A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

In Spain, soccer is a wild, no-holds barred contest January 26, 1989 Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) When one is in Spain, one must do as the Spaniards do, or so we've been told by the College Consortium for International Studies Center staff when we ask about how to enjoy our free time here. This applies to everything -- from eating lunch at 2 p.m. and dinner between 9 and 10 p.m. to drinking tall glasses of "cerveza Cruzcampo" (the Spanish Budweiser) with tapas at one of the billions of bars in the city. And for those of us with a desire to be athletic (even if it's once during a 12-week term), it applies to playing sports. Because soccer is the national sport here, it was only natural that we, too, would want to catch a little "futbol fever." Most of the time we watched soccer games on Spanish television, although quite a few of us went to see the Spain-Argentina exhibition game or the Spain-Ireland game,...

Study abroad is more than educational: it’s an experience Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist (Originally published in the December 1, 1988 issue of Catalyst ) SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) Over the past six weeks of my stay here in Seville as a participant in the College Consortium for International Studies’ Semester in Spain program, I have come to understand how challenging studying abroad really is. Several other students from this campus are also taking part in this program. In many respects, studying abroad is no different from studying at our home college or university. We have our schedule set up much like we do in the U.S. with lectures and reading assignments. We have midterms and finals, of course, although in some classes final exams are given at the director’s discretion. Unlike studying in the U.S., we’re learning about a different country’s history, culture, government and economic system, not by reading about these in a textbook, but by living in it. “It’s be...

It is late spring, 1940.  It's been nine months since Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland plunged Europe into general war. France and Great Britain, which had hoped to appease Hitler the year before at Munich -- and practically gave away Czechoslovakia to Germany in order to stave off war -- have been forced to fight. After a period of uneasy waiting called "the phony war" by the American press, Hitler's armies have quickly overrun Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg and thrown the Anglo-French forces back into France in less than six weeks. British forces are forced to leave their heavy equipment on the beaches and evacuate from the port city of Dunkirk. Only the English Channel, units of the Royal Navy and less than 1,000 fighters stand between Hitler's conquering legions and the British Isles. As the new Prime Minister says in a speech before the House of Commons, "What General Weygand calls the Battle of France is over, the Battle of Britain is about ...

November 22, 1963 is one of those dates that, like December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001, has left its mark on the collective memories of Americans who, for good or ill, were alive and at an age to be able to remember exactly what they were doing and where they were when they heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had died an hour after being shot in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza shortly after 12 PM Central Standard Time. JFK’s assassination has, of course, been one of the most chronicled and hotly-debated crimes in American history; hundreds, perhaps thousands, of non-fiction and fiction books, articles, documentaries and movies have been produced since the mid-1960s, each one with its own spin on how and why the 35th President of the United States was murdered as he rode in a motorcade through downtown Dallas on the last leg of a political trip to Texas. Along with the many non-fiction books that stick to the “Lee Harvey Oswald-did-it-alone” account, there are man...