Teachers

A thought about the teaching profession.

Everyone is in agreement about the importance of the profession, or should be. It barely needs stating why – education makes social equality possible, teaches us how to be citizens (even if indirectly), and makes us smarter.

Still broadly accepted by most, but not quite as unanimous, is that teaching is a difficult job. It requires an all-round, all-defining commitment of time, character, and ethos.

Fine – agreed.

More contentious is whether the difficult, possibly vocational nature of the job means that outsiders – specifically ministers and civil servants – are not sufficiently qualified to tell teachers how to do it.

Many teachers, it seems to me, believe that those on the ground know how to teach, whereas ministers can only make under-informed, and therefore probably damaging, interventions.

I can see some truth in this position. But I think the teaching profession by and large has taken it too far – to the extent of disastrously misunderstanding the nature of their role. 

Important jobs are often difficult to perform. But important jobs are also the ones that need the most oversight and accountability. Don’t like getting a hard time from the management about standards? Then you shouldn’t have become a nuclear safety officer / air traffic controller / teacher.

These jobs are difficult because they are important. With so much at stake, more than usual needs to be done, and more carefully, by those doing it to avoid failure. And with so much at stake, and the possibility of adversely affecting so many people, more oversight is needed from government to make sure the public are protected.

So the teaching profession’s argument that the difficult nature of teaching is why government should keep its nose out simply cannot wash. Its difficulty is a symptom of the same factor that necessitates government oversight – proof, that is, of the opposite of what the profession argues.

‘You’re the one who chose to become a Marine .’

If you want to do one of the most important jobs in the country – and I’d say that guaranteeing the UK’s future as a decent, thoughtful, and prosperous place is hugely important – then accept that with this comes scrutiny as well as kudos. Scrutiny, standards, and the very real possibility of bollockings.

The thing with being a public servant is that you don’t get to define your position –the public does. And the public in this instance is represented by the elected government rather than the teaching unions. Which sounds about right.

Ok – counter-argument. Governments tread lightly around, e.g., the issue of an armed police force – as far as I know, there is no statute saying British police will not go armed. Commissioners could decide to arm their constables if they wished, and the government allows this decision to remain with them because the government doesn’t have the right to take out of policemen’s the right to decide for themselves what is proportionate self-defence.

Same goes, to an extent, with the armed forces.

So does this justify the teaching profession’s ‘hands off’ attitude? Not really – the police and armed forces are still regulated to within an inch of their lives (rightly), and besides no one’s actually going to get killed, hopefully, in a classroom. Also important, I’d say, is that the armed forces at least are more effectively self-disciplining: superiors must keep their subordinates in check, not least by making sure they behave according to the aims and laws prescribed by the government. 

I don’t think headmasters or the teaching hierarchy behave as a cross-check in any comparable way whatsoever.

When I worked as a teacher (I wasn't very good at it) I replaced an unwell but also outrageously time-serving teacher who (a colleague of the teacher told me) over fifteen years teaching philosophy produced not one single teaching resource.

An utterly tame inspection system meant she got away with this. Although, in fairness, she was eventually constructively dismissed, she went on to bring a case against the school, which she won, naturally. I doubt they counted at the tribunal how many students she had let down over the years.

The bankers and the unions

Bob Crow died this week - the union leader described by Paxman as a 'dinosaur'. 

As did old Labour grandee Tony Benn:

Crow the hardline socialist out of time, Benn the real deal from the sixties and seventies. It struck me that the unions fell out of favour, leaving Crow an outlier, because they were allowed to be too good at their job - that is, protecting the interests of their members at all costs. In 70s Britain, the interests of the unions and their members came to dominate the wider interests of Britain.

This is all simplistic stuff, I realize. But it illustrates an interesting point: that to acknowledge the social value of certain groups - special interest groups, for instance - is to acknowledge also that these groups must be kept in check if they are to be of value to society. Unions exist only to protect their members' interests, hell for leather - this is necessary and worthwhile, but as society consists of more than just union members, their power must be held in balance with society's other competing group interests.

If I'd read Hobbes, I'd probably say this is a Hobbesian view. Anyway, maybe we could say that one way the UK came unstuck in the 70s was by losing this balance - which was itself due to an overly close relationship between the interests of unions on the one hand and, on the other, the Labour governments who should have kept them in check.

Interestingly, in this way the unions are exactly like the group Bob Crow detested - bankers. 

They too have a single-minded self-interest - make as much money as possible - which our society can only live with if is curtailed and kept in check (in much the same way, you can only keep a rottweiler in your house if you cut its nuts off first). We came unstuck when - from Thatcher through to Brown - this balance was lost.

Dracula

I am reading Dracula at the moment. I wasn’t terribly impressed at first, though it is picking up (the action has just switched from Transylvania to England). The passage below, with its description of Whitby in North Yorkshire, took my fancy.

Right over the town is the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is the scene of part of Marmion, where the girl was built up in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits. There is a legend that a white lady is seen in one of the windows. Between it and the town there is another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones. This is to my mind the nicest spot in Whitby, for it lies right over the town, and has a full view of the harbour and all up the bay to where the headland called Kettleness stretches out into the sea. It descends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen away, and some of the graves have been destroyed.

Dracula was published in 1897, though Stoker visited in 1890 and drafted this scene at some point following his visit. Marmion, which I’ve not read, is an 1808 epic poem by Walter Scott about the Battle of Flodden Field.

There is quite a lot going on here – at least, if you interpret the passage in a certain way. Immediately of interest is the reference to Scott’s Marmion. It got me thinking – when can a fictional work directly reference a real-world work of literature without ‘breaking the fourth wall’? That is, without seeming to belong simultaneously to both the real world of literary authors (who have agents, and read other novelists, etc.) and the fictional world of the narrative? 

I intuitively feel that the reference to Marmion here does not cause an ‘alienation effect’ – just as there is no such effect when, e.g., Howard Jacobson’s characters refer to Hamlet. But I probably would feel something odd was happening if Stoker referred directly to a contemporary such as Robert Louis Stevenson, or if Jacobson referred directly to Julian Barnes’s Sense of an Ending.

I don’t feel there is an obvious explanation why the one type of reference is more disruptive, and maybe even unsettling, than the other – I will have a go at approaching the matter later. Suffice it to say for now that there is clearly some sort of distancing effect that distinguishes the two – the works of Walter Scott are sufficiently distanced (in time, say) that reference to them does not flag up in our minds the current writer’s similar status as a writer of literary texts in the real world.

Going back to the passage itself, what is interesting is that there is a direct reference to Scott, together with an indirect allusion to Wilkie Collins, who had died in 1889 shortly before Stoker started drafting Dracula – we know that Stoker was influenced by Collins (because it says so in the ODNB, here) so it is reasonable to wonder if the legend of the Whitby ‘white lady’ recalls Collins’s The Woman in White, a novel whose content and structure directly fed into Dracula (ODNB, again).

So this is maybe a direct example of the distancing effect I was talking about – Scott is directly referenced but Collins only alluded to because Collins belongs more closely to the literary context that produced Dracula. It would be veering into overly playful self-reference to directly refer to Collins. 

(Contrast, coincidentally, Collins’s Moonstone, in which narrating character Gabriel Betteredge evangelizes the benefits of living one’s life according to the wisdom of Robinson Crusoe. This is ‘meta-literary’ but only inasmuch as the 18th -century novel Robinson Crusoe is a part of the real world’s historical fabric, and as such an uncontroversial and unmarked part of fictional descriptions of that real world – it does not in any way impute, or bring illicitly into focus, the literary context that frames the Moonstone itself).

But still – there is, I think, a meta-literary aspect to this passage, if I can write those words without sounding like a PoMo-addled undergraduate. The different intertextual techniques used for both authors confirm Scott and his Gothic-Romantic style (the ‘beautiful and romantic bits’ Mina sees in the abbey) as belonging firmly to (in fact by means of this comparison, being relegated to) a bygone literary past, and Collins as belonging to the literary present that frames the narrative of Dracula itself. By confirming Collins as too close to home to be referenced directly, Stoker lays out his own programme – he has relegated older forms of Gothic to the past, and instead follows the more sexually and psychologically sophisticated fiction of Collins.

That all three authors share a (vaguely) Celtic background is also (vaguely) interesting.

If there is any validity in this interpretation, then I should probably take a step further and note how the topography of the scene is probably significant too. The idea of a literary fault-line, between the old and new Gothic genre, has a fairly clear metaphor in the shoreline on which the abbey stands – indeed, the ‘romantic’ edifice stands there facing a sea which will soon bring against to shore Dracula himself (and also Dracula).

I’ve written before about Vergil’s metaphorical use of shorelines to represent boundaries between metaphysical worlds – e.g. between life and death, between reality and representation (it’s here, in my very much unrevised thesis). I’m not sure how far I would want to take a similar interpretation regarding the Dracula passage – it would involve saying something like ‘the shoreline delineates a number of boundaries simultaneously – a physical one between land and sea, a meta-literary one between old and new styles of Gothic, and a metaphysical one between the notional fictional world in which Dracula takes place and the literary real world of Stoker, Collins, and Scott to which it simultaneously belongs. Like the shoreline itself, it is a border that is always risk of being encroached upon.’

I’ll return to paradoxical literary self-reference in my next post.

Death 2: Bin Laden

'A violent loser, and a mutt.'

One death I’ve been thinking about is that of barely-remembered Osama Bin Laden, and in turn the wider policy of extra-judicial killing.

The killing of Bin Laden was, according to Barack Obama, ‘one of the greatest military operations in our nation's history.’ Fair enough – even if it is an over-statement, his death was legitimately an occasion for overstatement. And the intelligence build-up leading to his death was by the sound of it an extraordinary achievement.

But… one can't help wonder if, over the long years of the War on Terror, the US has lost sight of the days when her fighting men took on other soldiers, rather than over-excited holy men. To recap: a large team of soldiers, trained at eye-watering expense to the taxpayer, successfully shot an unarmed old man in the face; while also killing or injuring one armed opponent, and five unarmed women. Along the way they also, inexplicably, lost a $60-million helicopter.

This was no Iwo Jima, Mr President.

'This was no Iwo Jima, Mr President.' 

(I mean, the killing of Bin Laden wasn't - this picture was Iwo Jima, obviously. Read the above bit before you read this caption, it'll make more sense).

But I’m snarking. I agree with the case that Bin Laden was an enemy commander in the field and a fair target, rather than a civilian felon – al Qaida were, still are, a heavily militarized outfit, and the notion that one single set of anti-terrorist laws can provide grounds for action against e.g. both Baader Meinhof-style groups and, say, Hezbollah, is a clear nonsense.

And, frankly, I think in some ways it was a classily executed affair. It delivered a sickener to other violent losers in a way that will probably save lives – you won’t get a blaze of glory, you’ll disappear with a ‘splosh’ and the world will forget about you, like the mutt you were. And you can forget about the seventy virgins too.

However I’m not too interested in delving into rights and wrongs in these two posts (though I accept both are highly debatable, and am not trying to draw the question to a premature close). I’m more concerned with looking at neglected possibilities, and disturbing corollaries that weren’t immediately obvious to me. I’ve not read round this topic a great deal, so it’s more than possible that they have proven obvious to a great many others, on an immediate basis.

The first query. A participant in the raid (Mark Owen, the one that wrote the book – N. B. not Mark Owen) described it as routine in most aspects and no different to many targeted killings he was involved with before (the so-called 'decapitation' strategy targetting the mid-level leadership of the Taliban). We know that in Iraq and, with less success, Afghanistan, thousands of such ‘kinetic’ operations have taken place (what is it with the macho posturing of soldiers from certain countries? surely when you're the real thing, you don't have to speak like you're pretending to be the real thing?). As one source rather unpleasantly put it – the Americans, supported by the British, have been killing ‘on an industrial scale’.

Is it implied therefore that the casualty rate of the operation (one target, one armed combatant, and five unarmed non-combatants mostly female) was also uncontroversial and typical? We know that certain aspects of the operation were controversial, as chuntering ensued – the intrusion into Pakistani territory, and the ethics of the intelligence operation (the sneaky obtaining of DNA samples, the possible use of torture) for example. But there seems to have been no attempt to hide or query the fact that, in a so-called surgical strike, only two of the seven casualties were valid targets.

Now it might be that behind closed doors commanders were furious about this rate of 'collateral damage' or 'attrition' or 'accidental neutralization of enemies of freedom' or whatever silly term they use. Perhaps such things are done behind closed doors.

Possible, but then contrast the public contrition and the punishments doled out when US forces accidentally killed a hostage by throwing a grenade at her (the deeply unfortunate Linda Norgrove). We certainly heard about the fallout that time.

So given this, and given the general openness and leakiness of the United States and its institutions, it seems reasonable to conclude that within military circles this was a non-controversial operation, with a casualty rate that was entirely to be expected.

In which case, if these operations have killed, let's say, a thousand Al-Qaida and Taliban militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, then it follows that another 3,500 non-combatants might have been killed and injured on top of that.

This would clearly be a great wrong – and inexcusable from a modern, technologically superb power. Indeed, looking at accounts of the raid, it seems likely that the casualties piled up because of a culture of risk aversion which is massively stacked in favour of trained combatants, and against non-combatants who never asked to be involved in the first place. 

That is: the person you are shooting at might or might not be a threat, but it is preferable for an enemy non-combatant to be killed than for a friendly combatant to take the risk of being killed. Expendability shifts from soldiers, whose lives and expertise are politically and economically valuable respectively, to enemy non-combatants, whose deaths don’t sell newspapers or swing elections.

I think someone wrote a book on this topic about ten years ago, calling it something like The Western Way of War. I suppose it could be argued that this argument is now out of date – the ‘heroic restraint’ drive (gist – upon seeing a non-white person with a firearm, at least wait a bit before calling in a massive airstrike) identifies and has possibly solved this very problem. We should be prepared to accept that the US military, with its extraordinary flexibility and adaptability, has turned the tanker around. But if the Bin Laden raid was representative – maybe not yet.

My second point is wider. As suggested above, the media’s utter beguilement at anything to do with the special forces, and their frequent inability to discover the truth surrounding them, produces a kind of ‘moral hazard’ for the soldiers. By 'moral hazard' I mean, to borrow OED's definition,  the lack of incentive to avoid risk where there is protection against its consequences, e.g. by insurance.' The reluctance of the press to criticize America’s elite forces (itself possibly a consequence of popular support for them – witness the success of recent film Lone Survivor starring Mark ‘we’re going to land somewhere safely’ Wahlberg) is likely one factor among others that enables the soldiers’ heavy-handedness - see e.g. here.

An altogether more pernicious enabling factor is the patronage military elites attract from the political elites that should be overseeing and crosschecking them. An elite, that is, is all too often someone's elite - a would-be Praetorian Guard. The result is an out-of-control military cabal, and the subversion of democratic principles at the hands of their supposed guardians.

Think, for instance, of the love-in between Thatcher and the SAS during the 1980s (and doubtless beyond) which culminated, bizarrely and disturbingly, with Thatcher using them to quell a prison disturbance in Scotland (HMS Peterhead). Think the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, and its extensive political power; Putin and Russia’s paramilitaries; and any number of South and Central American tinpot dictatorships, probably.

A certain ideological narcissism is involved – Thatcher saw in the SAS not just a flag-waving, tab-pleasing vote-spinner, but also a self-flattering reflection of her own buccaneering, brawny, and pitiless free-market individualism. More to the point, this seems also to underlie the Pentagon’s fairly recent espousal of unconventional soldiering, having until recently been unsold on the idea (which stands to reason – why faff around with unconventional warfare when you have more conventional power than any nation in history?). 

Donald Rumsfeld (now forgotten about, in a way eerily similar to his nemesis Bin Laden) saw in US special forces not just the right tool for the job he was about to make an absolute pig’s ear of – viz. fighting the war on terror – but also a chance to radically downsize the US military and with it the federal government. As a small-government fundamentalist, this was a higher ideological end (an end served also by replacing professional soldiers with the nightclub bouncers, tubby ex-policemen, and other cowboys that make up Blackwater / Xe / Academi).

In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, for instance, civilian Rumsfeld insisted that the country could be conquered by 15,000 special forces soldiers backed by airpower. The generals didn’t listen to him, obviously, and instead fielded 150,000 soldiers from the US alone (‘shut up, Don’).

So it is easy to see how an anointed elite can come to operate in isolation from the moral and political pressures that should circumscribe its actions. There is a dangerous feedback loop – the politician identifies in the soldiers an aspirational image of himself and his ideology, a hefty dose of reflected glory (decisive, strong, daring, a cut above, etc.), and the soldiers are more than happy in turn to exploit this affection – it protects their budget (likely contested anyway) and gives them more opportunity to do all the fun things they train for but never actually get to do.  And the more ‘fun’ they have (think back to the ‘killing on an industrial scale’) the more glory accrues to their political paymaster.

This mutually reinforcing pattern is the very opposite of the accountability ministers must impose on the military, as a sort of inertia mechanism. And the results are real, and bad – many of the ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques that proliferated over the past decade plus were traced back to the resistance-to-interrogation training inflicted on elite soldiers. This was where the rot was coming from.

It is under this culture of tutelage, then, that the Navy SEALs shot the five unarmed occupants in Bin Laden’s compound. Did a similar culture see British soldiers and /spies – in the high watermark of Thatcherite cowboyism during the Troubles – use Loyalist terrorists to systematically murder Republicans during the late 80s and early 90s, as is alleged? We don’t know yet – but you wouldn’t rule it out, despite the implausibilities.

There's another post I want to write, about how, sadly, such unaccountable and shady military adventurism is the likely future of the British Army. But I'll leave it here for now.

The Beatles

Kate has most of the Beatles' albums on her iPod, which means you can see all of the songs in one big list. It is a reminder of just what an extraordinary career they had - not just that they maintained the level of quality and never really dipped, but that they did so while constantly innovating, constantly taking huge risks, and, most impressively, constantly just working.

I realize that, for some, expressing a love of the Beatles is a rather bland, anodyne non-statement that hugs the mainstream so closely ('everybody likes the Beatles!') as to attest no real discernment. But this is fatuous and self-regarding - who is so pettily narcissistic to imagine that their own taste constitutes an interesting statement in itself? The music produced by the Beatles is far more interesting than the fact of my liking them and someone else not. 

And my reasons for liking them could well be bizarre and outlandish, and far from 'mainstream' appreciation, whatever that is - I'll not have my reasons imputed for me. Especially not by some sneering bloody hipster.

The quality or value of the Beatles' output can nevertheless be contested; but even then, there is no arguing that their musical development (admittedly at a time when everyone and everything else was changing rapidly too) was just extraordinary. Consider:

March 1963      Love Me Do 

July 1964           Hard Day’s Night 

August 1965     You’ve got to Hide your Love Away 

Dec. 1965           Norwegian Wood; Drive My Car 

August 1966     Eleanor Rigby; Tomorrow Never Knows; She Said She Said 

June 1967          A Day in the Life; Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds 

Nov. 1968          Dear Prudence; Happiness is a Warm Gun; Everybody’s got Something to Hide (Except for me and my Monkey) 

Sept. 1969         Come Together; Medley; Something

So they managed to go from Love Me Do (yeah, yeah, yeah - oooooh) to the dark and utterly unique Come Together in just over six years. In just three years they went from Can't Buy me Love and And I Love Her to A Day in the Life. A further two and a bit years later and they were at the lush, extraordinarily new sound of Abbey Rd, thereby kickstarting the seventies before Father Time had got round to it.

Contrast Oasis, a band once (laughably) compared to the Beatles by Britain's execrable rock journalists: Definitely Maybe in August 1997 and then burnt out a mere three years later with the leaden monstrosity that was Be Here Now.

The question now is how many of the 'landmark' songs I chose above were John songs and how many Paul's.

Granada! Part Dos!

Just a brief addendum.

The cathedrals and churches of Granada were, as you’d expect, a definite highlight, especially those in the mixed Spanish-Moorish style. Not all of them were open to visitors. Of those that were, the interiors were often very splendid as in this quire:

(My photographic skills are less than splendid – see here and here).

Sometimes they were slightly gaudy and over-gilded, as this from Guadix cathedral:

And sometimes they were downright terrifying, as this from the church in the Barrio de las Cuevas just outside Guadix (picture taken from the web):

I am not sufficiently informed to know whether or not this is a particular flavour of Spanish Catholicism, though my hunch is that to some extent it is. Either way it’s trivial to run down someone’s faith simply because I find its symbols aesthetically unappealing, so I won’t.

Nevertheless, I am interested to know why I find this style unappealing. There are lots of descriptions I could throw at it – macabre, kitsch, un-self reflective and so immune to irony – but these feel unexamined and therefore unfair.

Maybe what makes me uncomfortable is an extremity of belief which holds that it is impossible to overstate or hyperbolize what is absolutely and infinitely true. And, similarly, which holds that these images need no moderation or circumspection – Mary is absolutely full of grace, Christ absolutely having a shitty day up there on the cross – because there is no other alternative truth that could undermine or ironize it. You can only have irony where a plurality of truths is possible; to insist on its impossibility is to claim that there is just one, crushingly victorious truth. Which is probably why we respond antagonistically by emphasizing their kitsch value – we insist on reinstating the ironical potential we think has been peremptorily ruled out.

But even then, I’m not sure this is getting me any closer to why I was put off at the gut level – this is all a number of rationalizations down the line. And my immediate feeling wasn’t one of oppression. Maybe the problem is in over-exemplification – in her grace and lovingness and innocence Mary is, or poses as, the final and undiluted instantiation of those things. Again, this can be immoderate and oppressive: a claim that this is the highest, most perfect manifestation and therefore cannot be hyperbolized. But the real kicker is that it has a sense of the uncanny – they are human figures but with an inhuman idealness and unreality, and this human but somehow-not-quite aspect (see this) is what disturbs and alienates.

On an incidental note, and I am not sure in what way, if any, this is related, some of the Moorish décor of the Nasrid palace in the Alhambra has a similar impossibility-of-excess style. All over the walls are repeated passages from the Koran and Islamic catechism, like this:

As the guide pointed out, if you are an Arabic speaker the effect is of entering a room with the same words written all over its walls. If I wasn’t so afraid of the repercussions I’d compare it to that bit in The Simpsons taking off The Shining, where Homer scrawls ‘no beer and no TV make Homer go crazy all over the walls’.

I found the effect beautiful, though as a non-Arabic speaker I suppose it was mainly decorative for me. The same principle seemed to hold: that an uncontestable truth cannot be overstated. It reminds me of the only passage of the Koran I know, in fact not from the Koran (I just found out) but from one of the Hadiths, recounting Muhammed’s vision of the Sixth Heaven. This is quoted from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (notoriously flaky, apparently) but from having a snoop on Google it seems the Hadith definitely says something very much like this:

I saw there an angel, the most gigantic of all created beings. It had 70,000 heads, each had 70,000 faces, each face had 70,000 mouths, each mouth had 70,000 tongues, and each tongue spoke 70,000 languages; all were employed in singing God’s praises.

Not sure what I’m doing with this. I suppose what immediately crossed my mind was some sort of cross-cultural historical link between Spanish Catholicism and Moorish Islam. But there’s no basis for that, and this is all getting a bit thin. I’ll just call it an interesting parallel and leave it at that.

Granada!

I recently spent a week in Granada in Spain with my very dear girlfriend Kate. These are my ragged, slightly sangria-splashed impressions.

Granada is beautiful; the weather generally gorgeous; the food was delicious; most of all, the locals we talked to were almost all very friendly and welcoming. In fact, they were lovely, and for this reason I am never going to Italy again.

(The only exception was the chap with the guitar in the Mirador San Nicolás who, like many of his countrymen, sadly mistook shouting for singing. He’s probably still there, belting away, ruining his larynx and the digestion of the nearby diners).

Highlights:

• The Alhambra, especially the Nasrid palace
• Habas con jamón (soaked ham and beans – I think I’m only just starting to sweat out the ham fat)
• Hamam (Arabic baths and massage)
• Carmen de los Martires – beautiful and seemingly neglected gardens in north-east heights of the city.
• Realejo, Albaicin, and Sacromonte (esp. the views they give of the Alhambra)

Kate was very keen to visit Sacromonte and Guadix to see the caves there and their modern-day dwellers. Unusually so, actually. I wondered briefly if she was looking to reunite me with my fellow cave-folk, as if escorting a lost ewok back to its tree-house.

Next are slightly more specific impressions, some of which will be very boring indeed. So if you stop reading now, let your take-home be: go to Granada and give them lots of your money, and time, and wild affection.

So:

1. Free tapas with each drink

Self-explanatory.

2. Potemkin high street?

I went there, predictably, with Spain's economic woes in mind, but was taken aback by how affluent Granada seemed, particularly its retail sector. It has a population roughly the same sized population as Oxford, I think, and yet has vastly more high-end clothes shops and boutiques. The Spanish seem to dress quite sharply so it’s conceivable that they are dressing to kill while living on a cup of rice a day, with the odd helping of habas con jamón as a treat (Jesus, those beans). But no doubt about it – there was a lot of swank, and where there is swank there is usually wedge. So if Spain is almost broke, what gives?

The ‘Potemkin villages’, if the term is unfamiliar, were ‘any of the sham villages said to have been built by Potemkin to give a false impression of prosperity in the Crimea’ (OED). It crossed my mind darkly that these businesses might be shop fronts and nothing more – fine facades supported only by maxed-out plastic and over-extended lines of credit. I hope that isn’t the case – and not being economically literate what do I know? – but there was definitely an ominous air, as if this beautiful and smiling city is secretly dying and not able to face that awful fact.

It’s like the last days of Pompeii, had the Romans been into Zara and handbags rather than orgies and slave-thrashing.

Also, the siesta seems crazy to me, though I didn’t experience it from the locals’ perspective (I just stared at shuttered shops and swore at myself for going shopping at the wrong time, again). How committed can you be to the task at hand (that is, your job, which pays for food and shelter, and other luxuries) if you are happy to abandon it for two hours every day, like a bored cat? It jarred with all the other signs that Granada was part of a modern, moving economy. Frau Merkel, I feel your Schmerz. But this is no more than my ignorant foreigner's perspective.

3. Architecture

Many of the churches have large stone panels on them, as below. Does anyone know what they are for? Structural? Decorative – i.e. they once had murals painted on them? To reflect heat better?

4. Spanish < Latin (a real turn to the boring here)

One way I entertained myself in Spain was by working out the regular patterns of sound change between Latin and Spanish. You might think that only the most appalling tedium could bring me to seek my entertainment in such dismal corners of pedantry – but you would be dead wrong, sir. In fact, it often helped me work out the meaning of Spanish words without a dictionary – for instance I was able to work out that signs saying caja denote cash machines because caja corresponds with Latin capsa, French caisse, whence English ‘cash’. I was also helped by the large numbers of Spaniards drawing wodges of banknotes and rubbing their hands.

But seriously, this is quite a useful way for a Latinist (esp. one with a cack-handed grasp of historical linguistics) to guess the meanings of words in Romance languages. It is much easier with Spanish and Italian than it is with French.

So:

Latin word-initial f-  >  Spanish h- (i.e. 0):

furnus  > horno ‘oven’; faba  >  haba ‘bean’; fames  >  hambre ‘hunger’; facere  >  hacer ‘do’

Medial geminate Latin or Romance -ss-  >  Spanish -j-, /x/: 

With It. basso cf.  baja ‘low, beneath’; Fr. pousser  cf. empujar ‘push’; caja as above

/l/ is frequently destabilized (as common throughout IE langs), esp. in any position other than start of syllable onset. So, Lat. -li-  >  Sp. -j-, /x/: 

mulier  >  mujer ‘woman, wife’; al(l)ium  >  ajo ‘garlic’

?? Lat. obstruent + /l/  in syllable onset (or is ‘when word-initial’ better?)  >  Sp. ll-, /ʎ/ 

clamare  >  llamar ‘call’; pluvium  >  lluvio ‘rain’ (cf. Lat. labial consonant + l in syllable onset > It. bi-, pi-, fi-, nebula  >  nebbia, planus  >  piano, flos  >  fiore etc.); with Fr. plage  cf.  llegar ‘arrive’ (for the semantic shift cf. ‘arrive’ > ad + ripa – to arrive is to ‘beach’?)

Lat. -o-  >  Sp. -ue- 

monstrare  >  muestrar ‘show’; ovum  >  huevo ‘egg’; focus  >  fuego ‘fire’

Lat. -ens- (also -ons-, -ans-)  >  Sp. -es- 

sensus  >  sesos ‘sense, brains’; pensus  >  peso ‘that which is weighed out’; monstrare  >  muestrar ‘show’; mansio  >  meson ‘inn, place to stay’ 

Difference between ser and estar also very interesting but I very much doubt I could do it justice. Although alienating to English speakers to think such an all-encompassing idea as ‘being’ can be rendered into separate, discrete ideas, really it just lexicalizes a semantic difference already present in the different senses of ‘be’. I guess one way to approach it is to say that one uses estar when the predicate (is this right?) can be plausibly paraphrased as a prepositional phrase denoting the adjunct mode or state in which the subject finds itself; ser when the predicate is a constitutive attribute of the subject. estar for ‘Eric Blair is warm’ (= in a state of warmth) but not for ‘Eric Blair is George Orwell’ (*= in a state of being George Orwell) or ‘George Orwell is an author’ (*= in an authorial state, in the state of being an author). For the latter two, one would use ser. (1)

5. Very Moorish

And now we rejoin the human race.

Granada is most worth visiting for its Moorish remnants and the mixed Moorish-European mudéjar style. The Moorish theme of the city, presumably vital to its tourist pulling-power, has also been boosted by recent immigration from North Africa, such that one could easily believe that the souk-style shopping streets and tea shops (teterías) represent a continuity with Al-Andalus of old. Actually that’s probably the entire point, now I come to think of it. Problematic, though, given that there was no such continuity - Moorish Spain, I think I am right in saying, was thoroughly Christianized in the Reconquista.

A very minor quibble I have with Granada (and there has to be a quibble) is that it seems to prevaricate over the significance of this historical legacy. Aside from the beauty of the historical monuments, which are reason enough to visit, there’s little coherent sense (on the tourist trail at least) of their moral and historical significance. It would be odd to visit WWI battlefields just for the Belgian countryside, as this would perversely ignore the more pressing human and commemorative value they ask us to acknowledge.

Granada, as the last Moorish city in Spain to fall to the Christian reconquest, obviously has a story to tell that is more than the sum total of its old stones, but (on the tourist trail at least) it is unclear whether we are to celebrate its past diversity in ethnicity and religion, and accept the monuments as its proudly surviving legacy, or to lament amid the few remains all that was destroyed in the Reconquista. In other words, what is the human interest, once we've had enough of the architecture - is it tragedy or triumph that so little / so much of Al-Andalus remains?

To take an illustrative example of the celebrate-remains vs. mourn-loss distinction – admittedly a rather extreme and emotive one – it would be perverse to embrace the Krakow Ghetto wall (apparently one of the few remains from the Ghetto’s liquidation by the Nazis) as a lingering presence fortuitously linking us to, and continuing, the Jews’ long history in Poland. Rather, the wall is significant because it implies everything else around it that is now absent and lost to us.

I am not equating the Reconquista to the Holocaust. I do not know enough about the former’s history to say if it even qualifies as ethnic cleansing. Nor am I even sure that Granada is under a moral obligation to confess to the past it obliterated – this has happened in every place and we can’t live our lives as one big apology. But given how prominently the victorious Catholic Monarchs are celebrated in Granada, and given that the Muslim presence in Spain – and therefore also the extinguishing of that presence – were more or less unique events in mainland Western Europe (2), the message seems a little unclear, a little mixed. The illusion of continuity created by the modern North-African stylings is certainly dubious.

But then maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

6. See point no. 1.

1. Much of this is probably unsound – I guess I could always look it up, but then I don’t want nobody to give me nothing – open up the door, I’ll get it myself.
2. Is this true?