History's hand at Martorell's bridge

Photo by David Oliver/Wikimedia | Copyright: Creative Commons

I pass this extraordinary bridge regularly on the way to and from Barcelona and always give it a second look and a series of thoughts.

 (Whenever I see it I always think of a slightly similar bridge, the Stari Most (in Bosnia) that was famously blown up in the war there 20 years ago this November. My memory is of watching an explosion causing it to fall, broken into the river. [See 3:00 at the video below])

But the bridge at Martorell has a similar effect on me in that I get the sense I am looking at a creation from a long way back in some medieval past. Just like walking through Kyoto's very old Ponto Cho area, even after dozens and dozens of times of seeing it, I never get blasé about it.

“The Puente del Diablo, or Devil's Bridge, crosses from Martorell to Castellbisbal in Catalonia, and its gravity defying structure has a surprising stabilizing device. The bridge was originally built over the Llobregat River in 1283 over a former Roman bridge, the remains of which can still be seen around the current bridge, including a triumphal arch. If it doesn't seem quite right for medieval times, the bridge was actually destroyed in 1939 during the Spanish Civil War and rebuilt in 1965. However, much of it is still the original stone.”

See more photos of the “Devil's Bridge” at Martorell at Atlas Osbscura here.

Video: Santander claims title as Europe's "smartest" city

 

"As the centrepiece of an ambitious experiment to make cities more efficient and easier to live in, Santander in Spain is being hailed as the smartest in Europe. With thousands of near-field sensors installed throughout the city, Santander authorities say they have created a technology template for others to follow..."

Read more at SmartSantander's webpage here.

"How Europe's solution for the crisis is actually the problem "

[Youth unemployment rate in Europe between 2005-2013 via Les Crises – public domain]

"Europe's current crisis is more than economic. Between the German government advocating a dangerous austerity policy and European authorities lacking any other suggestions, it is clear that the 2008 financial crisis is no longer solely responsible for the downward spiral of Europe.
The GDP for countries in Europe has fallen by a considerable amount: 5.3% for Greece, 3.9% for Portugal, 4.1% for Cyprus, 2.3% for Italy, and 2% for Spain. This is without even mentioning the recession into which France is entering. In the first quarter of this year, the European Union economy contracted by 0.7%, or one percent when only taking into consideration the eurozone."

Read more from this Global Voices article here.

An Asturian coal miner

The coal miner's wife wakes him and he coughs. He goes to the small bathroom sink and spits black liquid, washing it away with with the brown tap water.

Last night he slept badly because he had stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting again. Until last year he was working in the zinc mine at Arnao in Castrillion but the Belgian company let him go to the San Juan mine, where he considered himself quite lucky because at least there they had a river pool for the miners to wash in.

As he leaves for another day under the earth he looks for a last time at the mountains, their ferns and the tall groups of eucalyptus - pencil thin, not quite straight, but just like the trees in a Dr Seuss book. He sees the houses with their sharp pitched roofs, the deep gorges and is comforted by the roll of the hills in this green and pleasant land.

But it is only a pleasant land for some.

The miner lives before the era of the chemical plants and the big metal factories. He knows others who dig for iron and he knows it is vital for tinned food because electricity and refrigeration has not yet arrived to this part of the world.

His mine, like many mines, is close to a river and the river is a means of transporting the coal for trading this raw material with British towns like Cardiff and Newcastle-upon-Tyne (where my father was born and grew up next to a river also.)

This miner's children will see chemical industries grow, thanks to the mines, thanks to his labour.

In fact, (he thinks to himself as he makes the walk to the pits) the story of Asturias is the story of the miner, and the story of the miner is the story of Asturias. It is one of hardship and scant reward. Of growth and ill health. It is the deep earth's hidden secrets and bountiful suffering, the open spaces of the valleys and the claustrophobic confines - as unforgiving and back breaking as any imagined hell in those greedy shafts penetrating ever downwards into the planet.

Today, like thousands of other days he will throw his body into the ground and probe for hour after hour for that black gold. At the end of the day he will take aspirin for his aching bones, smiling at the ironic fact that it has ingredients made from the very coal he has been digging at.He does not yet know though that his children will one day eat kiwi-fruits and chestnuts that grow particularly well in the carbon-coloured soil left in the abandoned open mines that are scattered across the nearby hills.

As the miner eats his simple lunch with his hands still blackened by coal dust, he remembers his father, who was also a miner. This man worked to extract the iron that was in such high demand for both 20^th century world wars – a metal that helped the country become richer. His father had started his life as a rural worker and had to adapt from the rhythm of the seasons to the very different rhythm of an industrial timetable. It was necessary to learn to accept days and nights with no sky or trees when he was underground in the mines, which sat right next to his tiny terrace house.

Like every other subterranean labourer, his father and he both wondered if life could be different for them. He had heard that it was a bit better at the one and only mine run by a trade union. But it was on the other side of Asturias and he had never even visited there.

Our miner lives in Bustiello town and all of the Marques de Camilla's workers have their neat little houses below everyone else, at the very bottom of the valley. It is an orderly, rectangular village and each house has a little garden.

Up the hill above them live the engineers and above them is the church then god of course. This is what he knows. The planning of the town exactly reflects the social and spiritual hierarchy because the Marques is a conservative man - not in the least progressive.

Up in the mountains though, there were some mining zones that suffered from “special measures” during Franco's dictatorship. Around Pozo Fortuna trade union activists were assassinated and their bodies were thrown down an old pit-hole.

Our miner speaks about this sadly with his friends and falls asleep hoping that the bad times would end.

In the morning, he rises and faces another day.

Catalan study finds that music improves in-vitro fertilisation

Photo - Javier

"The exposure to music during in vitro fertilisation has a positive impact on the fecundity rate of egg cells according to a study developed by the assisted reproduction centre Institut Marquès, based in Barcelona. 

The study concludes that the micro vibrations in the music shake the culture liquid in which the ovum swims and this improves the distribution of nutrients and also avoids the accumulation of toxic products around the cell. As a result, the fertilisation of the ovum is facilitated by the effects produced by the vibes, and the fecundation rate is improved by 4.8%. 



Three styles of music were tested (pop, heavy metal and classical) but no significant differences were observed in relation to the different frequencies. The study was carried out on 985 egg cells from 114 patients. It is the first study of this kind made on human egg cells."

Read more here.

 

The colours of Asturias: a poem

the flag of the region should be green, black and red

Asturias is certainly verdant green, but it is also black

the black of the miners lung

and the almost permanent colour of his spit

it is also that sightless place of no mercy

at the bottom of the pit where

another of Franco's victims is thrown  

Asturias has a history the color of carbon

the same earthy tint as the blood sausage

that has fed its people

and black like the hide of a cow

who has quietly ruminated on its grassy hills .

and there is that black of a thousand widow’s dresses

mixed with that black of the children’s despair

at their fathers early death

the same dim shade of the early morning forest where

the dictators enemies hid shivering, hungry, but unbroken

and the crucial Asturian black

the lump of its freshly-mined coal

or that frivolous fully-rotten apple

as dark as the night-time ocean that empties itself

into rivers like the Nalón

as brutally stark as an unlit mine

and it might too have been

the charcoal feathers of a bird

that watched all this great grim past

with its darting granite eyes 

and Asturias has a culture full of red

red like some of those ripened apples

that make the people's everyday cider

not as red as those huge painted silos that hold it all

the enflamed red too of the wild flowers that grow here

and the smoky paprika powder that is sprinkled

on yet more cooked potatoes

but it is also the red of the dead

the civil war corpses and the slaughtered soldiers

that ruby rich hue that also inhabits the church wine

and the vino tinto waiting on the table

or even red like the double bars of the Spanish flag

with that saffron yellow lying

in between those royal stripes

and also that arterial red

of those painted iron trains

the ferrocarill

that opened up

the heart

of Asturias

“I lost 15 or 20 years trying to write in Spanish” - an interview with Joan Margarit

  

A fascinating English-language interview with the Catalan poet (and architect) along with an enlightening podcast recording of some of his translated poetry from ABC Radio in Australia.

Asturias...as it is

Tomorrow I am going to Asturias - one of Spain's relatively un-touristy and lesser-known regions. 

I will be part of a group of four other writers (including the novelist and travel-writer David Baird) co-sponsored by Tourism Asturias, and we will be visiting locations to come up with stories to be used to promote Asturias, and more particularly a new Parador hotel that is due to open next month in a converted 11th century monastery in the area of Cangas de Narcea.

More to come soon...

 

Latest interview for ABC Radio

This Saturday evening I will be doing another interview for ABC Radio in Australia (Sunday morning Australia time) for the Overnights program. 

We are going to be discussing the Lionel Messi tax story, Rafael Nadal, how the Spaniards and Catalans are fairing economically, and also the closure of the national broadcaster in Greece. 

Mp3 audio file, click here.

 

My interview with Matthew Tree - author of SNUG

Below is the text of my interview with Matthew Tree, the prolific British/Catalan writer who has just published SNUG, his first novel in English.

[A version of his article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine in June 2013.]

You've had a very successful career over many years writing in Catalan but this is your first published novel in English. What has caused the delay and now the publication of SNUG?

What mainly caused the delay was the fact that I found my written voice first in Catalan, in 1990, when I wrote and published a small text called 'Viatge a Romania'. As I still hadn't found my written voice in English, I then made a more or less conscious decision to write only in Catalan for about ten years (with the odd incursion into English, which only went to prove that I still couldn't write in this language). Then, in 2000, I got an idea for a full-length novel which came to me in English and in English only. So I wrote the novel in English, and discovered that, finally, after the years of discipline of working in another language, I had finally broken the back of my mother tongue. That novel, however, was published in Catalan (my version) and in Spanish (translated by someone else from the English original). But not in English. The idea for SNUG came to me in 2006 and was based on a host of other ideas that had been building up over the years. I finished it in 2011. My agent, irritated with the wall of silence she was getting from most UK publishers, decided to bring SNUG out as a promotional, though professionally produced, edition. Much as I like this edition, which has been beautifully done, the idea is to use it to attract the attention of a mainstream publisher.

You are one of the few writers born in England who is brave enough to regularly write honestly about social class in that country. How important is class as a theme in your work?

Class was the reason it took me so long to find my written voice in English. Class is built in to British English, as far as I can see. The stratification that English society is still in the grip of, reaches right into the language: open a book by almost any English writer and the vocabulary and syntax will immediately indicate the social class of either the writer or the narrating voice. I wanted an English that was fully malleable, fluid, unconditioned, like American English. And when I got it - or I hope I did! - I used it to talk about class, but directly, not 'unconsciously'. They say writers should write about what they know. Like everybody raised in England, I know about class. It's affected me all my life, and I suspect it's a lot more important - reveals a lot more about the nature of people in general - than is usually supposed.

Why did you set SNUG in a small town on an island in England?

Because I wanted the African visitors in the book to come across England at its most complacent and cosy and snug. I got the idea for the novel when on holiday in the Isle of Wight, which is the kind of place that feels like nothing is ever, ever going to happen there. Perfect.

One of the three main characters in SNUG is what could be called an "intelligent racist." He's a quick-witted man but his blind-spot is that he is instinctively prejudiced. Did you base his personality on a particular "type" of person?

The interesting thing about racism is that, despite its irrational, acientific (or pseudoscientific) nature, it is often espoused by highly intelligent and well-informed people. Who are not intelligent enough, however, to realise that they are gift-wrapping their intelligence around outmoded and patently absurd prejudices in order to justify them. Dr Whitebone in SNUG is that kind of 'intelligent' racist. Smart, but not really smart. Christ knows there's enough of them around.

This same character in the novel says that "providence has provided me" as the solution to the crisis in the town. Do you think that this delusion is a typical one of religious zealots?

No. For what it's worth, I suspect that religious zealots are weak-minded people who love to feel that they are subjected or even enslaved by their beliefs and therefore do not have to answer for anything those beliefs impel them to do. Dr Whitebone's sense of providence is more like that believed in by many political leaders, of the left or right: they think they're the man or woman of the moment, and can help the benighted populace, even if this means some sacrifices being made by that same populace. 

The anti-Semitism in your novel is particularly well shown-up. How much of a problem do you think this still is, in the UK and Europe?

You'd have thought that after the Shoah, anti-Semitism would have gone the way of the dodo bird, but certain far left European intellectuals, especially in France, revived it in a new form in the late 60s and early 70s - as 'anti-Zionism' - and it has since spread from there. In the Arab world, where it was imported directly from Nazi Germany through Haj Amin al-Husseini (the founder of modern Palestinian nationalism, and one of Yasser Arafat's mentors) it is especially virulent. But it should maybe be remembered that Zionism - not to be confused with religious Zionism - is simply the belief that the Israeli state has a right to exist. Anti-Zionists, then, presumably want it to be eliminated (Hamas are genuinely anti-Zionist in this sense). It's a complicated issue, as there is no question that the Israeli state deserves severe criticism for its continued occupation of Palestine (the parts of Palestine that used to belong to Jordan, to be precise). But many people use that as a starting point for encouraging anti-Jewish hatred around the world, which is just absurd. As we hold this interview, news has come through that the Syrian government has just killed 50 Turkish people in a bomb attack. Compare the fairly muted international outcry now with when the Israeli military killed nine Turkish nationals on a boat headed for Gaza, a few years ago. Why this difference in virulence? Anti-Semitism, unfortunately, is still very much with us, on both the left and right, but gives itself sneaky political justification in the form of the undeniably legitimate Palestinian struggle for independence (support for this struggle, of course, doesn't automatically imply an anti-Semitic stance: you have to read between the lines to see where people are really coming from, in this sense). In the West, it seems, then, that anti-Semitism is hard-wired into the belief system, perhaps because it was, indeed, a Christian invention.

Another of the three main characters is 12 years old. What did you do to create the mind of this character?

I thought about when I was twelve. A lot of the larking about between the narrator and the other young teenagers is based on a holiday I went on in East Anglia - when I was twelve.

The other narrator of the story is an African man who is directly involved in creating the conflict on the island. At one point he uses a popular British hymn to cleverly satirise the locals. What was your idea behind this?

In fact, the use of William Blake's 'Jerusalem' - which Jonas Cole, the African spy, overhears and 'adapts' as he listens to it - is a bit of a cliché, in that it's appeared in a couple of films I can't identify at the moment (I vaguely remember people singing the hymn in church, cut with images of other people being beaten up by British soldiers or police). But 'Jerusalem' does sum up perfectly a kind of exalted self-satisfaction you often find in England, and which the visiting Africans, of course, disturb somewhat.

What influenced you to write SNUG and have you read any other books that also skillfully explore colonialism?

For about 20 years I'd worked on different ideas for a novel based on a siege: but I never got either the besiegers or the besieged 'right': the situations i invented just didn't work at all. Then there I was, in 2006, on the Isle of Wight, when I suddenly remembered a story I wrote when I was 20, in which thousands of Africans come to Thatcher's England, furious with the way their continent is being treated and the bullshit they have to put with. Bingo: I realised a Wight coastal village would be the besieged entity, and the besiegers, Africans. As for reading, I read anything I could get my hands on about Africa: history, African fiction, including Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart', perhaps the greatest anti-colonial novel of them all. For SNUG, I went to Tanzania and was lucky enough to meet a major Swahili language writer, Erick Shigongo, who put things into a much-needed non-European perspective.

What are you working on currently as your next book for publication?

I'm working on a new novel in English, which could be summarised in three words: 'England as sect'.

What are your thoughts about the current political situation in Catalonia?

My personal sense is that we are at a historical moment that started on the 11th of September, 2012. The outcome is uncertain but whatever happens, it will mean that Spain will no longer be as most people seem to think it is. It seems that the home-rule process is accelerating, not least because the Spanish government  is doing it's best to make Catalans feel like aliens inside Spain.

Antonio Muñoz Molina becomes first Spaniard to win literature prize for 15 years

He is a writer I have championed ever since I first read his work some years ago.

"Novelist and essayist Antonio Muñoz Molina on Wednesday became the first Spaniard in 15 years to be awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters.


The jury decided to honor the 57-year-old author, who was chosen over names such as Irish writer John Banville and Japan's Haruki Murakami, for "a body of work that admirably assumes the condition of the intellectual committed to his time."

For the last few days, the jury had been considering the need to hand the award to a Spaniard. The last Spanish national to win the Letters prize was Francisco Ayala in 1998 and no Spanish-speaking author has received the honor since Guatemala's Augusto Monterroso won 13 years ago.

"When one receives a prize, one feels very happy and when one doesn't, one doesn't," Muñoz Molina told a press conference in Madrid on Wednesday. "But I don't think that the career of a writer can be measured by the prizes they receive. One can be very good and not win prizes and one can be bad and win them."

Article and photo source here at El Pais.

5th World Congress against the death penalty to be held in Madrid

"The 5th World Congress against the death penalty [is to be held] in Madrid from the 12th to the 15th of June. It is organised by the association Ensemble contre la peine de mort http://www.abolition.fr/ (Together against the death penalty – ECPM), under the sponsorship of Spain, Norway, Switzerland and France, and in partnership with the World Coalition against the death penalty."

Read more from the source here.

Spanish TV offers parents tips about how to dress their kids without being "provocative"

An astonishing program was shown on public TV recently.

Spain's main public television station channel 1 featured a workshop for parents on “how to teach their children to dress appropriately” in its daily afternoon update on May 14, 2013. Although the report was barely a minute and a half long, it featured soundbites such as “it seems we live in an era when everything must be shown” and “the big question: is my daughter dressing provocatively?”

I don't believe there's actually anything wrong with discussing what kids wear in this country.

I just think there are a lot bigger problems such as use of over-technology, bullying, commercialisation of young people or infantalising them.

This TV program raised the question of “provocative” dressing by young girls. There is certainly a de facto summer-time “uniform” of very short jean-pants for teens and some pre-teens and this is generally conformed to by plenty of this age group.

The issue to me is not so much whether this is somehow provocative but whether girls are simply dressing like other girls because they think they should. Following a fashion because others do is sheep-like and dangerous more because it shows a tendency to act without individuality than it is wrong to show bare legs.

It is so much easier to focus on what we can easily see, rather than investigate deeper, more serious problems that are not so apparent to the eye.

(As is so often the case, the commenters on this Global Voices article are also really worth a read.)

EU visitors to Spain denied hospital care

There's a lot of good points about living here, including the usually very good public health system, but on top of the privatisation that is slowly going on there are some other worrying signs, as explained in this article...

“The European Commission has warned that it may launch infringement action against Spain unless the country's hospitals stop refusing emergency treatment to European Union citizens on holiday. The Commission is receiving reports, concerning 20 different hospitals, of treatment being refused to foreign EU nationals unless they pay on the spot. 

 

Under EU law, member states must offer foreign EU citizens who present a valid European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) the same treatment as nationals for emergency medical care. The bill should then be submitted to the health authorities of the patient's home country.”

A Euro-kiss that dare not speak it's name

[Photo by Richard Frost/Gay Star News]

"Will Eurovision censor a kiss between Finland's Krista Siegfrids and a female dancer?

Turkey has just banned the show from being broadcast and now the press reports that there is pressure on Eurovision to cancel the kiss before Saturday's final. Eurovision organisers are worried other Eastern European countries might ban the contest too.

If the kiss is censored it would be a huge victory for anti-gay voices. But if thousands of us sign the petition calling for the kiss to go on, we can show Eurovision that there will be much bigger outcry if they choose censorship over celebration."

Read more from All Out's  page here.

A Spaniard asks "How?"

"Today, headlines from around the world resonate with the news that there are nearly six million Spanish citizens currently unemployed. Spaniards are in the process of losing their quality of life, along with their access to health, education and even food...

How is it possible for the country to accept that over half its population of under 25-year-olds are unemployed? How does a society sustain itself with over a million members living in households where not so much as a euro comes in by way of a monthly salary? How sick is a society when the only social group not to lose its purchasing power in recent years are the retired and when there are more than 150 home evictions per day?

Juan Luis Sánchez gives some answers in this article for Eurozine.

Catalan aristocrat is "a link between North Korea and the world."

Alejandro Cao de Benós, born in Tarragona, Spain in 1974, is a descendant of the barons of Les in the Aran Valley in northern Catalonia, the earls of Argelejo and the marquises of Rosalmonte. Besides his rather unusual lineage, it is unlikely that his name would be widely known if this 39-year-old Catalonian was not an important foreign spokesperson for the North Korean regime.

Founder and president of the Korean Friendship Association (KFA), he is an honorary special delegate of the country, where he is known as Cho Son-il, meaning “Korea is one”. In an interview with Tribuna Popular he explained the origin of his relationship with the Asian country:

Read more at this article from Global Voices.

My book, "The Re-Made Parent," to be published via a Barcelona agency

 

My non-fiction book, "The Re-Made Parent" is to be published via the Antonia Kerrigan Literary Agency in Barcelona (AK Digital, Amazon (and others) plus print-on-demand.) 

(Thanks to Matthew Tree and all those involved in the long struggle to get to this point, finally.)

"The freedom of the fox in the chicken run:" (A metaphor for Europe?)

"The great welfare states as they now exist in some of the countries of Western Europe are also built upon an economic lie...

When those preaching the free market are in fact using their power simply to protect their interests – or, in the case of the real intellectual naifs, to protect the interests of the already powerful – then the only freedom we might talk about is the freedom of the fox in the chicken run."

Nicholas Bradbury made his literary debut this year with the novel "Market Farm", a reworking of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" for the free market era. He talks here [at EuroZine] about influences for his satirical take on the current financial crisis and potential grounds for hope for the future.

Catalan outdoes “the majority language” in Spain's Wikipedia entries

Groups of enthusiasts in Catalunya have ensured something truly remarkable.

“A study by Mark Graham (@geoplace), researcher at Oxford University...shows that 35,000 [*Wikipedia] articles have been created in Spanish territory with coordinates in Catalan, [compared to only] 19,000 in Spanish.”

In other words, there are currently more entries for the whole of Spain in Catalan than in Castillian Spanish.

Also quite impressive is the fact that the Catalan language is ranked “first place in an index compiled by the Wikimedia Foundation, which measures the quality of the thousand most important articles.”

“The Catalan version of Wikipedia...has become central to the activism around the language...Àlex Hinojo, project manager at Wikimediacat and creator of@CatalanMuseums, says:

Many people say they edit because it's fun, they can provide more information about a topic…and they are building a country. Catalan-speaking civil society always maintains a certain activism in favour of its language, just as it does with other topics.

Read more here at Global Voices.

Note: To my mind, *Wikipedia is a sometimes unreliable source of information and can only be completely trusted when an article's sources are credible.

WikiMarathon at Drassanes Reials (Barcelona), on Wikipedia's 12th anniversary. March 2013. Photo by @Kippelboy.