On antique books

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How attracted are you to old books? The older the better? I must confess I love books in general, but I am fascinated by old books.

This fascination has gone on for a long time. Yes, I will stop and look at any (attractive) book, but if it is old I will really relish it. I have a handful of old books, which I enjoy, but part of the thrill is in discovering them: at garage sales, old bookstores, who knows where one is going to see an old book.

Our library has an antique book collection which I sometimes visit. Obviously, the old books are very delicate, so we limit their viewing, but it is still a pleasure to be surrounded by such treasures. Unfortunately, it is difficult to read old books, precisely because they are brittle and fragile so just being in the presence of them and even being able to handle them is a thrill.

In my striving for a simpler life, I am committed to only having 100 books at home, the oldest one is not particularly old, a 1944 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In my office I have a handful of technical/professional books, and in Spain I have another handful. For someone as passionate about books as I consider myself to be, I think I own remarkably few books.

What old books do you have? Or have seen? Tell me in the comments below.

Gentlemen; get your check up.

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Gentlemen, when was the last time you had a check up?

For me it had been a couple of years. I am not a fan of the American health care system (what system?), so I kept postponing my check up until I could do it for “free” in Spain.

I like to think that I take care of myself; try to eat healthy, do some sort of exercise almost every day, all that stuff, so I was not expecting any surprises…

But my blood test told a different story: my PSA level was a bit higher than it should be for my age group.

The PSA is the level that points to your prostate health. I had to find a urologist who then did two different tests, then an MRI scan, and eventually a biopsy. Needless to say, it is all a bit stressful.

Fortunately, the final results came in all clean, but we do have to keep an eye on my numbers with yearly check ups.

Of course, the scary bit is the word Cancer. So if you want to avoid the stress of having that word keeping you up at night, get your check up. You are welcome.

Once a tour guide, always a tour guide; a Tonxo Tours update

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Although nowadays I am terribly busy teaching, I still enjoy giving tours on my spare time, and I even gave a couple of tours of my school!

Now that I investigate it, I have not given a Tonxo Tours update in a long time (check out the last one here).

Since that update, I have given tours of the Everglades, which I love, and I have gained a lot of depth and confidence as I learn more about South Florida and Miami in general. This is normal for every destination; each tour is better than the previous one (usually…) as one learns more and more.

This Summer I had a few tours of Madrid, and I had a lovely multi day tour with a fantastic couple that included my happy place: El Escorial, as well as Toledo and Segovia, where we started by visiting the last Hieronymite monastery of Santa María del Parral led by my old friend Hermano Martín.

At some point the Development office at school connected the dots when they needed to show the school to a visiting high school and to a group of visitors, and they contacted me to do it! I was in between classes, and after some reviewing of history and other tidbits, I did it. It is not Toledo, with its labyrinth of narrow streets, or Madrid with its overwhelming history, or Miami, where your main concern is that your customers do not get run over, but it was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it!

So, if you need a tour in South Florida, Spain, or even St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary, give me a holler!

National Geographic; a lifetime subscription (almost)

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Everybody is familiar with the yellow National Geographic magazine. I have been a subscriber since 1977 (more or less, I think). My dad got me my first subscription back when I was a teenager living in New York, since then I have moved many times, but I have always kept my National Geographic subscription!

Yes, my first love was the amazing photography, basically telling the story of the article in photos, but little by little I got into reading the articles as well.

The magazine has gone through some changes and now belongs to Disney, but they seem to be doing a good job of keeping the quality of the articles, the writing, the photography, and the magazine itself. One of the peculiarities of Nat Geo is that there is only advertising at the beginning and the end, but no advertising in the middle of the magazine, this is very refreshing and conducive to reading, without interruptions. Another great feature are the maps the magazine sometimes comes with, they are spectacular! I love them and have even had some of them framed!

Nowadays, there are more “fun” little articles at the beginning of the magazine, I guess to cater to folks with short attention spans, but they do not detract from the main articles, which range from all sorts of topics like history, geography, archeology, sciences, nature, and much more. As I prepared for the photo shoot with my niece, we noticed that a favorite topic throughout the history of the magazine is ancient Egypt!

If you have never read a National Geographic, I encourage you to find one and check it out, they are special. You are welcome.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo credit: My niece

La cerca de Felipe II – It’s not that kind of wall.

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There is a lot of talk lately about walls, and there are a lot of walls, no need for me to mention them here.

But I recently explored a lesser-known wall, which had a quite different purpose than most walls…

You see, Felipe II, in the 1500s decided to build an almost 32-mile wall around his Escorial Palace (the largest Renaissance building in the world, read about it here), but not to keep people out, there were plenty of gates, but to keep wildlife in, as in hunting game, so he could hunt it!

This wall, the Cerca de Felipe II was not finished in his lifetime, nor his son’s Felipe II, nor his grandson’s Felipe IV, but continued being built into the Bourbon dynasty in the 18th Century!

My exploration partner Jaime and his sister Teruca led the way, taking advantage that the Valdemorillo reservoir is exceptionally low due to maintenance work on the dam. After a nice walk we found the wall and a bridge!

The wall is impressive! Over 8ft tall (2,5 mts), 20 inches wide, and not a drop of cement to be seen for 32 miles!

This reminded me that I had driven past an excellently maintained part of the wall -and a gate- near our village since I was a kid! The wall has “dips” which back in the day would have sand ramps on the outside to allow animals to jump into the walled area. Once in, the animals could not escape, ergo more hunting game for the king.

At any rate, the wall nowadays about 50% gone, but some remaining bits are in excellent shape as you can see from the photos.

Finding a treasure (and I need your help)

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In case you did not know this, my field of academic research is Francisco de Isla, an 18th C Spanish Jesuit who wrote Fray Gerundio de Campazas, Spain’s best-selling novel of the century.

Every Summer for the last few years, my friend Paco and I go to El Escorial to visit their old and antique book fair – and have dinner after. I normally just have a browse and rarely buy anything, as my reading list is already far too long. But this time, I found a gem.

The Biblioteca Jesuítico Española by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro is basically a bibliography of Spanish and Portuguese manuscripts found in seven Roman libraries and then some. And guess what? It has a bunch of references to our man Isla. Manuscripts found in different libraries in Rome, Toledo, Madrid, even Loyola in the Basque Country. Not bad for 10 Euro!

Then something special happened. I noticed the bookseller’s T shirt, referencing Monty Python’s Life of Brian. When I pointed this out to Paco, he knew exactly the shop where the fellow bought the shirt!! So we had to take a photo!

So now I must figure out which libraries I want to investigate their Isla manuscripts. This will be based on if I can find some sort of research grants to go investigate. This is where you come in: do you have any tips on how to look for research grants? Let me know in the comments, please.

Thanks!

Ernest Hemingway -a new ongoing series of my favorite authors.

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A few years ago, in an effort to professionalize my blog, I committed to publishing every Tuesday at 5:00 pm Eastern Time (11:00pm for my Spanish readers – my second biggest following). This is a healthy challenge: having to think of something to write, having some photos to go with it, writing something, and getting it published.

Mostly I write about the Humanities: literature, art, film, but I also write about the Camino (sorry I did not have time to walk this year), Education, food, wellness, and my life in general. Another quirk of my blog is that I choose not to have categories, as I prefer the chronological set up. Which I understand makes it harder if you only want to read what I write regarding a single topic – mostly the Camino, sorry.

At any rate, going back to Literature, one of my first loves. I realize that although I write a lot of book reviews, I rarely write about my favorite authors -wow, that was a long introduction! So this might be the start of a new ongoing series of my favorite authors.

I was blessed to have a great English teacher in High School. Mr. McGovern was also my track coach, but that is for a different blog. He actually looked a bit like Hemingway. A Farewell to Arms went a bit over my head, I did not have the maturity to appreciate it at the time. On the other hand The Old Man and the Sea really hit a chord with me, it has been one of my favorite books and one that I reread often. After that I read For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death in the Afternoon, and a bunch of short stories. And I loved them all.

Ernest Hemingway is out of favor in the 21st century. His toxic machismo, his destructive masculinity, But I wonder how many people who cancel Hemingway have read any of his work. (Yes, I did read the latest New Yorker profile)

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

― Ernest Hemingway

What I love about Hemingway is his craft of writing, his ability of saying so much with so little, his emotions to words ratio. Like García Márquez (another one of my favorites), Hemingway was trained as a journalist, where every word counts, and that economy is visible in their work. Add to that solid narratives, and you get, well, a Nobel Peace Prize winner!

So put aside your hip and trendy 21st Century political correctness and go read Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea might be a good starting point, you are welcome.

Walking my first Camino, I met James, a genial brit who was also a Hemingway fan, and we talked about him for hours. We split in Pamplona as I continued, but when we bumped into each other in Puente la Reina, he gifted me a copy he had bought for me in Pamplona! (See photo)

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

― Ernest Hemingway

Musings on modern art.

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Confession time: I do not always understand modern art, it does not move me, it does not make me question anything, it does nothing for me -maybe giggle. Having said that, I do not agree with the “I could have done that”, “My toddler could have done that”, “A drunk monkey could have done that” variations. It does take some creativity to come up with the idea to make/paint something.

Walking around the Retiro park recently, Celia and I dropped by an exhibition at the beautiful Palacio (or Casa) Velazquez by renown modern artist James Lee Byars. Having just come from seeing the Colecciones Reales a few days earlier (check that our here), the contrast was, to say the least, amusing.

The show included fixed pieces, which ranged from interesting to outright questionable, (half a golden sphere, seriously?). More interesting were performance numbers with people walking around the gallery and performing different activities. I did stop by a fire extinguisher wondering if it was part of the exhibit or part of the emergency equipment of the building.

Did I miss anything? Please enlighten me in the comments below.

Humanities, Caravaggio, and Artificial Intelligence.

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Am I the only one who is sick and tired and bored of AI? And this nightmare has only just begun? Yes, let’s eradicate Cancer and streamline flight traffic, and all that good stuff, but do you really need an AI generated picture of whatever nonsense you think of? and you certainly do not need it for that high school or college essay. Sorry.

This comes to mind because AI is already everywhere we look, but also because as every cloud has a silver lining, folks are hungry, thirsty for meaning. The solution? more Humanities, more arts, music, theatre, literature, more stories, more narrative.

Everybody has an opinion on AI. Some more positive, like Spanish writer Irene Vallejo, who thinks AI will “push” us towards the Humanities, and some more pessimistic, like French philosopher Éric Sadin who wisely explains that AI will not generate new jobs -at any rate not enough to cover those lost to AI.

So what does Caravaggio have to do with all this? Well, I was thinking about AI when I unexpectedly “bumped” into a brilliant Caravaggio at the Colecciones Reales recently (read about that here) and I was so deeply moved, that I understood how art and the humanities are the antidote to AI. A few days later I saw two more Caravaggios at the Prado, including a lost one which was in the attic of a Madrid family. I then basked in the memory of other Caravaggios I had recently seen: one in the Cathedral of Toledo, and a couple at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome. The evidence was evident: AI can “paint” just like a Caravaggio with the amazing 3D effect and the chiaroscuro, but it will never be a Caravaggio.

Caravaggio only painted about 60 to 105 paintings, and the story each one tells, the drama, the humanity, is moving. You can see where each painting is on this Wikipedia page.

So, if you are hungry, thirsty for meaning, for purpose, for humanity, find a Caravaggio near you and go enjoy it. If you can’t find one, you can read a good book, watch a good film, listen to a symphony, etc. You are welcome!

Advantages of teaching in a small school, coaching and Podcasts

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Next year will be my professional Platinum anniversary, my 20th year teaching. During that time, I have instructed little kids from 7- to 10-year-olds -exhausting- to university. Basically, I have taught 10 years in secondary (high school) and 10 in university (those little kids were my boss’ and she asked me to go to their school to teach the Spanish classes, it was an amazing experience but I don’t have the patience). Each type of school has different pros and cons.

St. Vincent de Paul is a small school and I love many the advantages that brings:

Something I would never be able to do at a bigger school would be to teach and coach at the same time (other than at secondary schools, where many times you are required to coach), but I have already written about this (for example: here)

Every month we have a special birthday lunch when everyone that has a birthday that month, students, faculty, staff, is celebrated. The kitchen staff prepares a great lunch, and the Student Council prepares a video. I was recently cast in the birthday video, the last of the year, where the theme has been fighting the many iguanas we have on campus. (if you want to skip to my Oscar winning performance, go to minute 4:24 but you would miss a hilarious film and a great tour of school)

Another thing going on is that the students have started a podcast, and they recently invited me to participate. It is called In-Formation, and while it is an easy pun, it is very informative. You can listen to it here. It is an honor to follow an illustrious list of guests including the rector, a couple of students about to graduate, a bishop, etc. To listen to the podcast click below:

https://www.svdp.edu/information-podcast

So, while there are drawbacks to working in small schools such as lack of diversity of students, fewer courses to teach, etc. I really enjoy the benefits of teaching at such a special small school.