Meanwhile on my bookshelf...

Lately I've spent my weekends at home, and I'm embarrased to say that it was because I wanted to, so among other meaningless things I rearranged the books on my shelf in alphabetical order but this time making no distinction between English, American, Spanish, Italian or French. The result was...eclectical. These are some of the funny effects:

-A Qur'an between two Bibles (:s)

-Candace Bushnell ("Sex and the City" author) too close to the Brontë sisters

-Francis Scott Fitzgerald shaking covers with Ken Follett.

-Hemingway with Hardy (this is not as bad as the others)

-Kerouac and Stephen King TOGETHER (this must be a sin)

-Orwell's "1984" too close to the biography of a politician: Obama

-Freud giving advice to "Coraline"on how to live in such a weird world

I like to think that it happens like in Toy Story and the books move when I'm out and just have relationship with those of their level. Helen Fielding's Italian translation of "Bridget Jones' Diary" complaining about "questo Faulkner é pazzo!" (this Faulkner is crazy) and stuff like that.

So Far This Week #8

 

Winner of the Week.... "Howl", though it's a very subjective prize since I happen to love Ginsberg and James Franco (and Jon Hamm, of course).

My recommendation for you this week is a Spanish movie: "Un franco, 14 pesetas", about a Spanish guy in the 1960s who has to emigrate to Switzerland. Really good.

(Now you can kill me for watching "Labor Pains")

5th March, Celebrating Differently

Today is the 5th of March, a festivity in my city but I've never joined the people on the park drinking, eating and laughing. I was always celebrating something else. This day was my grandma's birthday so instead of going out with my friends I used to stay at her place drinking, eating and laughing with my family. Even when I was a teenager I never preferred the other option. Now there's nothing to choose but I choose not to go out and celebrate her birthday by myself, remembering how she received me when I got her home, in a way everybody in the block knew I was there, how she got so funny angry when I refused to be combed and brushed, how she tought me to play cards and clean parts of the house nobody cleans, how she cooked (oh my, HOW SHE COOKED!), how I teased her about her son/my father, how she called me "fat" using thousands of euphemisms (to be honest, I was quite fat by then), how she kissed me the way only a grandma knows how to kiss, how she made me think she was a witch when guessing right what I lunched at school...

[For the record, I'm the baby in the photo]

The Blind Assassin (who took my heart)

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin”. To be honest, I felt it quite boring at the beginning but as I kept on reading I discovered one of the best books ever, 637 pages of pure beauty. I have a defect: my books are a disaster as I love underline interesting quotations. And this one is full of them, so let me share some with you. No spoilers, I promise.

He had never known a woman to bruise so easily. It came from being so young and delicate.

He favoured thighs, where it wouldn’t show. Anything overt might get in the way of his ambitions.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it?

I was sand, I was snow – written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don’t really believe you’re there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.(This is for you, Andrea)

 

A fist is more than the sum of its fingers.

Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

 

But who knows where they get those things [organs for transplants]? Street children in Latin America is my guess; or so goes the most paranoid rumour. Stolen hearts, black-market hearts, wrenched from between broken ribs, warm and bleeding, offered up to the false god. What is the false god? We are. Us and our money. That’s what Laura would say. Don’t touch that money, Reenie would say. You don’t know where it’s been.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

I’ll cry a few tears, but only a few, because the eyes of the elderly are arid.

So Far This Week #7

 

And the winner of the week is..."SAVING PRIVATE RYAN" for its amazing depiction of war, mainly the fist scene of the D-Day.

So Far This Week #6

And the winner is......"DIAL M FOR MURDER"

(But really loved Brad Pitt's character in "Burn After Reading", his funniest after "Snatch")

Analogic English Foursome

Maybe you noticed that I don't upload much photography here, which is shameful as I studied a bit and have a lot of cameras and so. Well, if you're interested in Lomography, here you have some photos I took last year when I was in England, some of them depicting what I found real British over there. The camera used is an actionsample flash.

 Sunday Roast, I MISS YOU SO MUCH!

 Typical mailbox. It linked me and my boy for some moths.

 Beautiful litter box, with Nottingham's banner.

 Starbucks, yeah, I know, not very British, but I have none in my city so you can understand my excitement.

 Nottingham city hall and Lace Market Square

Two captures of the most beautiful place in Notts: Wollaton Park, with the lake and the hall.