Key to success

The website promo for the Banff Writers Conference tells me, "The key to success is NETWORKING, MARKETING, AND PROMOTING." Gee, and all along I thought it was WRITING. Guess I've been wasting my time. 

BTW, speaking of writing, Chapter 2 of my novel about Christians and Muslims fighting for old Constantinople is now up at the Copperfield Review. Click on "Fiction" and check out "The Palace Garden." You get to see the author in drag; I impersonate a not-quite 15-year old princess. Any of you who are now or at one time have been 15-year old princesses (I know you're out there), please let me know if I've got it right.

"So why don't you write something?"

"¿Por qué no escribís algo?" my friend César Chelala asked me last night. I had been raging about the absurd and dangerous contradictions of Bush's "anti-terror" policies.

For César, "escribir algo" -- write something -- means to produce a 750-word op-ed article on some important current event. He's written hundreds of them (you've probably seen his by-line) for dailies from Stockholm to Japan. Maybe I will. For now, and to get my thoughts together, I interrupt the pleasant little Spanish travelogue for a burst of indignation. Here goes:

In the name of combatting terror, Bush & Co. are doing everything possible to stimulate more terror. Prior to Gulf War II, Iraq presented no threat to the United States; today, thanks to the U.S. invasion, Americans are being killed by Iraqis every day. The "weapons of mass destruction" Bush described, poison gas stocks and that famous nuclear bomb that Iraq supposedly could launch in 45 minutes, couldn't have reached the U.S. even if they had actually existed. Now not only are our soldiers in constant danger, but so are the young Poles, Australians, Spaniards and others whose governments have obligingly sent them to save this disastrous occupation.

What is terror? In Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, it is "shock and awe." That is literally correct. My dictionary defines terror as "intense, overpowering fear," but "shock and awe" conveys the idea even better. That's what Rumsfeld promised to deliver to the Iraqis, and he did. And it's still going on. Just the other day, an American general boasted of his cleverness in kidnapping a woman and her children, to force her husband to turn himself in to the U.S. military authorities. When the Argentine generals did that 25 years ago, we -- and even they -- called it the "dirty war." Now they are at last being prosecuted for their terror campaign. And the people around Bush know that the same thing could happen to our military officers if an international court of justice ever got to them. So of course Bush has done everything he could to destroy the new international court, or at the very least to make it ineffective against crimes against humanity committed under the Stars and Stripes.

Bush's security program is making us all less secure. Not only is he giving more people more reason to hate Americans and especially the U.S. government, he and Ashcroft and Rumsfeld and the rest of them are trying to close off all those legal channels by which people could object -- by imposing press censorship, withholding evidence against accused "terrorists," denying the validity of international law, so the only option left is violence. This is just what one might expect from a cabal that had so little respect for this country's laws and traditions that they forced themselves into power after losing an election.

In Spain, I had long conversations with a Frenchwoman who describes herself as "of the Right" and who greatly admires the U.S. and George Bush. For me, that is an enormous contradiction. If you love this country, and its traditions of democracy and liberty, you will want to do everything possible to free it from the grasp of the G.O.P., the party of Greed, Oil and Privilege.

Now back to our regular programming.

BLOGGER

50º Aniversario del Asalto a Moncada

More on what I think it means (that the Cuban revolution has held out so long) in coming notes. Right now I'm still in the People's Republic of Carboneras. I may find clues here to what has happened there. You never know -- everything is connected. So, Congratulations, Cuba -- I think.

Correction: wrong tajo

Back on July 8, writing about Ronda, I said that the "Tajo" or gorge that is the most dramatic feature of the city was cut by "the Tajo, one of Spains's great rivers." Boy, was I off! By hundreds of kilometers. The Tajo (Tagus) river runs through Madrid. The river that has cut the spectacular tajo of Ronda is the Guadalevín. (I don't know who Levín was, but "Guada--" is the first name of many rivers of Spain. I haven't yet found out why, but I suspect it's a castillianized form of the Arabic "wadi".)

Report from the red zone: the struggles continue in Carboneras

And in all of Almería (the province). I just learned the other day that Almería was the last province to surrender to Franco's forces, 31 March 1939 -- two days after Jaén and 3 days after Madrid. It was not until Almería surrendered that the war was over. Except, it wasn't really over, merely interrupted for 36 years.

I'll have much more to say about this after I've had a chance to digest lots of new information and time to write it up in something clearer than my cramped notes. Besides the splendid little library of Carboneras (whose computer I'm using at this moment), there are all the splendid people, and the less splendid but nevertheless very interesting people, that I've been interviewing, in my quest to understand how Andalucía in general, and Carboneras and environs in particular, got so red (anarchists, socialists, communists). And of course there's snorkeling and trying to negotiate our way through the local bureaucracy (we're trying to build a house here). I'm getting deeply suntanned, mostly on my back -- because I spend almost all my water-time face down, watching all the bright-colored fish and seeking out the wonderful octopuses (octopoi? Is that the Greek plural?) in their reef caves. More later on the reds, both home-grown and the many who've come through or settled here from distant places.

España ha 20 años / Spain 20 years ago

Still in Carboneras. The Ayuntamiento has had the good sense to paint over the ugly graffitti I wrote about, and Susana has discovered where the real "moros" -- Moroccans, Algerians and others living in Carboneras -- hang out. They were delighted to see her friendly face in the little store where they can buy seasonings from home.

An interview of Mario Benedetti at his home in Spain (where he has spent many of his frequent exiles from Uruguay) reminded me why poetry is the noblest literary art. All else is "fiction," says Benedetti, and I know what he means. I have rarely committed poetry, but should do more -- not because I do it well (though maybe I can improve), but because it can be a more authentic expression of what one feels. Meanwhile, here is one of my few poems, written over 20 years ago on my first visit to Spain, in Spanish: Las cosas buenas de Andalucía.

Joda en Bédar

We interrupt our investigation of the intense struggles of Moros v. Cristianos, landed nobility v. starving peasantry, and -- continuing to the present day -- Reds (the dominant local political color, currently represented by the Partido Socialista Obrero de España, PSOE, in power in Carboneras, and the Izquierda Unida) v. Conservatives (I'm not sure what color is associated with them -- blue, maybe, or white). The investigation is proceeding well -- more on that later -- but we interrupted for very good reason: a wonderfully comical street festival in the compact little mountain town of Bédar. Five strolling musicians in yellow pants and straw hats (trumpet, trombone, saxophone and two drums) and five hyperactive clowns, variously striding and cavorting on stilts and step ladders, pedaling precariously on the steep narrow streets on unicycles, clambering up the iron grillwork on the houses, spraying kids from water bottles and enormous plastic boutonnieres, tossing candies and juggling balls, clubs, and so on. The strolling festivities began at 9 p.m., still very light out and not too late for the kids. We found our way (it wasn't easy) into the little town, perched on a peak behind other peaks, by about 20 past nine, and looked for the fun -- finally discovering we had driven into it. Fortunately, our SmartCar is so short that we could park it where there was no space, just as the man on high stilts came leading his merry crowd and all of the younger Bédar citizenry up the brick road, where there was now just room enough for stiltsman, unicycles, jugglers, musicians and kids and their parents to squeeze between our little car and the corner of the building opposite. We had driven in with our car's top open, so our little red car was immediately adopted as another theatrical prop. Stiltsman bent his long legs and rested his fanny on the edge of the car's roof and bent back as far as he could inside, just as though our car had been expected all along. We joined the revelers up more steep streets and down again, where they performed their finale -- with some lucky kids and embarrassed adults plucked from the town square to participate -- with juggling and feats of ridiculous physical prowess (jumping over a low stool, with much fanfare from the musicians, and then piling up more stools and, after great suspense and drum rolls, stepping around them). The jugglers were really good, one especially, but the others could keep up when he got them into a three-man exchange of missiles. Then the one who had seemed the most foolish and least talented of the clowns demonstrated superb drumming skills while teetering on a board across a cylinder rolling across another drumtop on top of a table in the plaza in front of the ayuntamiento. The kids were screaming with delight, and by then the littler ones seemed mostly ready for bed. And so were we. We got home to our supper a little before midnight. Oh, and there was a full moon, which we could see through our open top as we drove along the mountain edge over the water between Mojácar and Carboneras-

Carboneras, Chapter I: Blood on the Sand

The first thing we saw yesterday as, at around 6 or 7 p.m. we headed to the beach (good time of day -- the sun goes down around 10) was the aggressive graffitti. Crude white letters painted on the new washroom shed on the east end of the beach spelled out FUERA PUTOS MOROS. ARRIVA ESPAÑ (the graffitist, besides misspelling, had failed to calculate room for the final A). On the adjoining, shorter wall the complaint was spelled out in further detail: NOS ESTAN INVADIENDO ENTRETODOS. VAMOS A ECHARLLE (there's that spelling difficulty again) HUEVOS. Both walls are decorated with crude swastikas and other mysterious symbols: an A with extended crossbar, like wings, a cross through a circle.

Pretty scary. Is it really serious? There are plenty of bored young men in this little town, trying to amuse themselves by racing loud motorscooters at 1 and 2 in the morning. There are also maybe a score or so of immigrants, very noticeable in a town of about 5,000 permanent residents. Rumanians, Bulgarians, at least one family of black Africans, and possibly some "moros" (used loosely to include Moroccans, Algerians and other North Africans). But are the bored Spanish youth capable of violence? I know they don't typically know much history, but surely they are aware that "Arriba España" was the slogan of the Franco forces; I doubt though that they are aware that when he invaded Spain to overthrow the Republic, Franco's troops were the Moors he had commanded in Ceuta. This morning I photographed the graffitti, framing the shot to include the Moorish watchtower on the peak behind the town.

There has been a lot of blood on these beaches, some real and some theatrical. This is where they filmed "Lawrence of Arabia", where the 12th century watchtower plays the part of a Syrian castle and the sand as the desert of the fertile crescent. After the Catholic Monarchs (Fernando & Isabel, in case you've forgotten) chased the Nazarí­ Moors out of the area in 1488, and out of Granada (their last stronghold) in 1492, they and their successors had trouble staffing the watchtower, because the area -- depopulated after the expulsion of the Moorish agriculturalists -- was so isolated and vulnerable that the Spanish guards kept getting kidnapped by corsairs from the Barbary Coast. That is, the Moors returned, over and over again, and because their correligionaries the Ottoman Turks controlled the Mediterranean at the time, there was no one to stop them. They would pillage and burn and carry off "old Christians" (as distinct from newly converted former Muslims) as slaves. In one famous raid in 1573, they carried off more than 240. That, the Marqués del Carpio (then owner of the land all around here) decided, was the last straw. And with all the speed of cumbersome monarchy, some 20 years or so later (no exact record remains) the kingdom began building its fort, the Castle of San Andrés. Meanwhile, since the Battle of Lepanto (where Miguel Cervantes, not yet a famous writer but a mere sailor, lost the use of a hand), the Ottoman dominion had ceased and the danger of raids must have diminished.

I've begun trying to find out something about this little place that we have been visiting for years, and only today did I discover this history. The town exists mainly because the State required a garrison here. By 1850, the garrison of San Andrés was 28 men. The town had 300 houses for 450 "vecinos" (I suppose that meant "heads of households") and 1,800 "souls", a church, a plaza, a boys' school with 30 pupils and a budget, and a girl's school with 10 "discí­pulas" and no budget. (Wonder what they taught them? Whatever it was, I guess the girls didn't need books.) The main industry was fishing (it still is -- wonderful abundance of many kinds of fish), plus agriculture and mining (lead, later iron). Very poor. The land is terribly dry, and an especially prolonged drought in the 1870s drove many to emigrate. When people hear Susana & me talking, they take us for Argentines (she actually is; I just talk like one), and they hurry to tell us stories of relatives who emigrated to Argentina.

More blood in the sands in the 1930s. This was a "red zone," and still is -- the Socialist mayor has been in power for decades. I plan to interview some old timers, both reds and whites. And I hope also to find out what people have to say about the immigrants, and whether the "Arriba España" crowd is any kind of threat. More later. Hasta luego.

Ronda, Provincia de Málaga, España

Sorry for the delay in writing. It's not always easy to find both an internet business and the time to write when you're busy exploring ancient Moorish castles and even more ancient Iberian cave paintings, plus the many layers of Spanish and other cultures on top of those. We left JFK in New York on July 4, on a Spanish charter airline, Air Plus, and arrived in Málaga the morning of July 5 -- groggy, but not totally wiped out, because we both had managed to sleep a few hours in the cramped seats of the plane. We rented a SmartCar -- an engineering marvel, exactly half the length of a "normal" car, but so cleverly designed that we could fit ourselves and our luggage. It's a lot of fun -- it turns in no space at all, can be parked almost anyplace you could fit a motorcycle, and, if it weren't that the Andalucian sun is so brutal even as late as 8 or 9 at night, we could put the top down. We had a scare yesterday, though. On Sunday we had parked on a little street in Ronda, unaware that we had picked a loading zone -- which was OK until 3 pm on Monday (all business in Andalucia closes down from about 1 to 4 or 5 pm, but it seems that truck drivers wake up from siesta a little earlier). It was about 4:30 when we went to get our little red car, and there was a tow truck backing up to haul it away! It wouldn´t have required much effort from the tow truck. The city cop supervising was annoyed with us, pointed out the "loading zone" signs, and told us to get the car out of there -- which we gladly did. If we had had to get it out of the pound, it would have cost us muchos euros and hours of annoyance.

A few memorable moments (not involving tow trucks): the Roman theater in the city of Malaga (there should be an accent over that first "a" but Blogger is screwing up all the accents), discovered by accident during excavations in the 1960s, where in the 1960s and 70s rebellious directors and actors used to stage plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, et al., with veiled anti-Franco messages (not veiled heavily enough -- the Guardia Civil came down hard on them). This was a reminder of the Roman occupation of Andalucia, where Romanization occurred faster and more thoroughly than in the rest of Hispania. It was near Seville that the Romans defeated the Phoenicians -- earlier colonial occupiers -- in 206 BC. Then came the Vandals (from whose name we get Andalucia, I recently read) in the 4th century AD, then the Visigoths a century later, and then the first "Moors" -- Berbers from Morocco, led by Tariq, who was invited by one Visigothic faction to help fight another one, and ended up seizing the whole territory. They defeated the last Visigothic king, Rodrigo, in the early 8th c., and took control of the entire Iberian peninsula but for a Christian mountain redoubt in Asturias. All of this history (except the Vandals, who left few traces) is visible today in this province. More memorable moments (not remembered from centuries but only days ago): the Pasaje de las Chinitas, where stood the Cafe Cantante de las Chinitas made famous by a poem of one of Malaga's best known sons, Federico Garcia Lorca. It's a narrow pedestrian passageway, now filled with little stores and bars, but the Cafe Cantante is now a textile shop. The Alcazaba, where the Moorish rulers lived, right next to the ancient Roman theater (which the Moors must have known about; it disappeared under new construction after the Moors themselves had disappeared). As in many towns of Andalucía, the Christian conquerors built their church on the base of the former mosque, which gives the churches a peculiar, un-Christian shape. The central space of a Moorish mosque tended to be cubic, the ceiling rising as high as the width and length of thefloor. Christian churches of the period (15th-16th centuries) were, in other places, usually cruciform. Wonderful seafood (mariscos) at the Marisqueria Alaska; a thin, poor, but skilled guitarrist sitting in a passageway on Sunday morning, playing for coffee money. I stopped to listen more closely when he started to play one of the pieces that I've been practicing, because I like it and wanted to hear how to play it better. I thought it was by Fernando Sor, but he said no, it was anonymous, and he was sure it had been composed by sentimental priests (but surely in the time of Sor, early 19th century). The music and the lesson were easily worth the 2 euros I left him, and he was happy to have his coffee money at last). Parque Natural in the spectacular mountain forests between Malaga and Ronda. Ronda itself, once the home of an independent taifa, or Moorish kingdom, but conquered in 1485 by Fernando el Catolico (just seven years before he captured Granada and his wife, Isabel, dispatched a Genoese seafarer to go find India). The old part of Ronda is on the east side of the Tajo, one of Spain's great rivers, which here cuts deep through the rock ("tajo" means cut) making the Moorish castle unassailable from the west. We had a room in the Hotel Don Miguel, No. 101 (ask for it if you are in Ronda), on the west bank, with a balcony looking into the rough vertical walls of the gorge, where rock doves (we call them "pigeons" in New York) flutter and swirl and perch easily on the nearly shear rock face. Much more, of course. Yesterday we drove to Arcos de la Frontera, merely an hour from Ronda, the westernmost of the "white towns". This too was for a time an independent little taifa, but it was taken by the Christians under Alfonso el Sabio in 1285 -- a terrible earlier blow to Muslim hegemony. The Muslims by this time were having the same problem as the Visigoths 500 years earlier. They were fighting so much among themselves that they could not unite against the common enemy, whereas the Christians had finally gotten themselves more or less united. So, there went the neighborhood. It was a war between two monotheisms, but one was more monolithic than the other.

Today we plan to see some much more ancient signs of human settlement, cave paintings from long before the arrival even of the Phoenicians, before there was a Spain. Then back to Malaga, and tomorrow we drive through Granada and Almeria up to our destination, the little town of Carboneras.

BTW, somebody seems to have hijacked my e-name. If you get a "call for help" or invitation to play a game from "gefox", that's not me. Hasta luego.