An Unhelpful Companion for Unsettling Times
I’ve just climbed up from a pile of office work, to write a few unrequested lines about one of my favourite novels. Please, don’t expect anything ambitious. When I first read Maurice by E.M. Forster, I was seventeen years old. I produced a sloppy little review for La Chambre Ardente, a journalistic project kept by […]
Read more "Dedicated to better times"Originally posted on Biblioklept:
Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have stopped at a cabman’s shelter, a small coffeehouse under the Loop Line Bridge, for a cuppa and a rest on their way home. And the hope that the coffee will sober Stephen up. After an appropriate period of such hospitality, Bloom sees that it is…
Shall no one lower, by tear or reproach this declaration of the mastery of God, who, with magnificent irony gave me at once, the books and the night. Of this city of books he made owners two lightless eyes, that can only read in the libraries of dreams the senseless paragraphs his eagerness’ dawns grant. […]
Read more "A Translation of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Poem of the Gifts”."
En 1970, Jimi Hendrix murió de una sobredosis de barbitúricos. Arthur Rimbaud murió en 1891, de una sobredosis de pene de Verlaine. Yo, el otro día, tuve una siesta para nada reparadora, mientras padecía una sobredosis de nicotina. Gustaría de suceder la introducción de este bochornoso episodio con una aclaración: No estoy sufriendo secuela alguna. […]
Read more "No me he estado sintiendo muy bien"
I’m gaining weight like mad. I’ll be epistemologically irresponsible, and say that 50% of it is muscle and 50% of it is the consequence of my succulent breakfasts (which consist of about a litter of coffee and, certainly, a whole package of XXXTentaciones cookies). From the pedestal of my corporate job, my twelve Twitter followers, […]
Read more "How to Save your Life"
Uno de mis trabajos de análisis literarios favoritos es la primera página y media de “Good-bye to Objects, or the Nabokovian in Nabokov” (“Adiós a los objetos, o lo Nabokoveano en Nabokov”), de Mikhail Epstein. Epstein comienza proponiendo que la literatura sea estudiada, no bajo las categorías convencionales relativas más a la estructura que al contenido, […]
Read more "¡Sr. Nabokov, endúlceme los oídos!"
One of my favourite works of literary analysis is the first page and a half of Mikhail Epstein’s “Good-bye to Objects, or the Nabokovian in Nabokov”. Epstein begins by proposing the study of literature, not under the common categories related more to structure than to content, but in search of traits of a worldview, aesthetic […]
Read more "Mr. Nabokov, sweeten my ear!"