reading

Yesterday I went to the Contemporary Art Museum, or rather, to an exhibition by said museum in a different building since the real building is being rennovated, and has therefore been closed since I got here. Unfortunate, really, because what I saw yesterday was pretty interesting. The exhibition's called "Contrabandistas de Imágenes" (Image Smugglers), and has stuff from all over the world. There was a pretty interesting video display which was two screens which showed the set but mirrored, with mirrored camera movements which just repeated themselves endlessely. The action consisted of a man destroying and then fixing back up his aparment, the same man and apartment on both sides, but usually one apartment was messed up and the other orderly. Hmm. Sorry for the bad description - modern art videos are not meant to be paragraphs but rather moving images with coordinated sound.

Early this week I read La casa verde (The Green House) by Mario Vargas Llosa. A very good novel which I read surprisingly quickly considering its 400-page size. I read it for class, but so far the lectures have been less interesting than I had hoped, but maybe that will change on Wednesday (since Monday is a national holiday for some sort of Chilean military (naval, I think) victory).

Also this past week I made chicken parmesan, using the recipe my parents sent me. Oh so good, and surprisingly easy.

This afternoon was spent cleaning and going to the store to buy lightbulbs, and the evening drinking tea and mate while reading. I finished Amberes by Roberto Bolaño, one of my favorite authors who writes in Spanish, and read a bit of Notas de viaje: Diaro en motocicleta by Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and now that I've written this I'm going to read some Julio Cortázar short stories.

tic toc

I went and saw some flamenco on Saturday. It wasn't bad, but certainly wasn't what I expeted. The guitar playing was pretty amazing, but the dancing didn't interest me too much. But it was fun to go and see anyway.

Saturday I went to Thelonious for some jazz music. Again, nothing amazing, but a nice way to pass the evening.

Turned in a group paper today in Narrative class. The whole thing went much better than I expected. In fact, I had planned on just writing the paper by myself so I could freely talk about whatever I wanted, something about the mathmatics implicit in Borges (the paper had to be about Borges, and one or two specific stories). However, the professor was of the mind that all the students should work in groups, and, as such, I was adopted by a group. We met and talked about what we were going to write before writing, which worked surprisingly well. Whodathunk that prewriting really did have a purpose. Our thesis was basically that the reader, in reading, is really recreating the text and the author, and the author, in writing, is creating the text and a (imaginary) reader, and that the text makes the author an author and the reader a reader, because it is hard to write nothing or read nothing and still be a writer/reader. So, if you take that literally, maybe too literally, there is no meaningful difference between author, text, and reader, or maybe I should just say that they are all equally important in terms of literary creation. But yeah, the point is I worked in a group and it didn't suck.

Now I'm going to get back studying for my complex variable test on wednesday and reading about Casa Verde, the novel by Mario Vargas Llosa I have to read for a week from Wednesday.


oh, and I almost forgot (actually, I did forget but there is an edit function): there are some new photos in my photo album if you are curious. and in case it isn't obvious, the "oldalbum" album is, well, the old album.