The You of My Song: Notes from a Voluntary Exile

(L-R) Gusi, Cha Cha, Loba, Chuf Chuf & Tiquis Miquis

Too Many Cats and Dogs? Impossible!

According to an article in this morning’s Independent, I’m going to live forever. The author, Rebecca Armstrong, in her article, Heal, boy: How Pets Can Keep You Healthy, reveals what researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered:

“After studying nearly 4,500 adults aged between 30 and 75 for 10 years, it was found that cat owners had a 40 per cent lower risk of suffering a fatal heart attack.” (more…)

I want to share with you this interview (below) which we did yesterday with my wife Maureen, the artist. This 10-minute video chat is thanks to the extreme kindness of our good friend, Juan Carlos Romera, who is a prize-winning producer and director of documentaries and short films. In fact, Maureen had one of the leading roles a couple of years ago in his 38-minute short, Bive, in which she played a British artist living in a Mediterranean village who falls in love with a Spanish fisherman. (You can see an account of the shooting of Bive here on World Printmakers, and the video of the film’s trailer here.)

It was Juan Carlos’s idea to shoot yesterday’s interview and upload it to YouTube. It was a lot of fun making it, and it’s great to see it online. I hope you agree.

If the painter sounds exceptionally cheeky for an interview, it’s because it’s her husband who is asking the questions. He’s cheaper.

I’ve been an unconditional admirer of Lewis Lapham ever since I discovered Harper’s Magazine many years ago. Lapham was the editor of Harper’s for 30 years, from 1976 to 2006. His current title is “editor emeritus,” which is not to say he’s retired. He still writes his regular Notebook feature for Harper’s and he’s embarked on a new history-journal project called Lapham’s Quarterly. The journal’s interest goes beyond its excellent content, for the three media it employs simultaneously: online, print and radio. Not to drag this introduction out, I just want to offer you some of Lapham’s comments on YouTube. There are a couple of hour-long interviews, along with some shorter features. All of them are worth spending your time. Lewis Lapham is a singular American. If there were 100 like him it would be a different country.

This first video, a 2006 interview with Harry Kreisler from “Conversations with History” includes a hilarious (”hilarious” as in “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…”) account of his job interview with the CIA:

This second clip, “Nickel and Dimed from the American Ruling Class,” is full of wonderful Lapham humor and irony, and even includes a musical number:

I’ll leave you with this quote from Lapham’s 2006 homage to Molly Ivins:

As we know from any reading of the morning papers, liberty is never at a loss for ambitious enemies, but the survival of the American democracy depends less on the magnificence of its Air Force or the wonder of its fleets than on the willingness of its citizens to stand on the ground of their own thought. Unless we try to tell one another the truth about what we know and think and see, we might as well amuse ourselves–at least for as long as somebody in uniform allows us to do so–with fairy tales.

Maureen is always dragging me off to music recitals and poetry readings. The other night it was the presentation of a new book of short, short stories, in one of Granada’s many historic palaces which have been renovated by the town hall for public use. There was no way I could get out of it as the publisher, Miguel Angel Arcas of Cuadernos del Vigía is a friend, the only intellectual I know prepared to come out early on a Sunday morning to hunt mushrooms with me. So I was not about to let him down. (more…)

British journalist, editor, world traveller, and old Spain hand David Baird has written a new book, his seventh, and he didn’t have to go far to research it. He’s been sitting virtually on top of it since he arrived in the Andalusian village of Frigiliana to live in 1971. Between Two Fires: Guerrilla War in the Spanish Sierras, about to be published by Maroma Press in English and Editorial Almuzara in Spanish (where the title is Entre dos fuegos: Guerra sin cuartel en las sierras andaluzas) tells the long-ignored story of “the people of the sierra”. This was the anti-Franco guerrilla movement which operated in the mountains of Spain’s Málaga and Granada provinces in the 1940s and 50s during the fierce Franco repression after the Spanish Civil War.

For years Baird had heard hushed references to “la gente de la sierra”, and “el maquis”, as the anti-Franco resistance fighters were known, but it wasn’t till he started doing his research for Between Two Fires that he discovered that his own adopted village of Frigiliana was one of the principal centers both for guerrilla and counter-guerrilla activity.

(more…)

The British reporter, Robert Fisk, was not only a valuable source for me in researching and writing The You of My Song, but a significant moral support, as well, when it came to writing not just with honesty, but with conviction. Now, after spending more than three decades covering the most conflictive areas of Europe and the Middle East, always in the vanguard, Robert Fisk has announced his retirement in an interview on New Zealand Television’s ‘Campbell Live’. In the interview, which you can see here:

Fisk gives the reasons for his decision to leave active duty, and describes his sense of despair at how little positive impact he feels his work has had.What has made Fisk’s journalism unique is his personalized, combative reporting style, along with a notable disregard for personal danger. When he was in Pakistan covering the first days of the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001, he was beaten nearly to death by a crowd of Afghan refugees.The next article he wrote included these lines: “I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing…” and their “brutality was entirely the product of others, of us — of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the ‘War for Civilisation’ just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them ‘collateral damage.’”

American actor John Malkovich precipitated an international incident when he declared in 2002 at the British Cambridge Union Society, when asked whom he would most like to “fight to the death,” he replied that he would “rather just shoot” journalist Robert Fisk. Fisk’s reply to Malkovich, (published here: http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles77.htm) was eloquent and all inclusive. (more…)

I intended to introduce you Robert Fisk this morning, but this journalist who has given us the finest, most reliable Middle East coverage for decades will have to wait till next time. Breaking news demands our attention.

According to Madrid’s El Mundo newspaper this morning, Sal Emergui, their correspondent in Jerusalem, filed the following report yesterday: “The United States and Israel are daily forging an alliance to confront Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadineyad’s nuclear project, but the pistachio question has provoked certain differences. This is not a joke. The Bush government has protested to Israel through various channels accusing them of consuming large quantities of Iranian pistachios.” (My translation.) (more…)

Most of us agree that free access to reliable information is essential for democratic societies. Until recently most of our information came from books, magazines, newspapers and radio and television news. Most of this news arrives late, in bits and pieces, and comes straight from “official spokespersons” via the mainstream media. Not only that, we only get it one day, and then it’s gone. It’s practically impossible to go back and find anything we’ve read or seen or heard. We’ve already wrapped the garbage in it and thrown it out.

The World Wide Web has changed all that, both for professional researchers and concerned citizens. I am convinced that, if anything is going to be done to rectify the current world situation, the Web will play a determinant role. It already does, but I think that role will become increasingly important. We need only look at the Web’s unique characteristics to see why:

• It functions day and night, every day of the year.
• It’s present in almost everyone’s homes.
• It’s instantaneous. Just connect and you’re off.
• It’s constantly updated, every minute of every hour of every day.
• It’s permanent. It’s there waiting for you when you need it.
• It presents all shades of opinion, so you can contrast them and make up your own mind.
• It’s searchable, so you lose no time in getting to the topic you’re interested in.
• It’s content comes in text, audio and video, making the information both more accessible and more convincing.
• It’s interactive. You can even contribute your own content to the Web. (more…)

I want to mention another honest, independent journalist, one whom some consider to be the finest investigative reporter of our time, and point you to a revealing video interview where you can very quickly take the measure of the man. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. Pulitzer Prize winner, Seymour Hersh, contributes regularly to The New Yorker these days, but he has been researching and writing his muckraking books and articles for more than 30 years. Hersh was the reporter who, as a 30-year-old freelancer, uncovered the Mai Lai massacre and the ensuing Nixon-administration cover up in 1969. It was also Hersh who exposed the mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. His most recent work deals with the Bush administration’s plans to bomb Iran using nuclear weapons, a revelation which he first published in 2006. (more…)

In the past few days I’ve added a couple of features to this blog, the beginning of a section of links (“blogroll” in the language of blogging), and a page of quotes from The You of My Song. The links are an important part of the site, as a large part of the book is concerned with communication, and most of these links are to my most trusted and admired sources, people I think everybody should know. These links are just the beginning. I will continue to add more as time goes by.

I want to mention an amazing source which I ran across while doing the research for The You of My Song. I thought that YouTube.com was a site for teenagers to show off their skills in skate boarding and ukelele playing, and for nostalgia buffs to find performances by Leadbelly and Buddy Holly. It is that, but it is much more. I found that it is also a vast audio-visual library of historic and present personages and events. This discovery occurred when I was searching the Web for President Eisenhower’s farewell address, the one where he warns about the potential threat to the American democracy posed by “the military-industrial complex.”

(more…)