Category Archives: bones

On starting over

Posted on by

As someone who works in education, for most of my life the end of August and the beginning of September has been about starting over as the new education year begins. I associate the dog days of August with back to school specials, the weird NFL pre-season, and a new school year. The students have come back to campus and today was the second day of move-in for those living in the dorms. All of this means starting over, especially for the first-year students who just three short months ago were the top dogs in their respective high schools. Now they are starting over as first-year fish. They are frightened, excited, confused, lonesome, lost, and out of their element. Their lives as high school students are over, their childhoods are ending, quickly, so they are starting over. Perhaps the only thing that never changes in life is change itself. We get used to a situation, a neighborhood, a job, a subway system, a car, a home, a relationship, and then something happens. We graduate, move to a new city, someone retires, a car breaks down, a new job comes along, a marriage, a divorce, a death, and we are forced to start over and our world is turned upside down and nothing seems normal, all of our recognizable cultural and social markers disappear. Different people react differently to starting over. For some, starting over is a welcome relief from their past and they greet starting over with open arms–they can put a tough past behind them, rebuild their personal identity, leave their old baggage on the curb. Others, however, are forced to start over under dire circumstances, facing life alone, single, without parents or boyfriend or wife or whoever might have been their personal support system. For still others, starting over is a tragedy, an enormous fiasco, a complete collapse, a boulevard of shattered dreams. Some people throw in the towel, give up, fold, quit, stop caring. Both stability and continuity are illusory and unrealistic in our fragmented, discontinuous, and chaotic world. For our first-year students, this is probably the first time they are facing life out on their own away from their parents and siblings–they are starting over. When I came to my current job over twenty years ago, I had to start over. Two decades have flown by, and I am very comfortable with both job and city, although I must say that Texas keeps my nerves rather rattled. Starting over–the race, the day, the job, the novel–is a mixed bag of emotions, experiences, stumbles, false starts, stalled plans, wrong turns, detours, stops, starts, unplanned surprises. Nothing is ever what we plan it to be, nothing is ever what it seems to be. In the end, our best laid plans go for naught, and for one reason or another, we end up starting over. This is the normal state of affairs. We have to start over. Starting over is the natural progression of how life cycles us through our routines, year in and year out. I find the process of starting over to be both liberating and refreshing. The fact that we all have to start over is one of those cold facts of life that we all know, but that we frequently choose to ignore.

On starting over

Posted on by

As someone who works in education, for most of my life the end of August and the beginning of September has been about starting over as the new education year begins. I associate the dog days of August with back to school specials, the weird NFL pre-season, and a new school year. The students have come back to campus and today was the second day of move-in for those living in the dorms. All of this means starting over, especially for the first-year students who just three short months ago were the top dogs in their respective high schools. Now they are starting over as first-year fish. They are frightened, excited, confused, lonesome, lost, and out of their element. Their lives as high school students are over, their childhoods are ending, quickly, so they are starting over. Perhaps the only thing that never changes in life is change itself. We get used to a situation, a neighborhood, a job, a subway system, a car, a home, a relationship, and then something happens. We graduate, move to a new city, someone retires, a car breaks down, a new job comes along, a marriage, a divorce, a death, and we are forced to start over and our world is turned upside down and nothing seems normal, all of our recognizable cultural and social markers disappear. Different people react differently to starting over. For some, starting over is a welcome relief from their past and they greet starting over with open arms–they can put a tough past behind them, rebuild their personal identity, leave their old baggage on the curb. Others, however, are forced to start over under dire circumstances, facing life alone, single, without parents or boyfriend or wife or whoever might have been their personal support system. For still others, starting over is a tragedy, an enormous fiasco, a complete collapse, a boulevard of shattered dreams. Some people throw in the towel, give up, fold, quit, stop caring. Both stability and continuity are illusory and unrealistic in our fragmented, discontinuous, and chaotic world. For our first-year students, this is probably the first time they are facing life out on their own away from their parents and siblings–they are starting over. When I came to my current job over twenty years ago, I had to start over. Two decades have flown by, and I am very comfortable with both job and city, although I must say that Texas keeps my nerves rather rattled. Starting over–the race, the day, the job, the novel–is a mixed bag of emotions, experiences, stumbles, false starts, stalled plans, wrong turns, detours, stops, starts, unplanned surprises. Nothing is ever what we plan it to be, nothing is ever what it seems to be. In the end, our best laid plans go for naught, and for one reason or another, we end up starting over. This is the normal state of affairs. We have to start over. Starting over is the natural progression of how life cycles us through our routines, year in and year out. I find the process of starting over to be both liberating and refreshing. The fact that we all have to start over is one of those cold facts of life that we all know, but that we frequently choose to ignore.

On things under the fridge

Posted on by

Have you ever noticed that if you drop something on the floor anywhere near the fridge, it scoots under the fridge as if drawn by mysterious forces of malevolent magnetism? I have dropped bottle caps, coins, walnuts, cranberries, clothes pins, pens, bottle opener, batteries, a spoon, half box of spaghetti, and a partridge in a pear tree. At first, you completely deny that the lost object has gone under the fridge and you look for it elsewhere. Once you are willing to recognize the inevitable, you start to get down on your hands and knees to analyze the exact nature of your problem. If you are lucky, the thing under the fridge will be right there within reach, but this only happens with cherry pits and old political campaign buttons. Your keys are probably under the middle of the fridge, or maybe even toward the back and there is absolutely no chance of sticking the yardstick under there and fishing them out. You look for a flashlight because that will help you figure out that you now must move the fridge if you want your driver’s license back during this century. Even with a yardstick and flashlight, however, you still can’t make out anything very clearly–lots of pipes and wires hanging from the bottom of the fridge that run interference for the missing objects–and the weird bottom-of-the-fridge fuzz doesn’t help at all. Even if you get your wallet back, it will be covered in weird gray fuzz, hair, dirt, and a mouse skeleton. Marbles and pennies will always find their way under the fridge, as will small toy cars, random earrings, the extra key to the cabin, Legos, the cat’s toys, broken glass, and the gas bill. Somethings that go missing under the fridge are gone for years, and so by the time you find them, you have already assimilated their loss and don’t know what to do with your long lost engagement ring, which you thought you lost in Yellowstone National Park. Moving the fridge is, of course, in the end, the only way to solve the problem of retrieving the kid’s teething ring, The second that you propose such an operation, everyone who could help suddenly has something important to do such as take a nap. Moving the fridge does pose a moral dilemma because you will always find lots of stuff that you never even suspected was lost. What’s worse is finding other people’s stuff, the dead bodies of every insect that ever crawled under there, or gobs of unidentifiable goo. Finding goo is bad enough, but cleaning up goo is worse. The things under the fridge are a tribute to our laziness and our clumsiness. I have frequently given up things that have dropped under the fridge because I won’t move the fridge and I really don’t want to know what is under there at any given time. Finding a half-eaten mouse under the fridge is gross, but wondering what ate the mouse is worse. Finding a sock under the fridge is bad, but not recognizing it is worse. Wondering how a wrench you don’t own got under the fridge is bad, but adding it to your tool collection is wonderful. I dropped a pen on the floor this afternoon and cap shot under the fridge. I’m still wondering what I should do to get it back.

On things under the fridge

Posted on by

Have you ever noticed that if you drop something on the floor anywhere near the fridge, it scoots under the fridge as if drawn by mysterious forces of malevolent magnetism? I have dropped bottle caps, coins, walnuts, cranberries, clothes pins, pens, bottle opener, batteries, a spoon, half box of spaghetti, and a partridge in a pear tree. At first, you completely deny that the lost object has gone under the fridge and you look for it elsewhere. Once you are willing to recognize the inevitable, you start to get down on your hands and knees to analyze the exact nature of your problem. If you are lucky, the thing under the fridge will be right there within reach, but this only happens with cherry pits and old political campaign buttons. Your keys are probably under the middle of the fridge, or maybe even toward the back and there is absolutely no chance of sticking the yardstick under there and fishing them out. You look for a flashlight because that will help you figure out that you now must move the fridge if you want your driver’s license back during this century. Even with a yardstick and flashlight, however, you still can’t make out anything very clearly–lots of pipes and wires hanging from the bottom of the fridge that run interference for the missing objects–and the weird bottom-of-the-fridge fuzz doesn’t help at all. Even if you get your wallet back, it will be covered in weird gray fuzz, hair, dirt, and a mouse skeleton. Marbles and pennies will always find their way under the fridge, as will small toy cars, random earrings, the extra key to the cabin, Legos, the cat’s toys, broken glass, and the gas bill. Somethings that go missing under the fridge are gone for years, and so by the time you find them, you have already assimilated their loss and don’t know what to do with your long lost engagement ring, which you thought you lost in Yellowstone National Park. Moving the fridge is, of course, in the end, the only way to solve the problem of retrieving the kid’s teething ring, The second that you propose such an operation, everyone who could help suddenly has something important to do such as take a nap. Moving the fridge does pose a moral dilemma because you will always find lots of stuff that you never even suspected was lost. What’s worse is finding other people’s stuff, the dead bodies of every insect that ever crawled under there, or gobs of unidentifiable goo. Finding goo is bad enough, but cleaning up goo is worse. The things under the fridge are a tribute to our laziness and our clumsiness. I have frequently given up things that have dropped under the fridge because I won’t move the fridge and I really don’t want to know what is under there at any given time. Finding a half-eaten mouse under the fridge is gross, but wondering what ate the mouse is worse. Finding a sock under the fridge is bad, but not recognizing it is worse. Wondering how a wrench you don’t own got under the fridge is bad, but adding it to your tool collection is wonderful. I dropped a pen on the floor this afternoon and cap shot under the fridge. I’m still wondering what I should do to get it back.

On the Maltese Falcon

Posted on by

Like most people, I always thought that the black bird was just a figment of a mystery writer’s over-active imagination. Granted Bogart’s portrayal of Sam Spade is one of the great acting jobs of the hard-boiled film noire genre coming out of Hollywood in the 1940’s, but it was all fiction, or at least that’s what I thought. The writers of the movie suggested that the falcon was a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V. While doing some research at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in the mid-1980’s, I was reading Andreas Schott’s Hispania Ilustrata (1604), and although there was nothing too unusual about that, I came across a strange footnote that referred to a London publication of 1544 by Theodore Poelmann which made an indirect reference to the Arabic Spaniard Ibn Ben al Godón’s travelogue entitled, أسود الطيور. In that travelogue El Cordobés, as he was nicknamed by his fellow travelers, discusses the will and the final disbursement of the personal effects of Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master. This too-good-to-be-true footnote, which also spoke of a piece of the true cross of Jesus Christ, suggested that among those objects listed in the will was a black-enameled falcon. A copy of the will was supposed to be in a 1499 publication from Valencia by the German printer Juan Párix, Historia universal de los Templarios en la península. I had heard of Párix, but a search of card catalogues (including WorldCat) across the world did not turn up a single reference to this book. Even a few shady sources hinted that the book never existed. It suggested to me that the title was apocryphal, or that the publisher or the title were wrong–maybe the publication date or place were incorrect as well. I let it go. Searching for lost objects or buried treasure was for souls much more adventurous than mine, so I filed my notes and continued my research of medieval necromancy. About a year later, after drinking too much and fighting with someone, I stumbled into an antique shop that specialized in old volumes, incunabula, rare manuscripts, palimpsests, and the like, looking for an illuminated piece of mediavalia that I could frame and hang in my livingroom. I saw Párix’s name long before I realized that this was the book for which I had been looking for more than a year. There were no page numbers, but in an appendix at the end of the book was a copy of Molay’s will with the list of his personal effects. Though the list was rather mundane–a house, horses, dishes–there was an “auem nigri.” It was to be handed over to the Knights Hospitallers. I left the book where it was since I couldn’t afford the fancy price tag, but I never forgot about it. When I went back to buy the book a number of years later, the shop was closed and empty. Several years later, while having lunch with a Spanish history professor in Segovia, he mentioned the black bird as a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V for services rendered. Yet, neither he nor I could connect the one black bird with the other with almost two hundred years between the death of Molay and the gift to the king. My friend, who writes on the history of law in Spain and the Templars, reminded me that the bird never made it to Madrid, probably hijacked off of the coast of Sicily. The ship that would have carried it to Valencia never made it into to port, vanishing with all hands in 1554. All of this suggests a larger mystery of what happened to the “auem nigri,” but in spite of what the movie might suggest, the bird has never turned up and may lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean ocean. Perhaps the writers found reality stranger than fiction, thinking that no one would believe them anyway.

On the Maltese Falcon

Posted on by

Like most people, I always thought that the black bird was just a figment of a mystery writer’s over-active imagination. Granted Bogart’s portrayal of Sam Spade is one of the great acting jobs of the hard-boiled film noire genre coming out of Hollywood in the 1940’s, but it was all fiction, or at least that’s what I thought. The writers of the movie suggested that the falcon was a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V. While doing some research at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in the mid-1980’s, I was reading Andreas Schott’s Hispania Ilustrata (1604), and although there was nothing too unusual about that, I came across a strange footnote that referred to a London publication of 1544 by Theodore Poelmann which made an indirect reference to the Arabic Spaniard Ibn Ben al Godón’s travelogue entitled, أسود الطيور. In that travelogue El Cordobés, as he was nicknamed by his fellow travelers, discusses the will and the final disbursement of the personal effects of Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master. This too-good-to-be-true footnote, which also spoke of a piece of the true cross of Jesus Christ, suggested that among those objects listed in the will was a black-enameled falcon. A copy of the will was supposed to be in a 1499 publication from Valencia by the German printer Juan Párix, Historia universal de los Templarios en la península. I had heard of Párix, but a search of card catalogues (including WorldCat) across the world did not turn up a single reference to this book. Even a few shady sources hinted that the book never existed. It suggested to me that the title was apocryphal, or that the publisher or the title were wrong–maybe the publication date or place were incorrect as well. I let it go. Searching for lost objects or buried treasure was for souls much more adventurous than mine, so I filed my notes and continued my research of medieval necromancy. About a year later, after drinking too much and fighting with someone, I stumbled into an antique shop that specialized in old volumes, incunabula, rare manuscripts, palimpsests, and the like, looking for an illuminated piece of mediavalia that I could frame and hang in my livingroom. I saw Párix’s name long before I realized that this was the book for which I had been looking for more than a year. There were no page numbers, but in an appendix at the end of the book was a copy of Molay’s will with the list of his personal effects. Though the list was rather mundane–a house, horses, dishes–there was an “auem nigri.” It was to be handed over to the Knights Hospitallers. I left the book where it was since I couldn’t afford the fancy price tag, but I never forgot about it. When I went back to buy the book a number of years later, the shop was closed and empty. Several years later, while having lunch with a Spanish history professor in Segovia, he mentioned the black bird as a gift from the Knights of Malta to Spain’s king, Carlos V for services rendered. Yet, neither he nor I could connect the one black bird with the other with almost two hundred years between the death of Molay and the gift to the king. My friend, who writes on the history of law in Spain and the Templars, reminded me that the bird never made it to Madrid, probably hijacked off of the coast of Sicily. The ship that would have carried it to Valencia never made it into to port, vanishing with all hands in 1554. All of this suggests a larger mystery of what happened to the “auem nigri,” but in spite of what the movie might suggest, the bird has never turned up and may lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean ocean. Perhaps the writers found reality stranger than fiction, thinking that no one would believe them anyway.

On the Spanish fighting bulls

Posted on by

There is no figure more iconic in Spanish culture than the fighting bull, all 1,400 pounds of him. When students ask me about Spain, they inevitably also ask if we will be going to a bull fight, the ritual slaughter of one of these brutal animals. Even though the bull is highly recognized, highly iconic, he occupies a very small part of real Spanish culture. Yet bullfighting is such an odd and outrageous spectacle that it has become one of the most recognizable parts of Spain’s image. The fighting bull, a rather savage and brutal species of cattle, are native to Spain and have been bred for centuries for this one purpose: to be killed by a “matador de toros” or torero, armed only with a very sharp sword and his cape. Given the ferocious nature of these animals, bullfighting is an extremely dangerous line of work, and many men have died because of it. The bulls are raised in the distant high pastures of the central, southern, and western mesas that cover most of Spain. Curiously, the cows of the same species are relatively tame in spite of their large fierce appearance. The ranchers that raise these animals begin to cull their herds to the “plaza” when the bulls reach about three years of age and weigh in at about 1,200 to 1,500 pounds. I will skip the exact details of the ritual killing of these animals, ritual slaughter because others have written about it before and done a much better job–Hemingway, for example, in Death in the Afternoon. One might make an argument for the art of bullfighting, the danger, the ballet, the pressure, but I’m not super-impressed. Raising a large animal in order to kill it with a sword seems like animal cruelty, I’m just saying. Others would disagree and say that this is tradition, culture, and passion, but I would suggest that not all traditions, not all bits of culture, are worth saving. I don’t think that Spanish culture is better because of bullfighting, and I don’t think Spanish culture would be missing a whole lot if bullfighting went the way of the Dodo bird. A few old cigar-smoking curmudgeons with raspy voices will be free at five o’clock on any given afternoon, ranchers will have to raise regular beef cattle, and a few skinny guys with good sword skills will have to get real jobs. Still others will argue that it is hypocritical to challenge or criticize bullfighting and then go eat a hamburger. Yes, we slaughter our beef cattle, but it takes but a moment, not the average fifteen minutes that a single bull might last.To idealize bullfighting seems disingenuous, if not outright reckless, turning the ritual slaughter of an animal into a spectacle and business. Since I am not really Spanish, (I hear the murmuring), I just don’t understand either the ritual or the tradition. Perhaps I am just a bleeding-heart, tree-hugging, granola eating liberal that has no guts for a little pain and suffering, and I don’t understand the beauty of the pageantry, the glory and art of the successful bullfighter who runs that sword into the bull’s back. Perhaps I just don’t understand the danger, the challenge, the pain, the athleticism of the entire dark scene–blood, sweat, sand, swords, pink socks, and guys with ponytails. The bull is at the center of an extremely bizarre happening that is almost impossible to describe to the uninitiated. The animals are huge, fast, and dangerous, and the guys trying to kill them are definitely risking their lives, but in the end, I might ask, what’s the point? Prove they are more macho than the animal?

On giants

Posted on by

I am not a giant, but I am intrigued by the idea of giants. Certainly, I am not talking just about tall people. I perceive that there was a time when giants walked the earth. Giants appear in many literary venues from the ancient world forward. The fact that there are no giants today should not influence our ideas about the giants of the past. People such as Abe Lincoln, were, of course, giants, but one would be hard-pressed to find a giant in the twentieth century. A few basketball players are the great grandsons of previous giants, but they are only a ghost of what giants of the past really were. Hagrid is a mythical small giant in a literary work, but the author modeled him after the giants of the past. The giants of the past became extinct because the world became smaller with fewer unknown spaces and no land left to explore. We know giants have walked the earth for centuries, and the legendary story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” illustrates and testifies to the veracity of giant narratives and the existence of real giants. Giants were also a curse for Odysseus as he fought his way home. The Greeks and Romans both erected “giant” statues in honor of these larger than life characters. Why the giants disappeared, leaving traces in multiple legends and myths in multiple and varied cultures is a profound mystery. I think they left because their very existence has always been challenged by the rise of the machines and the accompanying technology. I would suggest that the digital age is not compatible with giant ideology, history, or sociology. As giants have disappeared from the earth, they have also taken with them their whimsy, their magic, leaving the world an empty place full of rational empiricists who deny the mere existence of giants, but who are also incapable of imagining giants at all, rejecting them as figments of overactive imaginations, nightmares, and hallucinogenic drugs. “Where are the bones of the giants?” they ask incredulously. They need proof as if the giants ever asked for proof of the existence of rational empiricists. This is the great irony of the giants–their lives on earth never depended on mere mortals. And as they have gone, victims of rationalism and empiricism, destroyed imaginations and uninventive minds, we puny humans long for the ethos of their magic, their greatness, their larger than life lives. We are forever condemned to a mundane giantless reality, filled with routine, noise, hunger, and mediocrity. Our lack of imaginations is compounded by the endless mindlessness of television, bad cinema, and boring pop music. Our own inability to dream of giants limits our horizons and kills our future. The scoffers, the naysayers, the logical will ever make arguments against the existence of giants, which is just what the giants want–to live free in their own world, untethered by the bonds of everyday life.

On giants

Posted on by

I am not a giant, but I am intrigued by the idea of giants. Certainly, I am not talking just about tall people. I perceive that there was a time when giants walked the earth. Giants appear in many literary venues from the ancient world forward. The fact that there are no giants today should not influence our ideas about the giants of the past. People such as Abe Lincoln, were, of course, giants, but one would be hard-pressed to find a giant in the twentieth century. A few basketball players are the great grandsons of previous giants, but they are only a ghost of what giants of the past really were. Hagrid is a mythical small giant in a literary work, but the author modeled him after the giants of the past. The giants of the past became extinct because the world became smaller with fewer unknown spaces and no land left to explore. We know giants have walked the earth for centuries, and the legendary story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” illustrates and testifies to the veracity of giant narratives and the existence of real giants. Giants were also a curse for Odysseus as he fought his way home. The Greeks and Romans both erected “giant” statues in honor of these larger than life characters. Why the giants disappeared, leaving traces in multiple legends and myths in multiple and varied cultures is a profound mystery. I think they left because their very existence has always been challenged by the rise of the machines and the accompanying technology. I would suggest that the digital age is not compatible with giant ideology, history, or sociology. As giants have disappeared from the earth, they have also taken with them their whimsy, their magic, leaving the world an empty place full of rational empiricists who deny the mere existence of giants, but who are also incapable of imagining giants at all, rejecting them as figments of overactive imaginations, nightmares, and hallucinogenic drugs. “Where are the bones of the giants?” they ask incredulously. They need proof as if the giants ever asked for proof of the existence of rational empiricists. This is the great irony of the giants–their lives on earth never depended on mere mortals. And as they have gone, victims of rationalism and empiricism, destroyed imaginations and uninventive minds, we puny humans long for the ethos of their magic, their greatness, their larger than life lives. We are forever condemned to a mundane giantless reality, filled with routine, noise, hunger, and mediocrity. Our lack of imaginations is compounded by the endless mindlessness of television, bad cinema, and boring pop music. Our own inability to dream of giants limits our horizons and kills our future. The scoffers, the naysayers, the logical will ever make arguments against the existence of giants, which is just what the giants want–to live free in their own world, untethered by the bonds of everyday life.

On diaspora

Posted on by

Though I have lived far from home, spoken a language I had to learn, eaten strange food, missed my family, I have never been forced to leave my homeland never to return, yet for many people, it has happened more than once, and it continues to be the their “pan de cada día” or their everyday experience. Diaspora is about the scattering of a people, a forced exile, a leaving behind, a tragedy, a disaster. Diaspora has many causes–wars, revolutions, racial cleansing, religious unity, human cruelty, the settling of old scores, scapegoating–but any is as good as none at all if you don’t need one. The cruelty of the diaspora experience is not necessarily about change, but about loss–of tradition, of customs, of language, of an enduring mental landscape that has been left behind. The cruelty of nostalgia resides in the persistence of memory, of families, of lives, of art, of songs, of celebrations. Diaspora is about a separation from what is comfortable, what is expected, happiness, joy, friends, births, weddings, deaths. As a group of people fan out to find new homes, they meet the challenge of finding all the rest of the world already occupied, and if they have been forced to leave one place, they will probably be less than welcome wherever they go. Those who suffer diaspora, forced to leave their homes again and again, will eventually become errant and drifting, unwilling to call anywhere home. Eventually, after being rejected enough, you have an entire group of people with nothing to lose, wandering the world in search of a home. All people want a place to call their home. This is a basic human desire, to have a family and a job and a roof over our heads and not have to move every few years. Diaspora breaks up families, history and tradition are forgotten, identity becomes variable, languages are both forgotten and learned, The dead are left behind, forgotten in unattended graves. Possessions, the relics of tradition, must be packed and transported or left behind. Wealth and land are left behind, lost forever. Perhaps new beginnings in new places can be a good thing as it has been for immigrants around the world, but the nostalgia for what has been lost is an ethos that has come to be emblematic of the human condition. In many ways, diaspora is the human condition.