this time, hopefully
have spent the last couple of days working on a little translation job that i scored from a lecturer at my uni. he needs his twenty page paper on migration and cultural exchange in austria translated asap and had a budget of 300€ to throw my way (it was actually 400 but 100 will get eaten by the tax machine). lets just say that i consider that really easy money. i actually kind of enjoy it. the article could be more boring (also could be better written). sometimes it's difficult to wade through his tautologies and trying to decide whether to preen it for him or leave it awkward and oversized as he wrote it. you actually tend to get in a really weird headspace when you really get going, because you're flicking back and fourth between languages so quickly that its like your brain runs on idle in some alinguistic plane. as if it was in some sort of unlinguistic mode of consciousness. also you tend to get really muddled up with your own mother tongue. i spent about fifteen seconds how to spell the english word especialmenty. and figuring out which preposition goes with which idiomatic expression, in respect of things that you should know can also get a little tricky. though usually stand out on a second reading, when you let your head relax back into english.
+++++
regarding the agur iruña party, we had to calm the owner of la pulga last night cos he hadn't been in pamplona when we organised the whole dj thing. the owner found out before we had a chance to run it by him when some random girl was like 'i hear javi's playing hear on friday night'. he was freaking out a little i think, but i'm pretty sure we've managed to calm his fears. the plans are now coming along nicely.
today, in my contemporary spanish novel class, i tore the shit out of the latest novel melocotones helados (don't bother reading it, it's slack and lifeless. but there's no english translation yet anyway).
the highlight of the class however, was the 'sociology girl'. ninety-five percent of the students in this class do about half of the absolute minimum to get by. they summarise things like the 'external structure of the novel' by saying: in the 1995 edition, the book is made up of 277 pages, divided into ten chapters and an epilogue, each chapter being around about 30 pages in length.
then comes sociology girl, a solid girl, with a flat, skull hugging mullet, who says things like: i'm just going to explain a bit about the socio-historical context of the novel, flicking her wrist back camply to emphasise its blasé nature. she then oozes out summaries of the politico-socio-aesthetic flows that have deformed that contemporary landscape, and how they infuse the averageness of the specific novel we had to read. i think today she used a term like structuralist dialectic of industrialism or something close. once again, in passing, nothing.
i couldn't help smiling to myself the whole time at the sheer absurdity of it with her discourse floating around in the same air that everyone else had just talked in.
we're having a party, even though i'm still here for another month or so. so with the encouragement of dagny, i had to make an invite. i did absolutely nothing original and new with this one and everything old and copied. and i'm not totally happy with it, but i had to tell myself to forget about it. i was already nerdy enough to make myself invites. there's no point getting precious about it. i think the only thing i'm really pleased about is my diy basque font on the 'a's.
so... how many of you kids should i expect? it's gonna go off.
<<¿en corea, son chinos o japoneses?>>
[in Korea, are the people Chinese or Japanese?]
question asked by a girl from my sociology class. i started a post about things like this here, but it needs to be digested more. or maybe i'm not the one to post it?
nearly there...
first, there is my painting of pasha, one of the boys i met in russia last summer. it's the largest thing i've ever tried to paint. it may devour me.
then there is the poetry that i'm writing with a book that i bought in a second-hand book store here. it's called como defenderse en la calle sin armas [how to defend yourself in the street without weapons]. it has brilliant illustrations and a flawless poetic flow. i'm translating passages into a sort of free verse i suppose and writing my own love poems to work alongside them.
also going to recommence writing on a short story in spanish about marín sanchez, the name on the second-hand stamp that i bought at some markets and the very start of my time in the spanish state. i've been encouraged to recommence because the guy in the second-hand bike shop offered to critique it for me.
++ wow, three references to second-hand things in one post! yes!
also, who wants to be the first to tell me what i've done wrong with my image html? i swear it's exactly the same as i always do it...
his name was raúl. there was no bus. it was seven am, and with the coming of summer, it was getting very bright. everyone was blind, there was no bus, his name was raúl.
he gave us a lift because his friends were fucking around and said they would meet up later. his car was parked next to the guardia civil but that turned out to not be a problem. we drank shandys and smoked from two packets of cigarettes. he told us how he does reiki and later performed it. it seemed intimate and intense and reminded me of someone's mum at a soccer match when i was 11. and her warm cupped hands pressed over my dodgy knee. we talked about my writing. my excuses sounded lame to me, and when i got home, thanks to raúl, i started that thing i'd been leaving for weeks.
he wore no underwear, he never shut up, his name was raúl.
alba
another skinny white boy
antipopper
asti
english lessons
hon
no se puede
somnambulist
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