Perception

Property of Snowberry

A friend of mine had recommended me a book by his father some months ago. His father is a historian and has published several books in Costa Rica, mainly through university publishers like the EUNA and EUNED. His emphasis is primarily on Latin American history, oftentimes with a slight leftish taste to his topics. I came to this recommendation as I was once talking to my friend and the name of Rosa Luxemburg came up. He mentioned his father had written about her and I've got ecstatic about the possibility of laying my hands on it. As it is, his book on Rosa Luxemburg is not available here, but for some reason available only in Chile.

Anyway, we've kept talking and he recommended me this book titled "El poema perdido de Aurora Cáceres" (The lost poem of Aurora Cáceres), saying he was sure I would love it. Trusting as I am, I've searched this book low and high and found it at the International Literature Festival held here in the end of July (or was it August?). It wasn't until recently that I've got to read it - following a month of October packed with other death-centric readings - and... Well, here is where our actual post start.

In my personal experience, Latin American authors that try to cultivate the "true Latin American literature", like to fall back to their own experience and their own lives as sources of inspiration. I find it funny because often these author have ample international experience, and many of them had studying experiences abroad is "posh" places such as wherever in the United States and wherever in Europe. Yet, as they come back, they seek to detach their work from what may have amazed them over there, by sticking strickly to their Latin American prism. I can't precise it where, but I do have a hazy memory of someone saying that true literature could only come from the personal experience of the author. Now, clearly I disagree with that. Mystery writers don't write from experience (at least I hope), and sci-fi and fantasy are clear examples of the heights imagination can reach, completely detached from experience. However the experience-centered literature was a thing and is a thing in some circles.

Aside from the "write from what you know" idea, the language and the wordsmithship of many Latin American authors favor a certain crudity in their expression. Sensations and facts and happenings are literally vomited over the pages in raw, unprepared, brutal ways.

As I started reading this book, I was quickly confronted with this vein of the literature, then it was rather quickly sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of dispair and misogyny. Page after page the story revealed a self absorbed man, desperate to escape, though there is never a clear thing or person or idea from which he tries to distance himself. Responsability, maybe? As the character delved into a dizzying world of sexual chaos, his thoughts about his family and his children were sprayed carelessly around like a second thought, or the remnants of puke dripping from the soiled cuff of the shirt. Though the crude sexual language and the demeaning phrases and pictures conjured by the author, the fleeting mentions of the family - dismissing the wife and the kids and centering only of the lost son, the dead one, and mainly on his death, not even his life - were disturbing.

I consider myself a regular reader, with not many qualms about what I can stomach when reading, and certainly I'm resistant in reading material of sexual nature, but this book became hard to swallow for me. It was not only the crudity of the language, but I was now seeing my friend through the eyes of his father, my friend's family through the eyes of a man who couldn't care less about about them, for whom they were a fixture or an excuse in the best of cases to justify his unsatiable need to run away from everything and purposefully seek out and choose the worse possible options in life. I held the book and my eyes trembled thinking of my friend reading those words. I was holding in my hands a sticky door to private, sickening family drama. How could he read that? Had he really read it or did he just recommend it based on the blurb?

The blurb does say it is a book about books and what people does for book, but the books in this story are nothing other than a poor excuse to shamelessly display a story written with a penis.

In some parts the author displays a heavy influence by Henry Miller - quite a taste of hos Tropic of Cancer - where the treatment of women is demeaning and visceral. As Miller, this author also vilifies the women in the story, making them all into dick-hungry, devious, stupid whores that try to hold up some sort of moral of intellectual standard that crumbles down in the end by their interaction with men.

As the story flows and the spirit of the author skinwalks from character to character, letting go of the family to simply concentrate on the women that play with them, sparsed with stories of lost poems, rare books and whatnots, and some careless homophobic slur passed as "male Latin American culture", it becomes easier to detach from the second hand pain my friend could have experienced, and see the author to the eyes as someone that has nothing to do with me. Through his skinwalking, as he sheds his visible social accesories, things start to emerge. For once, he does subscribe to the Latin American troubadour movement, but wraps it up in fashionable dispair. His once leftish inclination mutates into a bourgeois lifestyle, where flippant and fashionably acid comments cover up for the fact that he has, indeed, abandoned the red ranks. He sheds family and ideology, and instead rises the dregs of a disorderly life where everything is seen with hatred and crudity.

A picture emerges of a disorderly life where luxury and an accumulation of trips and trinkets out of the hands of the middle class of the seventies are coveted to be displayed in a purposefully disdainful manner in order to cover and justify for a dirty, disrespectful sexual pursuit of women (better if you can snatch a couple of sexual encounters from under her man, and give her back well used). Destinations stop being flashy, and listings of all the books and authors and... yeah, the eye jumps to the end of the comma string (which sadly you can't do when talking to someone), you are faced with a man who sees life as an unhappy, unsatisfying cesspool where his whole existence, his whole richness and all he possesses swirls around the stench and waste. A man who swells his lungs with putrid air and relishes in the fetid broth he has created around himself.

I asked my friend if he had read the book. He had. But had he really-really read it? Yes, he had.

"Why? Didn't you like it?"

"I... rather not tell you..."

"You didn't like it?"

"It's... disturbing."

"You didn't like it then."

"I can't forget this is your dad, and you read this. I find it disturbing from that perspective. I find it hurtful."

He dropped the topic.

Taking a Break in Vienna

Since my brother was visiting us in Budapest - well, he actually had other business to attend, but those matters were resolved quite fast - my boyfriend and I decided to take him to Vienna. For him it might be like a vacation inside a vacation, or a trip inside of a trip, and what a wonderful experience! After all, when you are visiting a place, ddon't you love it if you have the chance to visit other places too? ^_^ For us, on the other hand, it was a chance, or maybe an excuse to go visit a city we love very much (though I may love more than my boyfriend, since I really take any chance available to visit Vienna!). A city full of music, history, romance, art and endless beauty... and friends. Yes, one of my penpals lives here, but - unlike in other occasions - we couldn't get in contact, which prevented us from meeting as usual, for a good cup of coffee and a long and never ending conversation.

The city is blooming with the most wonderful flowers all over the place. I'm not very versed in botanics, but I can tell tulips from other types of flowers, and these are simply breath taking. It never ceases to amaze me how such beautiful flowers are kept in different parts of town and there's nobody damaging them, or taking them home, as it would happen in Costa Rica. Present in the most amazing colors, their sheer sight brings endless joy to the soul. It is at looking at these flowers that you get an understanding about the importance of flowers in one's life. Looking at them in the gardens, you understand their beauty, what they do for the scene, and why it's so awesome to get flowers as present, or buy a beautiful bouquet of them to arrange at your place. Hve you noticed how much a vase of flowers can do for a room?

This year was the first time - by the way - that I've ever seen pink and purple tulips. Aren't they something else?? In a matter of hours I became absolutely in love with tulips. I have heard of black tulips but have never seen them in real life still.

The weater changed quite some, getting much warmer than expected, and thus rendering the clothes I packed for myself pretty unadecuate. It is Spring, and this Spring has been acting a little bit cold, so of course I packed only long sleeve shirts. Well, it seems it changed its mind, or maybe egged by the coming of Beltane or May Eve, it decided to go on and heat up. As result, I was pretty much "compelled" to go get myself cooler clothes. I've a pretty thin pair of jeans, but I needed short sleeve tops for it, so without further ado, I went today at the shop under our lovely hotel - an Esprit - and got myself a lovely white blouse and two green tees... Sorry, but I really needed AND wanted those ^_^.

We took a walk close to the Prater, but didn't go much inside, because our main program was to visit the Schönbrunn, where I've got yet another book about Empress Sissi. Yes, yet another book. I hope it's not one of the same I've at home already, as sometimes the translations can be misleading, but if so, then I'll have a wonderful gift for a good friend in my hands.

As many of you know, currently I'm not working, though I can't be called unemployed for I'm on leave, so you may wonder that if I'm not working, if I'm waking up at any time I feel like, going to sleep at any time I feel like, and doing all day pretty much what I feel like, what do I need to take a break from. Well, though I love my Hungary and I'm crazy about my marvelous Budapest, it's good to change the scenary from time to time, get a new air, stretch your legs and change your perspective. And from the well learned streets, our favorite hotel (I'm including you the link of it because if you are planning on visiting Vienna, you should seriously consider staying at Hotel-Pension Continental. I've visited Vienna around 10 times by now, and only in two of them stayed at a different place... and regreted it every single time... both times), and our regular places, we've also discovered new and fabulous things. Learned about a concert program we will make sure to attend the next time, and with includes a fabulous mix of Mozart and Strauss, approached the Herrengasse from another direction, actually walked to the Stephansdom... and I discovered a statue of Schiller that had the power to undust the name from my memory and yearn to read him with the desperate urgency of sweet, firey, intellectual and emotional passion. One statue, and I was tumbling my Kindle for everthing I could foung in amazon.com about him and from him.

I wouldn't say that no particular thoughts have formed yet, no new lessons have been learned, but rather that many seeds have been planted in my soul from the tulips, the streets, the sweet sounding of Austrian German, sprinkled abundantly with sweet smiles and Sachertorte, and Schiller... oh master Schiller. I'll take these seeds to my resting palace, my Budapest, and there kindle them, cherish them and see what new thoughts spring from them.

With Vienna there's a simple thought, like a word wispered from the wise that keeps echoing inside me: "even in the well known and the rutinary you can always find something brand new to learn, if you are willing to".

Blogging starts first with reading my favorite bloggers and secretly yearning for the day I can read them also on my Kindle. Kindle. The word reminds me a story I heard from the Pagan Podcaster Fire Lyte, known by his podcast Inciting a Riot, as well as the podcast he co-hosts with the lovely Velma Nightshade, Inciting a Brewhaha. Fire Lyte said that he read somewhere that in the time of the Holy Inquisition, homosexual people were burned at the pyre with the witches, however that they were used to kindle the fire, not to be burn by themselves, and they tied them in fags, thus the term "fag" to refer to them - in a peyorative manner. Perhaps I'm insensitive - after all I'm heterosexual and Christian - but I keep rolling this idea over and over, trying to figure out the actual content of this information. Can people actually be used to kindle fire? For a pyre? Maybe I need to see to believe, but it does sound a little bit too much of a stretch of reality for me to believe it.

Part of the Holidays are over and only the last one remains, along with just a few days of the year and a few days of my vacations. I yearned for this break - I really did - but as things are, I don't mind getting back to work on Monday. A few days scrapped up for mandatory rest, and now that I'm not spending every single one of them - and others I can add to them - to fly to my beloved, frozen Europe, the days are... not particularly meaningful. Mean thing to say, I know, specially when my boyfriend is here and I don't have to wake up early and every morning we can stretch and roll around between the sheets yawing and enjoying either the iddle laying or the more active kind of pleasure. I have him, here, with me, in my days, so somehow the physical closeness, the physical togetherness isn't something so desperately cherished. Do I get my meaning through?

It's cool, though, to mash together the daily routines, the driving, pulling in more routinely conversations about the color of the kitchen, or how shall we manage with the closet space and what should be the first things that need to be taken care of, and even starting to work a long term plan about saving to get eventually a bigger place in the district I want (I'm so not moving from that subject!), because truth to be told, a small income from the rental could be much appreciated for other plans, and to get an extra margin for little indulgements and luxuries I love so much.

A cycle is slowly coming to an end with the turning fo the wheel of the year. Many things have changed and many cycles have been completed in this time. I've tasted into the waters of religion and phylosophy, and discovered things that tug my mind in directions that arrest my attention easily. I've also realized, after much time, that my writing should be rekindled, that the stories played over and over in my head are not enough, but that my skills should be put to practice, the word exercised and restrenghtened. As I stumbled upon my old writings I stood there paralized, almost scared at the skills I once had - the potential of what I could have achieved - and yet I let it all wilter so easily. It goes also to drawing. Perhaps I should try my hand once again at that, just practice and try to draw the things that have crossed my mind.

Unlike planned, I skipped the celebrating of a Pagan holiday: Yule, but also of a Christian celebration I have never kept so far: Advent. Maybe I'll have more knowledge and pay more attention in th next cycle of my life to keep the markers of these celebrations. I wouldn't make it a New Year's promise, as though I've tried, those bear not much meaning for me, but I'd like to make it a proposal for the new cycle of my life: make this new phase more life-aware, and that's own of the things these celebrations give to it. Of Advent I do not know much - therefore have no idea how to interpret it either  - and of Yule I know it's the day when the Sun is born and the powers of day and night, dark and light are shifted again. The contemplative times are to be slowly set aside, and ease back into the active, working days. From the side of Christianity, with the birth of Jesus, we see the birth of Hope, Faith and Light, and with Yule, we see the preparation towards hard work.

As balance tips again, it becomes time to prepare for the work to come, so kindle the lands back from the iced embroidery of meditation, work it, masage it back to fertility and prepare it, work it, sow it with our effort to see in the months to come, in the stages and seasons of our cycle, our efforts and work to blossom and bloom and ripe to harvest. There is a routine, but not because of that there's no change in it. Not because of that there's stagnation.

Is change needed no matter what, as today's "enterpreneur gurus" want to make us believe? Or is it okay to say "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Nature certainly doesn't go around reengineering itself time and again, deciding that mammals will not hatch from eggs, and plant will give birth to their sprouts. Apple trees are not requested to produce now both tomatoes and jam, nor cows are expected to produce flavored milk and orange juice.

When is change needed? When does the monkey turns man? When it naturally happens so, but meanwhile, there is change. Nature works constantly in cycles, from birth to death, from the dropping of the leaves and the winter slumber to the lustful blossoming and the pregnant harvest. Follow nature, follow Mother Earth, your very humanity and you shall find out that there's no space for iddle stagnation nor discomfort, unless you are trying to escape from the natural flow and yearn for what's not out there to be taken and transformed. Change that comes with destruction or change that comes with construction? In this new cycle, I wish to open my soul, my skills, my spirit to this meditation, and so, as the Sun has been born, and the Lord has been born, the fruits of meditation, the blueprints of future, shall be worked upon to make them happen, rekindling the warmth to make that generous, giving Mother Earth receptive to our seed.

Inspiration is Comming Close

I've e-mails to answer sitting in my mailbox, jobs to tackle piled on my work tray, letters to read and answer neatly lined up in my desk, and I'm not getting there yet. A letter I've been waiting for, which I finally received and read and to which I still have to reply is holding me back so far. It's a letter to my friend Hélène, from Belgium, with whom our correspondence flows partly in French, partly in Spanish. It's the French, naturally, what holds me back a bit, as I'm just not sure of it, it doesn't flow (at the begining) easy enough for me to feel comfortable, though as I know, just as being in Paris, once I'm there it's like I can't but think and speak and hear French all over. How long has it been since the last time I was in Paris? Too long for my soul, long enough to ache for it again.

But this is not about Paris, or French. This is about what's coming, and what's coming is October. Yes that month where I hit an emotional and inspirational peak, sort of an inverted Sebastian Venable, where is not three months of summer that feed the yearly poem that takes nine months to be written, but in my case October is the Peak Month, when by some reason I feel more inspired, almost assaulted by inspiration. The rest of the year I can write - though it has been a while since I wrote anything - but October is like the one month a year when the onslaught of the imagery and that pepperminty feeling sliding ribbons inside me is far stronger.

This month I wish to take the Muse's hand, hold to it and give up to her, follow her lead and write the sense away. A few projects are waiting there to be written, to be continued, to be followed and finished, and they have started leaking their fingers into the idle moments of my day. The scenes flutter again before my eyes, and I see over and over elements that should be written down in this or that work. They crowd my head, sweet and intoxicating, making me wish to be able to pick the right book and read more about them... but the book hasn't been written yet.

Am I an artist? I'm not fully conscious about it. Not now, at least. Am I a writer? Yes, I think so. I wonder sometimes what makes writers write. Do they really have something to say? It could be. For me, the things I have to say, I say through blogs and letters and my journal. The things I write, are basically the books I want to read, the stories I crave to find but haven't found so far. Does that make me an artist? It feels weird to think so, because I "craft" up for myself - sometimes on demand for my friends - but my pen writes for me. It's like the artist should have sex, please someone else aside from himself, but what I do feels more like masturbation: it's not for anyone else, isn't for a market or an audience, but to sate in myself what the broad market fails to provide for me.

Artist or not, October is coming down on me and soon I'll be enraptured by extasis and inspiration.

Chocolate as Insanity

imagine

it slides down your tonge pulling it back, rolling it, coy and sneering

lick, bite, chew, wolf on

silky, smooth, but not seductive per se

owns the power in it to infuse seductiveness in the eater

it wakens the soul and bids it to seduce itself

The Swirl of Narcissism

feel good

good about yourself

good for experiencing pleasure

engulf yourself in it, lose yourself in it

seek, grab, swallow, burst and enlarge pleasure

pleasure beyond any limit

take it

taste it

enjoy it

Fall, fall, fall

rush into the vortex of senses

where morals dilude

where judgments vaporize and disappear

where extasis lixiviates from chunks

drips on firm thighs

slides in thick drops from hipersensitive flesh.

Sheepish glances,

Guilty smirks,

the mischivous child flashes across the collected features

it is forbidden delight what crosses the messy head

innocence long gone

it flew away through the window

and the pleasure disolving in the mouth

is requested all across the topography of the anatomy

And as the tongue becomes brown dark

the flesh blushes blood red

capilars pump to the fullest

nerves stand firm and hard

millions of soldiers under the skin

waiting to the inminent touch that will make them explode

override the brain

and scream

it's not the chocolate itself

is the body's anthem to

Chocolate.

I Love Halloween

First of all, Happy Halloween to all my dear Witchy Friends out there! ^_^ May you all have a bewitching day, and get lots of candy and tricks. ^_~. I can already see the image in my head, of a funny gay situation:

"Treat of Trick!"

Answer No.1: "I take the trick."
Answer No. 2: "Ain't the same?"
Answer No. 3: "How about I treat the trick."
Answer No. 4: "Show me the trick and maybe I'll treat it."
Answer No.5: "I'm the trick."

Up to a few years, Halloween wasn't part of the Costa Rican traditions. I still remember when I was little that the kids of one family dressed up and ran up and down the streets screaming "Halloween! Halloween!" from the top of their lungs. There was no point in knocking doors and asking for treat-or-trick because nobody celebrated this festivity. The parents of these kids were with them and smiled, and we all thought that they had no shame. My mother frowned her nose at them and my father labeled them as "brainwashed by the yankees and making fools of themselves, as the yankees wanted them to". Well, okay, my dad has never thought anything nice of Americans and was convinced that Sesame Street and the Muppets were shows designed to program the minds of young kids to become their system's slaves.

Anyway, today only in a few neighbourhoods and in a few houses, kids can go asking for candy, but Halloween has been taken up mostly for partying. Pretty much all discos and bars are sold out, or charge insanely high entrance fares to partake in a costume-party.

Another thing I've always found wicked is that we have heard that some people in the U.S. go to work in costume. Yesterday he was Mr. Barry, but today, in Halloween, he's a Pirate (hopefully not in Somalia, Boosaase). Back then it was something unheard of, and just another think to pin on the "have-no-brain" yankees. Then, the call centers come, hire loads of young flesh into no-future positions, allienate them from their own environment... and they have Halloween with costumes worn at the office. Cowboys, ninjas, Sailor Moons and all sorts of... sorts, parade around in cubicles where normal-LOOKING people sat the day before, with headsets under their hats or carefully over tiaras, haloes, wigs, horns, antennas and other contraptions, while answering:

"Thank you for calling HP's Solution Center, how can I be of your assistance?"

If people could see them, they would scream:

"Holy Fuck! A black eyed, sexy leprechaun with Mexican accent wants to fix my computer, which I just hooked to the TV (instead of the monitor), broke the cup holder (CD Unit), or won't start even if I can see the plug because I'm holding it in my hand!"

So yes, we don't celebrate it.

Anyway, each year I send an SMS to all my girlfriends with a "Greetings on your day, Witch!", which I always get answered with laugher or a "Greetings to you too, Witch!". Today, has not been any different. I enjoyed sending the messages and then picking e-Cards on Hallmark for my friends and sending them all over the globe.

There are other things I love of Halloween, and particularly about the fantastic trio of these three days: Halloween, All Saints' Day (Samhaim) and the Day of the Dead. These days, probably due to my predisposition, I tend to be far more creative. The best of my poetry comes to me in these days, or around these days (though I forcefully defend my "title" as a prose writer, which I am, for I'm a very poor poetry writer, truth to be told), and so the plots for my stories, the solutions to knotted up stories and scenes just flow to me. They all, though, have kind of a "gothic" feeling to them, and they are stronger at night, but yet they make me feel better.

Today I feel like reading Ann Radcliffe... which can't be found in this Gaia forgotten land. Hn, and then people at my favotire bookstore ask why I don't buy more: because I can't find any other decent book to buy! I pretty much sniff up every good book I see, and some not so good, but please, please, I'd be happy to buy more if you'd just listen to me and bring the books I want to buy! And keep the influx of French books coming!

I tell you, Amazon.com is their death. There I find many of the books I like...

Change of Thought by Association. I dream with the day my favorite bookstore, which I visit at least once a week, will be in Hungary. With the thesis going on that day seems so close! I'm really, really burning for going there and live there... probably with no Halloween, even if the feeling and the flood of inspiration keeps coming to me, and whispering the most interesting stories and the words for verses filled with gloom.

Mah Dream Phone

Phones and I have a very particular relationship, you see. Even though I work at a telco, and I worked for the longest time at the Mobile Division (until some smart ass thought there was no need for "product-lead divisions") I always had difficulty deciding which is the coolest phone for my taste. I've seen the longest parade of mobile phones ever, either because my coworkers had the compulsive need to change their phones every three months (while people in the country change it every 18 months, 12 months for the more "hip"), or because we had presentations and pilot plans with all kinds of ne devices. Slowly these toys and thingies, which capture everybody's attention, started to leave me cold, much like it happened with cash after I worked at the bank. No matter what new, fancy little feature they had, it wasn't that much of a deal for me. Even when the iPhone made a hit, for me it was a slab, a flat, glass-like brick that disn't do much for me. Sure, I used it in a fic titled "Scholomance" (really cool), but still, it wasn't mah ride. I wanted something in the line of the blackberry's but without looking like I was talking to a notebook.

I first noticed this handsome contraption in the movie "The Devil Wears Prada". May, I wanted that cute little phone Andrea was carrying around! Tried to read the brand but there was none. Oh, what should I do? I have this Sony Ericsson thingie... of which I have seen at least FIVE in the office, same color and all, and I'm not much attached to it. Works better than my useless iPod, that's for sure, and it's my first clam-phone... and I'm not crazy for clam phones. I bought it as my "emergency situation" phone, since I lost my phone on the plane in Caracas... so I do needed something to communicate, and this was like the first, cheapest thing available that had what I needed. However, even before I bought it I made plans to change it for something much more to my liking (which includes all features in Hungarian) on December when I go home. But what was I going to purchase for meself? ^_^ Now I know: Andy's phone. ^_^

To my delight, I discovered that I can actually personalize the skin of my sidekick with an online tool, which I just did, as you can see in the picture above. You don't have to like it, but I LOVE IT!

I guess this means I've found my phone.

Renewed Acquintances

Yesterday, after a generous glass of red wine at the end of the "waste your time and money" seminar of "lets pretend this work, you can learn this by osmosis, and so you become negotiators, though you will never really be one, so keep calling us to do the job for you", I ran into an old schoolmate of mine: Ivan E, from high school. Boy, he hasn't changed a bit! Well, he did in body, as he stopped being a toothpic and grew a full male body onto his bones (is he working out or something?). First I thought he was ignoring me, and I wasn't really sure he was happy to see me. You know, most old acquintance meetings are rather uncomfortable, so people tend to avoid them. I guess wine made me hard to avoid (I was rather insistent), and so he might be forced to talk to me, and somehow we heat up to each other and ended up totally engaged in the conversation, deciding to go out on puti-tour this Saturday at this bar which I seem I read the signs correctly and IS in fact a gay bar.

He asked me if I kept writing, and I told him I do, but lately everything I write is homoerotica. I think this warmed him up to me, since he showed immediate interest in the subject and asked me to show him some of my work. I'm kinda aprehensive, since evidently I do not possess the knowledge on the matter as he does, so I fear I might have written something totally ridiculous... BUT on the other hand, I could, maybe, get from him a legitimate beta-reading of facts.

I love having him back in my life again!

Introduction by a Snob, Ignorant Sycophant

You may think anyway you want, and I'm sure you do, but there has been no worse decision made by an editorial house than to let Mr. Karl Shapiro write the introduction of Henry Miller's «Tropic of Cancer». Through Anais Nin's diaries, I have come acquinted with Henry Miller and his rather interesting, "naturalist" approach to life. I wouldn't say that then I loved him and I thought all his words were made of gold, but I stared at him and watched him from a safe distance, as through Anais' sometimes affected, sometimes shaded, sometimes rebelious and open words reflected this hard eyed, German descendant, who would barely write but devoted a great deal of his time to take tons of notes taht would rest in heaps all around him, would be irresponsible with money, speding in whores as if they were a basic necessity of importance only surpassed by breathing, whines about his relationship to June and then simply stares and let people do his life. From love to hate to disappointment, to soft love and a fading sense of friendship soon replaced by other characters, you get to know a given Henry Miller that raises yous curiosity. So you wonder:

"Okay, who the hell must he be?"

Anais' diary is, after all, a diary plagued with the most subjective observations of the world, and after all, what is a diary or a journal but the very concentration and intensification of the subjective view of an individual? Perhaps the question of the diaries, or journals always tends to divert me towards this story I was writing a while ago, a fanfic, a Snockhart that broke the boundaries of NC-17, truth to be told, and where there's mention of three journals kept by a character, three that were kept with different purposes, but weren't even those subjective? So, from Anais' words to Miller's, I thought it was about time I found out the Miller in Miller, so I checked upon two of his books, which I ended buying. The question was indeed fascinating, as you have been watching him from Anais' eyes and you imagine vividly a true procrastinator, who gives so much to a way of organization, the building of a work environment that applies to his European roots, so fond of orderliness and structure, which he yet can't comply with as he's immersed in his Americanism, prone to temper tantrums, and chaos and lack of discipline by claiming "freedom" and the destruction of structures that "enslave the human" and so on, and with which the final result is the nothing: a lot of blah and no result.

But so he wrote a book, pushed and pulled by two women: Anais and June, though... was it so? Did June's endless lies did feed the story so he would write it, and did Anais' motherly persistence allowed him to finally materialize the book. Was it so? Was Anais' hand in the letters, guiding him to put together a decent book and not only a pile of notes? It was time to turn to Miller and see what does he has to say for himself in the book that was supposed to be the portrait of June, a counterpart of «House of Incest», where June was protrayed through the eyes of her female lover. Orderly, as I try to be, I started on the first page of the book, Miller's book, and read my way through the Introduction. >_< Pfwaaaaaaaaaa!!!! You do better skipping it! Put together by Karl Shapiro, the words of an ignorant sycophant rain over you profuse of lists of authors and books and turns and turns around flourish that say nothing, anchoring in profuse quotations of the author himself, is a clear attempt to imitate Miller. Disgusting.

Why do we need to know the list of books Miller or Shapiro have read or the artists that lived or accounted Miller among his friends, or have snippets of Miller's passion for the phenomenon of Rimbauld and then ADD the list of poets and artists that lived in the time of Rimbauld? I stare in the book into the words of an ignorant, no better than the people who surround me on daily basis, who pretend to know by puking long threads of memorized snippets of great names with big words and self-important attitudes. Through thirty-too-many pages this ass-sucking dickwad vomits gouts after gouts of showy phrases that hardly connect to a point, but try unsuccessfully to encompass Miller, his work and present his love for Rimbauld's work and life as an "amazing parallelism" that do not exist if not in Miller's aspirations and half intended desire to imitate. Yep, I see Miller giving up women to fuck men in the ass and pretend an adolescence way up in his 30's and sit down to write poetry. Admiration is not reincarnation.

Shapiro misses all the signs and in the swirl of it, he misses also Miller and his work, spinning words and attempts to show his own "intellectuality" failing so miserably that ends up giving the book a sour, regurritating taste of bile. Anai's prologue smothers it somehow with delicated words and soft praise of her friend, with a shy apologetic smile on her lips, lowering her head and seeking to fit him in the frame of her dream world, imagining the crowd composed by an endless number of clones of herself that would not understand raw words if there's not a prior love for the writer. She might be looking back at her diary and guiltily thinking: "I wrote it was ugly... I tried to make it right, but the truth in me is that I hate it because it is so unaesthetical."

I'm amused. I snort carelessly, frown and face him:

"C'mon dude. Do your worse."

Quick Notes: Surreal Awakening. The World of Feelings Anais Pioneered. Hatred is All Consuming

The access to the editing and creating of entries is still blocked. Why must it be so?

I have not yet ordered my next volumes of Anais' journal, and I'm already missing reading her. « House of Incest » is beautiful. Someone talked about surrealism and The Clockwork Orange and 2001: Space Odissey of Stanley Kubrick were "too surrealist". I can't but pity him. What kind of poor sould, lacking of the skills for insight and meditation can't enjoy the lax embrace of surrealism? I have found that surrealism wraps around me, and that I can touch meanings embedded in the flowing, liquid words, where emotions, actual feeling and emotions and internal turmoils are finger- and brush painting upon pages with overflowing aquarelles that run over the lines of material definitions, make semantics escape the closeted, solid world of "things" and "facts of the matter" and become the giant array of meanings of the emotions. The warm ignorance of unknowing things, of learning them from books and words, but not by the rubbing on the flesh, the touch, the gust of air trapped midway in the throat, the flaring of nostrils and the widening of eyes. The dropping of eyelids and the tingling od the skin. The feelings that surpass fear, joy, apprehension, aversion, happiness, hate, excitement. Travel and travel into the dreams, past the meaning of Atlantis to the meaning of the water surrounding and engulfing the dreamstate where the turmoil swirls and reigns.

I feel understood.

I miss her.

Ma belle Anais.

Sunday I finished a journal book. I'm carrying a new one in my bag, which still bears no words. Not yet. My thoughts are growing and becoming ripe. I'm filled with so much deception, so much hurt and anger, and I do not wish to start a journal rattling about such things. It took me seven days to complete my reccount of such terrible happenings, and I cried every second for giving my dear journal's last, innocent pages to such wrath. It felt so bad, but I had to take it out of my chest. My words, like poison ivy, ran up the inner covers of the journal and stopped short from pasting additional pages to complete in full, hateful and painful detail the entire length of my deception. Like a Book of Judgment, a reminder for the next time I place my confidence on someone, the next time I allow someone to reivindicate past mistakes. There are flaws of character that shall never be forgotten nor forgiven, for they have no cure. Immaturity is one of them. Hyne, such hatred keeps eating up my heart, as my mind places a finger on that page of my life. There have been others who have poked my tolerance this week. Impertinent proding into my personal life, details that are not as starstruck as outsider, ignoring eyes would hope them to be. Sucking for inexisting words, for concepts and stories that would match twisted, sick, preconceived. misogynistic ideals of unnatural, primitive, deceiving, selfdenying romanticism. The anger again, the hatred. What do you think? How many times must I ask you to wake up and smell the coffee! The youngsters rush head first into their own deception. Old I am and I stand on my mountain, my rock after smacking my staff on their hard heads that would never listen the words they wish not to hear. Misplaced goals and grandeur. "Talk to us about life, Master". "Feed us with your experience on sex". I keep my tongue. Words are futile for those who wish not to understand them. Even silence falls on deaf ears.

I understand now why so many youngsters commit physical, intellectual or emotional suicide.

I look around me then. Yes, I could have been diagnosed as psychologically unhinged, but I am not dead. When I walk among men, I walk among walking deads, zombies by choice. The stench of their death, rotting upon their skins and minds chase me with the disgusting tones of imbecility, ignorance, irrationality, uncare, shamelessness, corruption, immaturity, unawareness. There was a mind in each of these heads that was widely awake once. I weep and mourn the death of so many ideas and believes. I mourn the death of human sincerity, the honesty towards oneself. I weep for the loss of touch with teh self, and in each corpse I mourn the mangificent, delicious person that could have been, from which I could have learned and which I would have loved so dearly. From close and from distance, I love violently those few still alive. My fingertips touch my lips and I mutter a prayer in deep gratitude for the glimpse of them I have gotten. Their live minds are the lanterns that light the dark waters of this unforseeable river of life. Lo there, they make it so beautiful. I love each of them, for they make life this beautiful river of floating lanterns and dragonfiles that draw upong the factual and material world a beautiful surreal universe of delight. From my high, lonely, snow capped mountain that baths in thescent of shy, fresh grass and tiny wild flowers, and the scent of nocturnal jasmine, I find tremendous joy in the beauty still alive and drawing such excitement on life. I pity those who let themselves be dragged by the darkness that miss the glimpse of such a breathtaking sight.

30.06.2008. 9+10.19.9+1.10.1+0.1. I have started my Year One. Numerology once taught to us by a professor at the Economics university. Meaning? A hard year. It is strange though how this year has started for me with enlightment. I wrote to Sandy how I felt rooted in light and filled. Sense of purpose, direction, balance, style... all have flowed to me. Rocky economical start, but that can be easilly arranged, right? Practice simplicity, wisdom, selfcontrol. Rationality. My closet is bursting with clothes. I don't need any more. There are books that gather dust, which I don't like and have no purpose taking precious space of my so scarce shelve-space. Seek to sell them to a used book bookstore. Shed, shed, shed. My year is starting, and it is time to clean out all I have no need for. Save the sweet memorabilia, but let go of the clutter, of the excess that drags you down. Let it all go and start fresh. Weekends of sorting and throwing away and giving away, selling and dumping and keeping are ahead. So much work... it is time to tune and align everything in my life with the new premises that rule my mind. Time to institute changes at the office as well. Let the bunnies go? It is certainly I possibility I've been considering. Seek a more green&glass approach. A flow between the soft decontracté and the elongating, curling, stylized art nouveau. There's a world of posibilities open and I'm eager to fill my mouth with them, dip my nose in them and have them sting my gums. Like a wolf biting into life, a cat eating the soft flesh of light.

Life is Magnificent.

-- « Every schilling you save puts a man out of Work for a Day. »
- John Maynard Keynes

"Without Reservations", and Original Fanfic

I finished reading this book, which was quite an easy, non-challenging reading. I admit it, I was sold by the cover and the idea of gay sex and werewolves. I thought: "Oh well, I have read worse". I ignored all the one-star comments about what a lemon and a waste of time it was, how it was boooring and blah-blah-blah. I mean, come on! If you seek plot, a homoerotica book is not the best place for that. I do hoped it was not another lame "quickie"-cut story, or something worthy of being published in one of those poor-quality gay anthologies where it seem sthe only requirement to get in is blowing the editor.

One of the comments I remembered was that it was so plain and lame, that every problem was resolved in the next chapter. It does not carry much trouble from one chapter to another, but there as things that last a few, and there are very subtle issues, but not too complex, which you can decide if they were put there purposefully or if it was put there accidentally as part of the subconscious of the writer, a materializing of her own inner issues and inner world.

The basic construction of the story is that of a fanfic, or an "original fanfic", which is the name given to stories written by fanfic writers, who are not borrowing characters of their own. Then why don't just call it "an original story"? Well, because only a few fanfic writers are actually capable of writing a story as a MAIN story, rather than a SIDE story. The difference again? Main stories are complex and create a whole in theirselves, while SIDE stories are complementing stories. You can notice that by the way there's no time taken in explaining certain background stories or explaining the circumstances or the rules of the particular universe: those belong to the "main story".

Naturally, many make a style out of leaving certain thing in the air, but still, even if you are dropped in the middle of it, the STORY itself is whole: there are no loose ends and it's MEANINGFUL.

I do liked the story, all in all. It wasn't Sartre, but you can't expect to live a life out of Sartre and Lévi-Strauss. (They are counterparts, thank you. Existencialism and Structuralism.) I know a few people who would also enjoy it.

Anthem, by Ayn Rand -- Comment

Dear Lee Jordan,




Today I finished this little story from Ayn Rand titled «Anthem». I started this book with an ill mind and hate towards the writer. The foreword by the author itself, as well as the introduction from an evident sychophant of this woman did nothing to improve my preonceived ideas about her. I still disagree deeply with her personal philosophy, and still think it's a pile of wobbly shite that would not stand up to any philosophical court's examination. However, the book itself, «Anthem» has a delicious "wording", so to put it. I was amazed at her writing skills, her capacity of "plot" even if her capacity of thinking sinks down the sewers.

Perhaps we shall start this with some structure. Argument: in some far future, mankind serves the collectivity to the point of banning their individualities. Any expression of self, including words that refer to the individual person, are seen as unforgivable sins, and as such they are punished. From this human herd one man dares to explore the difference and think about it. Him, Equality 7-2521, dares to "think evil" and then risks to explore it. The book is about his journey of self discovery. Caracters: Aside from Equality 7-2521, there is Liberty 5-3000, a female and then a very few others of equally weird names and such short appearances, they are almost "stunts" or "decoration" within the story. Perhaps only Liberty 5-3000 could be considered a secondary caracter, the complement heroine of the story, but her caracter building is so entirely grey and plain she's almost invisible. It's strange she's even in the book, for her dumb, blind obedience would not make her a fit partner for Equality.

No other caracter is given the chance to develop enough for evaluation of analysis.

«Anthem», as the word itself tells it, intends to become an ode to individuality, but it fails on several planes. The plot of the begining is rich and almost "cute" to follow for the very kiddy quality the world depicted has to it. The soft and curious personality given to Equality, his life, his experiences and the way he has to tell them gave the book a sweet and lovable taste, that makes you cling to it, just as you cling to the words of a very dear friend, whose simple, human story holds you hostage until the end.

However, the wonder is not eternal, and the story crumbles down in several mistakes. All by himself, in three-hour periods, he finds the time to read and discover electricity. He builds "strange things" out his own mind. Things "strange" to him even if he put them together. From street sweeper, he steps up to become an amateur electrical engineer. In two years he surpasses the knowledge of his whole society, concentrating basically on electricity, but not understanding it really. This shows the lack of knowledge in the field from the writer. Uhhh... you don't do that. There's time linearity breaking, which I appreciate a lot, and the plain stories are seasoned beautifully with little insights to Equality's life and personal history.The beholding of the punishment of the "Saint" is a particularly beautiful and inspiring scene which is weirdly so pro-communism tinted it becomes strange coming from such an imperialist woman. As you read, yes, the big "we" becomes despiseable, but as Equality 7-2521 pursues individuality, and tries to stablish its superiority contradictory elements raise on its wake.

He does not seek for Liberty 5-3000 to seek her own self, but she lets her be an obedient element, tied to a new "we". The "we" of the two of them. Her passivity and mirror like reacting, like a choir tuned to echo the big words of the hero, she vanishes into what slowly becomes the hero's very own society. It becomes contradictory how a pursuer of individuality ties itself to the wish to be recognized by the society it has betrayed. The collectiveness, the uniformity is changed for what I call the worse slavery of society: the craving for its attention. From a serving equal, at the end, with the discovery of its own individuality, the hero of the story, becomes unconsciously their most abject slave, begging for their attention. From one of the herd to an attention whore.

I wonder if Ms. Rand realized the huge mistake she did with this book, with her ending, despite her editing and revision. For me, the «Anthem» failed to become what the author intended it to, but and perhaps in that lies its beauty: regardless of all the objectivity, all the individuality, and the wanted detachment from the society to become a "man owner fo his own", his ode portrays a man, a young man who gives up the "social objectivity", the "all man vision" for the subjectivity of his own vision, his own reasons, and then, at the threshold of it, as the societies of which he reads, and which he do not understand, he bows in his mind and dreams ot returning to the City, victorious in his private quest, but return still, get in contact and become a dot charted in their map. Just as his detachment started in his mind, by the end of the story, if you read carefully, his return starts also in his mind.

It's imperfection is tremenduosly human, and as such, supremely delicious.

I loved it in spite of everything.



Love to All,

Locky The Bunny