Spanish conversation

Life - which is to say, work - has rather got in the way of blogging over the last couple of months. Since getting back to work after my long summer break, it seems busier than ever, with more to be done by fewer people, and an air of uncertainty underlying everything, with cuts cuts cuts the only thing being discussed - in the media and in people's daily lives. "Keep calm and carry on" seems a useful motto, as always. That resolution - of getting my work/life balance under better control - has not so far materialised.

I had a nice trip to Granada last week, to attend the meeting of a collaborative research project with the Alhambra which we're now engaged in. The weather was gorgeous - 23°C on Sunday! - but cold in the mornings and evenings, or if you stepped into the shade. It was an intense course in Spanish conversation, which did me a lot of good. I had that experience which I have always admired in friends for whom English is not their first language - like when Silvia and Rosa came here for dinner at the start of October, two Italians researching aspects of Italian-Islamic artistic encounter whom I wanted to introduce to each other. Of course we all spoke English, but when I stepped out of the room, and came back in a few minutes later, they were still speaking English to each other. Or when, in Berlin in January, I went out for dinner with some German colleagues from the Islamic museum, who were all still conversing in English when I got back from a trip to the loo. In this case, I was in Granada with a Spanish colleague from work, and a French colleague from the Louvre whom I know well, and with both of them I normally speak English - but because the lingua franca of our project meetings was Spanish, we continued to speak Spanish at the end of the day when out for dinner, and when I bumped into the French colleague, Sophie, on Sunday morning, having a coffee in a bar on the Plaza Nueva, we conversed in Spanish, because it felt odd to switch to English. How funny.

An interesting trip, as well, for understanding something about the internal politics of Spanish academia - sad, though, that in a city as small as Granada, with so many important groups of people who are experts in their own ways in local Islamic cultural history, that they should all be competing with each other, rather than working together to form a powerhouse of academic study in this area. They share information with us, as outsiders, but not with each other. It was good, though, to understand for the first time that I am not the only one who feels the tyranny of a certain couple, who seem to want to control what anyone anywhere says about Nasrid art history, by pillorying anyone who dares to express a theory different from one of theirs. Good, also, to understand that there are people within Granada who do not believe that their work is gospel any more. It gives me renewed hope for the new generation of upcoming Spanish scholars in the Islamic field, as well as a sense of reassurance that if one of this couple slates my book in a review - which I feel is fairly likely, especially since the Spanish translation is about to be launched - that not many people will pay them much attention.

There is not much other news, or what there is, is too boring to go into. I am giving a lecture tomorrow evening - the first in a while - so my time and thoughts over the last few days have been focused on that. It is on my book, a sort of promotional event which I had to organise for myself, since my publishers aren't doing anything. Compared to the publishers of the Spanish edition who have just invited me to participate in a launch event in Spain in the New Year! Anyway. I've been collecting book sightings - it's been spotted in the bookshops at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the American University in Cairo. It was in the Alhambra bookshops, and will hopefully be more prominently placed when the Spanish translation is out. (And a nice little plug for that came out recently in Granada Hoy, though with quite a few mistakes!)

But the best book-related anecdote so far is that a work colleague took a copy to present as a gift to the Sultan of Sharjah on a recent business trip, only to be told, "I've already got that! My daughter gave it to me!" So the Sultan of Sharjah has a copy of my book! The best book-related comment I've had is from the great professor of Islamic art, Robert Hillenbrand - chatting to him after his recent Islamic Art Circle lecture, someone asked us what was the book we were talking about, and Robert said - "Islamic Arts from Spain. You'd think, all the old chestnuts... But there is not a chestnut in sight!" I took that as high praise indeed.

The clocks went back this morning so now I have that strange feeling of my body-clock being out of kilter with what the clock on the wall says. Now begins the winter.

Podgrams

That's just a great word - trust Stephen Fry to come up with that! I just wanted to share this with you - I've been listening to his Podgrams on and off since he started them, gosh, a year ago. Last night, while cooking (risotto - and very nice it was too!), I finally got round to listening to his most recent one (from last December), about language - the joys of language, and how sad it is that the enjoyment of language should be considered somehow elitist. Among many many other things. That doesn't even begin to do it justice. The risotto was done and I just had to keep standing in the kitchen listening until it was finished. I swear, I actually felt more intelligent afterwards. How wonderful to have the intellect massaged so sweetly by Stephen's dulcet tones and thoughts! I am going to have to listen to it again and again to get the full benefit - if only this blog could be so aspirational and inspiring! I loved his phrase, "I linguify for a living!" And the following passage struck home with me, having been someone who grew up on the Classics, and even has a degree in it, would you believe. On language being a defining part of who you are, he says:

In my case, it's in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun, along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus, not because I was a Classical scholar, but because I was taught by Classical scholars, and grew up on poets, dramatists, and novelists who knew the Classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me.

Brief book update: Chapter 1 exists in an almost-complete draft, which I have decided to put to one side for a while before sending it off to my readers (I will have to have another sneak peak at the end of the week to reassure myself it's good enough to go), and this afternoon I have made a halting start to Chapter 2. Writing Chapter 1 was not just a process of getting the information down, but of understanding quite what this book is, and refining what I am going to be able to say in it: i.e. not, as I naively had in the back of my mind since the beginning, the last word survey text on Islamic Arts from Spain, which simultaneously meets a general and an academic audience. The format is just not long enough for that. I have had to cut out swathes of interesting thoughts, because fundamentally we have nothing in the collection that makes them relevant to the book. These thoughts - and probably even these texts - will get used elsewhere, but Chapter 1 was also a process of learning the art of compromise. Soon I will have to become proficient at the art of condensing thoughts into as few words as possible. So it's not an entirely positive feeling at this point, and makes starting on Chapter 2 harder than it should be. Anyway, tomorrow I am just going to dive in anywhere and get writing.