When Fray Bartolomé Arrazola felt he was lost, he accepted that nothing could save him. The imposing Guatemala jungle had ruthlessly, definitely, caught him. Once his topographical ignorance was

A few days ago, I watched Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother. It displays three at first sight unrelated stories that however share a few common themes—parents and sons' relationships

Last week I began reading Nabokov's autobiography. I casually took the book from a dusty shelf and, while leafing through it, got suddenly seized by a few random passages. Among the images that left

As I said in a previous post, I've decided to devote a couple of months to the study of French, with the prospect of visiting my friend in Nice for her birthday. With that in mind, I started

Salut ! Maintenant, je suis en train de remettre mon français à niveau, parce qu'on joue avec l'idée de faire un voyage à Nice en juin prochain (une amie très chère fête son anniversaire, et elle

Lately, I've been musing about an old comic I came across in my childhood. For some reason, it keeps haunting me, perhaps because now I notice it had a Lynchian touch avant la lettre (the comic I'm

Yesterday's movie was the story of a guy who wakes up in the morning remembering an eerie, rather dark, dream—a nightmare of sorts where he killed a man. At first, he feels reassured at being awake,

The title is absurd, but it works as a sort of bait. Baits like this one are normally used in social media in order to reap interactions. Sometimes (check the blue round badge beside the avatars)

I've just read about some details of the work of the author known as Pseudo-Dionysius. I read that, as a Neoplatonist, he upheld the idea that there's a hierarchy of beings in the world (the "Great

I just found this interview with Juan Cárdenas, a Colombian writer I didn't know. They delve into a few interesting topics, mostly related to Latin American literature, the role of translation, nac &

Link to the pic: https://ibb.co/35J0Pb8d You see two people in this picture: on the left, a woman leaning onto a stack of hay, her face concealed under her arm, and center image, a man, his back

This old saying has been haunting me for years, perhaps since high school. It resurfaced lately, during a conversation with a friend. What were we discussing? I really don't remember, but in the

A few days ago, I came across the story of a Cleombrotus of Ambracia, a Greek who, after allegedly having read Plato's Phaedo, is said to have thrown himself into the sea in order to experience the

As you may have read in my last entry, my home has become a shelter for a battered little dog. I confess at first I didn't feel much confident about her recovery, but fortunately I now see her

Last week I found the dog in the above picture. She was in such bad shape that when my dog turned aside to smell something, I thought it was a dead cat, but then I noticed it was this particular dog

This is the title of a recent article they published in The Financial Times. I came across it on Facebook and shared it on my page as a way of having it on hand for later reading. A few days later,

I came across an English version of this book many years ago, published by Picador. I must still have it somewhere. As a homage to Calvino, one of the authors I most admire, I tried this short

After finishing her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I finally did my homework regarding its author, Shirley Jackson. At first her name didn't ring a bell, but later on I noticed she was

Last week, I began reading a short novel from the beginning of the Sixties, by a US author. It's funny how I'm getting a good deal of useful tips about literature on Twitter lately--not in a few

"What does it mean, right-wing culture?", an interviewer asked Furio Jesi in 1979. It is "this culture in which the past is a sort of homogenized porridge that can be fashioned in the most convenient