After my stunning debut in “Naked Conversations,” it looks like I’ll be in another book. This one is called “Wikinomics” and they quoted my idea for an Open-Source Israel Palestine Peace Process.
Interesting looking project. One of the authors, Michael Pilling, said, “this wiki is an online (CC-BY-NC-SA) collaborative book project - the final version is [...]
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Posted in Writers on January 8, 2007 | No Comments »
Rebecca Pawel is an American writer, known for her series of mystery novels set in fascist Spain. The series’ central figure is Carlos Tejada Alonso y León, a lieutenant in the Guardia Civil and an unrepentant falangista. Pawel has made a series of very compelling books using a rarely sympathetic protagonist.
Although Tejada is not without [...]
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Posted in Poetry, Translations, Writers on September 27, 2006 | No Comments »
The Death of Antoñito el Camborio
By Federico García Lorca (El Muerte de Antoñito el Camborio)
Trans. Curt Hopkins
Voices of death resounded
Around the Guadalquivir.
Ancient voices surrounding
The voice of the virile carnation.
The bites of a boar
Bit through his boots.
In the struggle he leapt
As slick as a dolphin.
He bathed in his enemies’ blood,
His tie crimsoned,
But there were four daggers
And [...]
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Posted in America, Writers on July 17, 2006 | No Comments »
Jeffersonian Chitter-Chatter
Originally uploaded by Blogswana.
“I tremble for my nation when I reflect that God is just.”
To see the Jefferson memorial is to see the promise. The injustice of slavery compromised the message of the country’s promise. You have to see the Lincoln memorial to see that wrong rectified, though Abe was, [...]
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Posted in Poetry, Writers on January 2, 2006 | 1 Comment »
I just read a review of another biography of Siegfried Sassoon, the World War I poet, in the New York Times. (I won’t link to it since it requires registration.) I’ve never read Sassoon but the reviewer, Daniel Swift, quotes a few lines of his long poem, “The Old Huntsman.” It’s excellent and I may [...]
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The Protestant Northern Irish playwright Gary Mitchell, author of “Trust,” “The Force of Change” and others, and his family, have been attacked by members of Loyalist militias, according to the BBC.
Mitchell’s plays deal with the Northern Irish situation from a Protestant perspective. Mitchell is no a hero-maker in his plays. He’s as grimly honest about [...]
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Posted in Poetry, Writers on October 19, 2005 | 3 Comments »
I just read Qiu Xiaolong’s “Treasury of Chinese Love Poems.” It exceeded my hopes. It was really quite excellent. My previous relationship with Chinese poems was primarily through Rexroth’s “One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” (especially the excellent Wu Tsao) and an occasional Pound hilarity.
Then I started reading Qiu’s Shanghai political police procedurals*, in which [...]
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Posted in History, Spain, Writers on September 21, 2005 | 3 Comments »
I finished reading L.P. Harvey’s book, Muslims in Spain: 1500-1614, a book which addresses in depth the survival of Muslims in Spain after the Peninsula was completely in the hands of Christian rulers. This is a story with a surprising amount of nuance. Once the conquest of Granada was complete in 1492, the story of [...]
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Posted in Writers on June 4, 2005 | No Comments »
I was just reading a lecture by Jorge Guillén on Pedro Salinas (both poets were members of the Generation of ‘27). He quotes T.S. Eliot as saying, “If we have no living literature, we shall become more and more alienated from the literature of the past.”
Well, Eliot was right, as the subsequent years have proven. [...]
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Posted in Writers on February 21, 2005 | No Comments »
This evening Hunter S. Thompson killed himself. He was my kind of journalist. But he was also a drunk and he stuck a gun in his mouth. God have mercy on his soul.
“We’re your friends,” said my attorney. “We’re not like the others.”
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