jebrahn > Recent Status Updates

Lorca's poetry is incredible, but the translations can be very poor, completely neglecting the entendres, rhymes, and play in the Spanish language. This is a disappointment rather than a delight as a bi-lingual reader. The only delight is in playing the puzzle of how I would have translated it better to maintain Lorca's bright observations.

i'm listening to the audiobook, narrated by Tim Curry himself, and it was the right choice to have made. the great spirit of the theatre speaks and his voice will eviscerate and haunt you as it should!

there and back again.

If anyone recieves a galley of Ocean Vuong's "The Emperor of Gladness"...

Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster ... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. ~ Friedrich W. Nietzsche

A wooden puppet is hollow in the spot where the voice is produced.

In every boy there is a gypsy woman. In every gypsy woman there is an improvised inner journey. In every journey there is a secret tale told only after memory passes the age of shyness. Is this why you carried gypsies along with you whenever place was seperated from time, and whenever place was scattered in its inhabitants searching for it in traces of scents that prove the sensuality of the soul?

He wants to be a butterfly. Do butterflies have memories? Butterflies are memories for those who have mastered singing next to springs. Has he sung?

Be the master of your attributes now
My son, you have a dream
Follow it with the night given to you!
And be one of the dream’s attributes
Dream and you will find paradise in place!

How can the sea be imprisoned in three letters, the second of which overflows with salt? How can letters take on so many words? How can words have enough space to embrace the world?

Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the obscure: Come to me in search of what you know not, the blue called out to you. Luck and a coastal guard saved you from a definite detachment from the song of words. The jellyfish continued to sting you, but you never stopped loving the sea, not realizing that it was the source of the primordial rhythm.

Words are beings. The game will so bewitch you that you become part of it. You will spend your life defending the right of the game to lure you into its labyrinth while you lure it toward humor. You read without understanding what you read, so you read more and more, relishing the ability of words to diverge from the ordinary. Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave that wraps you in foam.

“The art monster idea is a dare to overwhelm the likits assigned to us, and to invent our own definitions of beauty.”

“Monsters dwell at borders, you might even say the border creates the monster. Everything that is acceptable over here, everything that is not acceptable over there.”

“Woman is a temple built over a sewer.”

“Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others- the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.”

“Poverty is not written in the stars.”

taking Spanish at PCC.

re-reading to remind myself of exactly the kind of monster we are the daily, rushed, and half-grateful beneficiaries of.

i have no taste for this genre, yet, this book was exactly what i needed- an empowering no BS voice and ally, wisdom from someone who has been exactly where i’m stuck- worsening a situation * breaking * abused and abusive * causing more of her own shame * obsessing * infuriated * suicidal, …knowledgable, non-repetitive, quickly moving. thank you :)