v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

At The Walters Gallery to Celebrate El Dia De Los Muertos

Paddington Station

Mario Benedetti

LAS PALABRAS

 

No me gaste las palabras
no cambie el significado
mire que lo que yo quiero
lo tengo bastante claro

si usted habla de progreso
nada más que por hablar
mire que todos sabemos
que adelante no es atrás

si está contra la violencia
pero nos apunta bien
si la violencia va y vuelve
no se me queje después

si usted pide garantías
sólo para su corral
mire que el pueblo conoce
lo que hay que garantizar

no me gaste las palabras
no cambie el significado
mire que lo que yo quiero
lo tengo bastante claro

si habla de paz pero tiene
costumbre de torturar
mire que hay para ese vicio
una cura radical

si escribe reforma agraria
pero sólo en el papel
mire que si el pueblo avanza
la tierra viene con él

si está entregando el país
y habla de soberanía
quién va a dudar que usted es
soberana porquería

no me gaste las palabras
no cambie el significado
mire que lo que yo quiero
lo tengo bastante claro

no me ensucie las palabras
no les quite su sabor
y límpiese bien la boca
si dice revolución.
 

 
 
 

Korean sum

I found myself at the Grand Hyatt in Seoul an environment unique in itself. Now for some business battles.

To the market and back

So off to the market this saturday morning to the heart of montparnasse and see all the things we can't take back home. Somewhere today we will find refugees to steal away to the land of the free.

French etiquette in a disorderly world

Sophie Pedder writes about the French and their ways at More Intelligent life.com:

The general French respect for formality and form is nowhere more finely observed than in Paris. Flowers don’t come in bunches with elastic bands, but in artfully arranged bouquets, with crackly layers of cellophane and tissue paper. Canapés at dinner parties are miniature culinary works of art. When my son was learning to write, his school report gave him marks for whether his boucles, or loops, of his joined-up letters respected to the millimetre the inter-line boundaries printed on the page. At the same time, he would bring back English exercise books filled with a chaotic caterpillar of mismatched letters. Why didn’t he use his neat handwriting in those books too, I asked him? He looked perplexed: “But that’s not how you write in English!”

The culture of elegance can be extremely stressful. One thing I’ve still not worked out is why Parisians don’t get dirty. My children come home from school with scuffed shoes and mud-splashed coats. Their French classmates, in round-collar shirts and corduroy, with dreamy names like Clementine or Aurélie, look as if they have just stepped out of a catalogue. Mothers at the school gate are always immaculately turned-out, silk scarf knotted just so. Children are taught from a young age to value look and appearance. In Parisian apartments, white sofas on parquet floors are there to be sat on, not used as gymnastics apparatus for infants.

Perhaps living amid the geometric elegance of Paris itself, with its tree-lined Haussmann boulevards and enchanting bridges, imposes an ordered form of style. Even now I find it almost an affront to spot a grown man dressed in belted shorts and trainers walking through the Place des Vosges, or across the Pont Neuf. Tourists in garish anoraks cluster around monuments and museums. But domestic, historic central Paris—the local boulangerie, the école maternelle next to the office building—still belongs firmly to the French.

Or maybe the answer lies beyond Paris, in the wider French mindset. From Descartes to Dior, the French have long prized rational order and clean lines. It is learned in school, where maths is rigorously taught from an early age and considered the most prestigious speciality in the baccalauréat school-leaving exam. My daughter’s English teacher here once tried to explain to me why they did so little creative writing in French in primary school: it takes so many years to master the strict rules of French grammar, she said, that there’s just no time left.

My college profs library

More from Paris

Some things we did and saw.

Protest in Paris

So here on a sunny may day we tried going to several museums until we realized that it was time to protest and eat. So we joined the others to declare ourselves against anything involving bullying or asskissing or for that matter torture.

Asian Consumables

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - shopping in Hua Hin