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“Estoy bien,” Antonio

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lesly vergara, bombal

In Bombal's piece, I really enjoyed the intense imagery. The descriptiveness of her writing allowed my mind to go in a direction of fantasy and wonders. I was unsure of whether the Sky, Sea and Earth were characters or she was just simply breaking them apart from one another. Like were the Sky, Sea and Earth "people" and the narrator simply claimed to know things about each of them. Granted, these would be very intimidating people. There is an infinite amount of things we don't know and aren't even close to discovering about any of these three. I really enjoyed the way Bombal wrote. The pace and the storytelling was easy to follow and relaxing to read. It made me excited to see what she was going to say next about the next "character".

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Xanthe Pajarillo

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Emma Rostykus-Public Theatre, Private Voices and Postmodern

  Lispector-By using a lot of imagery and metaphors, the writer conveys a certain amount of humanness through her writing. To do this is to really suck the reader in and involve them in something they can understand. Driven often by fear and insecurity the main character, Lori, is chained by her own mentality around her life and her abilities. “Being human was to her like an unending death without the final relief of death (123).” Also this sounds very pessimistic and hopeless, I think it is something that all of us as humans sometime feel during moments of hardship or even years of hardships. The character created by Lispector is very real in that she touches on the vulnerability of what it means to be a living being. Lori does not accept her own freedom and power in creating and shaping her own life until she decides to keep the appointment with Ulysses which is the beginning of her true grasp on her own freedom by facing and participating in life.

  Bombal-“…hard white coral becomes entangled in enchanted thickets where slithering fish of shadowy velvet softly open and close themselves like flowers; there are sea horses whose manes of algae scatter around them in a sluggish halo when they silently gallop…(131)” The first thing that I am curious about with this writing is, who is the narrator? The narrator speaks with a certain amount of experience about the Sea and the Earth but when they get to the Sky, they are afraid to claim any knowledge or experience for the Sky, because as they say, “…I fear it, and I fear the dreams with which it frequently enters into my nights(12).” This is a tribute to the unknown and again relating to the fear of humans. Sometimes, when we can’t understand aspects of events, people, places or things in our lives, we instantly fear them and with this fear comes a certain amount of denial that there is anything more there than we want to see. On the other hand, the things we can accept and understand are the things that we grasp onto, define our lives by and sometimes makeup stories about to make them seem even more real and definable to us. I truly translate this writing to be about the downfalls and strengths of human beings and how we naturally decipher and categorize things in our brain. It is still interesting to me as to who the narrator is because the narrator almost comes across as not human being that they talk about seeing to the bottom of the sea and the mermaids, however as I said above, sometimes humans take the things we do understand and exaggerate them in our imaginations because we feel comfortable with these certain aspects of life.

Eltite- This piece felt confusing for me as a reader. Although I enjoyed it, it was also at times confusing and hard to follow. The author uses a lot of imagery and distinctive construction, which made it hard to follow sometimes. The combination of one phrase lines and long paragraphs is an interesting choice on the writers behalf. The author uses many verbal repetitions, which I am a little unclear as to the purpose. Overall, it seems the general purpose for writing about the woman in a dark city during an enforced curfew is to bring awareness about political repressions and to signify the importance of each individual’s freedom of choice and speech within this system of dysfunction. 

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A link to the video, if anyone is interested. Synopsis:

In 'Zona de dolor' (Zone of Pain), Eltit places the body – her body – at the center of political and social re-signification: she cuts and burns herself and then goes to a brothel, where she reads part of her novel 'Lumpérica.' Her mortified body mirrors the wounded national body, and establishes a connection between the individual and the collective, and the private and the public, exposing her physicality, her words, and her voice in communion with a space that exists at the edge of social structures. In the latter part of this video Diamela Eltit's voice accompanies her action of washing pavement in front of the brothel, collapsing the boundaries between her novel's words, her body, and the space inhabited by 'public women.' Eltit not only disrupts the space of gendered sexual transaction, but also proposes a powerful reflection upon where the 'zone of pain' might be located in a historical moment marked by sorrow and injustices.

Xanthe

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Lispector, Stephen Rivas

From all the previous weeks I think this is one that moves around a lot.  In this piece, Clarice Lispector describes the process of her subject, Lori, finding herself and becoming one with the ocean. This text investigates the concept of identity, as Lori desperately battles her emotions, primarily fear, abandonment/loneliness, and seeks to quench her curiosity. Lispector creates a dialogue within the text, but the dialogue exists between herself and her own thoughts, as if she is thinking aloud. In the text, she questions her wants and her needs, the relationship between them and how to achieve a sense of self. Lispector’s usage of decorative adjectives and long graphic sentences furthers her cause; her mind is lost, looking to be found. 

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Food List for the Last Day-May 3rd

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Jasmine

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Zane

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Josh

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César Vallejo "The Low Point In Life" -- Carlos Murillo

César Vallejo's "The Low Point In Life" is a poem where 7 "different" men explain what was their low point in life. The repetition of the poem helps the reader start to compare and criticizes each man's low point with one another. The different answers show a pattern of subjectivity, in between the men and the reader.  What was the low point for one man could be nothing compared the low point of the other man and that can be true because of race and age. It could be that one experienced much more pain than the other because the other isn't old enough to experience it or that they were treated differently because of their skin. What is also worth noting is that the reader also comes from a different place which makes their opinions on the low points a subjective one. I also think that it could be possible that it's not 7 different men but actually just different manifestations of César Vallejo. Vallejo could be expressing all the different low points he's experienced and how at the time of those events it seemed like that event was the low point until the other one came around. Vallejo is someone who's had to deal with lots of hardship in his life.

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Kevin Zambrano

Cesar Vallejo-

Fever Lace: The narrator describes his accounts of acknowledging his parents as they are present, as spirits, within his space. We know this because Vallejo explains the feeling of being in their presence through the statement, “in a fever shudder, arms crossed, my being receives a nebulous visit from Nonbeing.” Nonbeing understood as a ghost or spirit, is capitalized in order to emphasize the relationship to God and the importance of spirituality. Ideas of spirituality are expressed multiple times within the poem. He compares his mother to the virgin mary and explains the importance of the host. The host in catholicism represents the body of christ, Vallejo elaborates that God is the Host before the host is merely the bread. Host is capitalized in order to share the idea of God as well as can be interpreted to be a vessel of God. These concepts of spirituality and the presence of a ghost help the narrator live. They provide him with love/yearning or the feeling of, “something that does not want to go away.”

Distant Footsteps: I had two different interpretations of this work. One, that the narrator is again experiencing the presence of his deceased parents or two, that he is the ghost walking amongst his family.  The first concept coincides with the idea that he is alone with his feelings of bitterness, distance and loneliness that fills his parents bodies. His parents are now experiencing peace while he is left dealing with his emotions. The other idea, ties the narrator to these concepts of loneliness. That his parents no longer have to deal with negativity now that he is gone. His mother is described, “savoring a savor now without savor.” She is able to enjoy life’s taste without his savor or mal trace. He is left to finally leave his home and walk the white streets alone with his heart filled with despair.

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Emma Rostykus-Vallejo, Quiroga and Bolaño

Vallejo-Fever lace, Distant footsteps, My Brother Miguel, Violence of the Hours, The Low Point In Life, Roster of Bones, I am Going to Speak of Hope, Black Stone on a White Stone. Vallejo talks a lot about suffering, loss of family, loss of self, and identity crises. His writing style is very strange in that his sentences are very varied in length and his speaking is somewhat segmented, similar to how a child would speak almost. It is interesting that he wrote a piece called “I Am Going To Speak of Hope,” and then the whole piece is about suffering. “Today I simply suffer. I get the sense from him as a writer that he has been through a lot of suffering and pain and that this is what “I am going to speak of hope is referencing.” He is saying that he has suffered so much that he has become kind of numb. He also seems to be very consumed with the idea of death. He understands and tells the reader that death is inevitable and life and death, pain and suffering, love and loss are all one in the same. Reading these pieces made me sad for the author because he seems to feel empty and lost, at least that it the interpretation I had of his writings.  My favorite part of this reading is at the end of “Violence of the Hours,” where he says, “It is not pleasant to die, lord, if one leaves nothing in life and if nothing is possible in death, except for that which is left in life!” This is such a spiritual phrase!! It is telling us that not necessarily God but we ourselves are the ones who choose our destiny. Our actions during our life directly affect whether we live in “hell” or “heaven.” What a beautiful and true statement.

Quiroga-This story seems to remind the reader of the ego. The ego, a mental state lost in competition, being right, winning and having power, took all “happiness” from this couple because they let it get the best of them. These four boys just wanted to be loved, whether they were idiots or not, and day in and day out, their parents were too consumed with their own greed and desire to be right. Its interesting because the writer calls the boys idiots constantly and they don’t really do much. But in a way, they are maybe learning even more because they are constantly observing. They observe their over spoiled sister, they observe their parents at each others throats and they take what they see and reenact it.  Every child needs compassion and love to thrive and these boys never received that. Sure, its very morbid what the boys did but they obviously had some strong feelings and saw the chicken as a representation that they should also make a sacrifice. It brings up the question in my mind about parenthood and what the whole point of parenthood is. It is not to fulfill our shortcomings in ourselves or to somehow prove to the world how amazing we can make our children. It is to love, cherish and teach those younger than us so that when we die, there are better people than when we first came. I think that Mazzini and Berta lost sight of this in their own obsession and greed with proving to themselves and the world what they could produce.

Bolaño-While I was reading this, I felt like the writer left a lot of parts to his story unresolved. Even at the very end, when there is a bar fight, Bolaño closes the story with the line, “And then the fight begins.” Its such an unfamiliar way for me to read but I kind of appreciate the uniqueness of his writing in that way, although it may take me longer to fully adjust to it. He writes a sad story that conveys to the reader the uncertainty, and the unhappiness in life. Many of the stories include narrators that are writers, which seems to be a way of relaying the struggle of writers at this time in Latin American history and identity. There is also an author named “B” which is Bolaño’s way of including himself in his writing. I believe that Bolaño wrote of poets/artists/authors surviving and struggling in the 20th century because he really wants the reader to understand what this life was like. It is hard sometimes for us to put ourselves in others shoes or to imagine ourselves there, but the detailed and dark writing that Bolaño uses to tell his story gives the reader a very close glimpse of what life was like for a Chilean poet during this dictatorship. It is clear that the experience certainly changed him and he wants this feeling of meaninglessness and loneliness to be understood and remembered by all.

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Sergio Sanchez on Danza de la Muerte and Vallejo

I found this week’s readings very interesting and insightful, especially the ones from the late Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. Vallejo’s poetry seems to come from a desolate place where on the surface you feel the agony and pain that he describes through his writings but once you start delving deeper and deeper into his poetry you also find a deep sense of compassion and hope towards humanity. I found his poetry emphasizing a tone of pain and suffering but underlying it all there is also a tone of compassion such as is found in his poem called “I am going to speak of hope”.  In this poem Vallejo centers his poetic tone on pain but juxtaposes it with the title of the very poem which has the actual word “hope” in it. This seems to be a contradiction in itself but it seems like Vallejo does this on purpose in order to have an underlying meaning hidden for the reader to find out. The first lines of his poem which read “I do not suffer this pain as Cesar Vallejo. I do not ache now as an artist, as a man or even as a simple living being. I do not suffer this pain as Catholic, as a Mohammedan, or as an atheist. Today I simply suffer” help us to understand the tone of the author by which he is describing that even though he acknowledges that pain or suffering exists in his conscience still he somehow feels detached from it because he is describing that his personality is not the one that is suffering. It seems like he has become so accustomed to the idea of pain and suffering that even if he was not aware of having a personality he would still have the idea of suffering in his mind. He goes on expanding on this in the following lines of the poem: “I ache now without any explanation. My pain is so deep, that it never had a cause nor does it lack a cause now. What could have been its cause? Where is that thing so important, that it might stop being its cause? Its cause is nothing; nothing could have stopped being its cause. For what has this pain been born, for itself?” With this lines Vallejo is trying to figure out what has been the cause of his continuous pain and is realizing that the suffering has always existed in his mind which is why he is so identified with the idea of suffering. He even describes that his pain, though it is very deep, never really had a cause nor does it lack a cause now. This seems to be a poetic inspiration from the author that is describing how the identification of his mind with his Ego has been so strong that is just blindly clinging so powerfully to the idea of so-called pain and suffering. With this poem Vallejo’s tone comes across as one of suffering but at the same time we also get a feeling of compassion because he has experienced that pain and suffering and is trying to find out the cause of it. The author know what suffering is because he has experienced it and describes that very poetically as a way to have compassion towards the human condition and that we can overcome pain and suffering if we can understand and uproot its cause.

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Danza de la Muerte / Dance of Death, Xanthe Pajarillo

In the first paragraph or so, I interpreted “The Decapitated Chicken” as a silly tale. I immediately attach the word “idiot” to comedy because of stories that have “The Fool” as contrast to a more intelligent counterpart. When it reveals that the term idiot is a way to describe the sons’ disabilities, it changes the tone entirely. I found this shift to be striking, effective and clever. Instead of feeling outside of the “idiots’” experiences, I empathized with them. As the story continues, it becomes more tragic, with layers of dark humor. Mazzini and Berta are complex characters, I felt their sorrow but also resentment of their treatment of the sons (or preference of the bratty daughter). Not knowing the experience of having kids, I have heard from other parents the fear of finding out your child has “something wrong with it.” Even my own parents checked that I had every single toe when I was born.

But I really admire how the story discusses the issues of having children with a disability or illness. There is a multitude of emotions the couple goes through. First genuine love for the sons, then self? hatred, and finally blaming each other. It’s not only about the kids but the way people perceive their bodies when creating life. There is so much responsibility. For example, when Mazzini says it’s Berta’s failure to not give birth to healthy children. Then she blames her father in law. The conversation where they say it’s “your kids” rather than “ours” is really powerful, with much subtext. When the boys decapitate their sister like a chicken it reads like an episode of the Twilight Zone. It demonizes the boys as unknowing little monsters, but it also feels of a karma-like response to the way the parents treated their children.

“Last Evenings on Earth” read like a noir action film but also covered the relationship of a father and son. It also felt like a coming of age story somehow. The son’s interests were books as opposed to his father’s women. I especially liked the moments where “nothing was said” between them – such as when B freaks out when he thinks his father is drowning, but when he rises to the surface neither of them talk about it. They know each other so well, yet do not like to show emotion for each other. B underlines this when he tells the girl that he “wouldn’t go that far” to say he loves his father. By the end of the story he seems to overcome a fear of dread, like the poet he keeps referencing. It’s hopeful and he’s willing to fight.

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Queer Literature, Xanthe Pajarillo

I’ve attempted to read “Visit” several times with difficulty. For some time, I couldn’t figure out why. It’s a story about grief, a touching one – but my mind drifts when I try to focus on the text. Then I realized it’s the form it’s written in. The sentences ran long, and it confused the way I was interpreting the story. The way the paragraphs always end with words such as “and,” and “then” was intriguing, but I could not figure out why they existed. I’m still not sure, but perhaps it’s a way of not wanting to let go. Not wanting things to end. If you end thoughts with “and” and “then” it gives it a feeling of continuation, especially considering this is about loss. There is imagery of that here, also in it being “difficult to seduce winged things.” On p. 148. The most striking part of the text was when the lovers participated in “forced modesty” because they were not free to be the intense romantics they wanted to be. It both speaks a lot to their situation and also who they are as people.

“Requiem for a Fugitive” gave me the impression that the mother was hiding refugee in her closet – I thought the child had an active imagination and saw this man’s ability like a god. However, when it reveals that it was an angel, it opened a new perspective. After a few reads I believe this is about “hiding in the closet,” and the way the mother does not acknowledge it out loud, but knows. Then I wondered where that term originated from. According to MentalFloss, it’s unknown but there are beliefs that say it may have come from the saying of “having skeletons in the closet.” But instead of a skeleton, it could be an angel. That interpretation with this in mind almost gives it a softened quality, a rose tint instead of one of dread/death.

First of all, the title “Lieutenant Nun” is very strong. To have the experiences from opposite ends of the spectrum – in the military posing as a man, and to have come from a covenant. It is very rare that I see a narrative (in any medium) where the woman is the “womanizer,” and this immediately made it refreshing. There is a lot of humor in the way she uses romance to survive, by ending up with two different wives then escaping in the end. However, there is also a lot of heartbreak in that for them, which makes it more interesting. This stories are not very internal, it mostly explains what happened and why – which makes it charming, but I do wish there was more of how she felt about things. I found out there is also a movie about this, which I hope to see some time: http://remezcla.com/film/in-la-monja-alferez-maria-felix-played-a-real-life-spanish-nun-who-lived-her-life-as-a-man/

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