Happy New Year! Another year has come and gone in the world—and also on this blog. In fact, I began writing here more than seven years ago! That being said, I know I have been relatively inactive this past year—I didn’t even write New Year’s Resolutions last year—which I am sorry for. In my defense, this was because I spent so much time this past year working on my new novel. At least I managed to get a few drafts completed.
Even so, one New Year’s Resolution I will make is to re-dedicate myself to this blog. I have missed writing here and, I am sure, at least a couple people (?) have missed it, too. In that spirit, here is a list of trips that I still have to write up:
Yes, it has been a productive travelling year. If 2023 is half as good in this respect, I will be fortunate indeed. I should also add the New York landmarks I visited this past summer:
Hyde Park & Vanderbilt Mansion
Lyndhurst & the Untermeyer Gardens
Olana & Kaaterskill Falls
West Point
Honestly, if I get through all this writing this year, it will be a miracle. But, somehow, I am feeling optimistic.
There are also lots of books I hope to read, much too many to name. Aside from these literary labors, I hope to continue practicing guitar and learning German. A more lucrative job would be nice, too. The most intimidating goal of all, however, is to finally run a full marathon. I took the plunge and signed up for the Madrid marathon in April. Wish me luck.
Well, it is fair to say that this year did not go as well as many of us hoped. Pandemics, it seems, are rather drawn out affairs. Viruses have commendable persistence but atrocious manners. Yet books may be enjoyed in even the most trying times.
The most important event of my reading life this year was the publication of my own book, Their Solitary Way. I was extremely grateful for the support of many readers on this site—proving, once again, that this community is one of the bright spots of the internet. Indeed, the experience was so gratifying that I soon began work on another novel (this one hopefully a bit more readable), which has occupied a good deal of my attention lately. If anyone asks, this is my excuse for reading and interacting a bit less on Goodreads these past few months.
But on to the books! Two of my absolute favorite books of the year were about birds. Sibley’s What It’s Like to Be a Bird is a beautifully illustrated compendium of curious bird facts, while Ackerman’s The Bird Way is an exploration of the most extreme bird adaptations. Both books brought home to me how absolutely ignorant I was of our feathered companions, and what wonderfully interesting organisms they are. All this has not, however, been enough to motivate me to become a bonafide birder. You have to wake up too early.
One major theme this year has been my attempt to learn about Asia (another subject I knew very little about). This led me to read a history of India and to listen to lecture series on China and Japan. I also took a crack at some literature, reading Basho’s travel sketches, Babur’s autobiography, and an abridged version of The Ramayana. I remain both eager to learn more and embarrassed at how little I know.
Apart from my novel, one major event was turning 30. To commemorate this milestone, I read Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade, which convinced me that I am a lost cause. I followed this up with a book about aging, Younger Next Year, which essentially said that the secret to a long, healthy life is lots of exercise. This redoubled my commitment to running, and led me to read a couple books by the sports writer, Matt Fitzgerald. Several races later, however, I wonder if all this running isn’t more unpleasant than just letting my body fall apart the natural way.
Throughout high school and college, I was an avid consumer (and occasional producer) of music. This habit fell by the wayside when I moved to Spain, crowded out by other interests. But this year music made a grand return. I became a member of the royal opera house, and signed up for flamenco guitar classes at an academy. Aiding me in this venture were Juan Martin’s excellent instructional volume on guitar technique, and Robert Greenberg’s lecture series on opera appreciation. I also tackled Paul Berliner’s monumental Thinking in Jazz, which convinced me that I am never going to be a jazz musician. (A career as an opera singer is still a possibility.)
Another book category this year has been—for lack of anything more precise—depressing and horrifying events. The four books I read about the September 11 attacks (inspired by the twenty-year anniversary) all fall neatly into this bin, as does Bartolomé de las Casas’s book about the genocide of the native peoples of the Americas, Max Hastings’s book about the Vietnam War, and—most chilling of all—Lawrence Rees’s book about Auschwitz. History is, apparently, inexhaustible in atrocities.
Thankfully we have fiction to distract us. My favorite novel of this year may have been Corazón tan blanco, by Javier Marías. Other honorable mentions are Carl Sagan’s Contact, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Forster’s A Room with a View, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Woolf’s Orlando, Alas’s La Regenta, Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy (though it is somewhere between a novel and an autobiography). And I cannot neglect to mention Flannery O’Connor, whose collection of short stories were easily among the best books I read this year.
I finished many other books, of course, though they seem rather random in retrospect. This includes a virtual class on photography (I think I improved), a book about trees, one about oranges, one about the intestines, and one about a whale attack. The only “serious” philosophy book I read was Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception—and I remain phenomenologically unperceptive. More enlightening was Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. which convinced me that, perhaps, the meaning of life might be found in my refrigerator after all.
I end this year merely hoping that life throws many more interesting books my way, and that I have the time, the patience, and the wisdom to let myself get lost in their pages. Oh, and if I can get this next novel finished, too, that would be nice.
The blog Madrid No Frills is an institution among the city’s anglophone community. Its author, Leah Pattem, has been writing about the live of the city for many years now—starting with the titular “no frills” bars, and then branching off to cover innumerable under-reported facets of the city. Leah was recently kind enough to publish a contribution of mine, about the Panteón de Hombres Ilustres, a mausoleum of noteworthy politicians who, strangely, have been mostly forgotten. Here is the link.
I am excited to announce that, at long last, my philosophical novel has been published and is nowavailable!
I wrote this book about six years ago—before I even moved to Spain—but I have been steadily working on it since. A philosophical novel with dubious commercial prospects, it took a while before I could find a publisher willing to release it. Thankfully, Adelaide Books agreed, and turned my little project into a reality.
In short, if you have ever read one of my reviews and thought “Boy, I wish that lasted three hundred more pages!” then have I got good news for you—you can! But be advised: I wrote this book when I was working under the combined influence of Marcel Proust and Ludwig Wittgenstein. While I would not dare compare my poor novel to their works, it does suffer from the attempt to emulate them.
In any case, to repeat the novel’s acknowledgments: “I am thankful to be part of such a wonderful online community of readers, and indebted to many members for helping me learn and grow.” It is no exageration to say that this book would never have been written, much less published, without Goodreads and the readers of this blog. So thank you once again.
(Ebook versions will soon be available across various platforms. I have linked to the publisher’s website and Amazon above.)
My best and oldest friend, Oscar Desiderio, has recently embarked on a new project—the Knowledge Daddies—along with two of his comedian buddies, Sean Barry and Andrew Steiner. The three of them interview others about skills they have, and then try to learn these skills themselves. Recently, I have been flattered to be interviewed myself about my upcoming novel.
The interview is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can follow the Knowledge Daddies on Facebook and Instagram. I believe they will be releasing some video episodes of their online series shortly. In the meantime, enjoy the interview!
Needless to say, 2020 was not an ideal year to be accomplishing goals out in the real world. But in my blog world, it was not so bad. I read a lot of good books, wrote a fair bit, and even succeeding in publishing a short story. Best of all, my novel is set to be released in February!
Even though I did not do much traveling this year, I still have a fair backlog of destinations to cover. Here’s the short list:
Aside from this, my major goal of 2021 is to finish at least a couple drafts of the novel I am currently working on, with maybe a few short stories thrown in. In an ideal world, I will also finally wrap up Don Bigote and continue with my Quotes & Commentary, two long-stalled projects.
Apart from that, I am grateful simply to have survived intact. My social life got narrower but deeper. I did not exercise as much as I wanted to, but I did improve as a cook. I learned a great deal, though not what I planned to learn. There are now so many books I want to read—about history, science, math, politics, music, art—that I cannot even make a list. But I have come to the conclusion that one must always have too many books to realistically read. Life is too dreadful otherwise.
With a new man (and woman) in the White House, and several effective vaccines, I am optimistic about this coming year. Cheers to that!
Back in June, I was interviewed for the radio station Santa María de Toledo. The host, Teresa Martín Tadeo, apparently enjoyed the interview enough to ask me to do another one. This time we talked about Thanksgiving traditions (the holiday isn’t celebrated here, so Spaniards are always curious), as well as the recent elections. I hope you enjoy!
One of my short stories was published in the latest edition of Writer’s Block. You can find the entire issue in pdf form by following this link. My story is on page 30.
This morning my coworker, Erika, and I were interviewed for a local Spanish radio station, Santa María de Toledo, about being an English teacher in Spain. I was very nervous, since the interview was in Spanish, and at times I think I didn’t properly understand the questions. But, feel free to take a listen
As I mentioned in my last podcast, it’s pretty hard to do a podcast about Spanish life when everything has been turned upside down. Normally I take inspiration from what I can see in any given week, or from a recent trip. But I’ve just been seeing the inside of my apartment and, occasionally, of the nearby grocery stores. However, I can’t leave this podcast season incomplete. After all, I just have one episode to go to make a nice, round, even twenty episodes. And since it’s hard to talk about day-to-day Spanish life during the coronavirus times, I thought it would be good to revisit the last time in Spain’s history when daily life was so completely turned upside down.
I’m talking, of course, about the Civil War of 1936-39. Of course, in this podcast I can’t hope to do a real thorough history of this war. If you want that, there are plenty of great books on the market. If I tried to even list the major writers on the war, I’d be here all night. In fact, the Spanish Civil War is only behind World War II in the number of books dedicated to the subject. That is pretty crazy, considering that far more people died in World War I or even the Vietnam War. But the conflict has an enduring fascination, for quite a few reasons.
So here’s the basic background. Spain came out of the 19th century in pretty bad shape. The Napoleonic invasions, in the early 1800s, successfully introduced the idea of constitutional government into the country. After that, things were never quite the same for the Spanish monarchy. There were tensions everywhere: between the monarchy and the church, between the church and the people, between advocates for different branches of the royal family, between the rich and the poor, between liberals, monarchists, carlists, and anarchists, and that’s just the beginning. Spain was steadily losing its overseas colonies, a process that ended in the humiliating defeat in the Spanish-American war in 1898, when the decadence of Spain’s power finally sunk in for a lot of people.
In the early 20th century, Spain was economically backward. Industrialization had come late to the country, and for the most part hadn’t come at all. Spain was still mostly agricultural. Not only that, but the country was highly decentralized, as it is now. Each region had its own organization, its own politics, and many regions had their own languages. In the places where industrialization had taken hold, like in Barcelona and Asturias, organized labor had become a powerful force. Meanwhile, in an attempt to get rid of the corrupt and inefficient government, Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power in a military coup in 1923. (Spain has had a lot of military coups.) He ruled for about seven years, until he too had to renounce power. By then there was popular support for democracy. The king absconded, and the Second Republic was born.
The Second Republic survived for five tense years, 1931 to 1936. As you can imagine, democratic government didn’t exactly heal the rifts in Spanish society. Political tensions spilled into violence all too often. There were street fights, riots, brutality between bosses and workers, and even a violent uprising in Asturias (which was put down by Franco). Basically nobody was satisfied. There were conservative parties, fascist parties, liberal parties, and anarchists and socialists who thought the entire system was broken—which it undoubtedly was. An unsteady and ineffective center-left coalition was in control in 1936. But that was just the beginning.
The military had secretly begun planning an uprising to seize control, as they had done many times in the past. The spark that set off the conflict was the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo, a conservative politician, who was killed by the bodyguards of the socialist party leader. Shortly thereafter, all around the country, military units attempted to seize control. If the plan had gone perfectly, there would have been no war. But it didn’t go as plan—at least not everywhere. In the weeks following the start of the uprising, on July 17, the rebel forces controlled about a third of the country. This included most of Spain’s north, a lot of the center, and a pocket of the southern coast. The government maintained control of Madrid, as well as the prosperous eastern coast—including Valencia and Barcelona.
At this point, the government didn’t seem to be in such a bad position. After all, they had more fighting men. They had the big cities and the big factories. They had the money. Most of the areas that the rebels conquered had a low population density and were mainly agricultural. If no outside party had gotten involved, then I think it fairly probable that the rebellion would have been defeated. But of course that was not to be. Spain, instead, became the laboratory of Europe, where all of the newly radical ideologies came to clash for the first time.
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany came to the aide of the rebels, while Stalin’s Soviet Russia offered supplies to the government forces. The rest of the world’s governments, however, wanted no part in the conflict. They were understandably wary of being dragged into another world war, after the terrible experience of the last one (though of course they couldn’t avoid it in the end). So England, France, and the United States signed a non-intervention pact, which forbid them to give or even to sell weapons to the Spanish government.
Meanwhile, people from all over the world began to pour into the country. There were lots of Italian and German soldiers, of course. (My girlfriend’s grandfather was one of these Italian soldiers, which is why she has an Italian last name.) On the Republican side, there were volunteers from all over—Ireland, England, the United States, France, and even some Germans and Italians. For the most part, these were inexperienced, idealistic young men who wanted a chance to fight against fasicsm. George Orwell was one of them. They formed the famous International Brigades.
Needless to say, the idealism and heroism of young volunteers wasn’t enough to stop German tanks and fighter planes and bombs. Simply put, the Republic soon found itself outgunned. Meanwhile, the organization of the rebel side soon consolidated under Francisco Franco, who was relatively young at the time, but who made a name for himself by leading the crack African troops in Spain’s wars to suppress its colonial uprisings in North Africa. (In fact, Franco had been sent to the Canary Islands right before the war, but he managed to return with his North African troops.) The Republican side, on the other hand, did not consolidate so easily. There were many different left-wing parties which had their own organizations, and which often did not agree. When George Orwell finally fled Spain, it wasn’t from the fascists, but from the Stalinists which had seized control in Barcelona.
In a series of bloody battles, the rebel forces gradually wore down the Republicans. Life for the civilian population had also taken a dark turn. There were summary executions on both sides of the lines. Neighbors denounced neighbors, and people were taken from their houses, shot, and buried in anonymous graves. The famous poet, Federico García Lorca, was killed, as well as countless others. To this day, Spain is the country with the most mass graves in the world, after Cambodia. Hundreds of thousands still remain buried across the country, many still undiscovered.
To make a very long and sad story short, the rebels won. Franco seized power in 1939, and he didn’t give it up until his death in 1975. His rule effectively kept the country poor and backward for another thirty years. To this day, the people who grew up in the opening years of his reign—people who are senior citizens now—are very noticeably shorter than their children and grandchildren, largely because of the widespread malnutrition in those years. After Franco’s very timely demise, Spain did finally make the transition to democracy, in no small part thanks to King Juan Carlos I, whom Franco had appointed as his successor. The Spanish constitution was voted into being in 1978, thus inaugurating modern Spain.
As you can see, Spain has historically had a lot of tensions running through it. And the same is true today. Spain still has regional tensions, most notably in Catalonia and the Basque Country. And it is still difficult to talk about the Civil War. Franco’s Spain didn’t end that long ago. Many people alive remember it well. Some people actively supported it. There are still living veterans of the Spanish Civil War, on both sides. In any case, Civil Wars are just inherently painful—the sense of betrayal and distrust is everywhere. Even though America’s Civil War happened a long time before Spain’s, it still causes controversy.It will be interesting to see how this current crisis affects Spain. Maybe nothing will really change, and we’ll all go back to normal. Maybe it will strengthen xenophobia and the populist right party, Vox. Or maybe it will engender a new sense of solidarity and unity in its citizens. I really have no idea. Spanish politics, as ever, are difficult to predict. But Spanish culture is a different matter. Spanish culture managed to emerge from a century of conflict, a bloody civil war, and a repressive dictatorship, and I know that Spanish culture will emerge from this crisis, too. It’s only a matter of time.
Lotz in Translation 