Wax Nationalism

It took me a minute to realize why the Wax Museum of Madrid smelled like church. The odor I had always assumed was incense used for ritual purposes is, in fact, the smell of votive candles. Votive candles and wax statues of major figures in Spanish history and culture.

I’m currently writing a new biography of Moses Maimonides for a medieval lives series that will include images. My editor encouraged me to find images that are freely available to use through creative commons license or other means. As I was looking for images to include with my book proposal, I discovered that there is a likeness of Maimonides in the Madrid Wax Museum, but I couldnt’ find any photos that would be good enough to use for publication so I went to take my own. 

Behold Wax Maimonides (r) and Wax Averroes (r) in the wax Nasrid-style palace that holds all of the Andalusi figures, regardless of whether they lived in any kind of temporal or geographic proximity to Nasrid Granada.

 

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Pre-Travel Anxiety Dreams

I’m trying to do more of my medium-form writing these days with an end toward getting it publish, so I suppose that I’ve been doing more listicle-ing over here as I try to balance blogging and publishing.

I’m preparing to take my sophomore honors students to Madrid for a week. It’s a great trip and I’m looking forward to it a lot, but it also means being responsible for the health and safety of 30 19-year-olds for a week, and I tend to end up having anxiety dreams for weeks ahead of time. Usually they’ve been the very standard sort of I’m stuck on a train platform and I can’t move my feet and the train is leaving kind of thing that comes from knowing it takes a lot of extra time to move a group of people anywhere. This year, though, my subconscious has been keeping me entertained with far more elaborate scenarios:

  • Was put on a special diet with only ten foods allowed. Amongst those were ham, eggs, and lavender tea. No vegetables anywhere on the list. I decided it was stupid and I was going to eat some romanesco.
  • Was chased through the streets of Ávila by two big black dogs.
  • Was chased through the streets of Ávila by several of my senior colleagues.
  • Was in Ávila and couldn’t get back to the train station because people kept giving me directions in Italian and I couldn’t understand the street numbers. (This was kind of cool because it’s the first time I dreamed in Italian, and of course I understood what people were saying, but somehow in my dream it was as if I didn’t. We are not, I should mention here, taking the students to Ávila.)
  • Arrived in Madrid with such a large blister on the base of my thumb that I couldn’t hold anything or hand out itineraries to the students.
  • And as a bonus but unrelated travel-and-teaching combo anxiety dream: Was stuck in Poughkeepsie in the late afternoon on a Sunday and couldn’t rent a car to leave because the only open car rental place was run by a guy who had seen my tweets about alt-right appropriation of the Middle Ages and didn’t approve of my opinions. (I’ve been thinking about participating in NYU’s prison education program, which would require my taking Metro North to Poughkeepsie once a week and getting a zip car to go from there to Wallkill.)