Class Master Class

 I was recounting our trip to Spain to our bud Sean.  Somehow I felt it apposite to explain how he guys sat in the front seat, the ladies in back.  Sean, who thinks and talks in paragraphs, explained (I paraphrase from memory)::

It's definitely lower class.  Were you middle class, the couples would have stayed together, each with his own.  And upper class, anything goes.

 Oddly enough, this sounds right o me, I have no idea why.  But it does remind me to write a letter to the GPS maker, with whom I have an unpicked crow.  Dear Mr. Tom;  may I call you Tom...

I Hate it when That Happens

The Thracian is easily confused with the Hoplomachus

Information panel in the Roman ampitheatre at Mérida, Spain.  Those of you still seeking enlightenment can go here.

Plutocracy Rules OK

[Updated with a better crop of the picture]. It's a graffiti from wall about two streets away from Great Mosque at Córdoba in Spain. Mr. Chubby on the right, tossing away bills, is "First World." The rest are "Third World." Guess I wasn't real clear those concepts existed any more. 

Notes: I suppose that is a pile of --Money?  Shit?  --off to the right-hand side, a complement to the bills the capitalist pig is so thoughtlessly dispensing (update, Eb says skulls and he may well be right).  In the lower-left, I think that may be an artist's signature but I can't read it and didn't stop to note it when I took the picture.

More Archaeological Turducky

In Bohumil Hrabal's novel I Served the King of England, there's the story (I'm working from memory here) of how the Emperor of Ethiopia shows up at the Prague Palace. He brings his retainers who occupy the courtyard where they butcher a camel and stuff it with a goat, and a turkey, and a duck, yada yada.

I'm realizing that is what I am seeing in Spain: architectural Turducky.  Here (from) is the latest, this from Mérida: a Graeco-Roman temple repurposed as a Renaissance palace, lately reborn as a tourist shrine.

Spanish Counterfactual

Thought experiment: how would the world look different today if the Latin America had been settled by Catalunyans instead of Castilians?

Secret History: Córdoba

At the Sephardic House Jewish museum in Córdoba:

--How many Jews are there in Spain today?
--Oh, about 30,000.
--Where are they?
--Madrid, Barcelona, all over.
--How many in Córdoba?
--Twenty-five.
--Only?  Not 25,000?
--No, no, twenty-five.  
--Are you one?
--No, not me.  But they went underground, so maybe we re all Jews.

Keeping the Memory Green

"When we were ruled by Franco we had money in the banco." Etc., but it ends with Felipe (i.e., Gonzalez?) who left office 16 years ago. So, just overstock for tourists?

Transitions:Córdoba

"It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764,as I sat musing amid the ruins of the capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.... But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the City, rather than of the Empire"

That's  Edward Gibbon, of course.  Her is talking about the basilica (Greek word, Roman temple) of St. Mary of the Altar of Heaven, once the Temple of Jupiter Moneta, the site (so it is said) where the Tibertine Sybil foresaw the coming of Christ.

I'm a sucker for these cross-cultural references.  I suppose in a sense you could say that any European cathedral in Europe is a shadow of its classical ancestor, but a particular favorite is the cathedral at Syracuse in Sicily, fleshed out in the Seventh Century around the Doric columns of its Greek ancestor, then refitted at the beginning of the 18th (after an earthquake) with an assertive Baroque facade.  I remember lounging on a bench outside the north wall one night, watching the Sicilians make their passeggiata while a band played "New York, New York."

Now here is another, new to me: the "Cathedral" (still in business) tucked into the middle of the Great Mosque at Córdoba in Spain.  Evidently it began life around 600 AD as a Christian church under the Visigoths, then refashioned in its Islamic role in 784, and re-Chrisitanized when Ferdinand III chased the Moors off  to Grenada in1236.  And its history may not have ended: in 2010 a couple security guards were injured, reputedly when they tried to stop a couple of young Muslims from praying in the contended site.  That picture above is just a cellphone snap and the lower part is in shadows but what you are looking at is (a) a recycled Roman column (with Corinthian capital) topped in turn by (b) a Visigothic arch; (c) a Romanesque Arch; (d) a Baroque spandrel; and (e) a dome.  The inevitable reference is to Yeats'  "Lapis Lazuli:"

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camelback, horseback, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilizations put to the sword. 

The El Greco Burial: Who Knew?

sS

We beguiled the time yesterday puzzling over El Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz in the San We beguiled the time yesterday puzzling over El Greco's Burial of Count Orgoz in the San Tomé Church in Toledo.  It's impressive enough to the untutored eye (i.e., mine) although it invites some explication.  Diving into some readily available sources, we find that it is remarkable, inter alia, in its challenging mix of the heavens above and the earth below--the heavens almost transparent in their otherworliness, the earth startling in its particularity (no matter that Saints Stephen and Augustine have descended to earth to help with the putting away).

It got us to considering: do the earthly dignitaries (evidently critics love to try to attach the faces to real people)--do these dignitaries understand just what sort of heavenly universe it is of which they are a part?  Mrs. Buce  says they must: she finds it inconceivable that a commission painter in the veriest black hole of Catholic faith would paint his betters as anything other than fully cognizant of their theological surroundings.

Could be that, as the fellow says, could be something else.  Me, always ready with a Shakespeare reference, I find myself thinking of the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, where the yokels present their play, observed by Duke Theseus and his bride, observed in their turn by the fairies, observed at last by us, the audience of the audience of the audience.  I like to think that maybe the painter was telling us more about the sacred space than even the truest of true believers might believe on their own.

Spain Notes: "I Came to Shoot Crap, So Let's Shoot Crap!"

So I'm sitting here in Segovia listening to the thunder and to the wind whipping the canvas awning and what have we learned today, children?  We've learned that the rain in Spain falls  mainly on the old Roman aqueduct, lowering over the city like those ostrich-legged invaders from the old Star Wars movie.  Between thunderclaps, wee got to chatting about aqueducts and ticking off all the places Romans built them: Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia and so forth all the way up to Wales.  My friend Ignota asks: I wonder why there are so many?

I think I know the answer to that: the Roman's did it because they could do it, that's why.  Fish swim, birds fly, men drink and squirrels have been squirrels for thousands of years. The boys were whiling away an hour down at the vomitorium when young Jupiter Pluvius piped up and said, I got it guys, let's build a coliseum!  a bath!  A highway network!  An aque, aque--one of those long skinny things that brings water down from the mountains!  Who knows, maybe of our descendants in France two thousand years from now can use it as a highway bridge!  Anyway, it's what we do!

All of which just naturally set me to thinking about the guys at Washington Mutual Savings Bank (i.e., now defunct) and their ilk.  Reading Kirsten Grind's admirable history of a once-great bank, you can't help get the sense that what got these folks into trouble was that buying banks was about the only thing they knew how to do, and so they kept on doing it.  Which kept on being fun until it wasn't fun any more and until it became clear that nobody knew how to make the damn thing work.  Which for the Romans led to a long dark age.  We may prayerfully hope for better fortune.  Meanwhile, travel weather note: stuck in the rain in Spain, I heartily recommend hot chocolate.  One thing those Spaniards do really well.

Spain: Madrid Street Notes

Random street notes from Madrid:

Bookstores.  Others go to pub crawls and bullfights. I wind up in bookstores and I still don't get it with the bookstores of major European cities.  They have stacks of stuff, tightly packed, floor to ceiling.  I haven't fouind anything yet as overpowering as Paris or London, but the general flavor is the same.  Which makes me wonder: is this culture lag, or something in the tax/subsidy structure, or some combination thereof?    One distinction about Spain as against other places I've seen: I'm  not finding as much in foreign languages.  I find foreign authors: here's a collection of John Cheever stories on display up by the front door, near to couple of George Orwells and a Dashiell Hamett.  Odd choices, what?  And all in Spanish.  In Paris (or Rome) you might well find French (or Italian)--but there'd be some English versions tucked away in the corner.  Maybe I just haven't found the corner.

Street politics: passed one small demonstration yesterday outside some fort of government building just off the Puerta del Sol.  Mostly elderly, which is to say close to my age.  Placards suggested something about health care and pensions.  Also something about "bancos ladrones," which ought to get broad assent.  Lung power still good in this crowd, though: lots of old-fashioned police whistles.  Evidently in a country so encumbered with economic problems, the beleagured masses are finding some other way to make their wants known.

Oh, and on a slightly more direct note.  I stood at the coffee bar this morning beside a strapping (easily taller than I) 125-pounder who ordered up a latte and a gooey goody.  She spent the whole of  breakfast break trying to brush off the accompanying powdered sugar.  Then with a plastic knife, she carefully sawed the goody in two, as if to restrict her intake to just one half.  I didn't linger to see her give in and scarf down the other half.

The Early Goyas

I checked in at the Prado in Madrid today for the first time in 17 years and found myself spending more time than I might have expected in a corner where (it seems) not many people linger.  I could say "among the Goyas," but it's not what you're thinking.  I'm talking not so much about the famous ones on the ground and first floors, but the stuff tucked away on the top floor--specifically the cartoons, as they are presented, for the tapestries of some defunct prince.

They're early work and they are "country scenes," which might set you to thinking Boucher, maybe Fragonard, maybe Murillo, possibly even Poussin.  Granted there is some of each of these in reflection here, but no more than some.  It seems that even when Goya is trying to be conventional or derivative, he can't help himself: these figures are alive, with juice and sinews that leap out across nearly 250 years.

You can see it in the subjects.  There's plenty of conventional-seeming stuff: a kite, a balloon, a boy climbing  tree.  But on second look,  not so much.   The boy climbing a tree evidently intends to steal some fruit and you sense there is more than merry mischief here: he looks like he might be hungry, and might be in trouble if he is caught.  And as to playing--here are some more boys, these tormenting a young bull.  

 The figures are not all children: there's a washerwoman,  a guitarist (blind), a water drinker (blind).  Even more striking (and probably the best known) is "La Nevada," a representation of s poor family (yes?) crossing a mountain in the snow.  Why the prince would want it in his bedroom is beyond imagining but it might make a fit companion to what I'd rank is the most extraordinary in the whole set.  It's called "the injured mason" and there he is being carted away by his fellow workers after (yes?) a fall.  The scaffolding for the job is in the background and I can't imagine how anybody could look at it without seeing a Christian deposition.

The only comparison that comes readily to  mind is that scene in Shakespeare's Henry IV part 2  where carriers and the ostler banter in the morning chill outside the in at Rochester.

Traveling Again

In Spain, where the bottled blood orange juice from the Corte Inglese tastes like it just hopped off the tree.  Must be it doesn't ship well, like the sherry.  And speaking of which, I must see if I can find the to-die-for sherry-and-anchovy that I whiled away many a happy hour in when I was last here 18 years ago.

Meanwhile jet lag, and radio silence.