January 2012
1 tag
amitava kumar
yinishi:
“The Reader I Want,” Tehelka, 30 January, 2010.
I feel quite strongly that the movement of any piece of writing, simply, should be toward complexity. I don’t mean complicatedness but something more like a clear articulation of a situation where several things are held in tension. Like when two, or three, or more thoughts emerge like stars ...
It's Not Who Lived Here
But who died here; and it’s not when but how; it’s not the known great but the great who died unknown; it’s not the history of countries but the lives of men.
fables are dreams, not lies, and truth changes as men change, and when truth...
1 tag
Brave Bull
I did not know that the Mexicans did this: the bull had been brave and now they dragged him dead around the ring by his tail, a brave bull dead, but not just another bull, this was a special bull, and to me a special lesson…
and although Brahms stole his First from Beethoven’s 9th. and although the bull was dead his head and his horns and his insides dead, he had been better than...
A Dream
The streets of Canada.
Instead of streetlights, the sidewalks are lined with large speakers that night and day transmit a voice giving a never-ending lecture on a French author whose name no one knows. Or at least, I don’t know.
The voice speaks French, and its speech is mixed with a little English, but it’s an English I do not understand. Sometimes the voice mentions names, but they...
2 tags
This, and much more, she accepted—for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case—mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness...
1 tag
“A victory over such antagonists was a sufficient humiliation.”
– Edward Gibbon, on his critics
The Look
I once bought a toy rabbit at a department store and now he sits and ponders me with pink sheer eyes:
He wants golfballs and glass walls. I want quiet thunder.
Our disappointment sits between us.
—Charles Bukowski
2 tags
Seahorse
I own the ticks on a horse I own his belly and balls I own this the way his eyes roll the way he eats hay and shits and stands up asleep
he is mine this machine like a blue train I used to play with when my hands were smaller and my mind better
I own this horse, someday I will ride my horse down all the streets past the trees we will go up the mountain down the valley
ticks and eyes and balls...
A very specific feeling
When you wake up from a half-dream, and you can’t remember a thing about it, so you begin to examine your brain, trying to think of all the things you could’ve been dreaming about: work, school, literature, past relationships, comic books, friends, seafaring, geography, sex, films, history, cats, death, and so on and so on—and not a single thing you think about reminds you of...
3 tags
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are illustrious toys you have left me. I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn. Your dark rich life…
—Jorge Luis Borges, Two English Poems
1 tag
To hunt sweet Love and lose him Between white arms and bosom, Between the bud and blossom, Between your throat and chin; To say of shame—what is it? Of virtue—we can miss it; Of sin—we can but kiss it, And it’s no longer sin: To feel the strong soul, stricken Through fleshly pulses, quicken Beneath swift sighs that thicken, Soft hands and lips that smite; Lips that no love can tire, With hands...
“Y reina en el espíritu con subconsciencia arcaica,
El miedo de lo demasiado...”
– Leopoldo Lugones, La Muerte de la Luna
1 tag
“You know when you see a fog in the morning when you wake up, before the sun...”
– Charles Bukowski
4 tags
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of inconstant forms, that pile of broken mirrors.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Cambridge, last lines
1 tag
And if I kiss you in the garden, In the moonlight,...
Miércoles, 25 de agosto (1971). Como, con Vlady Kociancich y Marco Denevi, en la calle San Martín, entre Córdoba y Viamonte. Denevi dice que en una reunión, los otros días, conoció a Borges. Estaban en mesas distantes. Denevi explicaba su teoría sobre el budismo zen: que habría sido al principio una simple broma contra el budismo tradicional. En voz alta agregó: “No sé cómo se lo...
Our acts continue down their path, which knows no end. I killed my king so Shakespeare could conceive his tragic play.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Macbeth
“The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted...”
– Gustavo Perez Firmat, Bilingual Blues: Poems, 1981-1994 (x)
The Last Question
New love, new love, where are you to lead me? All along a narrow way that marks a crooked line. How are you to slake me, and how are you to feed me? With bitter yellow berries, and a sharp new wine. New love, new love, shall I be forsaken? One shall go a-wandering, and one of us must sigh. Sweet it is to slumber, but how shall we awaken— Whose will be the broken heart, when dawn comes by?
...
“A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he...”
– Stephen Crane “A Man Saw a Ball of Gold in the Sky” (via within-my-head)
The Notebook
The idea for this short story came to me almost a year ago, and thanks to a good friend’s encouragement, I finally sat down to write it. Thank you for reading it, if you do.
After the funeral, I didn’t see my mother for a whole week. We were the only ones who didn’t cry. I never asked her, but I could guess her reasons were the same as mine: we couldn’t attribute enough...
“Y así como en el colectivo la gente suele sentarse, por no dar dos pasos más, en...”
– Alejandro Dolina (1989)
Dreamlessly
old grey-haired waitresses in cafes at night have given it up, and as i walk down sidewalks of light and look into windows of nursing homes I can see that it is no longer with them. I see people sitting on park benches and i can see by the way they sit and look that it is gone.
I see people driving cars and I see by the way they drive their cars that they neither love nor are ...
A joke from my father
I mentioned to him that I have a blog, and he asked me if I could write down this joke in English for others to read. It’s his favorite.
One day God decides to give temporary life to a pair of statues in a park. He chooses a random park with two random statues, one male and one female, and puts a soul in each one and tells them that they will live for 15 minutes.
The statues awaken and...
2 tags
“A god in wrath
Was beating a man;
He cuffed him loudly
With thunderous blows...”
– Stephen Crane “A God in Wrath” (via within-my-head)
bonhomía
f. Afabilidad, sencillez, bondad y honradez en el carácter y en el comportamiento.
fr. bon homme = buen hombre
TMI Friday
I wish I had a foot fetish. It sounds like fun.
2 tags
1 tag
Edmundo Rivero - Tardecitas Estuleras
Anécdota de...
My grandmother was a very lady-like woman who had grown up in a wealthy house and was always very careful about her manners, but for some reason she really liked to look at fires or car crashes. Whenever she heard a crash on the street she would go out and attend the scene of the accident for a while. Once, when I was five, she took me to see a fire at a warehouse a couple of blocks from my house....
2 tags
I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye. For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by;
A dreary, dreary beggar Without a friend on the earth But a thieving rascally cur— O a beggar blind from his birth;
Or anything else but a rhymer Without a thing in his head But rhymes for a beautiful lady, He rhyming alone in his bed.
—W.B. Yeats
Papá
Dad: I bought a cheese grater.
Me: But we already have a cheese grater, it works great.
Dad: Yeah, but this one, look here, it has thinner things on the sides to get thinner cheese.
Me: But the old one has those too.
Dad: But this one's... better :)