Wednesday, November 03, 2004

books and movies

sorry for the excessive delay in posting anything.

last week i had to write a paper and give a presentation on "anything that has to do with latin america." obviously the idea was that we chose topics that were interesting to us. i chose to write and talk about nicanor parra, a chilean poet, or, as he is known, antipoet. antipoetry is just poetry that breaks with the erudite poetic tradition and brings poetry to both everyday life and coloquial language. basically, makes written poems be like the poems we see an experience every day. quite a good poet. he also makes, well i guess he still does though he is 90 years old, artifacts, which are objects together with a few short verses, for example, a bottle of cocacola and a little card that says "message in a bottle." the idea is to mix common objects with common phrase and create an altogether uncommon result that he then procedes to call art. the mere act of calling it art makes people look at it differently. i could obviously continue on for 7 pages about him, but i'll refrain from that for now. i'll post any poems i find that he wrote entirely in english (since he has a graduate degree in physics from brown university and speaks english fluently).

friday (and i guess saturday too) i went to a 24 hour movie marathon, cine adiccion, of movies that are hard to find in chile. unfortunatly i fell asleep during the one movie a really wanted to see, the holy mountain, directed by aleandro jodorowsky, so i'll just have to find it somewhere and watch it again. another good movie was the tulse luper suitcases, and also i will walk like a crazy horse. 24 hours is a long time to spend in a movie theater.

tonight, or rather in about 10 minutes, i'm going to the 24th international book fair, where i'm hopefully going to hear a professor of mine talk since he is one of 14 new chilean poets there is a presentation about (and i know he will be there since he cancelled class so he could go). hopefully i'll also find some more good books to read - i'm almost done with the perfume: story of an assasin that i'm reading in spanish, translated from the original german. if not, i'll just go to the library - i want to read more by jodorowsky and parra.

time to go.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh chile and your crazy 24 hour movie marathon. People in chile must have a whole lot of free time.
ryan h

Anonymous said...

Sleeping in a movie? I can relate. I can't stay awake for more than an hour watching anything!

Dad