"The Empty Womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation"

 "I often ask my friends how they see themselves ten years from now. We know what we will do next week, but not in three months. Will I have a job? Will I have a home? Will I have met somebody? 

The capacity to predict our own lives doesn’t exist, because the precariousness has dynamited the possibility of visualising our future. 

The dynamics have been configured to make everything last only a short time: buy that which you will eat for dinner tonight, we will see what it will be tomorrow; maybe in one month you won’t have a job; remember that next year your rental contract will end. 

The uncertainty generated by the crisis [of/since 2008] has not only rocked our expectations, but also our most primitive certainties; those that I thought would always exist even when I didn’t have anything material to hang on to: a child, for example. A panorama that doesn’t allow anything but short-term thinking, pure survival. A scenario in which to think about having children causes panic. But not having them, if you desire to, also causes panic. 

This book deals with putting off having children in the generation of the 25 to 35 year olds. Also about those who when they were about to have a child, they lost their jobs. It reflects on the fear of having children and on the fear of not ever having them. A collective tale that talks about how our bodies have been crossed by precariousness. And about putting it all off until we don’t know when."


Above is the publisher's summary of Noemí López Trujillo's, El vientre vacío. Relato de una generación precaria y sin hijos [The empty womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation], 2019.

Source: an excellent blog on Spanish and Portugese literature: Literary Rambles.

"Drought Has Revealed Spain’s Long-Submerged ‘Stonehenge’ "

[Photo: RUBEN ORTEGA MARTIN/ RAICES DE PERALEDA]

When I passed through this region only a few summers ago, from a train I wrote in 'Slow Travels in Unsung Spain'... 

"swerving around a hill, a vast body of water suddenly appeared – a statement of abundance and life in this hard land, like something biblical from a Leonard Cohen song.

This was the Embalse de Valdecañas [reservoir] that marks the start of Extremadura province, being connected to the more than 1,000-kilometre-long Tajo (or Tagus) river that sweeps into Portugal: a river that two millennia ago the Roman poet Ovid sang the praises of for its gold-bearing sands."

Now, as ALYSSA MCMURTRY found, this scene is the exact opposite:


"THIS SUMMER HAS BEEN UNUSUALLY scorching across Europe and beyond, and things have only grown more intense in the already hot and dry region of Extremadura in Spain. 

Months into an official drought that could be developing into a mega-drought, local farmers are facing the loss of hundreds of millions of euros. Many think this is just a sign of things to come.

Droughts, and the way that they strip the land of plant cover and drain lakes and reservoirs, for all the problems they cause, are often a boon for archaeologists. 

The water level of the Valdecañas Reservoir in the province of Cáceres has dropped so low that it is providing an extraordinary glimpse into the past.

“All my life, people had told me about the dolmen,” says Angel Castaño, a resident of Peraleda de la Mata, a village just a couple miles from the reservoir, and president of the local cultural association. 

“I had seen parts of it peeking out from the water before, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in full. It’s spectacular because you can appreciate the entire complex for the first time in decades.”

The dolmen he’s talking about is known as the Dolmen of Guadalperal, the remains of a 7,000-year old megalithic monument consisting of around 100 standing stones—some up to six feet tall—arranged around an oval open space. It takes hours of hiking to get to the dolmen, which is now a few dozen yards away from the edge of the tranquil blue water. 

Visitors today are more likely to see deer than guards. Traces of aquatic plant life in the sand show that the site is dry and accessible only temporarily."

Read more from ALYSSA MCMURTRY's  wonderful article for Altas Obscura here  and my new book here.

"Jokerman" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

  

[Photo: EFE]

Unlike this summer’s extreme weather, which came to Europe then went, extreme conservative governments have also recently come but unfortunately don’t seem to be going.

In the UK, the latest incarnation of this threat to the average person is the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson (or simply ‘Boris,’ as plenty of his fellow media personalities call him.) 

But there is only one important question to be asked about him. Who will he and his Conservative Party govern for?

The answer is already clear. If we ignore all his populist, nationalistic public language and ignore his long history of incompetence, his almost continual episodes of self-serving immorality and if we also ignore his continuing catalogue of lies and vile racist and homophobic insults, there is still something much more important than all that staring us in the face.

The fact is that Boris Johnson has always represented no-one else other than the exact same kind of young males who he is pictured alongside in the ‘Wall of Fame’ at Eton, the school where only Britain’s wealthiest families send their children.

In other words, Boris Johnson will continue to act only for the richest part of the social spectrum. His first policy announcement after he declared he would run for the party’s leadership was calculated to let the rich know that he was still well and truly on their side. He stated he would give tax cuts to 3 million higher income earners.

As well as that he is arguing for further cuts to business tax, even though UK corporation tax rates are “one of the lowest...among developed economies, with successive reductions taking it from 28% in 2008 to 19% now.”

The great problem with schools like Eton where Johnson (and 20 other former UK Prime Ministers) went, is that, according to Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, it is a major part of “an archaic system that teaches those who belong to it that they are destined for the kind of greatness that others cannot reach.”

The idea of a personal destiny is appealing to people like Johnson because as adults it means they believe that they never have to show ability. “Preparatory” boarding schools such as Eton brainwash their young at a time in their lives when they are highly impressionable, being away from their families for almost the entire academic year. In essence, they instill the value of ultimate self-confidence as superior to expertise. 

This is exactly the root cause of Britain’s wider mediocrity in much of it’s politics and business; it comes from a social class system that virtually insists on taking nothing at all too seriously.

Johnson’s public image as a mumbling, bumbling, patriotic jokester is initially easy to like. He has a light-hearted charm which works with Anglo people who don’t like anyone to be earnest for very long. Comedy is good entertainment, they’d say. 

This tone of amusement was also something Johnson used in his earlier career in journalism and writing. Astonishingly, he wrote a sexist and offensive novel titled Seventy-Two Virgins – A Comedy of Errors (published in 2004) where the main character, obviously entirely based on Johnson, becomes a hero during a terrorist attack. The hand of destiny again.

Ultimately, Johnson is hellbent on “delivering” Brexit at any cost to the middle and working class people of his country. The irony here is that as recently as 2013 he wrote a newspaper article that advised his fellow cabinet ministers “to stop blaming Brussels for all our problems.”

Now though, we have him and his Brexit to more accurately blame. Johnson’s jokes are all the more hollow and the saddest joke is on us.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2019.]

"Catalan book week in Barcelona (Sept. 6 – 15)"

[(c) llull.cat]

"A week of literary events and book selling at the heart of Barcelona, next to its Cathedral (no, not La Sagrada Família…). 

The official website is Catalan only, but as you can see from the picture, there is also a stall dedicated to translations from Catalan. At the same time there is held a foreign-rights market with 18 publishers and agents from 16 different countries..."

SOURCE: Literary Rambles here [from Institut Ramon Llull (Catalan Language and Culture promotion)]

"Akala comes to Barcelona, Sept 8: Shakespeare or hip-hop?"

This Sunday in Barcelona hear from one of the most articulate voices in British hip-hop at Middle Passage Festival, as Akala kicks off a day of reflections on black culture.

For more details see Atlas of the Future here.