Wishes and Summaries

I don't know who got the idea, but seeing an upcoming period of time as if it was a pack of brand new days ready to be stuffed with good wishes is quite fine, almost as much as starting the year getting drunk and blowing a small trumpet (although I hope this one was another guy's idea).

Well, let me think... This new year I'd like to finish writing two stories. And I have exhausted the reserves of good wishes with this. Who ever heard of me finishing a story? :P

Wow, it has been swift. As regards the summary of the old year, one day of May I started blogging. That was cool :).

That's it. I'm getting the hang of putting things in a nutshell! Perhaps this is the best way for me to make less spelling mistakes... Hum, I'll think of it in the new year, but I don't promise anything.

...And all I wanted to say in this post is that I wish you all the best in the upcoming year. Cheers!

Read more...

Weird Little Friend

There are no stuffed stockings in Catalan homes at Christmas, but a log. A shitting log, to be precise.

He's named Tió and his sole purpose is to bring little gifts to the children. Firstly, a month before Christmas, the youngsters feed the Tió. He especially likes tangerine peels, and he eats at night. At Christmas Day, he's allowed to enter the dining room; the children are told to go to another room to cool a stick with which they will hit him; meanwhile, the adults put some goodies under the log. He's covered with a blanket that cushions him from the strikes, and it also hides the gifts underneath. The children accompany the hitting with specific songs for the Tió. Basically, they sing to him: "hey, you've eaten a lot so far, so it's time for you to give us something in return; don't you worry, we will help you to expel our gifts".

It's funny, scatological, older than Christian traditions, he drives the children CRAZY, and he's an emblem of the Catalan customs that have been on the verge of disappearing in our unhappy history. He may be a freak, but he's ours. Ultimately, this tradition can be related to that of the Christmas tree.

Our poor Tió did a great job today, the stick was broken against his back, he lose one leg, and he got completely emptied after five beatings. He was made by my father to my nephew (in a burst of creativity).

Read more...

The Sing of the Birds

I'd like to wish you a happy holiday with an ancient Catalan Christmas song, "El cant dels ocells" - The Sing of the Birds, performed by the Majorcan singer Maria del Mar Bonet. I have no words to describe either her voice or this beloved song, but luckily, others can: a poet named Jordi Pàmias said that when Bonet sings medieval Catalan texts "the prose sounds ardent, with a velvety texture: like love".

I hope you enjoy it. Lots of love for you all this Christmas.

Maria del Mar Bonet. Click the player below to listen:

My translation (with my apologies in advance):

When seeing the break
of the greatest light
in the most blessed night,
the birds, singing,
go to celebrate it
with their dainty voice.

The heron, jay and mistle thrush
say "It is already May".
The goldfinch answers:
"Every tree is greening,
every plant is in bloom
as if it was spring".

The titmouse says:
"It is neither winter nor summer,
but spring:
because a flower is born
that gives scent everywhere,
both in heaven and on earth".

Read more...

Wrapper in Chief

Source: Tara Dennis • Copywright 2005

Before Christmas, as I'm sure it happens in many places, our publishing house becomes one of Santa's elvish factories — or I should say, to be consistent, a tent of little helpers of the Magi. The designers are told to wrap books, the scanning boy must stick greeting tags and accomplish other small tasks just as mysterious, the editors are kindly asked to put calendars and Christmas cards in envelopes, the guys in the warehouse pick up the packages and bring us more wrapping paper and books, chuckling and nudging... We sit in a round table and do all these tasks in a festive atmosphere. I think that in December most of us talk more to each other than during the rest of the year, when everyone works in front of the print proofs and computers all day. So, yes, Christmas spirit or something similar also comes to our workplace each year!

Read more...

Seasonal Gifts

We must have a notebook, keep it on hand, in the pocket, in our travel bag, just like taking a safe conduct with us, we need to know to choose it, but more still needed to have good luck finding it. You don't look for a notebook because you feel the need or desire to write something. You write something because you have a notebook, because its shape and white pages awake in you the desire to write, note down, discover.

Antonio MUÑOZ MOLINA

In case the lucky relative who will receive this gift wonders what the hell is he going to do with it, I will accompany it with the hint above (a quote always helps!).

Read more...

Letter to the Magi

Children dressed as the Three Magi. Photo: Johannes Simon/Getty Images. Source: Life.

Dear Wise Men from the East,

I appeal to the bright memories of my childhood and my loyalty to the ancient custom of writing to you instead of that red-suited old man from Northern Europe that was brought here a few years ago. As a child every Christmas I awaited the arrival to my little village of one of those cheerful parades you rejoice to organize — I love your taste for kitsch — and even in a summer night, when seeing the lights from another village in the distance, I used to ask: "Is it the Three Wise Men parade?"

I've always been that innocent, I must confess. For instance, yesterday, while I was wrapping and labeling the presents that I've bought for my family, imbued with the best Christmas spirit, I got this phone call from a relative: "Hey, can you lend me € 1.000? I will return them on January". I felt like an asshole holding at the same time the phone and the gift I choosed for her, a € 30 Compact Diamond Mirror (which still makes a good gift as you'll agree).

When someone tramples on my innocence I become a monster. A monster that can lend money from time to time, but a monster all the same. I'm bothered by my innocence, and that was only a funny anecdote. If you think I'm suggesting that "something" has been "killed" the last two days you're almost right, for I'm asserting it. This explains my letter to you after all these years of lack of correspondence between us (not that I'm upset because you never answered, it's just that I feel too autistic when writing to you). So do not get me wrong: I do not wish to simply sit in the lap of the royal chamberlain and tell him my desires. I am open to everything, but right now my fantasies are of a different turn.

What I would like to ask of you, if not too much trouble, is to excise a piece of my innocence and scatter it throughout the world, in the places that you prefer, and if you can not think of any, then please save it for you.

Kind Regards,

Read more...

Christmas Reads (II): The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

My Christmas wish list includes one of the 100 Notable Books of 2009 according to The New York Times Book Review. I think this read will take me back to my early youth, when my friends and I first learnt about Romanticism in our course of literature and got crazy about it. We became Byron, Pushkin, Poe and so on, because the Romantic emphasis on inspiration, nature, and strong emotions such as horror seemed made for us on purpose.

Somehow the starting point of this book is the summer of 1816, when the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his 19 years old lover Mary, among other guests, spent the season at Lord Byron’s house near Leman lake at Geneva, Switzerland. They had plenty of leisure time and an awful weather, with raging storms and heavy rains, so they got bored quickly. They finally challenged themselves to write a horror story. While the two poets didn’t produce anything in the horror fiction genre, the young Mary, after having a nitghtmare, started to write her novel Frankenstein. In 1817 she ended the book and got married with Shelley; the book was published anonimously in 1818.

From that point forward the Shelleys were pursued by disgrace, and this fact, along with that summer in Geneva, has drawn some artists interest. I’m mostly thinking of Gonzalo Suárez and his film Remando al viento — Rowing with the Wind (1988), whose script my friends and I knew by heart. This film is situated in that very same summer and descrives Mary’s relationship with Shelley and the monster she created. It’s a mix between fantasy and history, and so is The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein.

A screenshot of Remando al viento, whith a bunch of unknown actors at that time (Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Hurley...). Source: Monelle.

Ackroyd’s book begins with an impossible meeting between the fictional character Victor Frankenstein and the Romantic poet Percy B. Shelley... And I don't want to know anything more about the plot by now! I'll find in it some characters that evoke my early readings and I enjoyed the excerpt of the first chapter published in The New York Times: that's quite enough.

Read more...

Christmas Reads: View with a Grain of Sand

If I had enough time, this Christmas I would like to calmly read a compilation of poems that's been waiting on the shelf for too long. It is Poems New and Collected by Wisława Szymborska, the celebrated Polish poet awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. So far the book I've read by Szymborska is another compilation, View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, full of curiosity (even for grains of sand!) and irony (isn't it a great view?). It is much recommended for people who don't usually read poetry, because any reader can be hooked by her style: it is at once accessible and profound, with clear and deep thoughts about human condition. I like the way she ponders small facts — an authentic way. Let me quote one thing that has been said of her work: "elegant linguistic playfulness" (nobelprize.org).

Szymborska once told a journalist (and I now quote from memory) that she likes to spend a long time reading short books. I should find a moment to read at least one of her everlasting poems this Christmas!

Read more...

Musical Things In Nature

Joanne Olivieri has announced an amazing contest in Poetic Shutterbug concerned with music and nature. Basically, this contest encourages our creativity taking as a point of reference the phrase "Music in Nature" — click the link above for further details. I hope you'll join the contest!

As I did in the post Keen Lists — dedicated to Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book — featuring a list of THINGS THAT UPSET ME FOR ONLY FIVE SECONDS, I thought I could write a new list. I know it will be quite impossible to win, but it's been really funny to write this entry. So this is my list:

THINGS IN NATURE THAT MAKE MUSIC

—Northern winds: brass. Southern winds: oboes.
—Some velveted petals falling on the ground.
—The earth hums with a crackly intimate voice when water is filtering.
—The silence of a forest: musicians tuning up.
—A flowing stream after a drought.
—Every single leaf of a tree is a part of a bigger instrument always waiting for new names.

Read more...

Between Being A Poet...

Let me introduce you to Joan Vinyoli, a twentieth century Catalan poet. Poetry was for Vinyoli a way of rooting in reality, and the optimal means to achieve freedom as well. His late work was in part related to the magical and transcendent aspects of the poetic words. I've translated a few writings by him for you (I hope nobody will retaliate against me for this!):

Let's read each other again, if possible, our eyes.
•
The sea is full, but I spend days
filling it with my look.
•
Between being a poet or simply to live, there is a fair option, that is to live poetically.
This is what I try since I decided not to sojourn definitely nowhere and to be a wanderer.

Read more...