If I were in Cardiff this week, there's a whole load of fantastic cultural goings-on I wouldn't want to miss. However, as I'm going into hospital instead, I'd like to encourage other people to go and then report back to me please!
Poetry Under Pressure - Thurs 24/Fri 25 May
Academics from my department at Cardiff University - the School of European Languages, Translation and Politics - have invited two East German poets, Uwe Kolbe and Richard Pietraß, for a two-day poetry extravaganza. There's a poetry reading (Thurs 7-8:30, Chapter) and a public colloquium (Fri from 10, EUROS building) featuring interviews, talks from academics and a free lunch, as well as two workshops, one for translators (Thurs 10-12, EUROS building) and one for poets (Fri 3-5, Wales Millennium Centre).
More from the School of European Languages, Translation and Politics, this time as part of the Transeuropa Festival. The Human Library is like a real library, only the books are humans. People from a whole range of backgrounds with so many different life experiences. 'Readers' sit down with their 'book' and get to know there story. Given that Cardiff is such a vibrant city, I'm sure there'll be lots of people with fascinating stories to tell.
The Get Together - until Sat 26 May @ Sherman Cymru
As I've said many times before, one of the great things about Sherman Cymru is its commitment to new writing, and Simon Crowther's The Get Together is another example. Four friends and a few drinks promises to end in 'laughter, betrayal and blood'.
If you go to any of these events (and why not?), please comment and let me know how they went!
While I've had limited mobility these last few days, I have at least been able to get on with my dissertation. I've tried to combine as many of my favourite topics in it as possible: literature, travel, Europe, nationalism, identity and Galicia. It's about the travelogues of people from Galicia who travelled around Europe in search of themselves and in the process became the leaders of the Galician nationalist movement: Ramón Otero Pedrayo, Alfonso Castelao and Vincente Risco.
Written in 1930, Arredor de sí is a fictionalised version of Otero Pedrayo's youth. A highly intelligent young man from a landed family, Otero's alter-ego, Adrián Solovio, is desperate to get out of Galicia. He doesn't feel at home there, and doesn't even really know who he is. He starts by exploring Spain - Madrid, Toledo, Burgos, before moving on to the rest of Europe. It's through visiting France, Germany and Belgium that he slowly realises that he belongs in Galicia and that Galicia deserves its own place in Europe. Where he once believed the Galician language was backwards and for peasants, he returns from his travels determined to prove that Galician is a worthwhile vehicle for deep philosophical thought and modern writing.
As a piece of literature, Arredor de sí isn't the finest example. It's very academic, constantly name-dropping philosophers and writers (not surprising considering the main character is a devout student, but it doesn't really help the flow of the story). However, it's important for what it represents. It's a call to arms for Galicians, an assertion of the value of Galician culture and a demand for a Europe where small nations are equal and respected. It's also a testament to the importance of travel and getting to know other cultures in the search for one's own identity.
Happy Europe Day! As you may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Europe, especially when it comes to culture, so I actually celebrate Europe Day. The day commemorates the Schuman Declaration of 9 May 1950 in which the then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed a form of European supranational community, leading to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the ancestor of the EU.
In honour of the day, I'd like to travel through the EU through films, but I'm sad to say I don't know enough. So that's where you come in: please send me your suggestions! I'd love to end up with at least one film for each of the 27 member states.
I'll start off with a few of my favourites. Some of them are obvious choices, famous and critically acclaimed (e.g. La Dolce Vita). Others are less well known, but I love them.
France: Les Chansons d'amour (Love Songs) - Christophe Honoré (2007)
When people think French film, they'd maybe say Godard or Renoir, or more recently films like Amélie or La Haine. I am a huge fan of French cinema, old and new, but there's no director I love more (not just in France but in general) than Christophe Honoré, and his Les Chansons d'amour is my favourite film of all time. Big claim, I know, but I just love it. For starters, it's a musical, which is always going to win my favour, especially as the songs (written by Alex Beaupain) are really catchy. What I love most about it though, is that it explores so many aspects of human relationships, romantic to familial, mundane to illicit, joyful to tragic. It's an engrossing, moving and extremely true-to-life portrayal of love, loss and new beginnings. It also stars some of the best new French talent including Louis Garrel, Chiara Mastroianni and Clotilde Hesme. The trailer does not do it justice (probably because it's trying to avoid giving any plots twists away).
Germany: Metropolis - Fritz Lang (1927)
As much as I love recent German films like The Edukators, The Lives of Others and Goodbye, Lenin!, I'm going old-school for this one. Metropolis is widely regarded as one of the all-time classics and rightly so. It's one of the most creative and iconic films I've ever seen and an incredible technical achievement given when it was made. It proves you don't need words to make drama.
Ireland: Once - John Carney (2007)
A charming little musical made on a shoe-string that has taken the world by storm and has just been taken to Broadway. Staring Glen Hansard (of Irish folk band The Frames) and Czech songwriter Markéta Irglová as musicians who come together to make something beautiful. Their song Falling Slowly won the Oscar for Best Original Song (an honour slightly tarnished by the fact that Man or Mupet won this year). It's also a great film for Europe Day as it shows the benefits of supranational co-operation ;-)
Italy: La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini (1960)
An obvious choice really. While I enjoy neo-realist classics, smush-fests like Il Postino and Cinema Paradiso, and modern films like Gomorra which show the realities of contemporary Italy, La Dolce Vita encapsulates the glamorous ideal of Rome. Plus I needed Marcello Mastroianni in here somewhere!
The Netherlands: Zwartboek (Black Book) - Paul Verhoeven (2006)
Admittedly I don't know very much about Dutch film at all (please send me recommendations!) but this exploration of Second World War Resistance is really interesting and visually impressive.
Spain: La Mala Educación (Bad Education) - Pedro Almodóvar (2004)
Pedro Almodóvar is undoubtedly the most successful and renowned Spanish film-maker and while All About My Mother is usually cited as his best film, I much prefer Bad Education. This semi-autobiographical film ties together strands that have run throughout his work, including questioning gender and sexuality norms, religious iconography and ambivalence towards the Church, and the nature of film-making. Absolutely beautiful and completely engrossing.
Sweden: Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) - Ingmar Bergman (1957)
Another obvious choice, The Seventh Seal is the film that gave the world the iconic image of death playing chess. Beautifully made.
UK: In Bruges - Martin McDonagh
Choosing one film for th UK was always going to be a challenge, so rather than trying to find a film that is particularly representative of Britain, I've just gone with another of my favourite films. It also seems appropriate as it's set in Belgium, home of the EU. I've seen this darkly hilarious gangster film/homage to one of Belguim's biggest tourist attractions so many times and yet it still makes me laugh more than most films.
So that's eight down, only 19 to go! Please send in your suggestions and help me get around the EU in films.
Having taken European Studies as both my BA and my MA, one question I've asked and been asked more than any other is "What is Europe?"
Europe is certainly getting a bad rep at the moment. When I mention I take European Studies, the response on the street is generally a negative comment about Europe, either the dire state of the Euro (even before the recent crisis) or how Brussels is ruining things for everyone in Britain. This is undoubtedly a symptom of British Euroscepticism, but I think a large part of the problem is that people have little emotional connection with Europe - they can't imagine the EU beyond economics and politics. In fact, when I got the chance to study identification with Europe in a research project at Sciences Po, I found that people had two very different images of Europe - the EU was far away, opaque and difficult to understand, while Europe more generally was linked to more positive images of experiences in different countries and with different people.
I therefore truly believe that for Europe to ever succeed as a stable, supranational project, we need to increase identification with Europe - and other Europeans. As a result of my interest in languages, and my time travelling and studying abroad, I am very aware of the similarities between myself and other Europeans and what knowledge of their cultures adds to my own, all of which makes me feel like I belong in Europe. It's vitally important that other young people get to know the bonds that unite them with Europe, to create a new generation of Europeans. That's where Europe & Me Magazine comes in.
Europe & Me is a quarterly magazine voluntarily written, edited and produced my young people from over 20 different countries. There aim is to write about all aspects of Europe, to give a more complete picture of Europe - the good and the bad - beyond official EU programmes (they are completely independent of the EU). They admit that Europe is incredibly hard to define geographically, historically or politically, so their motto is "Europe is a state of mind". The magazine is divided into different body parts:
The Brain considers serious issues related to Europe, the Heart is all about feeling and emotion, the Diaphragm laughs at the silly side of Europe, Baby is all about sex, and the Legs are "Europe on the move", highlighting European mobility.
I recommend that anyone who wants to understand what young, committed Europeans think it means to be European should read this magazine - issue #15 is out in just 12 days.
It's a good question and one that I've encountered again and again in class and on the radio. An anthropologist would say that culture is everything that makes us human, that isn't the result of science. Different groups - tribes, nations, social classes, generations - can be said to have a different 'culture', encompassing ways of expressing themselves, rituals, beliefs. However, in every day parlance, culture is often taken to mean 'high culture': classical painting, sculpture, opera, ballet, auteur cinema. What I'm interested is somewhere in between: all kinds of artistic expression, including that high culture, but also popular culture, comedy, rom-coms, pulp fiction, musicals, graffiti - things that are often written off by the self-proclaimed defenders of 'culture' (although graffiti for one seems to be becoming rather establishment these days...).
'Culture' is such a loaded term that I have been criticised for being elitist in calling my radio show The Culture Show. Yet as much as I tried to avoid the perils of the word culture (and also the stealing from BBC2 implied in the name), there was no other word that conveyed the huge range of things I want to talk about: literature, music, theatre, dance, art and films of all kinds. So culture it is.
But as I've established, culture is a scarily vast term. So what exactly do I want to do? Well, as I'm forced to narrow my interests into some form of coherent PhD proposal, I'm not ready to let the others go just yet, so this is a place for me to consider cultural things that interest me. Sometimes that might just be 'This play/exhibition/film is awesome, go see/watch!', sometimes it might be an interview with someone that I've been lucky enough to meet through the radio. But what really gets me going is cultural analysis, so there will mainly be musings on what can be learnt from the book/film/musical/picture in question. I've always had incredibly multi-disciplinary interests (which is why I've always taken the broadest academic path, nothing can be vaguer than 'European Studies' which doesn't even know where the limits of 'Europe' are), and what I'm learning in class will undoubtedly prompt reflections here, so expect the following to appear somewhere:
-Questioning 'identity' in all its forms
-Nationalism, national identity and foundational myths
-Psychoanalysis
-Cultural mobility/intertextuality
-Translation and the politics thereof
-Foulcault and discursive techniques
-Orientalism and post-colonialism
...and probably a whole lot more! As for the source of materials, Spanish and French speaking countries will feature heavily, but I have spent the last 5 years studying 'Europe' so those influences will certainly crop up too, and as I currently live in Cardiff, how could I not be fascinated by Welsh culture?
I hope this will be not just interdisciplinary but multi-media. As well written ramblings, I will be putting my finely honed talking into a microphone skills to good use making podcasts, especially when visuals aren't essential. And when I eventually learn to use my camera, I hope to post videos too. And finally, I hope that all this inspires you to check out some of the things I talk about. My passion for languages, for travel, for research, for cultural analysis, was inspired by the films, books, music, theatre and art which I discovered one way or another and never cease to fascinate me. I hope some of them will fascinate you too.
