this time, hopefully
the first time i heard the basque/euskara language in public* (or at least noticed that i was hearing it) was in a bar. it was an old woman with a face that reduced towards a singular point, and deep, deep-set noam chomsky eyes. raisin-like. i was expecting it to sound harsh and brutal. but it wasn't so bad. the whole basque thing is weird. this language has somehow managed to survive in this little pocket of land on either side of the french/spanish border for thousands of years. there've been all these different rulers, german visigoths and moors and spaniards, but somehow the language survived. and up until a couple of centuries ago (can't remember the date) it was a completely oral langauage. it had no written form. maybe that was part of the key to its survival. it was invisible. you could hear it but you could never see it. like the predator. the weird thing is that since the death of franco and the re-emergence and legitimisation of euskara, it has been reborn in the exact opposite form to how it existed before. the language is everywhere visible. street-signs, shop windows, government publications. but the thing is, it's almost impossible for an outsider like me to ever hear it spoken. it's because i can only approach people in castilian. so they reply in castilian. for me, euskara is an eavesdropped language. eavedropped and signposted.
it's definitely a fun language to look at. it looks rough as guts, sort of the same feeling i get from the basque aspects of a city like pamplona when i'm out in the old town on a weekend. rough and dirty and soaked in a half-mix of alcohol and piss. it uses lots of letters that other languages tend to neglect. like k, x, z, u, b. and these are good letters too. take k for instance. what a great fucking letter. tough as nails. there's a letter you could trust your life with. it'll never let you down. not like that pissy little letter c that we seem to love so much in english. you never know what c is gonna do. when it's going to go soft on you. k is always a k. always has been always will be.
*you can always find some basque on the basque-run tv channels. and for the first few weeks in spain we could watch documentaries in basque for about twenty minutes before realising that it wasn't spanish. ohh, that's why we can't understand a thing, we'd say, and change to a spanish channel. fuck. still nothing.
one of the most odd aspects of the clash between the basque and spanish identities that i've noticed during my time in pamplona is the basque font. (and as ange said, this is a very i-edited-vertigo-last-year sort of observation) there's no doubt about it, i know that a café or bar is basque just by the font on its sign. it's a sort of folksy, medieval kind of font. a little awkward, and probably a little ugly if we're going to be honest. they even have it on basque run banks. and it gives them a strange, child-like sort of appearance, because the font looks a little like it has been traced out of the lettering book. it's even on street signs in pamplona, up the top, it says, calle (street) whatever, with it's castilian name, in a normal kind of font. then below, kalea (street, in basque) basque name, in the basque font.
the first time i saw it i was like, wow, if hon was basque, could he be a radical separatist?
i've recently introduced the word ganas into my english. in spanish, you can tener (to have) ganas de hacer algo. which basically means to want to do something. to feel like it, have a desire for it. for example, you can have ganas to go out to a club or something. they have something similar in german i think, with the expression, ich habe lust, which is obviously related to the word lust in english, but again, it doesn't really work to have a lust to go to a club, without giving specific connotations about the club. the best thing about ganas is, that if you have ganas to do something, then you can also lose your ganas. for example, the other night, i had heaps of ganas to go out to a discoteca from this bar we were in, but during the walk to the club, i well and truly lost my ganas. i was completely without ganas by the time we arrived.
so i make this salad the other day, which if i do say so was pretty fucking amazing. let's just say that there were mushrooms and capsicums and sherry vinegar and olive oil involved. and i left half an avocado sitting on the kitchen table. ten minutes later my flatmate approaches me with the avocado in his hand like damning evidence. ¿qué es esto? - what is this? this is the same guy who when i gave him some feta to taste, said, mmm, not bad, but it needs something. he reached into the fridge for his three week old overly phallic piece of chorizo, bit off a hunk, and says, ah, better.
it's funny how you become when you're working with a language that you haven't quite got a hold of yet. you become so functional. amongst my friends in english we all try to be so eloquent, stringing together clever little turns of phrase and seeking out that oh-so-perfect verb that makes an adjective superfluous. but here i have to beat spanish words into a form that i think will do the job. it's completely functional and tradesmanlike. the speech act becoñes a speech job. every semi-complex sentence i construct is sort of like when people replace their broken car antenna with a coat hanger. they know it's really not the tool for the job, but maybe it can work. and trying to be poetic in spanish would be like then bending the coat hanger into the shape of australia. that mutated and tumourous looking piece of spontaneous nationalist craft.
an example off the top of my head is yesterday when i wanted to tell my spanish flatmate to leave the letter box keys in the house during the day so that the other flatmates can open the box when they want as well. i couldn't think of a verb meaning to leave, as in, to allow to remain in a place. i knew salir - to leave, to go out. as in, salgo de la casa a las ocho - i leave the house at eight. but i knew that wouldn't do. the only way i could think of making that idea work, of placing that idea in his head, was to make the keys the subject of the sentence. ¿pueden las llaves estar en el piso siempre? - are the keys able to be in the house always? i asked. can the keys be in the house.
it's a pretty ridiculous construction. but the thing is, the keys are now in a jar in our lounge room. and i can open the mailbox when i want. the phrase worked. it functioned. i think it's interesting this idea of opposing elegant language with that of crude, functional language. because really, being pretty with your language is a pretty bourgeois (is there a more elegant word) game. those without language skills really don't have time for that. they're too busy labouring in language. fixing things. making them work again. finding out why a phrase is broken, and how they can repair it so as to use it again next time.
1) ensure that every time i put my headphones on i have the right in the right ear and the left in the left.
b) reference ghassan hage in every single essay i write that has anything at all to do with race.
a) snowflakes are actually as beautiful as cheesy american tv shows would have you believe
2) i fucking love snow. it's really not that cold. i love that every car with a good covering of snow on its bonnet is missing the front portion, where kids or adults have scraped off a good snowball's worth to hurl at someone.
so i don't sleep in this country. i am the mindless sleepless australian zombie boy. last night i was awake until after seven am and got up to go to uni by eight thirty. the up side of this is that i do a bit of extra reading and watch a lot of dvds and listen to still more music. i try to convince myself that this album will be the one to seduce me off to sleep. and then when the album ends i think, fuck it. i'll read a book. the only problem is tha zombie boys have short attention spans. so you're in that horrible predicament of having a mind that won't sleep but isn't really into being productive either.
but i have been reading a fair bit of george orwell. dave gave me a collected edition of orwell's writings from spain. it includes homage to catalonia which i finished a week or two ago, andnow i flip to random letters or book reviews that he wrote during the time as one takes my fancy. i recently found this gem in a review of a book called volunteer in spain, by john sommerfield:
'mr sommerfield was a member of the international brigade and fought heroically in the defense of madrid. volunteer in spain is the record of his experences. seeing that the international brigade is in some sense fighting for all of us - a thin line of suffering and often ill-armed human beings standing between barbarism and at least comparative decency - it may seem ungracious to say that this book is a piece of sentimental tripe; but so it is.'
priceless, eric, priceless.
so i've developed this kind of sick little habit. a kind of hidden, dark pleasure. like sado-masochistic sex. i've started actually reading some of the left activist group emails. and to be quite honest, i can't get enough of them. i just hope that this doesn't one day lead to my untimely death. like michael hutchence. maybe i'll have to get into autoasphyxiation stuff. i think it's more healthy, more natural.
alba
another skinny white boy
antipopper
asti
english lessons
hon
no se puede
somnambulist
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