A personal Matter

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 awsome learning, frightening memory, complex ideas, unbridled imagination, resilient political will, and indiscriminate modesty tempered by absolute self-assurance make him the most formidable figure in the literary world of Japan now" Masao Miyoshi.

Volan

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Volan's last will.

This is a picture of the envelope I received. On September the 29th I received a letter sent from London Metropolitan Police’s forensic department. The envelope contains Volan’s death report. I am still recovering from such a terrible moment. As Volan’s closest (and perhaps sole) friend I am in the obligation of publishing these lines on his own blog, as it was his last will. In strange circumstances my dearest friend Volan passed away in the dawn of the 23rd of September in Homerton Hospital in London. His body was carted off from the churchyard of Saint Paul’s Cathedral after a mad night out with Siobhan (Sweeny), -an Irish-Scottish blues singer whose Volan had just met few hours before in the surrounding areas of Anexo Bar, close to Farringdon Station. At the moment that the ambulance arrived at the place Volan showed a critical state and almost without vital signals dying a while after indoors, in the above mentioned hospital. The death certificated shows a very cryptic language ...

Vomiting in Old Kent Road.

Darko's last post is dated back to 2008... have all this years been a dream, a nightmare, am I back to life, back to death?... Shioban! Shioban... where are you? I died and got back to life... or vice versa. Shioban didn't I see you in the Middle Kingdom? Didn't I? Where have you gone Shioban? Irish Muse? Back to death from life... and a sketch she made in 2006, back the "deadly ol' smoke" Back form the toxic earthly smoke, life deterrent, as I walk covered in tar and sweet pop music, baijiu. Shioban!... you are young, I am gray.... Shioban where have you taken my bones? am I ashes, tar or smog? I still have got that ugly punch you directed at me nose, that night at Kingsland road, I landed, smacked my head to the ground only to wake up at Lewisham... or near, Shioban, you crazy Irish death.... was it Old Kent and Rotherhithe where we vomited solitudes that night? Shioban.

I wanna live in America

The White House publicly acknowledged on Wednesday that President Bush has authorized the use of waterboarding, and that he may do so again in the future . The statements amount to an open admission of criminal activity on the part of the US government. The acknowledgement from White House deputy spokesman Tony Fratto came a day after testimony from CIA Director Michael Hayden before the Senate Intelligence Committee. For the first time, Hayden officially stated that the Bush administration had used waterboarding on three prisoners in 2002 and 2003. Waterboarding is a form of torture used since the Spanish Inquisition . It involves pouring water over a prisoner’s head to cause drowning, and has been prosecuted as torture by the United States government in the past. While the Bush administration is now stretching language and credulity to claim that it should not be categorized as torture, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, acknowledged on Wednesday that “taken to i...

Nevermind the bollocks!

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