Win A Review Of Your Blog

One of the things I want to do in my blog is talking about other blogs that I like. In this respect I’ve thought that a drawing would be a funny way to promote my blog, and not only mine.

If you vote in my poll (on the right) you can take part in the draw for a free review of one blog. I will post it in July. You just have to vote, let me know in a comment (here, in BlogCatalog or Twitter) that you have voted and put the link of your blog. Of course, you don’t have to say which goal you’ve chosen and you’re not meant to do anything in return. You can trust me, I look forward to write that review. In other words, I wish to have a good topic for one of my posts.

So what do you say? What’s your goal when you blog? You may miss a lot of goals in my poll. Which are them? Do you agree that we bloggers should help each other when we try to promote our sites? What do you do to promote yours? Feel free to share your thoughts about initiatives like this drawing.

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Together

There’s a table at work that everyone keeps away from.

It’s the place where we pile the originals that people send. I only see movement around that table once in a month or two, when G. comes with a wheelbarrow and takes away enough papers to prevent the pile from collapsing and burying a visitor such as a financial supporter or an institutional author unaware of this sort of dangerous unpublished books. As far as I know the only feature of these papers is that they obstinately tend to be piled and fall down.

I’m proud of the books that were rejected by our publishing house and then have been succesfully edited in another place. Their authors are good and have struggled to be recognized. I imagine them sending their book firstly to the biggest publishing houses. They never answer nothing at all but even so those writers insisted, made a phone call after fifteen days and then, if they forced them to say no, sent the book to smaller (and better) companies until someone took the trouble to look at it. I like the stories about people finding their own place.

And then, there are those other books that I will never know what happened to.

I often think about those piles of papers. Full of joy, creativity, memories, passion. Everything just waiting to be noticed and unleashed. If those papers were alone they wouldn’t do much. But together they can unexpectedly crush the strongest sponsor or the most arrogant author with their increasing weighty talent.

ping podcast

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The Room Of The Hands

I’m about to rewrite once again my first and only novel. Yes, it’s likely to be one of those ever-unfinished works. Anyway, before that I’d like to choose a fragment and translate it into English. I’ll give it a try:

Robert

That first night Robert slept in Joaquim’s former bedroom. It was at the end of the corridor. Robert’s old room was in a more accessible place and now used as a pantry.

The three brothers built by themselves their bedrooms when the family extended the house. Their father didn’t have good materials but only self-made bricks to construct the house and the farms.

At the beginning, when the three of them were still used to sleep at the barn they felt uncomfortable and alone in the whitened rooms. Only Joaquim who at that time was a teenager was glad of having a private place to keep the shotgun, the toolbox and even his bike. The two younger brothers Robert and Nèstor would have installed in Joaquim’s room if he hadn’t been deaf to all their friendly pleas and banished them with a thousand menaces. He hung some pennants and posters and marked a wall with his hands soaked with paint as though he was delimiting his own territory. Since the elder brother left home his room remained almost the same. The few times the family needed to mention that place apart they called it the room of the hands.

When Robert entered there it was too dark to see the blue and green hands but he knew they were on the yellowish wall. He thought that Joaquim had always kept inside that teenager that was crawling on the wall with his palms wide open willing to feel everything and knock at everywhere although he had changed a lot since the day he got dirty with paint. Sometimes Joaquim still showed that instinct like and echo of a distant shout with a vigorous nod or a break in his tone of voice.

Just because Robert was lying at someone else’s room his thoughts were modified as if he was surrounded by unknown silent dreams. He got used to the shadows and finally saw the colored hands. Before getting asleep he would have liked to reproach Joaquim for having left his room and not caring that one of the younger brothers was there.

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Auden

Talking about writers should be the same as sharing the enjoyment we take from them. I learned it from Auden’s poems.

Source: Barnes & Noble

What attracted me to Auden was his particular view on world. I like his hatred of useful knowledge, lines such as “not, please! to resemble / [...] a thing like water / or stone whose conduct can be predicted” or his resigned calm. And there is something else, a sympathy for his writing style and his idea of art as a compensation for an undermined life.

He said that poetry must make us more conscious of ourselves and the world around us. In Latin ‘conscius’ means “knowing with others or in oneself” and also “accomplice”, suggesting “someone who knows”. This is how I feel with Auden, like he’s an accomplice with me in life. It’s difficult to keep on commiting useless attacks every day with the only true weapon we have, poetry. I’m thankful that he used to admit his own weakness.

If I had to recommend a single poem by Auden I would choose “In memory of W. B. Yeats” and the fragment you can see below. Auden knew among many other things how to share what he loved:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

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Hidden place

This blog is a good place to talk about the editors I work for without being noticed. It would be hard for them to find me here. The only foreign language they speak, or rather mumble, is French and they prefer a calculator to any other electronic device with a keyboard—that is to say, a computer.

But I won’t do that. Although I could grumble in my secret forest, what I like to do is to talk about anyone anywhere. And if I have something ingenious to say about my superiors I prefer to say it to them and make them laugh.

There’s not a clear relation between the title of this blog and its contents and it’s because I’m in the mood to talk about life more than to have a writing project. And every day I struggle with everything that plays the part of me and it’s not what I am. Therefore it makes sense that when I create this blog the first thing I did was rebel against it just in case it was a mask or something.

Now I feel comfortable here.

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Typing

I work in a printing house.


What I most enjoy about my job is typing books. Sometimes an elderly author brings to my boss his life’s work. This sort of books is often typed in an old machine or written by hand and I can’t scan them and use an OCR program or something similar. They usually are full up folders that become weighty tomes dealing with dense and endless subjects like the maritime law or the Spanish Civil War.

None of these books is autobiographical but you can always glimpse the author’s nature while he or she talks about admiralty or generalship, for instance. I know there’s a little of their lives on my fingertips even though they intend to be objective. I can’t explain why I feel safe when I work in these books, but I do. They’re warm, wise and soothing — and they will have a small number of readers.

There are just two or three books like these in the course of the year though: only a few authors left working with a typewriter or a pen.

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A book

In our last English exercise we had to talk about a book and let our classmates guess which book it was.

So...


The book I've just read is made up of several letters, specially the ones that send to each other the two main characters, a funny old woman and a polite Englishman. She is an unknown scriptwriter and he works in a bookstore. The storyline is about the relationship between them as a customer and a salesman; she orders old books and he tries to provide a good service. We don’t know much about them and the novel is one of the best examples I know about the suggestion in literature or how to mean a lot saying a little.

As regards historical background, what I really like is that the author focuses on the way the war affects the relationship between the characters, who are common people. Therefore we don't see violence or great dramas but tenderness and solidarity. It's a laudable way to talk about war.

And the title of the book is...

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