Getting Back to Reading

Just finished a wonderful short story (they’re all I have time for lately) called The New Man by Luis Loayza, a Peruvian writer.  I haven’t been able to find out much about him, but at some point he was a translator for the United Nations in Geneva.  I’m trying to track down some of his collections, but I think they’re almost all in Spanish, and those would take me  forever to read.

Strange, in college I used to take such a critical approach to reading.  I’ve distanced myself from that, which feels like I’ve distanced myself from serious thought.  I don’t read to parse through and create new ideas, I read, like most of us, for simple pleasure.  One particular downside of that is that I rarely remember for long what I have read.  Once I had wanted to be able to summon passages and quotations from works famous and obscure, but I no longer have anyone to impress.  I’m worried that this also means I no longer have any ideas to follow or believe in.  Reality has without my knowing it become day to day, and there are no large future landscapes to dream of inhabiting.  Blogging is a symptom and cause of this — it’s time spent summing up the days, hoping that down the road someone might detect a theme in this cotidian chatter.

We are Danes…PBUH!

Peace Be Upon Him. The Grand Poobah. The Grand PBUH.
In our first draft of an Op-Ed regarding the cartoon controversy, we actually discussed whether if we referred to Mohammed (PBUH) we actually had to include the PBUH. After all, we weren't Muslims. But we would be writing to a Muslim audience. In the end, we punted and decided not to mention Mohammed (PB… – oh forget it) by name.

Totalmente Padre

The title for this entry came from a comment I made in an email to a friend in Mexico. He apparently liked the phrase, so now that I have validation for my poor Chilangolandia-speak, I feel fine about using it. For those not in the know, “padre” means “father,” but is also Mexican slang for “cool, hip, neat.”  And thanks to Rosina for pointing me to the link for a great DF magazine that will keep any would-be user of Mexican Spanish up to date.