Saturday, January 15
STRANGERS ON A TRAIN
never be a good film critic. My friend Joseph Havel (which itself is a good critic) always tells me I look at the less important. I go to see The Tourist knowing it is not much, but quite the opposite, but set in Venice and I never get tired of returning to Venice. The argument sounds like one of those novelties with which I fall asleep on the nights of insomnia. As a child, I slept with a story, and I still do, but now I tell stories to me. A tourist traveling alone by train to Venice, being entertained by a book, a mystery novel, and when his eyes upward next to a woman he smiles. Everything changes from that time. Also in my fantasies just in the Hotel Danieli, but opening the window do not see the Rialto bridge, as in the film, but the beautiful silhouette of San Giorgio Maggiore, and in reality. In my fantasies care verisimilitude. There is a fact that breaks the routine, a wonderful meeting, from there, everything has to be thoroughly believable. The writers of The Tourist think otherwise. So my identification with the protagonist (is, like me, an obscure professor, and if you get nervous speaking, like me, in Portuguese when you speak Italian) quickly broken. I entertain myself recognizing places: Camp Renaissance columns of San Francesco Vigna for example, where the crooked cop trying to deliver Frank to the mafia. And I enjoy watching the absurd licenses I have already spoken of changing the Danieli, also prefer that the airport is not far away and place it in front of Piazza San Marco.
I'm a fan of verisimilitude, but the reality does not tend to me plausible. I also like Johnny Depp had a surprising encounter once I went by train to Venice. Who boarded the train at an intermediate station (I can not remember which one) and sat in front of me, although there were many empty seats, it was not Angelina Jolie, but a monk in white robes and bare feet. On Baggage carrying a plastic bag, such as those given in the supermarkets. It took an apple, and after cleaning with sleeve and offer me (I declined, of course), began to devour it with great bites. Several times he tried to make conversation, first in English then in French, and finally a vague English with a Mexican accent. "Do you already have accommodation in Venice? He asked. The hotels are very expensive. I know a house where you can stay for free. " I had already booked hotel and although the reserve set aside, should pay the first night, I did not care. I'm one of those people whose lives and nothing ever happens, however, spend their lives telling their life, so I could not miss such an occasion. I had my doubts before arriving at Santa Lucia station. Was this a real monk monk? Looked like a tramp, with dirty feet (and I was going barefoot), but instead the habit was pretty neat, and a shaggy beard that long ago I did not know scissors or comb. The eyes, however, blue, laughing, inspired confidence. The calculated age would not know: the same could be forty years sixty. I was walking briskly, to a place near Santa Maria Formosa. It was an ivy-covered mansion, surrounded by a narrow channel that seemed more like a moat (no sidewalk on one side or the other), a narrow footbridge left us at the front door, which opened without the need for flares, as if we were waiting and come see us. "What do you do?" He asked as we walked. "I teach literature," he said. And he: "I do miracles, heal people." I looked into his face, surprised, but was very serious, not joking.
that I spent a week in residence. I do not think that I never dare to tell what I saw and lived there. It's too implausible. But her brother Jonathan, who was from New York, smoked dope and had met Allen Ginsberg, truly worked miracles. I can vouch for that.
Sunday, January 16 RHAPSODY
"All existence is decoded in dreams." I open at random the last book of Pere Gimferrer, Rhapsody , ready to throw a few laughs, as we have lately grown accustomed to his neo-modernist verbiage ripiosa, and I find a remnant of the former greatness. The poems (or fragments of a single poem) start well, but not long in headlong. "It is likely to be stripped of half my life," read the first verse. And in the second "as the feed of dawn collapses in the Willows "(or" the sword of the day slip on the hill ", I smile: anything goes). On the back cover and preface urges us that the entire book was written in six days. Do not hesitate: it shows. Arbitrariness has its seat in some verses in which, from time to time, the poet who was looming. I like especially the variation of Cernuda's poem: "Thanks to demos and Dante Góngora, / demos through the verse and its tolling: / in the hourglass and ever / every word is our redemption."
I close the slim volume and decide not to write about it. A writer worth at best he has done. And I know by heart any Gimferrer's poems that dazzled me when I was twenty and it's the gift to say with truth beauty. "
But this battered Rhapsody talk about me: It has to be stripped half my life and dreams help me figure out who I am.
Monday, January 17 FRANKLIN STREET
a friend gave me The New York of Woody Allen movies and I take this opportunity to give me a tour of the places I was happy. My memory stops especially at a subway entrance is at the intersection of Broadway and Franklin. It has a wrought iron structure that distinguishes it. There at midnight, a mediocre writer, disgusted with his life, tells Winona Ryder and loved before meeting already in your dreams long before appearing in your life.
smiled when I see first Celebrity , reached the scene. There, in the same place, I was about to commit such foolishness, but my shyness kept me from making a fool, but do not be so bad again. After all I am accustomed. Came down from heaven to earth when I asked for money. It is not the first time that happens to me. I Ready for life and then I behave like the naive suckers Mihura Miguel theater.
Tuesday, January 18
THE BEST PUBLIC
already has become a pleasant habit dinner with my friend Rosa Navarro Durán as it passes through Asturias on one of his regular tours. Before her, coming out of her English class, I find Ernesto, one of his fans, which gives me a message for her: "Tell him to come and talk to the kids at school of the Immaculate Conception." Ernesto still almost can not read, but you know by heart the story of Ulysses and the Cyclops, not like Homer's account, but as the account Rosa.
"Children are most grateful to the public and more demanding. This morning one raised his hand and asked if it was easy or difficult to write a dictionary. I do not know, I have not written any, I answered. He politely said nothing, but while I was signing books, he left class, went to the library and returned with a school dictionary that I had written the foreword and that I had forgotten. Excuse me, I said, this puts Rosa Navarro Durán and professor at the University of Barcelona. There may be another. " I am like that child, but less friendly. I remember once, tired of listening to José Agustín Goytisolo said that he had never been a social poet, and had never used in his verse the word Spain, I to a reading anthology with José Luis Cano The theme of Spain in the English poetry and I turned to ask the question. Replied that always answered, and then I opened the book and read his poems of social and unequivocally tone in which it appeared that the word of the swearing. Said: "These poems have corrected." And yes, he had changed the word "Spain" with "country." I felt no remorse for letting public ridicule. I was not as polite as the ten year old boy who asked Rosa for his dictionary, one of those collaborations that venal or saved memory.
Wednesday, January 19
NO COMMENT "Have you seen the letter to the editor about snuff published today by Francisco Rico?" I asked a friend. "It seems there has been consistent with the resounding slap that gave him the reader's advocate."
---- No, I have not seen, nor do I talk about it anymore. Since I got bored.
---- Well, you should. I had read many times in newspapers Trapiello that Rico was silly, and always thought it was a vengeful evil. Now I see that you can be (have been, rather) a great scholar and reasoning as a resentful shower. Start saying reactions to his article "are almost all inquisitions clumsy in his private life." And if you refer to their smoking status is inquiring into his private life, it is surely right. But he neglects to add that it was he who began by stating that his life had smoked a cigarette. Nobody, he said, responding to his assertion that "not a few of the arguments against the snuff lack scientific rigor." In fact, he continues, there is little literature. And when you expect him to say "about the negative effects of snuff" is that the literature is scant regard to "the effects of legislation on the health of nonsmokers." He cites the work of British Academy Review which show that the more snuff is prohibited in places of entertainment, more grown nicotine levels in nonsmokers, "especially in children, which are major affected in the short and long term. " The reason? "The ban in bars and restaurants make snuff consumption moves to private places": So if I understand correctly, no doubt Rico and the negative effects of snuff for the health of smokers and nonsmokers (although the little literature that says there is about it), but does not believe that current legislation benefits of passive smoking because smokers pissed going to smoke in their homes, twice, regardless of the health of their children. His poor wife and their children, if any. I would not want to be in place
---- not engage, I will not talk about it anymore. Let Rico, sounded like a boxer (he is a professor at the former, the gallows and knife, and used to the whole world would thank him and hold him impertinence), continue punching the air until crash on the canvas.
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