Neruda

Neruda is my man. My latest favorite activity is to listen to Pablo Neruda read his poems aloud and pretend he’s reading them to me. And while I would love to upload a file of him reading one of his poems, the free wordpress won’t allow it.

Tengo hambre de tu boca, de tu voz, de tu pelo…

poem

Only you I let into my skirt

through my hips

look at those hips, those childbearing hips

that will never bear life

dry as dry bones

after years of wind, wind passing through

a desolate desert

once was a garden of Eden

luscious, wet, full of ripe fruit

fruit, dripping juices down your chin

giving you nourishment

like you gave me, through my hips.

post-men

“Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman’s toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough would add immesurably to world peace.” -Marianne Williamson

Swine Flu

So some people in the US are thinking to change the name from swine flu to something with fewer misconceptions – the misconception being that one could, *gasp*, get the swine flu from eating pork.

“”We’re discussing, is there a better way to describe this that would not lead to inappropriate actions on people’s part?” said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

-the inappropriate actions  being to stay away from eating pork. Now, would that be such a bad thing? Really, Americans, is eating pig so goddamn essential to you that the government has to do everything in its power to make you feel safe enough to eat it? Yeah, yeah, I get that all pork import bans in China, Russia, and Ukraine and possibly other countries may be detrimental to businesses, in turn detrimental to our economy as a whole.

Groups representing the pork industry — including the National Pork Producers Council, the National Pork Board and the American Meat Institute — have all been in talks with the Agriculture Department asking officials to discourage the name “swine flu” and to reassure the public that pork is safe.

The last people in the world I want to support are these guys, for whom death and slaughter is their life,  how they make their money. So, swine flu it is and swine flu it shall remain. And if fewer pigs get slaughtered and put into fat American bellies because of this, that can’t be such a bad thing.

source:

US rooting around for a new name for swine flu

Hint Fiction

Robert Swartwood is hosting a Hint Fiction contest through his blog. The post on the contest and the details of Hint Fiction can be accessed here. Hint Fiction is basically a short story written in 25 words or less. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to portray a narrative in such few words.

I love this idea; I believe you can convey deep and meaningful emotion in only one line. The first time I came across a writer who was capable of this was when I picked up the complete plays of Sarah Kane in 9th grade. Not all of these are under 25 words but they’re succinct, explicit, and perfectly piquant:

From Cleansed:

Robin- If you could change one thing about your life what would it be?

Grace- My life.

From Crave:

As she gets more and more angry off come more and more clothes as it gets less and less likely she’ll let me anywhere near her.

Depression’s inadequate. A full scale emotional collapse is the minimum required to justify letting everyone down.

She ceases to continue with the day to day farce of getting through the next few hours in an attempt to ward off the fact that she doesn’t know how to get through the next forty years.

There’re worse things than being fat and 50. Being dead and 30.

My entire life is waiting to see the person with whom I am currently obsessed, starving the weeks away until our next 15 minute appointment.

From 4.48 Psychosis:

“I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit suicide.”

- Have you made any plans?

- Take an overdose, slash my wrists, then hang myself.

- All those things together?

-It couldn’t possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help?

In case you decide on entering the contest, good luck!

verse

Going through hashtags on Twitter has becoming an exciting way to find articles and relevant material on that which interests me. Through doing a #German search, I found this site, http://www.christin-zenker.de.vu/. Christin Zenker is a modern German writer and has some impressive work on her site. I wanted to post a piece of verse with my very rough, and unsophisticated, translation.

Der Brief

„Willst du, dass irgendwann einmal, wenn du in der Blüte deines Lebens stehst, du Kinder hast, einen Partner, den du liebst, jemand an deine Haustür klopft, in dein Heim eindringt, deine Familie ermordet, dich in ein Gefängnis steckt und foltert, dich vieler Dinge anklagt, die du nicht getan hast, dich schuldig erklärt, weil du einfach existierst? Nein? Dann fang an, zu denken…“ The letter “Do you want, that at some point, when you are in the bloom of your life, you have kids, a partner, who you love, someone knocks on your door, invades your home, murders your family, puts you in a prison and torments you, accuses you of many things which you never did, declares you guilty, because you simply exist? No? Then begin to think… “

beauty in words

I love quotes. I especially love finding quotes in random places – such as painted on a mural on a random building in Valparaiso, Chile (except it’s not so random, because it was in the vicinity of Neruda’s house), or under a freeway bridge in Berlin, where the only things you would expect to find are dirt and desolation.  And I always try to take pictures of them. So I wanted to post here a collection of quotes I found in cities, mainly Berlin and Valparaiso. I’ll post translations under them. Why don’t we have more of this in Salt Lake?

I want my liberty, my human love.

Chiapas, Mexico – “Penalty of death for assassins and kidnappers.” What’s funny is the guy in the baseball cap with the thumbs-up sign. Discrepancy, anyone?

I condemn all the people who ignore the other half.

The conch waits for the wind asleep in the light of the sun.

I say your name in this dark night, and your name sounds more distant than ever.

Oh it takes such hard work to love you like I love you! (Wow it sounds so much more romantic in Spanish)

Paris, France - Anyone have a translation?

"Sometimes I feel so empty" - the most adorable garbage can I've ever seen.

This was in a bar. Daffodils? Hehe.

He who doesn't know the truth is simply a fool; but he who does know it and states lies is a criminal.

My trees look like spinach and my sea, like everything that one wants.

There is no solution, because there is no problem.

Life is no pony farm.

Not every cow can be milked.

I didn't take this so I don't know where it was taken. But isn't that the best way you've ever seen that warning phrased?

"I invite you to live as disciples and missionaries to construct a better Chile" - Jesus. This made me laugh. Somehow I doubt Jesus said that.

Not yet finished

Ok today is one of those days I feel a need to write. It could be the coffee shop setting in spring when I am so close to being finished with school – and this time, when I finish, I’ll be finished with my undergraduate career, with a BA in linguistics and a minor in German. Exciting.

My plans for the future? I was lucky enough to get a summer job and have an excuse to stay in Salt Lake slightly longer. I’ll be working as a “residential supervisor/coordinator” for an internship program for Shoshone high schoolers working at the Center for American Indian Languages. It’s a 6 week program and I get to live in the dorms with them and be their mentor. 5′3 me, still scared and ignorant about life whipping the kids in line and helping them move through life unscathed and maybe even the better for the experience.

I bought a plane ticket to Germany in August. For three months. No, there’s no plan, no job I will have upon my arrival or classes I’ll be taking. There’s a German friend in Kiel who will help me. It’s kind of exciting – I’ll finally do what I’ve always dreamed of; go to another country with no expectations and learn the language and make a life there. I already know quite a bit of German, but I need to perfect it for graduate school. But I want to visit everywhere and see what life is really like there. I’ll transform this into a sort of travel blog. Travel writing, man, I’d love to do that. However, I’ve never been a very observant person, my thing is more about how a place makes me feel, the general ambience and senses and energy of a place. But I’m not the kind of person who can write things like “The house was situated upon a blah blah, with gleaming Victorian windows…” Nope.

The biggest question in my mind as of late “What am I to you?” and “Who are you to me?” Though of course I know the answer to the latter. That comes as instinctively as any human need. But I can’t depend on just my own mind and textbooks for the answer to the first, and that’s the root of the problem.

quotes

A glimpse of a document I keep, with the intention of writing it all down on a paper journal.  Paper Journal is the term I use to distinguish a blog for the purpose of public reading to my journals I write by hand that I let very very few people see. I have three journals: one is a quote book, one is a book quote journal of passages I find meaningful from books I read, and the other is my plain ‘ol pour-my-heart-out-vent-and-scream-and-contemplate journal. That’s the really secret one, and I’ve completed about 10 of them.

Anyway, here’s the glimpse. Most of the quotes I found on http://quote-book.tumblr.com/ .  Tumblr has the most intriguing artistic blogs I’ve ever come across. I marvel at this community of like-minded individuals (check out http://brokenmachine.tumblr.com/ and http://52books.tumblr.com/). Also find me on twitter @SartreandB

Have to Read: Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

Buy: Tofu spaghetti

“ The paranoid is never entirely mistaken. ”

• Sigmund Freud

“ Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. ”

• Paul Tillich

“ Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you. ”

— Oscar Wilde

“ The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet. ”

• Andy Warhol

“ Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

• Pablo Picasso

“ We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

• Albert Camus

“ One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it.

• Vincent Van Gogh

“And the sun and the moon sometimes argue over who will tuck me in at night. If you think I am having more fun than anyone on this planet, you are absolutely correct.” -Hafiz

“ Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve. ”

• Erich Fromm

“ Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly. ”

• Rose Franken

“ Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. ”

• Dag Hammarskjold

“ Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best—” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. ”

• Winnie the Pooh

“ The terrible thing about talking to yourself is not having a third person for a second opinion ”

• Zaira – The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay

“ Eating is the sleeping of being awake. ”

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“ Envy is an insult to oneself. ”

• Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“ No civilized person ever goes to bed the same day he gets up. ”

• Richard Harding Davis

“ Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation. ”

— Graham Greene

“ Minutes become hours and hours become a day, continually marking time and life.
But strangely, when you are away, a single, solitary moment lasts forever. Time refuses to be measured in an ordinary way. ”

• w harrell

“ Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful. ”

• Milan Kundera

“ Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. ”

• Ellen Goodman

“ You’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life. ”

— Casablanca

el futuro

“She insisted on her unequivocal determination for them to remain together only so long as they were friends, without constraints or promises for the future, just like Sartre and Beauvoir.”

-from House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende

This sums up my current state of relationships pretty accurately. I am trying to enjoy the moment without thought of the future, because I know at this moment my future is extremely precarious and unstable. In 4 months, I could be doing any number of things including working in Germany, travelling with my mother in Chile and perhaps running a business there, or settling at my parents’ house in conventional Cedar City and making money. Needless to say, I’ve never been more terrified or more excited.

I had one of those conversations today with a fellow student that was “as stimulating as coffee and as hard to sleep after”.  She told me about spiritism, and it completely opened my eyes to a new way of looking at religion. I loved it, because she had a cross around her neck and a beautiful picture of a saint, so I assumed she was Catholic. But spirituality should be about more than adhering to one religion with rigid beliefs. So, the core ideas of spiritism seem to be about reincarnation, communication with spirits, and karma. Also, a belief in God, so that spirits and other such things can make sense. God, a causer, not necessarily a punisher.  I always feel so moved when I have a conversation about such matters, it’s like a fire runs through my whole body.

On another note, I was nominated to do the convocation speech at the graduation for the College of Humanities.  Scary… I have to write my speech during the break (on which I’m going on a cruise to Mexico!). I want to write something meaningful, something I would need to hear (because I can pretend to have answers, though I know I have more questions than ever now). I want to incorporate Heather into it… that would be more special than anything else, including the honor itself,  being able to dedicate it to her.

On the break I also plan on writing more of my story. I had to read an essay by William Labov for one of my classes, and I loved how he said  “After I got out of college, I had an idea that I wanted to write, like many other people who don’t know what they want to do.” I’m just like everyone else, I suppose, but in some ways to have my fear shared is comforting. My inspiration came from another linguistics’ student. That is what I’ll miss the most of college, the constant interchange of ideas and knowledge. It’s always a stimulating environment, and I thrive on it. What I don’t thrive on (anymore) are tests and grades and sacrifice of myself to studying. But I love learning. I think that’s why I won’t be able to stay away; I have a feeling grad school will call to me next year, and it’ll pull me back into its security, a further delay of the risks of the real world.

I’ll be 21 just in time for my graduation. My brother-in-law graduates with an MA the day after my graduation, in Vegas, and I will finally be able to enjoy that city from the perspective of an of ager. It’s a whole different world to those worthy of its sparkling bars and clubs, its secret smut and glam. And I can be a part of that.