book is, though noticeably unfinished, definitively good enough to merit inclusion in DFW's published canon. Here are some first impressions.

Does TPK work? Yes and no. Even though a lot of the chapters are among DFW's finest writing, the book's real point comes across only partially. TPK's "thesis" as such is buried in DFW's own Notes To Self after the end of the book proper; he writes there that

It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

As plenty of other folks have already pointed out, it's a reiteration of (one of) his Kenyon College theme(s). He wrote - said - in the Kenyon College Address that

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

So The Pale King was going to articulate this process in greater detail, we suppose. In the end, though, the point comes across only partially. We see plenty of characters who do possess the kind of mindfulness that DFW wants to evoke, but they are often literally supernatural beings: Drinion levitates a centimeter above his chair when he is immersed in whatever it is he's doing, Sylvanshine receives totally random secret information about the people's he's around, two benevolent ghosts materialize to "be with" IRS workers and improve their concentration. Only "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle is fully explicit about his own mindfulness; he affirms that

...I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me. That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way - I'm being serious; I'm not just trying to make it sound more dramatic than it was - and that these realest, most profound parts of me involved not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness, if only I could stay awake...

Beautiful though the passage is, we don't get much about how to actually go about learning that kind of focus (short of course of Fogle's method: accounting and the IRS). What technology of the self allows me to pay attention to the world? TPK is somewhat unclear on this. Other books of DFW's have argued very explicit points: consider the massive statement on The American Pursuit Of Happiness that is Infinite Jest,* or the commentary on seduction that Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, "Good Old Neon" and Jest's Orin Incandenza together articulate, or the lapidary precision of DFW's nonfiction. In comparison with those other works, TPK fails to elaborate a really clear statement of how exactly to learn to pay attention to the world.

I like to think that this would be the really major change between TPK's current unfinished state and its hypothetical final form.

"How unfinished is The Pale King?" is, of course, the biggest question hanging over the novel. I submit (and editor M. Pietsch says, w/ much more authority than I, the same thing) that structurally it's actually fairly complete. Although there's no "ending" as such, recall that neither The Broom of the System nor Infinite Jest offered closure; furthermore, DFW's own notes for The Pale King read: "Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens." It's pretty clear, I think, that the hypothetically finished TPK wouldn't have some rising action> climax> closure arc to it. In terms of the language itself, there was a lot of hype surrounding the "new" prose style DFW was aiming for here. The prolix Infinite Jest, with its glittering page-long sentences and hundreds of endnotes, would be the thesis to TPK's antithesis - however, I find DFW's prose style here just as baroque as it's always been. Certain spoken passages adopt much simpler language, of course, but that's been the case from Broom of the System on. I'd like to know to what extent TPK was already reread and revised by its author: TPK's prose style tends to give a "final-draft" feel that, if the book is really at times a first draft or freewrite, is impressive. A few of many memorable passages:

"I'm assuming I haven't talked before about running around with this odd gang of guys at Bradley and the strange thing we got into junior year of breaking into people's dorm rooms and holding them down while Fat Marcus the Moneylender sat on their face."

"I observed the effect of the tea in opened sockets and mass frenzied orgylike copulation and humping under the trees, on the table, under the tossed egg, on both ends of the horseshoe grotto. There were actual buttocks thrusting under my grill. [...] The wieners themselves were writhing, thrusting. Plump, thrusting, shiny, moist, there on the grill, on Mrs. Kagle's aluminum platter, in the air"

"At night from the trailer's part the hills possessed of a dirty orange glow and the sounds of living trees exploding in the fires' heat did carry, and the noise of planes plowing the undulant air above and dropping thick tongues of talc. [...] At sunset then the north and west were the same color. On clear nights she could read by the night sky's emberlight seated on the plastic box that served as stoop. The screen door had no screen but was still a screen door, which fact she thought upon. In incendiary orange to the deepening twilight in the smell of creosote burning in the sharp hills upwind."

A few final thoughts: the overall tone or mood of the book has something of Infinite Jest's final third. It's a cold quality of impending revelation reminiscent too of Broom of the System's conclusion (as such) and, the best example of near-revelation, Lot 49; the post-picnic interview with the hotdog-grilling IRS man, for example, hints that he (in the wake of the implied tea-drugging and mosquito attack) inexplicably sprouted from his forehead a mosquito's proboscis (?). The book's tone is very calmly supernatural. Borges thought that beauty is the nearness of revelation that never reveals itself - in that sense, The Pale King is a sure triumph. But in comparison to Lot 49 or Broom or Jest, The Pale King really doesn't reveal much: where Pynchon would take us to the very brink of revelation, where the younger DFW of Broom and Jest would dance all around the climax w/o stating it outright, TPK reveals nothing. (I repeat, reveals nothing intentionally: "Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.") A few more things: along with the main boredom/focus thrust of TPK, the book's tangential themes are eminently DFWian. Steyck's "pathological" tendency to do good, for instance, goes hand in hand w/ Brief Interviews' discussions - doing good in order to be recognized for doing good, using other people as like moral gymnastics equipment instead of simply "being" with them - ; the many characters in TPK who mix "hideous" interiority with utter banality take part in a theme shared with Brief Interviews, DFW's essay on David Lynch, "Good Old Neon" and much of IJ.

The best way to read The Pale King, I think, is as a sort of huge short story cycle: a series of vignettes that often share a common message but that are not bound by the traditional arc of narrative. Infinite Jest did the same thing but w/ much more cohesion; even when it presented as an extravagant multi-page endnote, you knew that what you were reading was a novel. The Pale King is somewhat flawed as a narrative whole but, as a heterogeneous short story collection, it's often splendid. "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle's 100-page chapter is extraordinary, as is the brief dialogue about the nature of modern democracy that takes place early in the book, the abortion discussion between Lane Dean Jr. and his girlfriend, the scenes from Steyck's youth and the charged tête-à-tête between Rand and Drinion. These are pieces more than strong enough to stand alone and, pace the substantial success of The Pale King as a novel, they transcend the book that they constitute.

I'll wrap this up: does The Pale King justify publication in its unfinished state?  Absolutely.  Is it the sacred text we've been waiting for, the book that will save us all?  Not really; less so than the rest of the DFW canon. Should you read it? Of course you should.

*I see The Pale King as a cousin volume to Infinite Jest: a book about boredom and discipline, where Jest was all about addiction and entertainment.

remixed: social media use

I had to submit various 500-word writing samples for a job application recently, one of which was the below post - which is made up of two previous posts w/ the fat trimmed and the purple prose toned down a bit. Figured I might as well replace those two inferior posts with the leaner version. This has to do with how social media use affects how we see ourselves and how we see others.

* * *

I’ve been thinking recently about the role that social media plays in our lives. I propose that, while social media use isn't “dangerous” in the sense of some malevolent ur-technology bent on amusing us to death, it does play a catalytic role in the split between our interiority and our public life.


Mirrors make us two, subject and object. And a facebook profile, mirror-like, offers the same effect. While the ostensible purpose of facebook use is to communicate with others, I want you to admit that you keep a closer eye on your own profile than is strictly necessary. You have scrolled from time to time through the photos tagged of yourself or through the recent items on your wall, imagining the impression of you that they will limn for others. Am I the only one who, after confirming a friend request, will often check my profile rather than the new friend's, eager to be sure that they'll be impressed by what they see? No need to point out the strangeness of my assumption that they'll be any more interested in me than I in them; this sort of solipsism is hard to shake. If you have ever untagged an unflattering photo or paused to compose a studiously witty online comment, then you too are familiar with what I think of as the "rhetorical function of truth-telling:" the way that authentic soul-type characteristics are contaminated by performance as soon as Others see them and approve of them, validate them. Facebook is one more mirror in the presence of which we become double, both “authentic” and performative.


I submit that our generation must be marked deep down by a self-consciousness magnified by the hours that we spend online polishing our public faces – but I want to go back to the issue of solipsism. DFW wrote in his Kenyon College commencement address that
everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. ...it's pretty much the same for all of us... lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
It's hard to argue with that. But I now submit that the self-objectification that facebook foments might, when considered consciously, be one way to take seriously the subjectivity of others. Mirror-gazing may not be a healthy way to regard yourself, yet – in its implication of other people who perceive you – it may be one small way to regard others as subjects as "central" as you are. To fight solipsism, I mean. So while I argue that facebook makes us more self-conscious and encourages us to think as "Them" rather than as “I,” I propose also that “thinking like Them” can have anti-solipsistic powers when it is a deliberate choice rather than our default setting.


(And yet, like Borges, I still don’t know whether it's the public or the private "I" that’s writing this page.)

Madrid update #6

Another long month since the last proper update: I apologize for the delay!  Things have been going great in Madrid and, of course, time is flying.

Tl;dr Abstract: hike; new classes; roundtable discussion of bilingualism... gone wrong (the discussion, I mean); running some 10ks; Thanksgiving fun; Founder's Day at SAFA; teaching miscellanea; Barcelona travels.

And now, delivered in the gritty, hard-hitting style you've come to expect, here are the highlights most worth sharing...

·               A fantastic hike with Eric, Ellen, Neal, Kristie and Caitlin.  We took a bus up to Manzanares el Real, a small town about an hour north of Madrid known for its rock climbing.  From there our trail headed north out of town up a river's route, before splitting off and climbing up to a pretty spectacular saddle overlooking the plains on both sides of the Sierra de Gaudarrama range.  Gorgeous fall day, warm pine-scented wind; companionable mule trail-side.  What more can you ask for?

·               The conclusion of our first quarter of Masters classes and the beginning of the second.  Everyone (I included) freaked out and crammed for the art history test, but in the end both classes were pretty manageable finals-wise.  Q2 classes are off to a great start: "Spanish for Heritage Learners" explore the unique challenges involved in teaching Spanish to kids who already have a cultural/familial connection to the language, and "Contemporary Spanish History" - an unironic title - investigates the contemporary history of Spain.

·               A heinous "round-table discussion" convened as part of Madrid's "Science Week 2010."  Although the theme of the discussion was ostensibly to be bilingual education, and although plenty of non-Masters folks showed up to listen, the event degenerated into two straight hours of colleagues complaining about their experience abroad.  It was literally embarrassing.  Not that the complaints weren't often valid - e.g. petitioning for better communication with fellow teachers - but I think a lot of people totally misunderstood the point of the round table.  Madrid: on the behalf of the Universidad de Alcalá, I hereby do formally apologize for ruining one of your science week events.

·               Perhaps the most thrilling highlight of the last month was the discovery on the C/ General Lacy curb of a discarded wooden desk that I, a modern-day Columbus, have now claimed as my own.  It doesn't wobble, it's big enough for computer + books + coffee: it's great!

·               To the confusion/disgust of Willamette Cycling, OREC, and my own self-regard, I have started running a bit.  I have no bike here and what's more, living in the dead center of one of the busiest cities in Europe, there's nowhere nice to ride; therefore running is the best temporary replacement.  I promise that it's short-term and that my intentions are pure: I only want to stay in reasonable shape so that I can resume cycling more readily when the time comes.  Calm down people, it's not as bad as it looks.  Mea culpa out of the way, I further admit to running two 10ks in the last few weeks, one of which was the "MARCA Carrera de los Aficiones," an event pitting the fan base of Real Madrid vs. the fan base of Atlético de Madrid.  Underdogs all, we ran in support of the populist Atleti "colchoneros," and - here swallowing my bike-racing pride - the race was awesome.

·               Thanksgiving in Alcalá de Henares was a lot of fun.  Two thanksgivings were a lot of fun, in fact: one at Eric's apartment, and another, later in the evening, as guests of new friends Alberto and Vidal.  It was good to eat some classic American food, and both events manifested the true community spirit of the holiday. 

·               The following day (Friday) was the "Founder's Day" party at SAFA, a wonderful event.  First of all, it meant a day off teaching (marred only by an appointment at the Oficina de Extranjerías to get a full residence card); even better, it meant a multi-course meal at school that night with the rest of the teachers.  The meal turned into a veritable international summit of slang language usage, and I can honestly say that I learned more rowdy/uncouth Spanish there than I have in the last three months.  A major success!

·               Teaching in general has been going better and better.  The bachillerato (high-school equivalent) kids especially are super smart, and their questions tend to vary between extremes: either "Profe, have you ever smoked weed?" or "Profe, what exactly was the relationship between the Cold War and the Vietnam War?"  Most recently we read an excerpt from David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Plurum"* (denouncing the cultural dominance of irony as a "dead end" that can only critique, not mean anything) alongside that classic Onion article New Bill Would Protect Marriage From Sharks, a text that (I submit) uses irony in a very non-dead-end way.  Next two weeks: a discussion of "PC language" in which (once again) DFW's critique** of that rhetorical mode - that it not only distracts us from hard cultural questions with the easier question of their labels, but also invariably supports the status quo - will be contrasted with a brief etymology of certain slurs that people legitimately should not say.***  I'm plotting to get ahold of Zinn's People's History of the United States and a photocopier and turn much of the bachillerato spring semester into a US-Contemporary-History-type class: Civil War, Reconstruction/Jim Crow, Great Depression, WWI/II, Red Scare, civil rights movements(s), historical role of newspapers/press, etc.  In conclusion, teaching is going awesomely, especially with the older kids.

·               Last highlight: a great trip to Barcelona with Ellen, Eric, Kelly, Syd, Jenn, and Gaby for the December puente long weekend.  We headed out on Saturday and flew back in to Madrid yesterday.  The original plan was to fly both ways, but a nation-wide air traffic controller strike shut down all Spanish airspace on Saturday.  We ended up taking a rude nine-hour bus ride to Barcelona... but not before Sydney was interviewed live by CNN's Spain correspondent from the Barajas airport! That damn bus ride pretty much killed Saturday, but Sunday was awesome: lots of strolling around Barça (esp. the Barceloneta & Ramblas areas), lots of time at Gaudí's spectacularly cool Sagrada Familia basílica, a visit to the downright festive Christmas market, and flavorful tapas.  And Sunday was even better: Eric, "Killah Kelly," Kelly's friend from home and I went to the Monstserrat monastery in the mountains inland from Barça, a small village & basilica carved from a sheer cliff face.  We heard the boys' choir sing (standing-room-only), spent lots of time gazing downwards in astonishment, and hiked up to the Cruz de San Miguel and points beyond.  The icing on the cake was coming "home" to find a delicious meal already prepared, a meal that was, appropriately, accompanied by Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona (sp?).  We strolled the Gothic quarter once more before bidding a fond farewell to Barça and flying home the next morning.

Ed.- I must here take my stand w/r/t the perennial Madrid vs. Barcelona debate.  Maybe it's my madrileño pride (or familiarity) talking, but I have to pick Madrid as my personal favorite at the end of the day. Barça's seaside location is obviously way better, but there's just a friendly energy to downtown Madrid that I prefer.  That said, Madrid's "energy" didn't help them much last week when FC Barcelona savaged Real Madrid 5-0 in the Clásico game: ¡Tomaaaa!

Well, there are only about two weeks left before winter break starts.  Emily flies in on the 19th and will be here until 9 January: we're planning a trip to see one Lindsey Arrington in France, as well as day trips and maybe a longer adventure within Spain.  I can't wait!  So the holidays are nearly here, and as they say the interim is pan comido: literally "eaten bread," metaphorically "as good as completed." 

Happy holidays, and thanks for reading!

-Dave

8 December 2010

------------------

*From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

**From "Authority and American Usage," Consider the Lobster.  In answer to your astonishment at the English proficiency of these kids, I do tend to go through the excerpts/articles and replace the biggest words with simpler equivalents.  At any rate, their (the kids') English is impressive.

***Everyone already hears f---, s---, c---, n----- etc. etc. in all the popular rap songs - I'm starting to sound like a curmudgeon - so it's not like the slurs are new vocabulary: the problem is that Spanish 17-yr-olds quite naturally don't understand all the baggage that goes along with saying those words, and that stuff is for sure worth teaching.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm a few days late: pardon me this lapse.  Just wanted to wish any and all readers a hale & hearty "Happy Thanksgiving!"  I certainly have a lot to be thankful for this year: an excellent group of new friends, a supportive/rad work environment at Colegio Sagrada Familia, 500+ goofy and (mostly) charming students, a good current "quarter" of Masters classes, the opportunity to live in Spain for this year, my family, all of my good friends back home, Willamette Cycling, Emily (to family/home friends/cycling team/Emily: I miss you!!), my health, all the things - good and bad - that have gone into making my life what it's been so far, etc. etc. etc.  Plenty to give thanks for!


I hope your holiday is great, however you end up spending it.  And, of course, I hope that Thanksgiving can be (for all of us) a reminder to be thankful every day, not just once a year.


Take care,
-Dave

A gold mine

All you David Foster Wallace fans out there - I'm assuming there are a lot of you - should go immediately to http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/uncollected-dfw.html, a pretty comprehensive archive of "Uncollected DFW."  It's fantastic; tons of really obscure articles/essays/excerpts available for download in PDF format.

In other news, amazon.com has made The Pale King available for pre-order.  The unfinished novel will be out on April 15th ('11) - yes, tax day - and it apparently details the trials of IRS agents working in an atmosphere of crushing boredom.  Like DFW's Kenyon College Commencement Address (2005), it will advance the idea that "mindfulness" - concentration on, immersion in, and acceptance of the present moment - transforms even the most boring, meaningless existence into something beautiful.  The cover art is by DFW's widow, Karen Green.

The really sad irony here is that this is the book that in some sense killed DFW: struggling to move forward with the massive project - the book that would do away with his baroque, pomo past and instead handle universal issues in spare prose - he began to suspect that his antidepressant (Nardil) was dulling his mental firepower.  He stopped taking it in 2007, jumpstarting the final downward spiral that would result in his suicide on September 12th, 2008.  The New Yorker writes that "In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This [The Pale King] was his effort to show the world what it was to be 'a fucking human being.'" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=13)

So the book's (pre) availability is bittersweet.  Part of me can't wait to get my hands on it in April; part of me is already dreading reaching that final page.

Update #5 from Madrid!

It’s been a long time since I’ve shared any properly journal-type stuff with you guys.  A month?  I think so...  At any rate, owing to the volume of material to cover, we’ll be making use of bullet points today.  These are the highlights of the last month.

            -The four-day “Puente” weekend, which was just 100% fun.  It began with a “Pinchistes” party at Rodrigo’s (another teacher’s) apartment: combining “pinchos” (snacks) and “chistes” (jokes) in one event, it was awesome.  Fascinating people there, including a professional magician and a film critic for “El Mundo.”  Get-togethers like that are by far the best way to practice Spanish, because you are immersed in it completely and you are finally comfortable and relaxed enough to speak without embarrassment.  After “Pinchistes” Friday night, I headed up to the coast town of San Sebastian with partners in crime Eric, Sydney and Kelly for an unforgettable weekend.   Our hostel – the “Ocean View;” highly recommended – was filled with all the best people in the world, including a rude surf crew of Aussies and a lot of other internationals.  We stayed there only three nights, but we left with a brand new family.  Impact.  San Sebastian is really beautiful, by the way: after months (OK, weeks) in land-locked Madrid, it was an incredible relief to breath ocean air again.  I hadn’t realized how much I missed it.  We also spent a day in Bilbao, but aside from the (very impressive) Guggenheim, Bilbao lacks S. Sebastian’s charm – but what it lacks in charm, it makes up for in dark-grey industrial-type buildings.

             -Teaching Onion articles in class.  I only tried this with a few classes (of 1° Bachillerato, aka 17 yr olds), but it ended up pretty much working.  We talked about Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign and Republicans, Leukemia Team Up To Repeal Health Care Law, both of which texts are rich in “teachable” elements: regional stereotypes, dominant US political parties, the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of politics, etc.  I don’t think the kids enjoyed the articles as much as I did, but it’s a start.

            -A calligraphy exhibition/lecture at the European Institute of Design, with Rodrigo and Jose María (another teacher at SAFA).  It turned out to be really interesting: although the speaker made a quip about “calligraphy and vanguardism having nothing in common,” a lot of the ideas she brought up sounded genuinely vanguard-ish (or, mejor dicho, so old-fashioned that they’re new again): e.g. ideograms pointing straight to concepts & and the way that they’re painted always informing their meaning, so that “Father” or “Love” – universal concepts – are never alike in any two paintings (maybe texts is a better word here.)  It was fascinating to learn more about a linguistic tradition that was getting along just fine without Saussure, Derrida et al.  From there we headed to a few bars in the Salamanca neighborhood: there was a tapas (small-plates) competition going on between bars in the area and Rodrigo knew the bar owner’s daughter, so we took advantage of tapas both abundant and delicious.  Also learned that Jose María had played futbol against one Javier Bardem for years when they were younger, pre-fame.

            -The next weekend after that – Laura and Kristin took me and Neal to a fantastic hole-in-the-wall place where an enormous beer and as much castellaño food as one can eat end up costing only 4euros.  Incredible!  This also marked a milestone: the first time a native madrileño asked me (w/o discernible irony) if I was Spanish.  Admittedly, I had spoken only a few sentences up until this point, but it felt awesome to not stand out for once. 

            - A big art history test and an important presentation in “Techniques of Writing,” both of which went well.  Although I used to resent the art history class for the sheer volume of material covered, I’ve since changed my mind: with the first big test out of the way and its content memorized, it turns out to be a lot of fun to be able to walk around Madrid and identify architectural elements, their styles, centuries, etc.  Good stuff.  “Well I’ll be damned, would you look at that! ... Even more arcos apuntados!”

             - Also good stuff: the discovery of “La Casa Encendida,” Caja Madrid’s (a bank’s) social project.  It’s a combination library/art gallery/movie theatre/rooftop garden, all with free wifi!  They really try hard to project a vanguard-ish vibe there, so it tends to draw a hip young crowd… which is fine by me.  New favorite place to study for sure.

             - The additional discovery of Bus #32, which goes straight from the Atocha train station to SAFA in only half an hour.  I can’t tell you how much nicer the bus is than the metro: instead of making two transfers every commute, suffering the constant invasion of your personal space by strangers and feeling in a huge hurry the entire time, we now get on the bus, sit down (there’s room to sit down!!), and relax all the way to work.  It feels so decadent.

             - The beginning of “private lessons” with Jose Luís and Antonio, more fellow teachers at SAFA – “lessons” which will consist of getting coffee Friday mornings and chatting.  (The first “lesson” reinforced my growing suspicion that I may be happier teaching students older than 18… but don’t tell anyone.)

             - A glorious visit from Daniel “Keo” Keough, part of that rowdy crew of Australians from S. Sebastian.  Keo’s been here all weekend long, which is a huge treat.  Also glorious was the Halloween party that Kristin and Laura threw Sat. night: need I even say that, once again, I went dressed as a pumpkin?  It’s refreshing to learn that - with minimal gumshoe work - one can find a flattering, masculine & altogether dapper pumpkin suit in Madrid.

             - A visit to the “Rastro” public market yesterday, which was just incredibly huge and overwhelming.  This market stretches as far as the eye can see in several directions, with vendors aggressively “repping” their wares as you walk by.  The major downside was the (presumed) theft of Kelly’s wallet at some point during the visit, the resulting stress of which theft I can only imagine.  Fingers crossed for it to turn up at the police station or something.

             - Final highlight – an exploration of several neighborhoods last night with Rodrigo, which included: “txocolina” wine at a Northern-style café; drinks at a cueva or “cave” bar in La Latina (so named - cueva, I mean - for its low ceilings, intimate mood and meandering floorplan); an ad hoc architectural-highlights tour of the surrounding neighborhoods; tapas and drinks near the Plaza Mayor; oysters from the historic market (delicious); an untrustworthy dish purchased near Sol that Rodrigo later revealed to be pan-fried lamb intestines; and finally a local dessert wine “on the house” from our stern-faced (yet big-hearted) bartender.  An outstanding evening: every quintessentially Spanish meal I eat takes me one step closer to the personal goal of “Bajo, Moreno y Gordo”  (“Short, Dark-Haired & Plump”) that I have set for myself for this year.

And Finally, A Postscript That Journalistic Integrity Demands That I Add

I have earned (the hard way) a lesson all too obvious in retrospect: that eating a plate of pan-fried lamb intestines will - as if acting out the lamb’s posthumous revenge on the equivalent human anatomy - savage your GI tract within one day.  That is, the price of pan-friend lamb intestines is measured not only in euros* but in the shame/discomfort of digesting them.  And the subsequent shame associated with blogging about it.**

* (3 euros)

** (if any)

Madrid update #4

Abstract for the "tl;dr" crowd (here looking at you, Stephen Moore):
Butane runs out, is restored; adventures in student teaching and classroom management; hike near Alcalá de Henares; talent-show-esque benefit concert falsely billed as "flamenco show;" impressions from the General Strike; "Ecocríticas" lit conference; Museo Nacional Reina Sofía; day trip to Toledo.

Hi all,
The last two weeks have been busy and stressful but for the most part positive. Ellen and I kicked off our first week of full student teaching and Masters classes (the week before last) with the death by starvation of the butane tank that powers both the cooking elements and the hot water in our apartment - without it (the butane), no hot showers or cooked food! And, chillingly (pun?), no coffee. The standard bombona-replacement procedure involves home delivery of a new tank, but that only works if someone is home when the Repsol folks arrive and they never call ahead to confirm this; in desperate need of some butane, I opted for the ad hoc technique of carrying the empty canister about 15 minutes on foot to a physical Repsol station, buying a new one, and carrying that heavy f***er back. Home-size butane canisters are massive.  The full replacement tank truly put my composure to the test. And then it turned out that the station attendant gave me the wrong type of fuel (propane and butane canisters are for some reason labeled identically), so that the entire Sisyphus-type odyssey didn't even pay off! Our saintly landlord Diego saved the day with a butane home delivery, but the entire episode left us w/o hot water for most of the week, an episode exemplary of the level of difficulty that simple chores sometimes unexpectedly assume here. Others e.g. catching the wrong train to class because its destination board's bulb was burned out or something; using Skype in crowded, loud, very un-private internet cafes; accidentally locking yourself out of your apartment for many hours on a work night etc. etc. There: my venting is done and out of the way.

Student teaching at Sagrada Familia (henceforth referred to as SAFA) is off to a solid start. I teach mostly ESO and Bachillerato, the rough equivalents of middle and high school grades - inexplicably, my schedule also includes a few classes as young as 6 and 7 yrs., which is a totally new experience for me. I'm having a hard time even beginning to learn names: 18 classes x roughly 30 students per class means a lot of kids. The ESO and Bachillerato kids get sassy sometimes, and iron-fisted discipline does not come naturally to me: controlling unruly classrooms solo has been a true learning experience. (Read that last in kind of a nasally sarcastic/mocking voice to convey my full distaste for it.) But the kids are all incredibly smart, most speak impressive English, and when it comes down to it they're mostly well behaved. All of the other teachers are fantastic, and one of last year's American student teachers (Abby) is working again at SAFA this year as a "real teacher," which is great. Plus the teacher's lounge has internet, so it's a prime spot to do homework, blog entries, or lesson prep in the afternoons. (Still no internet at home.) I feel really blessed to be working at a school as all-around good as SAFA, and I'm sure (or at least hopeful) that the whole thing will feel comfortable in a matter of weeks.

Of course there have been a few good adventures alongside work and classes. Last weekend we went hiking in the hills behind Alcalá de Henares, hills whose existence I would never have posited looking at the flatness of the nearby landscape. Led by our fearless Eric, we crossed a pretty good-size river via the slippery-algae-covered lip of a totally submerged cement dam, the current pushing urgently sideways at our feet with every step. After crossing that very effective tourist blockade we saw almost no one all afternoon. The trail wound up past the crumbling towers and walls of a Moorish castle, totally unmarked and unprotected and vulnerable to exploration - there's something surreal about architecture over 1,000 yrs. old not warranting even a fence or road or info board. We eventually ended up at the top of a decent-sized hill: certainly not a mountain in the North Cascades sense of the word, but nonetheless a beautiful getaway from the urban bustle of central Madrid. After returning to Alcalá de Henares we stuck around for a "flamenco show" in the town bullring: a show that turned out to be a benefit concert featuring one Carlos Barroso alongside a ton of other acts, all of them vocally and repeatedly - every other song or so - indebted to Carlos, who was evidently organizer as well as performer. Flamenco-wise we knew something wasn't quite right when the warmup act was, rather than a classical Spanish guitarist in the tradition of Andrés Segovia, a DJ dressed head-to-toe in angelic white mixing beatz from behind what I'm pretty sure was a turntable-equipped lectern.

The big adventure of this most recent week was the "29-S Huelga General," the much-hyped city-wide strike targeting Zapatero's apparently insufficient labor reform policies. With SAFA resolutely open but three separate metro lines between home and work, we weren't sure if we'd even be able to teach on Wednesday the 29th - I guess most of the other non-striking commuters were even more concerned, because even with only 20% of the trains running, the metro was so empty that the strike day was the easiest commute all week. That evening Neal Parker (who just moved to Madrid; welcome Neal!) and I walked to Puerta del Sol via Calle Atocha to scope out the rally/march. An hour after the published rally time we left disappointed by the utter lack of crowds; as we walked away from the plaza an incredibly huge crowd appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, marching the opposite direction (back towards Sol). Although the whole thing didn't/doesn't feel like "our strike" at all - ie we're earning Spanish euros here while the unemployment is at 20% - we accepted proffered union stickers and joined the march back to Sol. The gargantuan crowd wore mostly red, and quite a few hammer-and-sickle and Anarchy flags flapped amidst the ubiquitous UGT union banners. The size of this crowd was just astonishing, especially once we realized that similar crowds were converging on Sol from all other directions for a speech and rally. And the papers deemed the strike a failure the next day for its lack of numbers...

The great irony of the day occurred while watching the crowd gather in Sol before the speeches.  Over 60 feet tall, at least 80 feet wide, a massive promotional poster for "Come, Reze, Ama" ("Eat, Pray, Love") looked down on the would-be-revolutionary crowd with benign contempt.  Julia Roberts' was the face of neoliberal capitalism, utterly undisturbed and smirking.  No one around me seemed to notice the dissonance between the populist urgency of a general strike and the ad campaign that, "gold-shot with looming wonder," visually dominated the event; nor between the gritty economic reality that brought the crowd together and the comfortably pseudo-orientalist world view (non-US countries romanticized) projected by the film. (It must be even stranger to see posters for it in Rome.) Start by tearing down the ad, people!  Nothing against "Eat, Pray, Love" - just the ironic distance from the strike that its ad forced on us.

Other happenings - I attended a few events at the "Ecocríticas" literary conference hosted by the Univ. Alcalá de Henares, specifically a book launch and a poetry reading/discussion with some visiting authors. While eco-crit as a literary sub-genre (or whatever we want to call it) has existed stateside for decades, it is apparently almost brand-new to Spain. And while Spain's national self-image isn't so bound up in wilderness as, say, that of the American West, there is certainly more than enough spectacular/iconic landscape here to warrant hope that Spanish authors and readers might take readily to the idea that writing and reading about nature are effective (and worthwhile) tools for its preservation and sustained use. I missed the rest of the conference's events due to disappointing combinations of work, class, and getting lost on my way there.

And - Friday night we SAFA student teachers went out with Abby and some Spanish friends of hers. The plan was to keep things low-key because of a rudely scheduled thesis meeting early Saturday morning, but ill-advisedly that plan evolved into staying out to nearly 5 before a 7:30 wakeup. Consequently, Saturday was a relaxing day made up mostly of a visit to the Reina Sofía museum (literally five min walk away from our apartment) during its ample free hours. The Reina Sofía tends toward the modern end of the art spectrum, and highlights for me included: "readymade" and totally indecipherable installations from Duchamp, Klein et al; Picasso's "Guernica" (incredibly huge, overwhelming in person); various Miros and Magrittes; a collection of early-20th-century propaganda posters (mostly communist); and a spectacular but all-too-small collection of paintings by Dali. The Reina Sofía is awesome.

And - I took a Renfe train down to Toledo today, exploring the cobbled historic district for hours. Toledo is a beautiful town to begin with, and today was extra good: with a cold rain-scented wind blowing looming clouds and light showers between gaps of brisk clean fall sunlight, the winding and narrow pedestrian-only streets were gorgeous. Toledo's historic walled center is perched on top of a hill that in turn is surrounded by a river, so that the edges of the old center end in cobbled terraces overlooking the sheer drop down to the water and the rocky bluffs of the far bank. It felt good - in fact, comforting - to have some verticality in the world again. Flocks of swallows dart endlessly after invisibly small insects out over the current, and the wind generates intricate whirling patterns of dry leaves as it comes off the flat plain and hits Toledo's taller buildings, so that the narrow roads are either totally tranquil or - having turned a corner - unexpectedly funnels for the gusts. The Toledo trip was definitely one of the highlights of my time in Spain so far.

Well, that's it for the last two weeks... now back to work at SAFA.  Iron-fisted discipline time.  Thanks for reading!
Take care,
-Dave