Los Toros: A Performance

A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
a las cinco de la tarde.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
a las cinco de la tarde.
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco de la tarde.

It was just five in the afternoon.

A boy brought the white sheet

at five in the afternoon.

A basket of lime made ready

at five in the afternoon.

The rest was death and only death

at five in the afternoon.

--Federico García Lorca, fragment from "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías." Translation by A. S. Kline.

The torero, or bullfighter, is supposed to be a sexy creature. From the moment he enters the Plaza de Toros with his cape the color of fresh blood, he is the ancient symbol of the virile Spanish man. His exceptionally gaudy and colorful outfit—complete with pink socks, plenty of sparkly gold bling, and the funniest of little black hats—fits him very, very tightly as he steps out in perfect posture. I don't care who you are, you can't miss the marked curve of his little butt that he sticks out proudly as he strikes his performer's pose. Despite the ridiculousness of his outfit, his presence is commanding, and the crowd responds to it as such.

I had barely been in Sevilla a week when I watched the events of the Saturday Feria de San Miguel celebrations unfold under the afternoon sun between an Australian couple and a couple from Madrid who had traveled to Sevilla expressly to see los toros, the bulls. Around us sat a mixture of Spaniards and foreign tourists, often American or French. A bullfight is one of the must-see spectacles in this city—if you can stomach the sight of a peculiar form of animal violence. Regardless of one's particular position on bullfighting, the experience is an interactive art form imbued with tradition that offers a window into Sevillian culture, and a living history of sorts.

There were three toreros and six bulls. When a banderillero pricked the first bull, the Australian woman beside me said, "So that's it, right?" I shook my head. "Not nearly about," I said.  

A banderillero avoids horns just after sticking the banderillas in the bull's neck

A banderillero avoids horns just after sticking the banderillas in the bull's neck

I had seen a few corridas, or bullfights, on television, but seeing it live for the first time was a completely different experience. The electric charge of the silence as the men on the torero's team of helpers in the sandy ring concentrated; the hulking, muscular black form of the bull; the call and response of male human voices and charging animal hooves—all these kept me on the edge of my seat like a World Cup game between Mexico and Argentina. Because when I watched the blood darken to purple against the animal's hide and when I heard it grunt before charging the man who was always no longer there, the bull forced me to face the raw fact of death in its immediacy, not as an abstract concept I prefer to conceive of as far removed into the future.

The bulls were "muy flojos," the Madrileña woman to my left informed me. They lacked energy. The second torero instructed his men to weaken the bull too much, draining too much blood from it, with the result that the animal was buckling at the knees before the torero even had time to demonstrate his skill with the cape. It is no wonder that one of my friends had to leave early. For him, as he put it, the spectacle became "no longer a game of death, but a game of suffering."

In its purest form, bullfighting is supposed to be a game of life and death. If the torero has a good faena, the Madrileña woman told me, it means that he has proved himself against the bull; he has dominated him. He has danced with the bull, he has subjected him to his will. He has dominated the animal without emasculating him. He has faced an animal with a pair of fearsome, phallic horns, and finished unequivocally—even beautifully—victorious. If he does everything just right, he wins the bull’s ear.

In an attempt to not be the ugly American and instead fit in, I clapped when everyone else did, stood when everyone else did. It made sense, for the most part. It made sense to clap when the torero was obviously doing well with the bull. It even made sense to me to clap when he drove the sword deep into the bull's neck in one clean movement, leaving only the hilt glinting in the dying sun. But I was not so eager to applaud the bull's fall to the ground--a slow, stumbling, kneeling motion--or the carcass being dragged off by three horses.

The third torero captivated the audience. In his wavy black hair and sky blue suit he exuded the confidence necessary for the performance. The torero is an actor, a dancer, an athlete—in essence, a performer. And like any performer, he requires the participation of the audience. The audience’s participation is choreographed, to an extent, and stems from the performance of the actors in the ring. There are moments when you are supposed to clap, moments when you are supposed to be silent, moments when you are supposed to stand, and moments when you are supposed to intone ¡Olé!* But you are only to do these things—these performative acts—if and when the torero prompts you to. Not every swing of the cape deserves an olé; not every torero deserves a standing ovation when he has finished off his bull.

Miguel Ángel Perera, the third torero and also the youngest, performed virility with enough finesse to secure the ear of his first bull. Indeed, his performance was so skillful, and so clearly unlike that of the previous two toreros, that afterwards he walked around the entire ring, never once unsteadying his perfect stance, while the audience clapped for him and threw him hats and flowers. He did not even stoop to pick these up from the sand—his cohort of helpers did this. He established himself so clearly as the prince of the show, that by the time it was his turn again to face the very last bull, the suspense had reached a bursting point.

And he knew it.

Miguel Ángel Perera walked into the ring that Saturday afternoon not only to dance with the bull and dominate him. He came to do the same with the people.

At the end of a corrida, the bull kneels to the ground and in so doing says, “You’ve won.” The torero needs the public to give him recognition in the same way. So he courts the audience. The audience will not applaud if it feels defrauded; it will applaud and happily fall into the palm of the torero’s hand if he shows her pretty things and—most importantly—if his performance is clean.

Normally, the bull comes barreling in at the beginning and meets four or five men in their outrageous bullfighting costumes who work together to lure the bull into charges with pink capes, before darting behind wooden fences so the bull does not gore them. Not so this time. Perera prepared to meet the bull alone in the ring, on his knees (in much the same position as the bull when he kneels in dying), not ten meters from the gate where the bull would burst out at any moment. He kept nervously re-arranging the pink cape across his lap, letting it settle again and again before him, making sure of his grip. He made me nervous, just watching him.

And then the bull bolted out at full tilt, horns charging for a deadly gore. And, in a gymnastic pirouette, Perera got to his feet while swirling the cape just next to his body, and the bull charged past.

That was the beginning of Perera’s smooth dance with his bull. The two had a special relationship that could almost be called an understanding, that we, the onlookers, could never be part of, even though we were privy to it. When the band played, Perera steered the bull tightly round and round his body, and the surge of ¡Olé!’s meant that he had conquered not just the bull but also the spectators. He knew it, and he gazed proudly out to the audience in his tall, confident stance.

But he had not completely won yet. In order to earn his second bull’s ear of the afternoon and leave the ring the undisputed king of the day, Perera needed to place the sword correctly on the first try. The moment when the torero stares the bull in the eyes, and they both know that the animal is going to die, and the man levels the sword to drive it deep into the bull’s neck and finish it off, is called el momento de la verdad, the moment of truth. It is the moment of truth for the bull because it is the moment when he will die. Perhaps he will not fall to his knees for some minutes, but he is done for. But it is also the moment of truth for the man. In order to truly prove his manliness, he must be effective in this moment, when it really counts. If he fails here after a great faena or performance, it is as if he has lured a beautiful, hard-to-get woman into his bed, only to be impotent when it really matters.

Perera missed.

On the second try, he did indeed deal the fatal blow, but once his bull had fallen to the sand, he leaned heavily against the red wooden barrier and buried his face in his arms. He was inconsolable. The people applauded hard and long, but he did not even look out at the stands. “Pobrecito, está hecho polvo,” the Madrileña woman said. “Es que está hecho polvo.” He’s “turned to dust,” she was saying. He had fallen apart, and could face no one for shame.

No bullfighter was borne out of the ring on anyone’s shoulders that evening. But the people clapped hard for the young man who had made us hold our breaths.

There are still many things I do not understand about the bullfight. It has symbolism and meaning that I am sure I have glossed over, and that I would like to learn about more in depth. The above has been my personal impressions, based on observation, listening, and prior knowledge. I hope that having witnessed this bullfight, and having experienced the incredible suspense and excitement that thickened the air, I may begin to better understand the place of the toros and the art of tauromaquia in this city's conception of itself and in relation to the other arts that flourish here.

*I write olé with an accent here because that is customary. However, to my ear, it sounds more like ole, with the accent on the o. It sounds like an exclamation of appreciation and a bit of awe at the same time.

"Yo me quedo en Sevilla hasta el final"

I come from places where you need central heating. It came as a shock when, in Granada two years ago, I only had two hours of heat in the morning and two hours in the afternoon at my homestay. I learned to keep my bedroom door tightly shut to trap the heat, to wear a sweatshirt over a wool sweater over a shirt, to read under the covers even during the day. I also learned to go out and walk around in the sun to warm up, because the temperature inside the stone house was often colder than the temperature outside.

In Sevilla, the houses often have no real heat at all. I learned this in the process of looking for an apartment. As Professor Raúl Navarro of the Escuela de Estudio Hispano-Americanos here explained to me, in Sevilla there exists a culture of fending off heat. Sevillanos imagine themselves to live in an incredible warm place. Their houses have tile floors and blinds that can completely shut out the light, and these days most are equipped with air conditioning. Time and again, landlords and tenants told me, "Es que no hace mucho frío en Sevilla." "It just doesn't get that cold in Sevilla." But I have also heard that people from northern parts say that they've never been colder than when they stayed in Sevilla, precisely because of the lack of central heating that people in colder places generally get used to.

How warm or cold Sevilla actually is, is almost irrelevant to the cultural imagination of the city. Sevilla portrays itself as a warm, friendly place that is always sunny, and where anyone can live the life he or she wants to. As the popular song "Yo me quedo en Sevilla" by Pata Negra puts it, "Vente pa cá y déjate de frío." "Come over here and leave behind the cold." It's as if the song is promising that the guitar strums and yellow streetlights will always make everything better, will always keep you warm. The warmth of the city is much more than just physical warmth, then. I have yet to see how cold Sevilla really gets. But for now, I am enjoying the sun--in fact, sometimes melting in it.

At Puerta de Jerez, right next to the cathedral.

On the first Wednesday after I arrived in Sevilla, I attended an event at the Casa del Libro bookstore that mixed poetry and music. Omar Coello recited poems about the value of living life in the moment, of appreciating what one has, of understanding that it is never too late to leave behind fear, guilt, and resentment to embrace life without these burdens. José Ángel Muñoz Granado accompanied the poems on piano, guitar, or drums. This was not the loosely improvised jazz accompaniment of the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On the contrary, "El niño de la isla" played to the rhythm of the poet's phrases in a practiced performance that displayed a skilled harmony of music and words. And the music was far from simply the background for the words. Instead Coello sat and gave space to the musician at interludes, during which Muñoz Granado performed pieces whose lyrics complemented the words of spoken poetry. In these moments, the musician and his guitar were a unit, and while he played many different styles of music, it was when he played his flamenco pieces that he truly displayed his talent, and the audience began to clap out palmas in proper rhythm and sing along, and the poet looked at me with an expression of amusement because I seemed so incredibly taken with whole thing.


One of the songs he played was "Yo me quedo en Sevilla." It sings the praises of streets and plazas of Triana, the neighborhood where many flamenco cantes were born. I had just come from walking in Triana, and as I listened to the song and began to sing along, I felt a belonging to the city, and thought that I was beginning to understand why someone would sincerely sing:

Si tu te vas, si tu te vas, yo me quedo en Sevilla hasta el final, 
Si tu te vas, si tu te vas, yo me quedo en Sevilla hasta el final.

Acuesto con Sevilla por el mundo,
No me mudo de barrio por un beso.  
Canto pa saber que estoy cantando, 
Vivo pa saber que estoy viviendo.

Si tu te vas, si tu te vas, yo me quedo en Sevilla hasta el final, 

Si tu te vas, si tu te vas, yo me quedo en Sevilla hasta el final.

Observations Upon Arrival

Triana neighborhood in Sevilla

I wrote the following post the day after I arrived in Sevilla. It's about time it goes up. Much has happened since the Friday that I wrote this, so stay posted for more exciting tales!

Here goes:


20 September, 2013

It has begun. This year of writing and thinking and learning and living and creating has lifted its little wheels off the runway and is in the air.

I just arrived in Sevilla yesterday, and already I have witnessed creative combinations of artistic media enlivening the city. Because my project is to engage in the city's "culture of artistic confluence," this is very exciting. On a narrow, bustling pedestrian street I stopped, entranced, to listen to a beautiful classical duet of upright bass and violin. Further on, closer to the cathedral, two men grumbled to each other because the street music on the nearby corner was too loud for them to play their own. It turns out that the other music was accompaniment to outdoor belly-dancing. Later I saw the two young men fire up their music anyway and start dancing to it with robotic techno moves.

And then there was the cathedral itself, infinitely complex in its baroque attire and Islamic foundations, and standing like a magnet that keeps the city's inhabitants within its field of reach. Old and new co-mingle, as do East and West, in this city. (Not always, of course, in total harmony.)

Inside the Casa del Libro bookstore on Calle Tetuán (where the string duet serenaded passersby), each platform landing of the staircase was adorned with a painting on canvas and accompanied by a poem addressing a book. (I meant to include pictures, but I'm having technical difficulties.) An image of The Little Prince was accompanied by a poem that began "Una manera que tienen los versos / de quedarse en la memoria / como un sedimento involuntario...." ("A way that lines of poetry have / of sticking in memory / like an involuntary sediment...") In these paintings I saw the artistic confluence that is at the heart of my interest in Sevilla for this year. Painting, poetry, prose, architecture, and music all compliment each other and contribute to the vivacity of this city. I look forward to attending and participating in events of artistic confluence, such as the"Fusión de música y textos" ("Fusion of music and texts") on Wednesday at the Casa del Libro.

Since writing this post, I have attended said event, and Sevilla and her arts have begun to open up to me more and more. Stay tuned as I keep you up to date! Here's a sneak peek at the Fusión de música y textos:

Of Bulls and Books

You never know how big a bull’s face is until yours is shoved up next to it, and another human face presses hard against your cheek and you are trapped between the two of them, none of you able to move, because the people in front of you are stuck, and the bull is pressing you from behind, and now a person is trying to crowdsurf over you…

Then you realize how big it is. You knew that already, beforehand. You knew it when you decided to come to Pamplona, when you started getting in shape for it. You knew it when you saw the bulls thundering towards you and the people tripping over themselves and falling in piles on either side of the narrow street, unable to keep up with the pace of the massive bulls. But no, there is nothing like being as close to a bull as a babe to its mother.

After Friday’s bull run in Pamplona—the sixth encierro of the annual eight-day Fiesta de San Fermín in the Basque town of Pamplona—I thought it couldn't get any worse. A black bull had become obsessed with a young runner dressed in blue and yellow. On TV the scene was grotesque. The bull would not leave the man alone for a good thirty seconds—which is an eternity when a "clean" run from the corral to the Plaza de Toros can last just over two minutes. He kept attacking him with his horns, pulling his pants down, and at one point picking him up and throwing him back down in the most spectacular scene. The runner, we are told, is recovering and was not fatally wounded.

But it got worse. When the camera shot the final stretch of Saturday’s encierro, I saw that something was very, very wrong.

The running of the bulls begins with the chupinazo, a loud noise set off by fire right next to the corral where the bulls are kept. The bulls have been there all night, and before they run through the streets of Pamplona, they are joined by the cabestros, light-colored, spotted bulls that know the way and are not toros bravos—they mean no harm, and they will not be killed that day in bullfights. The cabestros show the dangerous bulls the way, ushering them through the sea of people—many of them dressed in the traditional loose white shirt and pants with a red bandana around the neck. When the chupinazo goes off, the cabestros bolt into the first street, la cuesta de Santo Domingo, with the toros bravos following close behind, or preferably, right up next to them. The bulls continue on Mercaderes and curve onto Estafeta, then finish the run on Telefónica Street leading into the callejón—the narrow passageway into the Plaza de Toros. There the cabestros lead them straight through the bullring to the opposite passageway, beyond which they will be kept before coming out to be played by a bullfighter later that day.

Or at least, that is what’s supposed to happen.

Many things can go wrong. One bull can sprint ahead of the rest and become very confused and start goring people. A bull can fall on the curve of Mercaderes and Estafeta. A bull can turn around on Telefónica and refuse to go into the callejón and instead try to run backwards into the people. Or, as occurred on Saturday—and for the first time this bad since 1977—a huge human pile-up can form at the end of the callejón, where it opens into the bullring.

On Saturday, the cabestros hit the massive pile-up first. The six toros bravos smashed in behind them. There were many seconds of collective panic and standstill as neither bulls nor humans could move. At last one of the cabestros was led into a side-door and all the bulls followed suit and entered the ring. But much damage was already done. People had been crushed beneath the weight of other people from above, and bulls and people from behind. A few of the victims are still in serious condition as of this writing.

Source: RTVE. (This image inspired the opening lines of this post.)

In about two months, I will be going back to Spain—back to this country of bulls and daring, of tourists and traditions, of songs and of pain. I will be living in Sevilla, home to one of the most famous bullrings as well as countless dancers, singers, and poets, who have been inspired by the tradition, beauty, tragedy, and fanaticism that surrounds the ancient connection between men and bulls in Spain. Today the runners in Pamplona invoke San Fermín to guide them through the run, but there is something more primordial than Christianity to the tradition. Running along Mercaderes, all that matters is the humans and the bulls, the bulls and the humans. All else is barricaded, inconsequential, for about two crucial minutes of one’s life. I can only imagine what it must be like in those minutes to feel connected to the majestic and dangerous animal, to feel oneself become, in many ways, an animal.

After watching the chilling pile-up, I re-read Shadow of a Bull by Maia Wojciechowska, a short Newbery Award-winning novel that affected me deeply in the third grade (thank you, Ms. Earnst!). It is a coming-of-age story about a boy who is expected to become a great bullfighter like his dead father once was. In the first chapter, the book poses a convincing and beautiful theory as to the primordial relationship between people and bulls in Spain:

“In Spain, however, people have found a way of cheating death. They summon it to appear in the afternoon in the bull ring, and they make it face a man. Death—a fighting bull with horns as weapons—is killed by a bullfighter. And the people are there watching death being cheated of its right.”

The Pamplonadas every year offer normal people the chance to face death and overcome it, and come back again for the thrill. For this reason, perhaps, Hemingway was so drawn to them.

And I myself must admit to being seduced by the whole song and dance. The ancient rituals, the beauty of the bulls, the countless miracles each day when horns don’t gore the runners, who are said to be saved by el capote de San Fermín (the cape of Saint Fermín). The red of the cape later in the bull ring, the man dancing with the bull, the moment of truth. All these captivate me.

But then there is that awful pile-up, that surreal scene like nothing I have ever seen before. I am sure I will watch a bullfight in Sevilla (what writer can live in that city and not seek inspiration from the Plaza de Toros, which is alive in sorrowful flamenco songs and the collective imagination?) but there is no way I will ever run with the bulls.

Yoknapatawpha and the Crescent City

Past the independent gas stations where you only put as much gas as you absolutely need; past the winding Natchez Trace Parkway where there are no gas stations at all; past the "Indian mounds" with signs written in 1950s non-PC language; past a Chickasaw site with the outline of a fort like the one they defended against the French on my birthday centuries ago; past the alternating ranches and mansions and farms on a highway that never ends; is the hometown of William Faulkner.

In Oxford, Mississippi, trees lead to destinations. Crepe myrtles with full white blooms like bouquets of grapes flank the entrance to Ole Miss, where football reigns king with the stadium for a crown, and nice Southern boys open the door for you. Deeper, the Grove of shade-trees offers a respite from the cruel Mississippi heat and provides a pathway to the center of campus, where the old Lyceum of 1848 faces an obelisk commemorating fallen Confederate soldiers. Behind the Lyceum, a bronze James Meredith walks towards intellectual columns, re-enacting his tumultuous entrance into the university as its first black student just months after Faulkner died. Past the largest catalpa tree in the state, more trees that are the homes of conversing katy-dids lead away from campus to the churches, and further on, to the Square.

Today the SUVs are part of the view from the balcony of Bouré Restaurant, where students lingering for the summer and gray-haired locals make sure to see and be seen in their pastels and white-against-tan outfits as the sun goes down and jazz begins to be played across the way. Square Books displays John Grisham’s novels proudly alongside Faulkner’s. But what was the Oxford that Faulkner knew? Who were the well-dressed frequenters of restaurants and bars, the churchgoers, the students? Modern-day Oxford offers us a glimpse, but to better understand this creator of Yoknapatawpha County, we must go amongst the trees again.

A little outside the main part of town, majestic cedars line the path leading to Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. There the respectable furnishings, the horse paddock, and the removed tranquility of the grounds reveal him to be a Southern Gentleman—of a most absurdly normal kind. Faulkner did not write about Oxford, Mississippi (AKA the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County) as an outside observer (at least not entirely). In many ways he was part and parcel of it, raising a family, being an outdoorsman, knowing everyone’s business. And yet his eccentricities show through in the house: on the walls of his study is written the outline of his novel A Fable. MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY—all the days of a memorable Holy Week in France—organize bullet-pointed occurrences, complete with scratchings-out. It is as if his mind lived in a different element from his immediate surroundings, and yet fed off them and could not create without them and sometimes seeped into them. Even the jittery hipster waiter at the Bottletree Bakery right off the Square sees this man as an odd, odd, fellow, and many a Mississippi grandmother would rather re-read Pride and Prejudice than make sense of As I Lay Dying. But Faulkner kept coming back to this place, physically and mentally, kneading it and baking it until he got a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer out of it.

He did, of course, leave. Yes, there was Paris, as there was for Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Breton and Dalí and Carpentier. But there was also New Orleans, the city of calliopes played at twilight on the Mississippi—steam organs puffing chipper ragtime and kick-dancing tunes over Jackson Square; the city of nonstop jazz and Spanish guitars on the streets; the city of beignets that make you not care that you’re getting powdered sugar all over your black skirt; the city with a street with a city name that is actually a person’s name commemorating the man who, incidentally, fought the Chickasaw (Bienville); the city where Faulkner spent ten months in an apartment in Pirate’s Alley by the cathedral.

The trees are elsewhere in the Crescent City; they are in the Garden District where houses are dressed up like schoolgirls in their Sunday best. Water, instead, leads to the French Quarter, where our oddball lived. A muddy industrial river and a lake like an ocean hem in the old high ground. The water brings with it another element—the element of alligator and gumbo and shrimps so big they must be prawns. The element of travel, of changeability, of danger.

Certainly the waters of New Orleans stayed with Faulkner as he returned to his Lafayette County, his Yoknapatawpha. Certainly the outside perspective made him see his cedars with their bee hives a little differently. Perhaps it was with watery thoughts that he decided to put a garden of concentric circles in front of his house. But he came back and he stayed.

As a lover of travel and dwelling elsewhere (wherever that happens to be), I find it difficult to understand why a person would keep coming back and back and back to the tiny place where he grew up. But Faulkner understood that Lafayette County contained a whole universe, and he needed to make it his own and people it with the characters of his imagination. To peer into the rooms where he lived and wrote, to leaf through books in the bookstore that was once his apartment in New Orleans, to look up at the clock tower in Oxford Square and imagine Faulkner doing the same—these are ways I have tried to enter this man’s mind a little. By reading his work, I can get to know him. But his eccentric mind will always be a little beyond grasp. Nonetheless, we must keep searching.

I found him somewhere between cedars and crepe myrtles and steamboats. He found himself in Yoknapatawpha, but we could find him anywhere.

Faulkner and I in Oxford, Mississippi.

He is slightly larger than life and looks strikingly like Carlos Fuentes.

Los Rumberos de Massachusetts

Un, dos, tres, cuatro--

The focus was intense and unbroken. The two guitarists stared into the eyes of the boy with the djembe until they all began cleanly at the same time. The three of them pulled us in but we were shy and we formed a wiggly crescent moon around them, leaving a black bulge of space between us and the raised platform that was the stage. The boy in the middle had left the top three buttons of his shirt undone, the one on the right sported striped purple socks, and on the left the colorful djembe was its own fashion statement. They made music that I normally hear coming out of my laptop speakers as I escape my dorm room to dream of Granada. They played music that wafts around me at dinner when I go home for the holidays. They played music that makes me dance at the best parties that are packed with nobody born here.

In between songs they made Mexican jokes with Mexican accents. Three talented Mexicans serenading us in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They made us carefree while they worked hard.

What does it feel like, I wonder, to have "made it" like that? What does it feel like to sell out concerts when you haven't yet graduated from college? To make people jump up and down with the talent you've honed your whole life, given yourself up to?

They tried to get us to dance. Really dance. Veo muchas chicas bailando acá, y muchos chicos bailando solos allá. A ver cómo le arreglamos. Como dice la canción, "vamos juntando los cuerpos...."

It was invitation. To let ourselves go. To let the strums enter our dreams. To fling the door wide open to let Mexico into a glassed-in Harvard building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

My Language Magazine Article

Lovely Readers,

For today's post I direct you to my article published in this month's issue of Language Magazine, which can be accessed online here.

I hope you enjoy reading about the importance of falling in love with language.

--Alex