May 2012 Archives
Letter from Seville II: The Endless City
Many friends, both old friends at home and new friends here in Seville, have asked if we'll be traveling around Spain during our time here. We could; five weeks is a long time, and my teaching schedule would permit quick overnight trips to other cities, especially with the good rail system Spain has. We could go to Madrid, Córdoba, Barcelona... A few people who know me well have asked, too, if we plan to trek up to Galicia, to see the province where my grandfather was born, the place from where my family name comes.
But we decided, after much debate, to stay here in Seville. To dwell. To live here, as much as such a thing is possible. To walk to work, to walk to the market, to cook, to wander, to read on the patio, to relax into the pace of life--to relax, period. (And honestly, as an adoptee whose adopted family was itself difficult and fractured, I'm tired of "roots trips" that, while rewarding, are always painful, intense, and ambiguous, leading to more questions, more quandaries of identity and belonging. I've done enough of those for a while.)
So we decided to stay here. And rather than feeling restrictive, this dwelling--I'm happy to report, in our final week here--has felt liberatory, fascinating, delightful.
Which is due, I think, in no small part to the fact that Seville is an endless city.
I don't mean endless in the sense of size, of sheer measurable quantity; the city proper can be circumnavigated in a single long walk.
Rather, it's endless in terms of those layers I wrote about last time: the palimpsest of history, the Iberians, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors, the Reconquista--the way that, over the many centuries, tiny crooked streets no wider than your outstretched arms have been wedged in among the monasteries and palaces and churches and ordinary houses of ordinary working people. You round a corner, and suddenly there's a tiny store with handmade shoes, or silk bags, or fountain pens and ink, or the exquisite ceramics for which Seville (especially Triana) is known. Tiny tapas bars. Tiny coffee shops. A vast hospital for elderly and ailing priests, with a beautiful sunken fountain in the center of its courtyard. Seville is dense, layered, thicketed with surprises. Even after four weeks of walking, walking, walking, we keep noticing alleys we haven't yet walked down, and when we do, lo and behold: three ancient Roman columns.
Seville is also home to many lush public gardens, including one of world's great city parks, Parque Maria Luisa, which itself is full of endless surprises. Within its grounds are, among other things, two fine museums, rose gardens, the vast showpiece La Plaza de España, and a fountain complex modeled upon the Alhambra. And trees! Huge magnolia trees thick as banyans, towering much higher than magnolias we've seen in Louisiana. Palm trees. Pergolas covered with wisteria. Statues of famous local figures, including Maria Luisa herself, who donated
the grounds, which used to belong privately to the San Telmo palace, to
the city of Seville in the 1890s. Long allées of jacaranda trees, their electric blue blossoms scattered on the sandy soil beneath.
We walk or go running in the park every day, among the peacocks and pigeons and horse-drawn carriages and local Sevillanos out for their evening strolls. It's a beautiful thing to do. Later, we head out for tapas, wine, and cold Cruzcampo, to which words cannot do justice. Our nights often end late at the lit cathedral, watching the swallows dart and swoop through the darkness.
So our time here, all of it spent on foot, has not been dull. And of course I've had the pleasure of teaching, as well. My students are lovely! Their work is so intriguing and well done. (My favorite student title thus far: "THE CONCEPTION OF MARTÍN ZARZA MINO IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR OF THE BLANK PAGE MADE UP OF SWEET SWEET CARAMEL.") The work is wonderfully varied: they're writing cryptic poems, and stories with multiple first-person narrators, classic tales, and thoroughly modern realistic pieces about urban alienation. They're fearless! Moreover, given that English is a second language for all of them, they're impressively sophisticated in our discussions, tossing about terms like postmodern and metafiction as lightly as jacaranda blossoms.
They've been on strike since last week, protesting the jump in tuition that the government has announced. (Our class has been meeting anyway, at the students' request.) To study is a right, not a privilege, their banners declare.
The BBC reports that tuition here will go up by 25%.* Individual students, meanwhile, have told me that their own particular bills will double. At the same time, professors have been told they'll have to teach 30% more next year, after just having received their second recent pay cut. And unemployment here is already at 25%. It's a difficult, volatile situation. We've seen several demonstrations and marches out on our walks.
The final thing that's kept me busy is the editing of my second novel. My editor was kind enough to send her edits here to Spain, so I've been working steadily on those. My deadline is the end of June.
I'm lucky. I've always been lucky with editors, and my St. Martin's editor's engagement with this manuscript was thorough, thoughtful, and smart. I couldn't ask for a more attentive, invested reader. She makes great suggestions, suggestions that actually push the manuscript closer toward what it wants to be (which is not always the same thing as what I want it to be). And the HH, who's recently gone on a Raymond Chandler binge, is reading it now, too, and making great suggestions as well. Here's hoping it turns out to be an even better book than Hell or High Water. Revising it on our beautiful patio, I hope, will make a difference.
Alas, however endless Seville may be, it's coming too quickly to an end for us. A week from now, we'll be over the Atlantic, missing our new friends and my new students, our minds dappled with sol y sombra, and already trying to figure out ways to make our life at home more filled with the delicias we found here.
*Many thanks to Amelia Montes for the link to the story!
But we decided, after much debate, to stay here in Seville. To dwell. To live here, as much as such a thing is possible. To walk to work, to walk to the market, to cook, to wander, to read on the patio, to relax into the pace of life--to relax, period. (And honestly, as an adoptee whose adopted family was itself difficult and fractured, I'm tired of "roots trips" that, while rewarding, are always painful, intense, and ambiguous, leading to more questions, more quandaries of identity and belonging. I've done enough of those for a while.)
So we decided to stay here. And rather than feeling restrictive, this dwelling--I'm happy to report, in our final week here--has felt liberatory, fascinating, delightful.
Which is due, I think, in no small part to the fact that Seville is an endless city.
I don't mean endless in the sense of size, of sheer measurable quantity; the city proper can be circumnavigated in a single long walk.
Rather, it's endless in terms of those layers I wrote about last time: the palimpsest of history, the Iberians, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors, the Reconquista--the way that, over the many centuries, tiny crooked streets no wider than your outstretched arms have been wedged in among the monasteries and palaces and churches and ordinary houses of ordinary working people. You round a corner, and suddenly there's a tiny store with handmade shoes, or silk bags, or fountain pens and ink, or the exquisite ceramics for which Seville (especially Triana) is known. Tiny tapas bars. Tiny coffee shops. A vast hospital for elderly and ailing priests, with a beautiful sunken fountain in the center of its courtyard. Seville is dense, layered, thicketed with surprises. Even after four weeks of walking, walking, walking, we keep noticing alleys we haven't yet walked down, and when we do, lo and behold: three ancient Roman columns.
Seville is also home to many lush public gardens, including one of world's great city parks, Parque Maria Luisa, which itself is full of endless surprises. Within its grounds are, among other things, two fine museums, rose gardens, the vast showpiece La Plaza de España, and a fountain complex modeled upon the Alhambra. And trees! Huge magnolia trees thick as banyans, towering much higher than magnolias we've seen in Louisiana. Palm trees. Pergolas covered with wisteria. Statues of famous local figures, including Maria Luisa herself, who donated
the grounds, which used to belong privately to the San Telmo palace, to
the city of Seville in the 1890s. Long allées of jacaranda trees, their electric blue blossoms scattered on the sandy soil beneath. We walk or go running in the park every day, among the peacocks and pigeons and horse-drawn carriages and local Sevillanos out for their evening strolls. It's a beautiful thing to do. Later, we head out for tapas, wine, and cold Cruzcampo, to which words cannot do justice. Our nights often end late at the lit cathedral, watching the swallows dart and swoop through the darkness.
So our time here, all of it spent on foot, has not been dull. And of course I've had the pleasure of teaching, as well. My students are lovely! Their work is so intriguing and well done. (My favorite student title thus far: "THE CONCEPTION OF MARTÍN ZARZA MINO IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR OF THE BLANK PAGE MADE UP OF SWEET SWEET CARAMEL.") The work is wonderfully varied: they're writing cryptic poems, and stories with multiple first-person narrators, classic tales, and thoroughly modern realistic pieces about urban alienation. They're fearless! Moreover, given that English is a second language for all of them, they're impressively sophisticated in our discussions, tossing about terms like postmodern and metafiction as lightly as jacaranda blossoms.
They've been on strike since last week, protesting the jump in tuition that the government has announced. (Our class has been meeting anyway, at the students' request.) To study is a right, not a privilege, their banners declare.
The BBC reports that tuition here will go up by 25%.* Individual students, meanwhile, have told me that their own particular bills will double. At the same time, professors have been told they'll have to teach 30% more next year, after just having received their second recent pay cut. And unemployment here is already at 25%. It's a difficult, volatile situation. We've seen several demonstrations and marches out on our walks.The final thing that's kept me busy is the editing of my second novel. My editor was kind enough to send her edits here to Spain, so I've been working steadily on those. My deadline is the end of June.
I'm lucky. I've always been lucky with editors, and my St. Martin's editor's engagement with this manuscript was thorough, thoughtful, and smart. I couldn't ask for a more attentive, invested reader. She makes great suggestions, suggestions that actually push the manuscript closer toward what it wants to be (which is not always the same thing as what I want it to be). And the HH, who's recently gone on a Raymond Chandler binge, is reading it now, too, and making great suggestions as well. Here's hoping it turns out to be an even better book than Hell or High Water. Revising it on our beautiful patio, I hope, will make a difference.
Alas, however endless Seville may be, it's coming too quickly to an end for us. A week from now, we'll be over the Atlantic, missing our new friends and my new students, our minds dappled with sol y sombra, and already trying to figure out ways to make our life at home more filled with the delicias we found here.*Many thanks to Amelia Montes for the link to the story!
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Letter from Seville
What a layered and beautiful city this is! The early Iberians, the Romans, and the Moors, followed by the Spanish reconquista and the plundered wealth that flowed into Seville from the New World--the history here is extraordinary, and shreds of it are visible everywhere. Palimpsest aficionados, Seville is your city.
The HH and I settled into a lovely little one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old building in the Santa Cruz barrio, the old Jewish quarter. Our landlord is lovely, a man from Malta who settled here almost 30 years ago and whose apartments are filled with books and paintings and fascinating objects from his various studies and travels. Huge vintage posters of Ferias past loom over our little bed and the littler sofa, flamenco ladies with their dazzling eyes and snapping hand gestures and those swirling gowns.... (His shelves are full of books, too, from Virginia Woolf in Spanish to John Le Carré, so I already had the chance to read Le Carré's excellent and suspenseful A Murder of Quality.)
Our two tiled terraces, where we hang our laundry and eat our meals (when we eat at home) have views of the Alcázar, the Spanish royal palace that was previously a Moorish fort. When we sit out there, we can hear doves, the rustle of palm fronds, and guitars being played somewhere down below. An ancient aqueduct runs down the alley that leads to our temporary home.
My walk to work leads me through the Jardines de Murillo, beautiful gardens that edge the palace grounds. Green parrots fly overhead. People walk their dogs. A tall statue of one of Columbus's ships towers in the center. The walkways are paved, the benches are covered with small bright tiles, and the trees are dotted with bright oranges. Lush, lovely, scented--not a bad commute at all.
I'm teaching creative writing at the University of Seville, in a gorgeous old baroque building that was once the Real Fábrica de Tabacos, the Royal Tobacco Factory. It began production in the 1750s.
This is the building:
Three thousand female cigar rollers once worked within its walls; it was the setting for Carmen. Here's a painting of it by Gonzalo Bilbao that the HH and I saw when we walked to the extraordinary Museo de Bellas Artes. (If you ever go to Seville, be sure to visit this museum. Our landlord called it "the second-best museum in Spain.")
According to Bilbao's rendition, the factory looks surprisingly jolly. Today that same hallway is just a hallway, and it was empty when I walked it. The building, though, is filled with statues, fountains, little surprise courtyards, and arches everywhere. For security's sake, it was once surrounded by a deep moat (now empty) and huge iron fences (still there). From the window of my classroom, I can see palm trees. My shared office where I hold office hours has a low, medieval looking wooden door with metal studs all over it. It's all rather a bit more lush and romantic and mysterious than I'm used to.
My students are fascinating. They're majoring in philosophy, medicine, psychology, and advertising--yet they all signed up to take a course in publishing creative writing in English. Very ambitious! They've been working hard so far, and I'm excited for them.
Things are happening with Hell or High Water--the French rights sold, a starred review in Booklist, and so on--but it all seems very far away at the moment--which may be the very healthiest way to prepare for a book launch that I've ever heard of. I'm working on the sequel while I'm here, too, but more on that later. For now, I'm focusing on getting lost and wandering, trying tapas, sampling vino, and enjoying the time-honored ritual of siesta--which, dear reader, I highly recommend.
The HH and I settled into a lovely little one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old building in the Santa Cruz barrio, the old Jewish quarter. Our landlord is lovely, a man from Malta who settled here almost 30 years ago and whose apartments are filled with books and paintings and fascinating objects from his various studies and travels. Huge vintage posters of Ferias past loom over our little bed and the littler sofa, flamenco ladies with their dazzling eyes and snapping hand gestures and those swirling gowns.... (His shelves are full of books, too, from Virginia Woolf in Spanish to John Le Carré, so I already had the chance to read Le Carré's excellent and suspenseful A Murder of Quality.)
Our two tiled terraces, where we hang our laundry and eat our meals (when we eat at home) have views of the Alcázar, the Spanish royal palace that was previously a Moorish fort. When we sit out there, we can hear doves, the rustle of palm fronds, and guitars being played somewhere down below. An ancient aqueduct runs down the alley that leads to our temporary home.
My walk to work leads me through the Jardines de Murillo, beautiful gardens that edge the palace grounds. Green parrots fly overhead. People walk their dogs. A tall statue of one of Columbus's ships towers in the center. The walkways are paved, the benches are covered with small bright tiles, and the trees are dotted with bright oranges. Lush, lovely, scented--not a bad commute at all.
I'm teaching creative writing at the University of Seville, in a gorgeous old baroque building that was once the Real Fábrica de Tabacos, the Royal Tobacco Factory. It began production in the 1750s.
This is the building:
Three thousand female cigar rollers once worked within its walls; it was the setting for Carmen. Here's a painting of it by Gonzalo Bilbao that the HH and I saw when we walked to the extraordinary Museo de Bellas Artes. (If you ever go to Seville, be sure to visit this museum. Our landlord called it "the second-best museum in Spain.")
According to Bilbao's rendition, the factory looks surprisingly jolly. Today that same hallway is just a hallway, and it was empty when I walked it. The building, though, is filled with statues, fountains, little surprise courtyards, and arches everywhere. For security's sake, it was once surrounded by a deep moat (now empty) and huge iron fences (still there). From the window of my classroom, I can see palm trees. My shared office where I hold office hours has a low, medieval looking wooden door with metal studs all over it. It's all rather a bit more lush and romantic and mysterious than I'm used to. My students are fascinating. They're majoring in philosophy, medicine, psychology, and advertising--yet they all signed up to take a course in publishing creative writing in English. Very ambitious! They've been working hard so far, and I'm excited for them.
Things are happening with Hell or High Water--the French rights sold, a starred review in Booklist, and so on--but it all seems very far away at the moment--which may be the very healthiest way to prepare for a book launch that I've ever heard of. I'm working on the sequel while I'm here, too, but more on that later. For now, I'm focusing on getting lost and wandering, trying tapas, sampling vino, and enjoying the time-honored ritual of siesta--which, dear reader, I highly recommend.
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