Nevermind the bollocks!

Nothing is happening during this summer, humid, sticky and lazy. I am wasting my life, spending my time lying in bed, reading, listening to music and looking at the whole world collapsing while I rest my arse on the mattress... what else can I do? what else can you do?... John asked me the other day... -hey mate so.... what is your master plan?...- , so I hesitated for a split second, ponder for a little while -I was trying to impress him- and replied, -well my master plan...errr...my master plan is to go back to the drawing board and design a plan!...- he laughed and I felt quite uneasy, as though I had not blood but hot sand running into my veins... -ok John I have to go, take good care of yourself...- -Okay Volan -he said- so you going to the drawing board?....- I launched a scornful gaze at his green eyes like olives and answered: -I'm going to a bar- I am walking down the street, it is 1:30am, a black young girl stops me on the street... hey fella... what are you up to? -...

Summer is here, yet I am not really happy, things are not going well but what can I do?. There is a new entry, new music, and a new drawing by Ferney . (he seems to be quite busy nowadays to visit his friends). A hot June damped by the Monsoon, full of football, (oh dear! I am still looking forward watching FOOTBALL.). The musical selection* for this very week is made of the Scotish band Belle & Sebastian , David Gilmour's great Pink Floyd ,the ex-gunners (Guns and Roses) Velvet Revolver , Gomez (pretty new band but very very good -sometimes it reminds me "Beck" -Not David Beckham of course),a bit of powerful punk by Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats -Irish Band-, Lou Reed's Velvet Underground ,a song by Nirvana from the "Nirvana Box" for those who say that the lads from Seattle never played Blues -and for a very special friend whose I believe hates Nirvana-, The Cure ; because we all were lovely children (with good taste) once upon a time, British...

Again, I want to write a brief comment on Japanese literature. (By now; thou dear reader; may have noticed that I am plenty of time and I have decided to update my blog, yes! thou are right! again!.) In this very occasion Ryunosuke Akutagawa is the writer and "Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories" the book. Akutagawa (1892-1927) was one of Japan's foremost stylists -a modernist master whose stories are marked by original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour. "Rashomon" and "In a bamboo grove" inspired Kurosawa's magnificent film and depict a past in which morality is inverted, while tales such as "the nose" and "loyalty" paint a richly imaginative picture of a medieval Japan people by Shoguns and priests, vagrants and peasants. Later works such as "death register" , "the life of a stupid man" and "spinning gears" , draw on Akutagawas's own life to devastating effect, revealin...

A must proudly admmit a deep fascination with Japanese literature , although I have not read so many Japanese authors but a relevant bunch of them in which I ought to mention Yukio Mishima , Kobe Katsukawa and Ryunosuke Akutagawa -I came accross the latest after reading a book by Gonzalo Arango-. This time I want to drop some lines about Kenzaburo Oe 's " A personal matter ". Oe won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 and is regarded as one of the most important and influential post-Wold War II writers. "A personal matter is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child". I have to say that while reading the book, characters such Himiko and Bird himself remainded me some of the characters in Dostoyevsky's literature in the way in which Oe develops their personality and understands the wide variety of human condition. "Without doubt Oe's aw...

A couple of months ago I was told about J.M. Coetzee ; a South African writer born in Cape Town in 1940; who was educated as a computer scientist and linguist. He has pocketed several literature awards like the CNA prize (in South Africa) for " In the heart of the country ", the Lannan Literary Award for ficiton in 1998 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2003 . The book I was recommended to read was " Foe "; now I want to share this experience with my readers (whose are not more than two or three) for whose I feel a heartly affection. Here I go with a little synopsis of it. " In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometime lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton ca...