"In Praise of My Sister" by Wisława Szymborska

My sister doesn’t write poems.
and it’s unlikely that she’ll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn’t write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn’t write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister’s roof:
my sister’s husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as
Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.
My sister’s desk drawers don’t hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn’t hold new ones,
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn’t want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn’t spill on manuscripts.
There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it’s hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.
My sister has tackled oral prose with some success.
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from
vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she’ll have
so much
much
much to tell.

Baby love

This world is full of very young mamas. From the very beginning, since we are just a baby girl, we are trained to take care of babies, even when we are still one. We want them for Christmas, that’s what we tell Santa. And he brings us one, sometimes even two. We wash their plastic bodies, brush and comb, their blond artificial hair –if they happen to have some-, pretend to feed them and pretend they stained their diapers. We talk to them just like our parents and relatives and some random person in the street used to talk to us, with that patronizing tone reserved for puppies –animal or human. We love them because they never grow up and they never will. And once they do, we get bored and leave them hidden somewhere. They starve, they get dirty, and they die. Just at the same time we discover dolls. We go shopping, clean the house, bake cookies for the boys. And then someone buys us a husband for our doll. We make love with our absent genitals and meanwhile, our baby dies, the one in the deepest part of the wardrobe and the one inside us.

 Text by the author of the blog

 Photo by Stanley Kubrik

What I read in 2011

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Sorry for my abscense but I've been working hard (remember, I'm a teacher) and writing my short stories and things for Norma Jean Magazine. Not an excuse, I KNOW. Anyway, this year I've discover I love making lists and I applied my new skills to record what I've read and the movies I've watched (next post). So here you have the books I've read:

-The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
-Beloved by Toni Morrison
-Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems ed. by Wendy Cope
-The Machine Stops and the Celestial Omnibus by E.M. Forster
-Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
-The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
-Que caiga el favorito by Ramiro Gairín Muñoz
-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-The Help by Kathryn Stockett
-Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
-The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

-Undeletable Scenes by Jeffrey Brown

-Maus by Art Spiegelman

-Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

-The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

-Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier

-Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada by Pablo Neruda
-Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue
-Manderley en venta by Patricia Esteban Erlés
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
-The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy by Tim Burton
-Casa de Muñecas (Doll's House) by Henrik Ibsen
-Summer and the City by Candace Bushnell
-La tienda de los suicidas by Jean Teulé
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
-Ten: New Poets ed. by Evaristo & Nagra

-I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason

-Everything We Miss by Luke Pearson

-Holocaust Poetry ed. by Hilda Schiff

-Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

-Guía de hoteles inventados by Oscar Sipán

And the best one is...written in bold. I strongly recommend Safran Foer. In 2012 I want to read "Everything is Illuminated" by this same author.
And the great discovery this year has been graphic novels. Just take a look at the green titles.

I wish you all a great 2012 full of good stories!

Very Short Story: The Nail

Just like he did when he was a kid, when the screaming escaped through the open doors, he passed the fingernail across the softest part of his arm, back and forth, once and again, turning it from pale to light pink until a subtle line of blood drew his distress. Now the source of his anguish wasn’t his parents but life, or rather the lack of it, so he thought. Is it life a life without love, a job, nothing to believe in? While he was struggling between yes and no, his nail, his body, had already decided.

"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett

I just finished reading Kathryn Stockett's The Help, 460 pages in less than two weeks (in English, not my mother tongue, remember), so you can imagine how hooked I was. It was a wonderful experience and mostly expected since it deals with two of my favourite topics: the 60s and civil rights (for black people, I mean). Narrated in first person by three women (two black, one white) it tells us the adventures these ladies had while trying to write a book about black maids in white Mississippi households. And I'm not telling more since I don't want to spoil it. If you are lazy to read it (I'm sure you're not) you will be able to watch the movie from August in the States and, unfortunatelly, October in Spain and UK. Here I leave you the trailer and two quotations from the book that depict its two dominant moods: happiness/hope and anger/disgust. 

Quotes:

• If chocolate was a sound, it would've been Constantine's voice singing. If singing was a color, it would've been the color of that chocolate.
• "You cannot leave a Negro and  Nigra together unchaperoned," Mother'd whispered to me a long time ago. "It's not their fault, they just can't help it."

And now, let's begin with Tokyo Blues by Murakami. Somebody read it?

A fine poem for a great girl

I just finished reading "Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems", as I told you before. I wanted to share with you some of the best parts or maybe the best poem I read here, or the one that made me feel happiest, as it was suppossed to be the purpose of the book. However, I preferred to pay a homage to one of my best friends and one of the weirdest girls I've ever met (if we bear in mind that being weird for me it's the top of virtues,). So here you have a poem about Mary Lou, by Kit Wright. If you read it aloud you'll find it really musical, just like her. Let's see if this forces Lou to write more posts. 

Red Boots On

Way down Geneva,

All along Vine,

Deeper than the snow drift

Love’s eyes shine:

Mary Lou’s walking

In the winter time.

She’s got

Red boots on, she’s got

Red boots on,

Kicking up the winter,

Till the winter’s gone.

So

Go by Ontario,

Look down Main,

If you can’t find Mary Lou,

Come back again:

Sweet light burning

In winter’s flame.

She’s got

Snow in her eyes, got

A tingle in her toes

And new red boots on

Wherever she goes

So

All around Lake Street,

Up by St. Paul,

Quicker than the white wind

Love takes all:

Mary Lou’s walking

In the big snow fall.

She’s got

Red boots on, she’s got

Red boots on

Kicking up the winter

Till the winter’s gone.

E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops"

I just finished reading the best-known short story by the author of "Passage to India" and found it beautiful and disturbing at the same time. It is very similar to "1984" but it was written years before, so Forster's is not a mere copy. Vashti and Kuno (mother and son) live in a post-apocalyptic era in which the Machine controls everything. And that's all I can tell without spoiling it. Here you have the best quotations I took from the book:

Something ‘good enough’ had long since been accepted by our race.

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter –one book.

Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air of their rooms.

Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.

The Machine develops –but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds –but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

I was surrounded by artificial air, artificial light, artificial peace.

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven.

Apparently, there's a short movie based on the book. You can watch it here.

"Skin" by Philip Larkin

Sorry about my absence but I'm quite busy these days, making some essays for my masters and (I should also be) revising. But I can't stop thinking about you and my blog so I leave here a short poem by Philip Larkin I'm sure you'll like as much as I did. Enjoy it (and comment on it, please). Photo by me.

Skin   

Obedient daily dress,
You cannot always keep
That unfakable young surface.
You must learn your lines -
Anger, amusement, sleep;
Those few forbidding signs

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time;
You must thicken, work loose
Into an old bag
Carrying a soiled name.
Parch then; be roughened; sag;

And pardon me, that
I Could find, when you were new,
No brash festivity
To wear you at, such as
Clothes are entitled to
Till the fashion changes.

2010: Books I read

Yeah, yeah, I'm not really original, cause both Andrea and Mary Lou already made a post about this, but at risk of humiliating myself, I'm going to share with you those books I remember I read last year. I guess there aren't as many as I'd like to because I was abroad mainly having other kind of fun, bad excuse, I know. To be honest, some of them (two or three, no more) were not finished but that's one of my worst defects. There's a lot of poetry, you'll see, and I'm sure you'll distinguish the summer readings from real literature...hehe. The (R) is for re-reading. The (*) are those I really enjoyed. To this list, I should add some african-american, film and religion books I had to read for my essays but I don't really remember now.

-"Selected Poems" by Langston Hughes (R)

-"The Complete Poems" by Stephen Crane (R)

-"Atonement" by Ian McEwan

-"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

-"The Tempest" by William Shakespeare

-"The Bible: The New Testament" by....several authors? (*)

-"The Carrie Diaries" by Candace Bushnell

-"World Without End" by Ken Follet (*)

-"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling (*)

-"Ensayo sobre la ceguera" by José Saramago (*)

-"1984" by George Orwell (*)

-"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck

-"Film History" by Paul Granger et Al. (*)

-"Imagist Poetry"

-"Antología bilingüe" by William Carlos Williams

-"Caroling Dusk" by Countee Cullen (ed.)

-"Love Letters of Great Men"

And I have a loooooooooot to read this year. Right now I'm with Margaret Atwood and Philip Larkin, but these are some I already have and want to read as soon as I finish the 800 pages of The Blind Assassin.

Favorite Poems I just bought it and it's such an amazing discovery! It's a big book full of great poems and poets, designed for boys and girls, but before I read them to my children and create little monsters their classmates will hate, I want to enjoy it. It has great authors like John Keats, William Carlos Williams, Shakespeare, William Blake, Emily Dickinson and my beloved Langston Hughes. It even has the lyrics of the USA national anthem! This is just a couple of lines I extracted:

A word fitly spoken
Is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

Wanna know where is it from? THE BIBLE. Lol.

My Favourite Book

I've never read anything from Stephen King...apart from what I consider to be my favourite book. I know many of you would kill me for this, but before cleaning your guns I'll tell you that this book has nothing to do with the rest of King's horror fiction. The Eyes of the Dragon was published in 1987, the year I was born, so I guess it's not coincidence I like it. The Spanish edition was given to me by one of my mom's friends and years later I bought it in English. I've read it several times and it brings me good memories cause I used to re-read it every spring for several consecutive years while eating medlar sitting in my terrace.
It was written for his children so even the style is different. The Eyes of the Dragon tells the story of the kingdom of Delain in the style of Arthur's tales, with magicians, treachery, suffering and love. If you want to know more about the plot click here and if you want some spoilers, here.
I strongly recommend it if you feel like having a good time. I even dare to say that you'll fall in love not only with the book but also with the characters, particularly Peter and his dollhouse.
Come on! Buy it know! It's just 0,01 pounds on amazon! (This is the edition I have, with beautiful drawings inside)