Blog Birthday: Top Ten Posts and Many Thank-Yous

Today my blog turns one year old. My first post went public on September 1, 2011. Then I was full of fire about "Hemingway Paradigm" stereotypes to debunk, and was in need of a serious distraction from seemingly insurmountable professional hurdles. A year later, and I'm still keen on seeing expats and visitors update or fine-tune their out-of-fashion anachronistic "Hispanomanía", though I confess my passions are increasingly directed away from this not-for-profit hobby to more fiscally-productive, extra-blog-icular pursuits.

Before I share with you what have been my most popular posts for the year, I wanted to say thank-yous to a few bloggers out there who were important over the course of the year in either drawing attention to the blog, or keeping me engaged in it. First thanks should go to Ibex Salad, a savvy Spanish economy blogger whose mention of my blog in its early days pretty much put it on the map so far as search engines and bot trollers were concerned. I had less than a 1,000 hits total before his mention on November 4, 2011, and averaged a 1,000 hits-a-week after. I'm eternally grateful. (So to all you power bloggers out there, don't forget the little guys. We appreciate it!)

My first blog entry was a call to arms... to puncture the Hemingway Paradigm!

Special thanks always go to Chic Soufflé, La Cuchara Curiosa and Hola Valencia / For 91 Days, bloggers who have been my direct inspiration for taking up this medium and whose blog projects continue to impress me with what blogging can contribute to the metaverse... good taste, creative commentary, exciting adventure.

And then there are you many other bloggers who, through your regular comments and constant twitter titter, have kept me tuned in to the project and the Spain expat blogging community, even as my time for blog posts has diminished in the face of an increasingly busy, fulfilling personal and professional life. Here I'll single out for mention, in no particular order... Reg and Nancy at the Spain Scoop, Nieves at Sangria, Sol y Siesta, Hamatha at Pass the Ham, Kaley... y mucho más, Tumbit's Mr. Grumpy (happy 3rd birthday to you!), Gee Cassandra, Mother Theresa at The Rain in Spain, Molly in Granada at Piccavey.com, Steve at This is Spain, Néstor at Luces eXtrañas, and Sorokin at Diario de un Aburrido. There are many, many more of you out there whose interactions I've appreciated this past year, and I try to give some recognition of it by adding you to the "Not Alone" Blog Roll on the left side of this blogsite... But if you don't see you there, please write or comment to let me know! (Spain blog newbies, feel free to comment here to let yourself be known to all of these "power Spain bloggers".)

I'd also like to thank BlogExpat.com for flattering me with an interview, and Expatica.com Spain for reposting many of my blog entries (since imitation is the highest form of flattery). And I can't resist an additional four-letter word thank you to Damian Corrigan, my Valentine, whose ludicrous, overly-trafficked About.com GoSpain site still continues to light a flame in my heart in the crusade to counterbalance trite and superficial expat commentaries about my adopted country. (Damian, yes, I still think you're wrong about Valencia.)

These thank-yous aside, here go my (thus far) all-time top ten posts:

(10) "Not Hemingway's Madrid, part 1"

It's been a while since I looked at this entry and the part 2 that I wrote on Madrid, but I continue to recommend it to those of you wanting to get a non-touristy view of Spain's capital.

(9) "That Perfect Gift: Kukuxumusu, Cartoon Cool"

Very few things cooler than Kukuxumusu. I doubt they need my help selling their image, but I'm happy to do so. Or maybe I should be thanking them for drawing traffic my way?

(8) "Valencia's Fallas 2012: The hangover post"

To the extent that blog post popularity reflects passion and local knowledge, I'm happy that this post has ranked up there among the top. It certainly was a hit the week after I posted it. I hope that next year during Fallas it gets more hits, and also encourages any of you Valencia or Fallas doubters to come here and experience the fun for yourself. Fallas, fallas, fallas!

(7) "A Sport's Nation: Its Always Soccer Time in Spain"

There are no limits to the power of soccermania in this country. No doubt, if any of you bloggers want to increase your page hits and blog traffic, write an entry or two about soccer (a.k.a. football) here. Name drop players' names, and load some pictures of them, too. None of us ever get tired of this image of that magical moment in July 2010. Good times.

(6) "Valencia, Spain's Third Largest City: Getting Oriented and the City Center, part 1"

"Valencia, es la tierra de las flores... di-dadi-da-di-dadaa... Valencia"... Nothing makes me happier than to see this entry in the top ten. Valencia is easily one of Spain's most beautiful, under-appreciated cities. In March I added a photo link to my blog template (in the left column at top) to a page on all things Valencia and Fallas, hoping it boosts the visibility of my adopted city. Valencia is great! Come visit! You'll love it!

(5) "Movie Review: Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)... A Moveable Flop"

I can't tell whether this post is getting traffic because people are curious about the movie and what a cranky "Not Hemingway" blogger thinks of it, or curious about the sex scene photos with Nicole Kidman. Whichever it is, I'm hoping it has the desired effect of steering audiences away from the film and towards more interesting things like books and articles about Martha Gellhorn. (Fat chance.)

(4) "Two Spains, Many Spains: The Spanish Civil War"

Okay, so I'm actually very proud of this entry. I think it's one of my best written. But can you guys _ever_ get enough about the Spanish Civil War??? I started this series, "Two Spains, Many Spains", with the idea of applying my skills as a historian to broad trends in Spain's dynamic culture. But then I got busy and burned out. But I promise to return to it... On the table: entries on immigration, the Spanish exodus (post-war and contemporary "brain drain"), and European Unification, among others. All trends transforming the country and making Hemingway's image an increasingly obsolete one.

(3) "The Hemingway Paradigm Is... Dark eyes, dark hair, thick lisp"

"Paz Vega" appears right below "Ernest Hemingway" on the list of all-time
search terms that lead people to my blog. Who knew?

Speaking of obsolete images... I only wished that the majority of visitors to this page were actually stopping to read the entry. But again, I suspect the source of traffic here is google image searches on Paz Vega and Elsa Pataky, since the volume of traffic fluctuated in sync with the gossip about these actresses' pregnancies and other shenanigans. This post is one of my every-25-entries-or-so revisits of the "Hemingway paradigm". Too bad the subsequent one on "bullfights, bandits, and black eyes" didn't rank here... but that one requires reading a lot of text to appreciate it.

(2) "Don Ernesto: Ernest Hemingway in Spain"

Well one would wonder if a site dedicated to debunking Hemingway stereotypes didn't draw traffic about Don Ernesto. So no real surprise that this entry gets a lot of visitors. If you didn't get a chance to read it, I recommend the twin entry I wrote with this on "Hemingway's Novels in Spain", which features some wordles of his works.


... and the #1 post of all time for my first year blogging is about ...

(1) "That Perfect Gift: Spanish Footwear"

SHOES! Hah! What a laugh! A subject I know relatively little about. Go figure. I suspect the popularity of this entry is partly owing to a pinterest tag on some of these shoe photos. Or maybe shoe shopping is up there with porn and cute cat photos for massive internet traffic. Who knows? Still, if this post helps to raise the profile of Spanish shoes in the world, then I'll rest happy. A big thanks to my mother-in-law, whose shopping savvy about Spanish footwear made this entry possible. And a thanks to Menorca, whose "menorquinas" sandals inspired the idea for the entry when I was visiting there.


I'll be curious to see what happens to these post rankings and the rankings of future blog entries as a new crop of exchange students, ESL teachers, and travel/adventure bloggers flood appear in Spain this fall and start perusing websites, gleaning information for their exploits.

Check back here next year to find out! And thank you to all for reading!

Epilogue to the Impertinente Curioso Entry or, why my goal should be to learn to write more concisely

"Be kind to the other readers, particularly if the blog uses inline comments - write a short comment, linked to your blog. Don't write a book, attached to somebody else's blog."—The Real Blogger Status

This picture is not particularly relevant to the post...
I just put it here because of Damian's fixation on the CAC
debate over iconic. And also because I want this to show
in feeds rather than some less iconic, non-Valencian image.

So apparently Blogger puts a limit on how much you can post in the Comments section. I learned this today because I was trying to reply to heartthrob Damian Corrigan's comments on my previous post about the Impertinente Curioso in Spain, and kept running up against a limit of 4,096 characters. It is one more sign that I need to make it my priority to learn to use brevity in this blogging world. The funny thing is that even when I try to post multiple shorter comments, blogger demurs. It's almost as if Damian's comments broke that entry's comment capacity. Apparently, Blogger puts this limit on because spammers were exploiting a weakness of the comments section where, if you put a long enough comment, it was impossible to remove the comment.

In the interest of continuing the dialogue, I encourage you all (yes, even you Damian) to post your thoughts on life, the universe, and About.com Spain Travel here. I've also decided my reply comment will have to fill my quota for the overdue post for this past Monday, since I'm busy prepping for a trip and Fallas.

...

So Damian, given that these were quite long replies from you, I'll start by thanking you for your time. (I think we are still keeping up the pretense of courtesy, right?)

I have had arguments with others online, but somehow with you I feel like holding up a mirror is the most useful way to reply… For example, why do you continually resort to dismissive personal attacks in your argument? E.g. "Should I care what you think? No." And I have never had the epithet "ignorant" lobbied at me with such frequency and incautiousness as in these exchanges. Yes, I acknowledge that I have insinuated many things about you, but thought better of saying them outright, conceding I don't know enough about you personally. With a close reading you'll notice that only twice do I really say anything directly negative about you (as opposed to your site, your statements, or "impertinente curiosos" in general). First, I more or less call you ignorant about paella. I didn't use the word "ignorant" (a poor choice of adjective if the intent is to persuade), but instead say "limited understanding". But since you insist on throwing around what is generally taken to be quite an offensive adjective, I'll stand by a statement that you are ignorant about paella. It shows in everything you write about it, and in your limited experience with it here in Valencia (one beany-paella a paella expert doth not make). It's okay. I'm ignorant about many of the things you write about. So don't take it as a personal failing. (BTW, it is "arroz a banda", with no article "la". "A banda" is Catalan for "a parte" in Spanish.) Second, I call you prideful. If other readers want to add "ignorant" to that, that is for them to say. But I think you yourself have made a pretty solid case in all these tweets and these two replies that you are proud to a fault. My only regret in pointing it out, is that to call a proud person proud is usually to throw fuel on the fire. I sincerely would like to see you change your mind and concede your mistake about Valencia. So this second affront was poor argumentation on my part.

(Though while we're on the subject of personal shortcomings, another peculiar thing about this dialogue with you is that at times I feel like I'm talking to an imperious child. You have this recurring habit of stating outright that this will be your or really "the" final word… "Against my better judgement,I have responded […] I will not do so again." "The fact that you wouldn't invite me to a VLC meeting […] invalidates your argument." Or the tweet that particularly amazed me: "No, I have a responsibility to be honest […] End." End! Full stop! Period! Who says this in an argument? And yet you keep talking and arguing. If you were so certain you had already won or made your case, why do you do continue?)

[Personal digression: This reminds me of something I learned in grad school about the often notable difference between a person's personality in person, and someone's written persona. Early on I read this academic's book, the prose were warm and inviting, the analysis thoughtful, and left you with this glowing feeling about the subject that person wrote about. But then, upon entering the program where said person taught, I was surprised to discover a cantankerous, quite rude and mean professor who was quick to tire of the students and was locally infamous for being someone best to avoid. When I mentioned this to my undergraduate advisor later, he simply laughed and said (I'm paraphrasing from memory): "Yes, it is funny how some writers/academics can have a rich and warm voice in their works, but in person are as personable as a rock." From this I learned, it is best not to judge a person's character strictly from what they write, to deduce the personal from what is generally an impersonal and affected textual medium. But perhaps blogging is a more personalized (honest?) writing form...]

Now let me say, I try not to be so flustered by an opponent's insults and attacks, even those as grandiose and unmerited as some of yours, to be incapable of appreciating his or her finer moments. So as an interlude, let me add that there are a couple of places in your replies that are real poetry and brilliance. For starters, you had me LOLing with "Mr. Earnestly Not Hemingway." Please don't be angry if I plagiarize that for future use. And the paragraph which starts with "In my travels through Spain and my time living here" was like a breath of fresh air, a pleasant relief from the general rancor and stench of your reply: 

"In my travels through Spain and my time living there, I have seen the beautiful green countryside of Northern Spain, walked from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Finisterre, seen the waves lap at the Rias from the top of the Hercules tower in A Coruna, had my aversion to Pulpo turned to a love in Santiago, seen the amazing cathedrals of Santiago, Burgos, Leon, Palencia, Salamanca, Zaragoza, Seville, Cadiz and many others, drank cider in all its forms of escanciar in Oviedo after hiking up to its Romanesque churches. I've seen the obvious and less-obvious sights in Madrid, Seville and Barcelona, had tapas and pintxos in Granada, Seville, Leon, Bilbao, San Sebastian and Logroño, seen the three faiths of Toledo, the turrets of Avila, the fairytale castle and viaduct of Segovia, the ghastly but historically important Valle de los Caidos, the Alhambra, the Roman ruins of Merida and Tarragona, etc, etc, etc."

I only wish all your travel writing on Spain was of this poetic, inspired stuff. While reading this passage, I almost heard Frank Sinatra's "My Way" playing in the background… "I've walked, from St-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Finisterre, and I did it myyy way." (Though I did notice the admission that you no longer live in Spain. How long did you live here? And how long have you been away? Because Valencia has changed _a lot_ in the last 5-10 years.)

But then you go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like… "I don't say that to gloat." (I'm sorry. Now I've got Frank Sinatra songs playing in my head.) "Gloat", what an ugly word. You put it out there claiming that you are not doing it. But me thinks he doth protest too much. Indeed, in many of your remarks it is hard not to read between the lines, and speculate as to whether your denials are in fact admissions of guilt. There are certain defenses you've drawn upon, with words like "honesty" and "responsibility", which have that —what is the word I'm looking for?— "truthiness" aspect to them, but which you repeat and repeat and repeat in a way that leads me to wonder if you're overcompensating. I think you've made clear how you "honestly" feel about these places, among them Valencia. But is that an argument beyond personal appeal? To me "honesty" here looks like pathos dressed as logos.

One issue Damian raises is what exactly About.com looks for in its Guides...
"They interact with our users daily" ... they are "a combination of passion and expertise"

Which maybe gets us to the heart of the matter. There's a moment in your avalanche of words when you use a very interesting, colorful turn of phrase: "subjective opinion". Somehow you think I'm dissatisfied because your opinion is, in my opinion, subjective. Alas, I would seek no other kind of opinion, as I eschew objective opinions, subjective facts, or all other similar sorts of deceiving paradoxes. So here it is, to be crystal clear, I am not bothered by your subjective opinion, but rather by your _bad_ opinion. Not just your bad opinion of Valencia, which started all this. But your bad opinion of people. To put it another way, your incredible negativity. And in your second reply we find a space for agreement. It has been unfair of me to take up my problem with your site on Spain with you. What can you do about your bad taste and "mala leche" (literal translation, "bad milk", but means more figuratively negativity or nastiness)? I suppose what I really want is somebody else to be writing the About.com Spain pages, and that is really something I ought to take up with whoever pays you, not with you. In that respect it has been unfair of me to bother you about it. (Mental note to self: on next spare day, look into where at About.com I can lodge a complaint about bitter, aggressive staff.)

As I've said before, if there's one thing Spain has had to deal with too much of
it's negativity from outsiders.

To know, that with all the amazing travel writers out there in Spain (I direct you to my blog rolls in the left column) who would have done both a better job on the site, and shown more grace and quality in taking critical feedback, and further, that many of them are currently seeking gainful employment… to know all this, and yet know that it is _you_ who is paid to write about Spain. Well, you are right. That is precisely what upsets me. Thank you. Now I know it is not you who has broken my heart, but rather the horrible irony of it all. I'm already on the road to recovery.

...

So reader, if you've made it this far, I really could summarize all the above with the following: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. How true!

Query: Dear (other?) readers, do any of you know how to submit a complaint about an About.com website or writer? I've run a couple of searches on About.com ("complain about staff", "customer service", "complaints about About.com"), and the one "about" I can't figure out how to find is how to log a proper complaint with About.com. Now isn't that irony? The best I could come up with was this "Contact Us" page, which seems to be directed towards advertisers. Any suggestions? (Maybe I'll write an email to questions@about.com?)

I did find this fun read on "Rude Hotel Staff"... "Too busy to be nice"
seemed relevant to my search, as did "One word: Nice" and maybe "Just no help"

Addendum: Oh my God! I just realized why Damian has been able to get away with writing such sour things about Valencia (and the rest of Spain). Everyone here (my fellow Valencians) are all outside too busy enjoying this beautiful city and its beautiful weather! Why get locked up inside long enough to reply to him? This morning I woke up, and was feeling all this negativity from his comments. I sat down to write this reply, and still felt all that negativity. But then I went for my run in the Turia Riverbed Park, and it was like rebirth. I feel much more relaxed. Now I have a new perspective on all this. For those of you who find yourselves feeling sullied by these encounters-of-the-Damian-kind, come visit Valencia! Its fair weather and beautiful parks are like a balm for troubled spirits.

The Hemingway Paradigm Is… the opinionated "Impertinente Curioso", so quick to judge

"Nothing gives more pain to Spaniards than seeing volume after volume written on themselves and their country by foreigners, who have only rapidly glanced at one-half of the subject, and that half the one of which they are the most ashamed, and consider the least worth notice."— Richard Ford, Gatherings from Spain (1846)

So every 25 entries or so (who's keeping track?) I try to reflect on the mission statement of this blog, to write about the "Hemingway paradigm" stereotypes and tendencies out there that gets tourism in Spain stuck in a rut. Today's entry is my 75th. I _was_ going to write about Washington Irving's "Tales of the Alhambra" (1832), which I became aware of thanks to Spain blogger Sangria, Sol y Siesta, and which I had planned to read since my wife and I are visiting Granada soon. But then I had a flaming Valentine's Day, providing me juicy content for an entry. No, it's not what you think. By flaming I'm referring to the social network experience of "flaming" on public forums. A couple of weeks ago, on Valentine's Day, I decided I would lobby the About.com "Spain Travel" guy Damian Corrigan on Twitter about the line on this page where he says: "First the bad news. Valencia, Spain's third biggest city, doesn't have that iconic, must-see reason to visit." And, depending on his response (which some longtime blogger-tweeple friends of mine hinted would be off-key and negative), I would commence operation shame-and-blame. In short, I thought I would try out a twitter war as an online social experiment and see what happens.

The page in question. I put it to you, do you think this is an insulting way
to characterize a city, or am I overreacting... or both?

I know what you're thinking, "This guy is a total troll" (another word I only recently learned). Even in my early blogging days I picked fights with Spanish Sabores over how "un-Spanish" a mojito is. I'm always ranting about how underappreciated Valencia is, like here on my first entry about the city, or here, in the comments where I reply to Kaley... y Mucho Más. Heck! My post on the "Paella Hall of Shame" even prompted one Spanish blogger (from Madrid, I believe) to say I was "becoming a real 'taliban' of the paella valenciana"! Why, only a few days ago I was joining the ranks with Mr. Grumpy himself, laying into Mo and others on her blog SpainStruck who celebrate Spanglish as "code-switching", when a lot of what I hear expats speaking here is more like "pidgin". So fair enough. I guess I can be a bit of a troll about "getting it right" when it comes to Spanish culture. But these were all spats with people who's opinion I respect and whose blogs I like. So all of this is silly pittance and prologue to my concerted effort to shame Damian into removing what I saw as a singularly insulting depiction of my beloved Valencia.

Did I mention that Fallas season has started? I recorded this video
of the first March mascletà yesterday. Awesome!

Damian Corrigan,
my Valentine
this year

"First the bad news..."?!? I felt this was too flippant a way to open about one of Spain's most important cities. But the reaction I got from him when I tweeted said this was so outrageous that I had to share. So today I dedicate this entry to those "Impertinente Curiosos", those outsiders/foreigners/expats out there who float through Spain, get a first bad impression, and then replicate it all over the place like a bad rumor. I won't say they are "wrong". Let's just say they do a lot of damage to local pride, and more often than not they don't _really_ know what they are talking about. Let's walk through my flaming-shaming campaign... to make this a teachable moment, as Obama once so eloquently put it. Like all social forums, there is apparently something known as "Twitter etiquette", and I definitely learned a few things from this scrape with About.com Spain...

My opening appeal

1) Lesson 1, don't start a flame war on Valentine's Day if you hope to reach anyone:

You're probably (understandably) wondering, "Does this guy have a life?" I'll plead the fifth on that. But I can say that my wife and I don't celebrate Valentine's for a couple of unarticulated reasons, but mostly because we find it cheasy (why encourage people!). (Instead we celebrate romance every other day of the year... "A very merry unbirthday to you. Yes, you!") But at first I did feel kind of bad... was I ruining Damian's Valentine's Day? Was he too busy wooing his love to put out fires started by grumpy online secret admirers? But no, alas, he also didn't have a date on Valentine's, or if he did, he must be that killjoy guy with the smart phone at the restaurant, texting away madly instead of "being there in the moment". But if he and I didn't have any special plans, everyone else did. Nobody in the twitterverse wanted to engage in sour grapes on a day for mushy hushpuppies. So even if I did have any sympathies from my followers (probably a big if), they were too busy selling love that day to sully themselves with my scurrilous cat fight.

2) Lesson 2, weapons of the weak or, in Twitter you've won if you get them to respond:
The "argument" between Go Spain and I was clearly uneven. He had something like 5000 followers on twitter, and I had around 100. His website's location in About.com also meant that he had institutional legitimacy, whereas I'm just some silly blogger with an ax to grind. I'm not going to go overboard and pitch myself as some kind of David versus Goliath, but... well, I'm just say, it wasn't a square fight. But in grad school I read a little about social movements, and had one book, James Scott's Weapons of the Weak (1985), particularly in mind. Social movements have certain tactics like "shaming" available to them, and they can use humor and their weaker position to appeal to the wider community. Moreover, I really had little to lose. Even when I started I assumed I would lose followers (amazingly I didn't), but I wasn't worried about that. Whereas I suspect Damian didn't want to alienate his readers. Indeed, one of the key characteristics of this online flaming trend is that one is anonymous... in this respect I had Damian at a disadvantage. The "right" move on his part would probably be to ignore me. This is the "social death" by way of silence. In effect I had to bait him into replying, but make sure not to alienate disinterested third parties and wayward audiences.

And he made a mistake… he did respond… [I think its a debatable point whether this was a "mistake" or not on his part. It certainly made him seem less aloof and corporate, but it also made him more human. He clearly cares about what people tweet to him, even if he does not _care_, as you will see below, about what they think or feel.]


3) Lesson 3, be prepared for a long war:
The reality is that a lot of nonsense gets published out there. And most people don't bother to say anything about it because it's just easier to ignore it. I assumed that this would be Damian's robe of power - sit through and weather whatever appeal I made, and assume I'd lose interest and give up. So you see, I had this whole plan thought out, with multiple stages to the flaming experiment: Stage 1) Appeal to Reason, Stage 2) refer to his peers and competitors, Stage 3) Reason by analogy, Stage 4) appeal to better nature. And so on. This was going to be my first flame war, and I wanted to see it through properly.

Stages 1, reason by pointing to his own words which show sightseeing worth reasons to visit Valencia,
and Stage 2, refer to his peers. I pointed him to Lonely Planet's more favorable review of Valencia,
and Travel & Leisure's estimation of the city rising. 

I had fun with Stage 3: lifting the offensive quote from Go Spain's website,
and inserting other "third biggest cities". Some of them surprised me.
(Learn something new everyday.)

4) Lesson 4, look to your natural allies:

I then sent a tweet into the void that is Twitter, directed first at my followers, and then specifically at Valencia people's twitter accounts, asking them to weigh in. And got nothing. (Review lesson number 1: don't flame on Valentine's Day.) But maybe it also says something about the "weak ties", as sociologists call them, on social networks (another name for them might be "fair-weather friends"). I suppose I could have made more of a campaign about it, by tweeting all the posts out there which celebrate Valencia as an amazing, dare I say "iconic" city to visit... like the fact, which Culture Spain posted, that the City of Arts and Sciences beat out the Prado in Madrid and La Alhambra in Granada for most visitors last year, or Mr. Grumpy listing Valencia's Fallas as one of the Seven Wonders of Spain. Even the Chicago Tribune out analogized me recently, by starting its description of Valencia off by comparing it to Paris!

I think at this point he would have just ignored me, until one blogger friend and twitter follower spoke up. Thanks Chic Soufflé for getting my back! And also indirectly The Spain Scoop for a retweet on Fallas being iconic! (I also got some belated indirect support from a couple of others, who I won't name to protect them, but thank you!)

5) Lesson 5, Try to avoid needless digressions

At some point the conversation took a turn, and we started to talk about what is meant by "iconic". (I can almost hear Alanis Morisette's song in my head, but with iconic instead of ironic: "Isn't it iconic. Like rain, falling on Spain's plains.")

Damian: "No, I have a responsibility to be honest to my readers about
where I believe tourists should and shouldn't go in Spain. End." Ouch!

"I try to believe in as many as six [iconic Valencian] things before breakfast."

Maybe I'm a little obsessed with the implications of the self-fulfilling prophecy,
but I feel like it's Spain's worst enemy at the moment.

How did he get the idea that I'm a citizen of Valencia? If only!

6) Lesson 6, let the other side dig his own grave:

As I said, I think other people weighing in got GoSpain's attention. Note his reply to Chic Soufflé: "If you think that is negative, you should see... [Worst Cities in Spain] My job is to differentiate and highlight what I like." I suppose this is his way of trying to show magnanimity and deference. I can't speak for Chic Soufflé, but it strikes me as absurd. Have you looked at the cities on his site he recommends people _not_ visit?: 1) Gibraltar, 2) Málaga, 3) Valladolid, 4) Marbella, 5) Algeciras, 6) Ciudad Real, 7) Huelva, 8) Albacete. Now I haven't been to any of these, so I'm not in a position to judge. But it strikes me as a bad business model for travel advice to categorically dismiss towns like these. I just had friends visit Valladolid, and liked it, and I've been meaning to go there for a while to see its film festival, one of the oldest in Spain. (I invite you, the reader, to make an argument for any of the others.)

"Get over yourself and your city, please!" Suggestion to all: don't use unnecessary
personal attacks when arguing with people online. If you don't know them,
it's better to give them the benefit of the doubt. Here he also writes to Chic Soufflé:
"If you think that is negative, you should see... My job is to differentiate and highlight what I like."

His concession that he at least did not put Valencia on this list is, well, weak. Here he falls into a common trap for travel writers: vanity, that he has the ultimate authority, judgment, and say in what is "worth it" and what is not. If he told his audience to flat out avoid Valencia, that it was not "worth it", his readers would know that he has no impartiality or taste whatsoever. This is because the subjects one chooses for travel writing make the writer as much as the writer makes the subject. This was something that Hemingway understood well. He helped to make Pamplona iconic, because of his amazing vivid prose. But he knew that it was Pamplona speaking through him, not just him alone...

I should add that at some point in all this he went private... sending me private messages on Twitter rather than public ones. In both public and private, he wasn't above ad hominem (personal) attacks. (Class, it is now time to review the twitter rule: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.) At one point he flattered me by mistaking me for a Valencian citizen. Funny how personal attacks can say as much or more about those who lobby them than those they're lobbied at. He clearly didn't take the time to look at my blog and read up about me, before rushing to judgment about what I was saying.

"High minded Valencians". This is a new one for me. Usually Valencians
are accused of provincialism. I think he really thought I was from Valencia. Suggestion #2:
Read up a bit on the person you are smearing. My "About" states very clearly that I'm American.

7) Lesson 7, Twitter and Blogging work best when everyone keeps it positive:

Now at some point in Day 2 (February 15th) I lost my drive. And I can tell you exactly when it happened. I was checking the link he sent Chic Soufflé on cities _not_ to visit... And then he went there… The featured entry on his site for Wednesday was "Paella". Yes, paella, my weak spot. Needless to say I couldn't resist checking what he put up, and offering corrections. 

This had to be baiting me, or some kind of indirect concession to my argument
that Paella is one thing that is Valencian and iconic.

As it turned out it, his entry had a lot of good information, though mixed in with some real fallacious bombs. I was pleased to see him get right the fact that "paella valenciana" doesn't have seafood in it. And the extra line about how to pronounce it correctly. Kudoos! His picture had the red peppers in it, the hallmark of a Castellon paella rather than the traditional Valencia one, but that's nitpicking. But the page also had some serious misinformation. The big one that stood out for me was "paella negra". What the f...? I pointed this out to him, that no local I've ever known has called "arroz negro" "paella", even though it is a paella. To which he responded that there were sites online that did say this. (I also pointed out that "fideuà" is _not_ called paella, ever. This he accepted easily, and changed immediately.)

The "jihad" against paella misinformation: paella (de) marisco,
paella negra arroz negro, paella fideus fideuà... Argg!

In good faith, I ran a google search on paella negra, and sure enough Wikipedia itself appeared among the links that show for "paella negra". But wait, Wikipedia English! So I did what I always do when I have doubts about what I see written on Spain in Wikipedia, I clicked the tab on the left for Español and Català... and sure enough, no mention whatsoever of paella negra. (Hint, hint: because locals don't call it that.) I pointed this discrepancy out to GoSpain on twitter, and he relented.

Open to reasoning, when the evidence is overwhelming.

And here I started to have that change of heart. I realized, he's doing his best with the limited knowledge and indirect exposure that he has. (Okay, so I also lost interest. I'm sure many of you are already thinking: there have got to be better ways to spend one's time than yelling at internet walls.) Perhaps the humble lesson I had realized was that I, too, can be an online impertinente curioso, quick to judge without taking time to understand. Once I sat down and looked through his site, I realized a lot of work had gone into. Don't confuse this for a recommendation. "I have a responsibility to my readers to direct them to good sources of information on Spain..." Forgive my vanity, but you'll still learn more from my Valencian rice entry, than his paella page... he fails to discuss arroz al horno, arroz meloso... In short, his site offers pretty standard and often cursory info, and can be misleading and biased by its authors limited understanding of the subjects he tackles.

His site suffers that common weakness of all writing about Spain by an outsider who only partially understands what he is seeing. He makes many mistakes, like the paella/rice mistake, which a local would _never_ make. Again, I don't see this as a personality flaw. I also make mistakes on my entries, which my wife or in-laws catch, or which my local friends or readers point out to me. There is a vast difference in knowing a city because you've read up on it online versus knowing a city because you've lived and breathed it your entire life. (Indeed, one of the wisest things my older sister once told me was that you don't really know a person until you've been with them through all four seasons of the year.) Locals can also miss things in their own city, but many of the mistakes we expats and outsiders make would leap off the page to them.

"He can be taught!" The About.com Go Spain page on Paella after Damian incorporated my suggestions.

8) Lesson 8, Stop using Wikipedia as a source but then writing like you know what you're talking about

Of course, maybe the real question is what has been the fallout from all this. For one, I'm pleased to say he updated his Paella entry removing the errors I pointed out to him. I also took the opportunity to create a Wikipedia account, and I edited the English entry so that Anglophone Hispanophiles wouldn't continue replicated that mistaken notion of calling "arroz negro" "paella negra". [Let this be a lesson to all of you Spain bloggers out there: when doing your online research for entries, take the extra step of seeing if the Wikipedia entry is different in Spanish (or Catalan) than in English. This is a _big_ clue about the pages' sources of (mis)information.]

That's the good news. The bad news is he has not (as of the posting of this entry) changed the page on "Things to Do in Valencia". I suspect Damian is a proud man, perhaps inflexibly so, and my campaign might have further ossified his opinion of the city and that page's depiction of it. -Sigh-. What's a Valencia lover to do? I'd tell you and other readers to boycott the page, but I doubt I have the kind of internet influence to have much of an impact on his online traffic. -Sigh-.

Even Wikipedia makes mistakes! Here the "arròs negre" entry in English
before I went in and edited it.

My first wikipedia edit... Brave New World!

And, of course, in a way "All news is good news" in the Twitterverse (or at least that's what this web article says about flaming). By tweeting left and right to him, I was giving him free advertising. And likewise, by responding to me he put my name on his readers' radar. So I suppose I should thank him for that. A major fallout was that I picked up some new followers, a couple of which sent me sympathetic tweets. (I'm not Damian's first broken heart.) All of this inspired me to add a new gadget on the left side of this blog: a Twitter window where you can see my lastest tweets. Clearly I'm spending too much time on Twitter, so I may as well share that with you here, too.

And, please, if you ever read anything here that rubs you wrong, don't be afraid to tweet me (or email)... heck, I'd even enjoy a good flaming, if it's for a just cause. ;-)