From Xico

This is not about Diego and Henry (yet) nor more about Freud and Netanyahu (yet), but it is about the continuing sin of racism in the US by Juan Cole, one of my favorite bloggers.  It has some dramatic numbers about black arrests, etc.  Inequality lives on.

Please read it.

 

 

Benjamin Netanyahu and Sigmund Freud

For a long time I have wondered (as have far greater minds than mine) if it is at all possible to figure out the underlying factors that drive people to hold onto seriously destructive beliefs in the face of all reason. In our black-and-white culture, we tend to paint people who don't agree with us all one color. It's hard to be subtle.  As I have watched the ripping apart of Gaza, I have seen no evidence  of the policy to spare civilians Benjamin Netanyahu claims exists. Instead, it appears that the Israel Defense Forces he commands are bent on absolute destruction.  I wonder how  Netanyahu who I am sure sees himself doing good could appear to have twisted himself into someone so  evil.  Who is this man who stirs the pot of hatred in his country so successfully? And why does he do it? Why does he feel righteous (not to say self-righteous) following his policy of enormous overkill in Gaza? Is it possible to figure out how we justify horrible actions to ourselves, all of us?  And why, with all our knowledge, haven't we come to terms with our own proclivity for violence in response to perceived attacks, for hatred of people we don't know.  Why haven't we developed a way to soften this hatred.

I happened upon a review by Vivian Gornick of a book called "Becoming Freud" by Adam Phillips.  I bought the book for my Kindle, and I will refer to it throughout this piece.  I am not a "Freudian", whatever that means, but I think he opened up ways to look at people from unexpected angles. Freud's discoveries give us an opportunity to take a different approach to Netanyahu.

In her review, Gornick says:

"It was through attention to the unconscious that he [Freud] made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions — our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations — yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love it and want — nay, intend — never to relinquish it." 

Somewhere I saw an illlustration of the human psyche in which our consciousness, our supposedly sensible, aware part, was riding a giant bull or some similar animal, barely under control.  The bull was our  unconscious, unruly portion of ourselves, much bigger and stronger.

There is no definitive explanation of the conscious and the unconscious, nothing even close as far as I'm concerned.  But we tend to recognize that we have been exposed to so much, have woven so much out of what we´ve been exposed to, that we can't possibly be conscious of it all, pull it into our decision-making or our creative efforts, even when it would be useful to do so.  And if Freud is right, we don't even want to know all the unconscious stuff we harbor: it would go against who we think we are and what we want to be.  We tend, all of us, to justify our own hideous actions to ourselves and others. Very few of us happily accept ourselves as evil creatures who enjoy doing evil things.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Nathan Mileikowsky (1879-1935), Benjamin Netanyahu's grandfather, shared pretty large pieces of cultural heritage (so did my dad's parents for that matter). But they responed to their heritage in very different ways.  Netanyahu's father and grandfather became revisionist Zionists who were deeply committed to getting as much of the British Mandate of Palestine as they possibly could to turn into the country Israel.  Their efforts were bloody.  Freud's background was not so political. 

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Adam Phillips says,"The Jews of central and eastern Europe in the 19th century lived mostly in small communities as minority groups in what were often tolerant but hostile cultures.They were hemmed in by restrictions and prejudices, but were not perceived as a threat to the states in which they lived....They had access only to the resources of their tightly knit communities, and they lived, like all immigrants with, and under, a great deal of suspicion.  The continuity of their lives resided in their family traditions, which were religious in origin, their inherited ways of life in a diaspora that had become their culture....The consolations of locality were always provisional....

"....The stories of the poorer Jews in central Europe in the ineteenth century tend to be generic...due to the lack and limits of ...documentation.  (Freud's parents and grandparents would mpt jave beem omterested om tjeor ñoves tje wau [Sigmund Freud] taught us to be.  For these people, success was survival....[T]here fate was to be always potentially nomadic because they had no political or civic status, living always on sufferance in foreign states.

Orthodox judaism itself was declining in the nineteenth century "...due to the pressures of modernization.  The haskalah--the Jewish Enlightenment...--was eroding the old scholarly-rabbinical tradition in favour of a more rational, skeptical humanism, radically suspicious of dogma and traditional forms of authority and encouraging more politically active forms of assimilation."

This was a period in which "European boundaries were shifting in Europe and the status of Jews was unclear. Whether or not they were a race or a people...they were resident aliens wherever they lived...As both the enemies and inventors of Christianity the Jews were doubly disadvantaged...they were by definition a dissenting group....

Although Freud ended up with an education in Enlightenment values, there had been "Generations of politically marginalized Jews in his family, people for whom political participation was unthinkable."

Freud and other Jews of his generation believed they had found a culture in which they had "a place and a voice" in Vienna.  

Phillips goes on, " The allure of a taken for granted liberalism, however wishful it seems ...[in]hindsight...must have seemed irresistible to the Viennese Jews of Freud's generation...[which] wanted to free themselves from...a 'history of the Jewish people...long limited to a religious narrative of persecutions and martyrdoms. Esther Benbassa writes this 'story of suffering stood in for History in the proper sense of the term' as a way of preserving the fragile unity of the community in diaspora.'  

This "story of suffering" still is dominant in the lives of Jews, secular or religious, who  participate in Jewish culture.  For some (many?) it merges with the notion of Jewish specialness, of Jews as "chosen people."  Before the end of World War II, these beliefs offered, sometimes, means to survive and to maintain some integrity in their identities. Of course the genocide they suffered under Hitler gave it new life.  Today, I think, especially in light of the great social and economic changes wrought in the second half of the twentieth century,Jewish communities themselves have changed. For some Jews, the mythology of their past has become malignant.

Netanyahu, the Zionist, is one of these Jews I think.  Freud was not.  Freud's father had renounced orthodox Judaism.  He was apparently a failing wool merchant and because of this, the family moved first to Leipzig and then to Vienna, at the time a particularly vibrant and liberal city.  The family stayed there.  Many, many Jews who couldn't sustain themselves in "local shtetl communities" were migrating to eastern and central European cities.

Jews wanted their kids to gain respectability by hopefully taking up a profession, "preferably medicine or the law."  Freud was consciously drawn to Enlightenment values,  and himself said his father "allowed me to grow up in complete ignorance of eveything that concerned Judaism".  Yet Freud's endeavors seem shadowed by his family's Jewish immigrant past.

 

 

 

Related articles

Jews and the 'mad science' of psychoanalysis

Worrying and the Value of History

Note: I cut and pasted the segment staring with "As Voltaire memorably remarked".  The underlined pieces of text from that point on are therefore not live links.

Richard Feynman, mentioned below, was a theoretical physicist. Look him up in Wikipedia via this link. Not only should he not be forgotten, he should be enjoyed. And while you're at it, do lookup Brainpickings.

In the wonderful newsletter called Brainpickings(www.brainpickings.org) there appeared today an article called Big Thinkers on the Only Things Worth Worrying About. There are snippets from a variety of Big Thinkers", and much presented ruefully, because worry is endemic to our species.  One particular segment caught my eye because the writer talks passionately about the importance of reading about HISTORY which of course I agree with. She talks about 'presentism', the tendency these days to dismiss the past as irrelevant and the consequences, grave indeed, of doing so. She includes a quote from Noga Arikha.

 "As Voltaire memorably remarked, “Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” Without appreciation for the Feynmans of the past we duly don our presentism blinders and refuse to acknowledge the fact that genius is a timeless quality that belongs to all ages, not a cultural commodity of the present. Many of our present concerns have been addressed with enormous prescience in the past, often providing more thoughtful and richer answers than we are able to today, whether it comes to the value of space exploration or the economics of media or the essence of creativity or even the grand question of how to live.  Having “living heroes” is an admirable aspiration, but they should never replace — only enhance and complement — the legacy and learnings of those who came before.  Below is a tiny piece 

"Indeed, this presentism bias is precisely what Noga Arikha, historian of ideas and author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, points to as her greatest worry in one of the most compelling answers. It’s something I’ve voiced as well in a recent interview with the Guardian. Arikha writes:

´I worry about the prospect of collective amnesia.While access to information has never been so universal as it is now — thanks to the Internet — the total sum of knowledge of anything beyond the present seems to be dwindling among those people who came of age with the Internet. Anything beyond 1945, if then, is a messy, remote landscape; the centuries melt into each other in an insignificant magma. Famous names are flickers on a screen, their dates irrelevant, their epochs dusty. Everything is equalized.'

"She points to a necessary antidote to this shallowing of our cultural hindsight:"

'There is a way out: by integrating the teaching of history within the curricula of all subjects—using whatever digital or other means we have to redirect attention to slow reading and old sources. Otherwise we will be condemned to living without perspective, robbed of the wisdom and experience with which to build for the future, confined by the arrogance of our presentism to repeating history without noticing it.'

 

 

 

 

What we do when we don't do much

MONDAY, January 6  I have resolved to write something for twenty minutes a day.  I have to tell you that the two things I identify myself most with are reading and writing.  I like to do a lot of other stuff, too, but these two top the list.  Reading is way ahead of writing.  Reading is EASY, writing is HARD, at least a lot of the time.  This bit I’m scribbling now is easy.  It’s essentially, what do they call it, not stream of consciousness.  Nah.  This is more like automatic writing: whatever comes to mind, put it down.

So not much is coming to mind at the moment.  Well, that’s not true.  What first comes to mind is that we’ve had no internet for three and a half days, let alone telephone and television, all provided by Megacable.  This is the first time we’ve had any significant problem with Megacable.  I think the problems have been amplified by the fact that each time we’ve called or gone to the office, the clerk has said the equivalent of the check’s in the mail.  What if, instead, she’d said, we'll try to have someone at your house on Monday, which is today, in the afternoon? Nah, that wouldn't have worked either.  Monday, we'd have screeched, or not screeched because we would have tried to be polite.  You don't think it could be sooner than Monday? The cable guy who is not Jim Carrey and who speaks Spanish probably exclusively which is not a problem, just a probable statement of fact, came, probably or possibly, while we were in Coatepec on line at the Megacable office (or in line as people not from the Northeast say).  When we returned home, our cleaning person told us someone had come to the door and told her the cable guy had come, and had gone back to Coatepec for some cable.

We are still not placing any bets on having stuff back in service tonight.  As we discovered as we attempted to go to  Coatepec to make our daily inquiry about our service, there is a manifestación, a demonstration, on the main road, the only easy (and it is very easy) route, not only to Coatepec but also to Xalapa and other points in between. The alternate route is a dirt road, recently graded, but very muddy and slithery and twisty and rocky.

Manifestaciones blocking important roads are very common in Mexico, and the right to have them is guaranteed in the Constitution.  At least until recently, nothing could interfere with them. Nada. Recently, after endless teachers’ demonstrations tied up vital spaces in Mexico City’s highway network including a very main avenue in the city and main access to the airport, I think some changes were made to put limits on the right to endless free speech which unfortunately doesn’t always have the impact the demonstrators hope for.  Jim suggested that in our area, one of the reasons manifestaciónes don’t always have significant impact is that there isn’t always enough publicity.  All we drivers know is that the road is blocked again. Sometimes people in the Colonia know what it’s about, sometimes not.  If it’s not a big manifestación, sometimes you can make your way to the start of it, like the time demonstrators blocked the crucero, the intersection where the road turns left to the very interesting town of  Teocelo and right to our colonia.  The demonstrators were protesting the absolutely horrific state that critical road to Teocel had fallen into. I mean talk about potholes, the pavement interfered with the potholes, not the other way around.  And indeed, THAT manifestación seems to have been successful as well as to have garnered quite a bit of justified sympathy.   Repairs have actually begun. Often there is reason to have sympathy with the manifestacion participants, though not for me anyway with the corrupt teachers' union.  I do share many of the concerns with the education law, but that's another blog post that I may or may not get to.  I just have to add that the roads are in terrible shape because we had extraordinarily heavy and lasting rains during the rainy season.

TUESDAY, January 7. Next daily twenty minutes.  Back to my Opening Paragraph. I'm not referring to the issue of automatic writing.  I'm referring to the absence of internet and television and coming in third, the telephone. 

Until recently I hardly watched television.  Jim would put on a movie at night and ask me if I wanted to watch it.  I would sit for few minutes and start getting antsy remembering that I was at a tense point in my latest Scandinavian mystery. I eat up Scandinavian mysteries.  I have no idea why. They are often depressing, and the weather in them is not generally inspiring.  It's usually not even beautifully snowy, more often rainy with harsh winds blowing.

Then one day a few months ago a friend of ours whose opinion I tend to hold in high regard asked if we'd seen Breaking Bad. I was shocked. Uh, no.  Why would we watch a series about a bunch of suburbanites who somehow get involved in selling speed? Our friend smiled knowingly.  I´m an addict, she confessed.  I watched the whole first season in one sitting. Then another friend whom I never would have dreamed would get caught up in Such a Thing confessed to a Breaking Bad addiction. She and her husband had the excuse that it was set in Albuquerque where they had lived for quite a few years.

So we renewed our subscription to Netflix (which we'd intended to do anyway) and with trepidation and certainty that we wouldn't like it got into S1 E1 of Breaking Bad. That evening we watched four episodes.

Fortunately last Friday when our cable connection failed, we had watched all 54 episodes available on Netflix and were waiting anxiously for the last season to show up.  There was no satisfactory substitute so I had retreated from TV and returned to Scandinavia, this time Finland.

But I craved the internet. I am not an addict. I swear.  I had only given in to the craving once, yesterday, Monday, when we stopped at an internet cafe in Coatepec and where I realized to my despair that I didn't remember my gmail password.

Since the information about the cable guy had been kind of blurry, I went to my neighbor's to check what the cable guy had actually said, and SHE had never seen him. She did, however, hear me cough and recommended that I try hoja santa leaves on my chest.  She told me what to do.  I went home and tried heating the leaves, but they shriveled up.  I went back. My neighbor explained more exactly what to do and gave me some replacement leaves.  And then one of the kids who plays on the block told me he'd only seen the Megacable guy up the street, not near our house.  Once again Jim and I comforted each other while being sure it would be a long time, considering the manifestacion in progress making driving slow at best, and what cable guy would contend with THAT? 

So Jim and I were sitting around trying to comfort ourselves that we could hone other skills, do other stuff.  We could, we could….And in fact we DO do a lot without the internet(because we’re not really addicts, we only need maintenance doses, but you know there’s that maintenance dose….)

Well, as you can see if you’re reading this, we did get our service back.

The cable guy showed up about 1:30.  He said he just had to turn on the connection.  Huh?  You mean fix the wire?  No, he said, turn on the connection.  Huh? He said when someone doesn’t pay the bill for a while a cable guy comes out and turns off the connection.  But we PAID our bill we huffed (I mean puffed) indignantly.  They realized that, he said, and that’s why I’m turning on the connection.  He climbed up the pole which is outside our on the corner. Maybe someone further down the line hadn’t paid.  Whatever. We practically threw ourselves at his feet in gratitude.  Let’s go inside and make sure your internet works he said IN ENGLISH.  You speak English? Yeah. He smiled. He spoke fluent English and our internet was back.  So not all cable guys in our area speak only Spanish after all.  I bet more people around here speak English than an equivalent bunch of people in maybe St. Louis speak Spanish.  Guess why.

 

Bus Trip to Mexico City, Second Segment -- a Little Bit of Mexican geography plus Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl

A few geographical notes.

Mexico is considered part of North America because it lies on the North American Plate, NOT for cultural reasons.  Some of Baja California also lies on the Cocos Plate and the Pacific Plate, but by far the largest portion is on the North American Plate. It is the rubbing together of these plates, as well as its related volcanic activity, which makes the country particularly earthquake-prone. 

Although Mexico City is in a valley, when we go there from our house, we go up even after we go down a bit.  We are never as low, on the whole trip, as we are at home.  Xalapa has an altitude of roughly 4000 feet, although it varies from place to place. Our house in Col. Ursulo Galván, about eleven miles more or less south from Xalapa, is at 3800+ feet.  The top of the Colonia is also about 4000 feet. Our area of Veracruz is on the eastern, down side of the Sierra Madre Oriental, on its corner with what is called the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, or the Sierra Nevada (Nevada means snowy--these mountains are or were snow-capped either all year or part of the year).  We are in the faldas, or skirts, of Cofre de Perote, to our west, which, along with Pico de Orizaba, makes the corner of the two mountain ranges.  The trees in these mountains are mostly oak and pine having, surprisingly for people expecting something more tropical. They have an appearance not unlike the mountains of the US west. to me they look somewhat Oregonian.

So the bus from Xalapa climbs through the Sierra Madre Oriental and then on to the Altiplano de Mexico, or the high plains or plateau of Mexico which extends from the southern US border to the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt.  In the southern area, its altitude averages about 6600 feet above sea level.  It is quite uneven because Mexico City itself is in a valley of the altiplano (called the Valle de México) and is 7350 feet above sea level.  In the bus we go down into Mexico City from the altiplano.  The site of Mexico City was originally a lake.  The Aztecs built on an island in the lake, but the Spanish filled it in. The people of the area farmed on man-made islands in the lake. Interestingly, Tlaxcala (see previous post) was one of the regions in which people lived who came to actively oppose the Spanish during the Conquest.

Well.  I could go on, but this post is supposed to be about what we saw on our bus trip.

Anyway, after Malinchin, the next spectacular sight is of Popocatepetl(17,800 feet) and Iztaccihuatl (17,160 feet), the second and third highest mountains in Mexico after Pico de Oriaba.  You see Iztaccihuatl first on the bus trip.  It is not an active volcano.  The name means white woman because it is snow covered, and its four peaks are said to look like a reclining woman. I think it looks as much like the profile of a face as of a body, but no matter.

The picture below (stolen from Wikipedia) is pretty much how it appeared to us.

You drive a bit further before Popocatepetl appears a bit to its south.  The two are separated by the Paseo de Cortés and are linked by a Nahuatl legend of thwarted love between a princess and a warrior, Iztaccihuatl being the princess, Popo, the warrior.  Popo was not the name of the warrior, however, at least I don't think it was.  Popocatepetl means smoke-covered mountain.  In the 1990s the glaciers on Popocatepetl shrank noticeably, apparently partly because of warmer temperaturs, but also because of increasing volcanic activity.

Popocatepetl is the more famous probably because it is still an active volcano (and is easier, at least for me, to say).  In fact, it was more than normally active on the 22 of May when we went past it for a visit to Jim's opthalmologist.  I wrote about that here.  The government has a series of warning notices about the severity of volcanic activity which seems a bit like the US's warning system for terrorism danger, but where the volcano is concerned, it is more useful and accurate.  The three stages are green, normal; yellow, alert; and red, alarm.  It has been on yellow for awhile now, though since our last trip, things have quieted down and it is has been at a low yellow.

It looked pretty much like this last Wednesday when we drove past, except it also had a very, very thin stream of steam coming out to the left.

This image is from the CENAPRED website.  CENAPRED is the Centro Nacional de Prevencion de Desastres.  It has an excellent page on Popocatepetl and information on a lot of other stuff as well.

Today, after a relatively quiet few weeks, there has been an uptake in volcanic earthquake activity with a cluster of seven of about 2.4 on the Richter scale occuring this morning. I found this information on the site called Volcano Discovery  which says it may (or may not be) an indication of an uptick in activity. This as well as the CENAPRED site offer all kinds of up-to-the-minute information on volcanoes, the former world-wide, the latter Mexican.  

Back on the bus, Popo and Izti (their nicknames) fade into the horizon behind us, and soon we find ourselves slipping down the broad, curving highway to Mexico City.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

A hike on Cofre de Perote at around 11000 feet

Mountain climbers mostly like to get to the top of mountains, but this is hardly necessary to do in order to envelope yourself in the majestic and sometimes strange landscapes of Mexico. I myself will probably--no, certainly--will never hike to the top of Pico de Orizaba.  I have hiked to the top of Cofre de Perote where you find a tiny village of workers and a small forest of antennae.  There are any number of at-least-as-interesting things below.

Having never been to the top of Pico de Orizaba (Citlatépetl in Nahuatl), I can't swear the same is true, but I do know that trips lower down are filled with their own beauty.  Several months ago, we drove to Nuevo Potrero,about 32 miles south-southwest of where we live, on the eastern flank of the mountain to walk just a little way up to the peak five miles away.

Here is a map of the area from Coscomatepec where you leave the road for Pico showing Potrero Nuevo. Remember, you can click on it to make it bigger.  

We did not spend much time in Potrero Nuevo, but you can find some stuff about it by googling Potrero Nuevo, Vereracruz, including some nice YouTube videos. It is, I believe, the highest town in the State of Veracruz at 10,637 feet.  We parked at the edge of town near the church which is either under construction or being rehabbed and set out with our dogs.  Below are some photos from our hike.  It is arduous, not only because it is a sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy steep trail, but even more because of the altitude.

You can just see the summit through the clouds here.

The road up from Potrero Nuevo

Jim and Jocko.  Jocko's mountain heritage shows when we go hiking at high altitudes.  He loves it.

We passed a man going down with his burro dragging some wood.  This wasn´t a recreational trip for him or his beast.

Jocko posing on the trail.

The trail goes into a leafless forest.

A view across the top of Mexico, more or less.

Just some more of the trailwith mist drifting through.

Jim has some pics of the little town which I will post perhaps someday.  I am hesitant because there are about ten thousand things I mean to post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yoga in Xico with Luana

I kept thinking I was too old to start yoga.  I thought this for years.  During the time I thought I was too old for yoga, I ran a 5 k (and came in last) and took pilates for quite a while and tai chi for a couple of years.  But yoga kept calling, so finally, after my friend who is ALMOST my age told me how much she liked it, at age 69 and almost 8 months I wandered into Luana's studio.  It is a comfortable white space with some colorful 8x10 Mexican-type banners strung across the ceiling which is high, old, wooden and beamed.  And I'm not too old.  And I love it, even after just a couple of weeks.  I had taken dancing lessons for years -- serious ones -- and I've never stopped missing them: the feeling that you and your body (to be corny) are one: the feeling of your muscles working and stretching and lifting you, the sweat pouring down your back as you push just a little harder and a little harder, the music coursing through you.There isn´t any piano music in yoga, though there are some chants, and it isn't as hard (or rather Luana won't permit old bones and muscles to push as hard), but it is still thrilling to be back making my body work in this way.  In the classes, the movement alternates with meditative periods where you stay in a position (for me, mostly reclining positions) for extended periods of time.  I've done breathing on and off for years, and in my years as a therapist with severely mentally ill patients I taught mindfulness which involves breathing, so I´m not new to it.   In Luana's studio, it seems that my experiences are a bit different.  Lying on my back, (I don't think I'm psychotic) it seems as if I am somehow a very thin shell, with the world flowing through me.  Even better, I notice the sounds and smells of the neighborhood outside: roasting coffee, bus exhaust, garlic in oil, trucks with their home-made wooden sides rattling down the cobblestones, a light hint of piano music or the sound of a clarinet in the distance, women gossiping and laughing, a radio playing norteño. 

Anyway, now a plug for Luana's classes.  She is very flexible (mentally as well as physically) and adjusts the movements according to the level of the student.  She is completely fluent in both English and Spanish.  She follows the Lyengar method.  Weekdays, she teaches Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9:00 am to 10:30 am and Monday and Thursday, from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm with a a class for children on Wednesdays from 5:00-6.00.  Obviously I recommend her highly.

Classes are 50 pesos a piece.

The address is Hidalgo 100, Xico

The phone is cel 228 111 7647

And she is on facebook at Yogatlán.

Wear shorts or comfortable clothes.

Popocateptl -- I saw steam coming out of it! I really did!

Last time we went for a check-up for Jim's eyes in DF, I SWORE to him that I saw Popocateptl fuming.  He was unconvinced.  Later I read in the papers that indeed, the volcano was spewing forth steam (en español, exhalaciones).  And a few days later than that, it actually spewed forth flame.  People in Puebla were sweeping ash from the streets.  

The volcano observers maintain their watch status at 3, or yellow, and haven't raised it for several weeks, but they haven't lowered it, either.

Here are photos from Aristegui Noticias on the 22 of May.  The one on the right looks exactly like what I saw.  The one on the left is from a different perspective:

We head for Mexico City again this upcoming week so I can renew my passport.  I will bring my camera and see if it is at all possible to take a picture through the bus window.

Disney and Dia de los Muertos

I don't know if this made it into the US press or not, but Disney was planning to trademark "Dia de los Muertos" and use it to market a movie and a whole bunch of Disney merchandise.  It also planned to prevent  people from using the name without applying for copyright permission!

Fortunately, the effort failed. There was a LOT of protest, so Disney withdrew its plans.  I would say this is chutzpah, but maybe not in the US.  Next thing, corporations will be buying rights to name cemeteries! How about Panteón Lala?  By the way, I looked up chutzpah to see if I could find a Spanish equivalent.  I came up with frescura, descaro, desparpajo, desfachatez, and desenfado.  

IMPORTANT AND WAY OVERDUE UPDATE: THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BOOK EXCHANGE

The English Language Book Exchange (and the Spanish one, too) are much expanded and open Monday through Saturday, 9-3 and 5-7 or so at Caftan Rojo in Coatepec.    You can find an excellent map of the location here. It is on the corner of Zaragosa and Xicotencátl near the crucero on the Xalapa side of town.  The telephone number is (228)8163151.

You can take a book (or two or three) and return them when you are finished or replace them with other books.  Enjoy!!!