Saturday, February 12, 2011

My Dog Ate A Piece Of Excedrin

UPR students in a seminar on Caribbean YoSoyElOtro in the U. Seville



Last December 2010, YoSoyElOtro was invited to meet Caribbean Week: Days of literature, multilingualism and multiculturalism. Organized by the Department of American Literature at the Faculty of Philology de la Universidad de Sevilla. Coordinado por las Profesoras María Caballero y Diana Torres.

En esta maravillosa experiencia presentamos nuestra asociación ante especialistas de Estudios y Literaturas Caribeñas. Agradecemos la invitación y la oportunidad de poder intercambiar ideas acerca sobre nuestra percepción sobre la región del Caribe, nuestras diásporas y lo que nos une al margen de nuestras diferencias.

Gracias por esta iniciativa y que se repita... YoSoyElOtro ya ha comenzado a organizar el II Congreso sobre el Caribe. Estén pendientes

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Can You Use A Temporary Id To Drink

A bit of bad feeling I have a vision

This is a book that, in reality, they are 2. If you get cancer and bad feeling raw writing, you can forget the start and jump to page 133. From there, start the "Other travel" and the thing goes backpacking with a touch of trans-and intersex: a good dose of Argentina least known to tourists, a pinch of social work in Nicaragua or a fully fledged chute Ayurvedic Cures in India. Almost 200 pages devoted to better know yourself out of travel around the world. Come on, a quiet read like a Sunday supplement travel.

As mine are hard drugs, the focus review only the first part, Language cell (Trojan Horse, 2010) itself.

Those first 133 pages are a collection of texts Nacho Gallego (Madrid, 1971 - Zamora, 2007) wrote while he was ill and left unfinished when he had to leave the feast of the living. They detected a testicular cancer, or so I understand I-at age 24, I healed and whores chances of statistics, was part of 0.05% of people who suffer a recurrence. Every 3 years had a relapse and the latter is not recovered. In between all this hard work was put together existential courage, humility and courage, and lived. He also found comfort in devoting a lot of hours reading and writing.

Good thinking, has egg-and-never better what this guy: If you know that death sneaks up on you, what is the point of losing time reading Borges's stories, poems of Jorge Calvetti, let you touch Gioconda Belli a book or read Eduardo Galeano to understand that the English did not do in America what the priests told us in school? I mean, this system from all angles conspire precisely to the contrary ... And go and see a guy like Nacho Gallego, which fights the expiration date your life as you against your boss for a raise, and decides to read. Also write. And to let some texts more or less breading testify, as claimed by its editor, has not lived in vain. Olé

his balls.
What better way to undo the lie of the land of the healthy telling stories that will prepare us to experience the journey of life in all its dimensions.
literature as a tool to live with greater intensity: here is one of the lessons of these pages. In a world full of superficial self-help speeches, empty sentimental poetry and prose avant-garde or seller of CrecePelo refining, relieves meet the honesty Language cell, resulting in loosely organized some of its passages. And the story is that everything is crossed by the highest literary tension: we live to die. (The rest are distractions that would Kafka).

Nacho Gallego's greatness is that even throws low blows. No gloating in his skull beardless, in vomiting or the "wide range of failures" that have their meat due to an adenocarcinoma. Neither sells a speech that could serve to overcome the managers of multinationals to harangue his troops. The greatness of this anonymous guy is trying to enjoy here and now of his life: making coffee, the book read, his loneliness, the caress of his girlfriend, transfomer the world around him into a more habitable. To live, in short, this time (a poem by José Ángel Valente, certainly, subscribe Nacho).

These pages are not great literature, if by this we understand the mannerisms to use a few days excite the avant-garde gafapasta and others, the aristocracy of the appointment reassuring humanist. Moreover, and to know your editor, Constantino Bertolo, I can say that there is not even literature, because that's the point of which has not, for the world (literary or not) is saturated with puns, interested ellipsis of worn metáforas que velan la realidad para manipularla a beneficio de alguna cuenta corriente.

Lo que sí hay en el Lenguaje de las células es verdad. Una verdad que irradia un tipo que vive con el deseo ferviente de arder, no de consumirse. Alguien preocupado, además de por convivir con la rebeldía de los oncogenes, por rebelarse contra otra enfermedad, una enfermedad más grave aún que el cáncer y que ha infectado a buena parte de la sociedad occidental: durar como sinónimo de vivir. En estos blandos tiempos donde el negocio es comprar y vender felicidad satisfaciendo necesidades ficticias, va y resulta que las células tienen planes propios respecto de la estrella del horóscopo: nuestra salud.

Vivir, no durar.

Arder, no consumirse.
Con el dolor le ocurría como con el amor: no había nada que él pudiera hacer, tan sólo esperar a que pasara el pico de intensidad, sucumbir a cada arremetida.
Leídas esas 30 palabras, alcanza para comprender que Nacho Gallego sobrevivió al descenso al infierno y supo tocar el éxtasis con los dedos. Supo en qué consistía la soledad de ser hombre. Y eso ni lo cura la quimioterapia ni lo atenúan narcóticos como la Dolantina . Con todo, el bueno de Nacho todavía tiene arrestos para ironizar sobre ello y dejarnos entrever que, para películas en alta definición y sensaciones 3D, la vida:
to body odor was different: "Your pillow smells burnt," Ale said he slept beside her, she was the only one who was touching her body as if it is not reduced to a bag of fluids and liquids. Had a chance, Joan would have changed by another in the nearest store: "I am a clean, no drugs, please," he would joke with Ale.
So write and live the brave.

Amen.



PD. Here can read a few pages of the book. Latest

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Crockpot Guiness Cake



a couple of Sundays ago stayed with a friend, Alejandro, for some beers in Lavapies. Before I went to the flea market and I reviewed the posts of books I have signed. This time, one of my favorites-one selling porn films and books in hardcover at 3 € - did not offer much, so I inspected it more deeply the other techniques usually make stops in Plaza del Campillo of the New World.

So I found a stall selling a 5 € books as brand-new editorial Melusina, Peninsula and any other similar. The fate of many books sent to the media at a table is to end Sunday best balance for someone like me to bring them to home 2 or 3 times cheaper than in a bookstore. I mean each have our place in the literary ecosystem food chain.

Well, he said, surveying the post I also found 2 books by Tom Wolfe, both of those first editions launched by Anagram in the beginning (or so I think, come on): The years of chaos. Chronicles of the 70 and The house band of the pump and other chronicles of the era pop . And, as I have a simple yes, I like this kind of journalism and swore that Herralde not reissue, I bought them for € 6 each. Did not even try to bargain the price, plus I loved the portadas, Anagrama ha reeditado ahora en formato 2 x 1 ¿Quién tema a la Bauhaus feroz? y La palabra pintada, y pide 18 eurazos por el libro. Quiero decir: no era mal trato.

Ya casi he terminado el de los años del desmadre y, cómo no, me ha resultado desternillante. Tom Wolfe es una especie Mourinho literario: es incorrecto a tiempo completo, como si lo de ser sublime sin interrupción tuviera que ver con dispersar al enemigo a manguerazos de cinismo. Y, como la estrella del flamante capitalismo florentino, da a entender siempre que el problema es de los políticamente correctos, de ese hatajo de hipócritas que nunca dicen lo que piensan y cuyo objetivo es llevarse bien with everyone to prosper. Football analogies aside, Wolfe read again made me make another point: Martin Caparros is the Tom Wolfe in English. I recently finished Contra change and his narrative voice follows the same sarcasm that the Virginian in the 70's.

That yes, I have not yet Caparrós read describe the high executive hemorrhoids extremely concerned for their beauty ... However, as Wolfe has no boundaries when he writes, can reach heights unattainable for others:
attacks always began with the feeling that he had a peanut stuck in the sphincter. That meant that a portion swollen varicose vein had broken through the gut and actually threatened to leave the anus.
And in that same chronicle, "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening", adding:
Hemorrhoids! That peanut incident ...
hilarious. So eating pistachios and birth dates of laughter remembering me (yes, the best chew before, not going to be that ...).

Finally, you have to see what things I write. Anyway, I had started this blog entry because there was a less eschatological passage also made me tinkle in the pots. It's about religion.

For years I keep thinking it over a este léxico que usan las corporaciones: visión, metas, objetivos, valores, cultura... Sobre todo a lo de la visión . Ese «I have a dream» , a lo Martin Luther King pero en versión capitalista. Tras leer el siguiente pasaje de Wolfe, me quedó claro que el concepto no procedía de gurú alguno, sino que deviene de la religión.

Sí, lo sé, soy un ingenuo porque el Vaticano es un perfecto sincretismo entre religión y economía... Pero, bueno, uno tiene sus limitaciones, qué va a ser. El pasaje en cuestión dice así:

Esta noción [orgasmo] cuenta hasta con su genealogía. Numerosas sectas, tales como los Shakti zurdos, o los onanistas gnósticos, han interpretado el orgasmo como el kairós, el momento mágico, el éxtasis divino. Hay pruebas de que los primitivos movimientos mormones y oneidas les imitaron. En realidad, el concepto de un cierto éxtasis divino está presente en la historia de las religiones a lo largo de los últimos 2500 años. Como Max Weber y Joachim Wach han explicado con detalle, todas las principales religiones modernas, sin contar una legión de otras menores ya desaparecidas, no se originaron a partir de una teología, ni de un sistema de valores, ni de una meta social, ni siquiera de una vaga esperanza de vida eterna. Al contrario, todas se originaron a partir a small circle of individuals who shared some ecstasy or access overwhelming, "vision", a "trance", a hallucination, in short, a true neurological fact, a dramatic mutation of metabolism, which appears to have lit the entire central nervous system . [...] The origins of Christianity are full of "visions." Well, that
: dramatic mutations metabolism give me every time I hear banks complaining about our pay and, in turn, communicate their benefits ... But what I was: I found revealing (pun intended) to note once again that multinationals use a religious vocabulary surreptitiously. It is seen that, when marketing departments to identify needs, feel, think also the spiritual.



Years of chaos. Reports of 70, Tom Wolfe
Editorial Anagram, 1979
Translation José Luis Guarner