#goytisolo

[fierritosv]

"(...) la decisión sionista de fines del s. xix de colonizar palestina y de crear un hogar nacional judío no se aplicaba a un territorio vacante sino habitado por un pueblo de un millón de personas cuya existencia y voluntad fueron sistemáticamente ignoradas"

"los palestinos desconocían que su tierra era el objeto de un sueño, despierto o no, de los judíos oprimidos del este de europa, espacio de un sueño en el que todo estaba por hacer; los judíos de 1910 lo soñaban vacío o, en el peor de los casos, poblado de sombras sin consistencia, sin vida individual, ningún palestino sabía que su jardín era un espacio vacío, abolido en cuanto jardín, espacio soñado a cien kilómetros y destinado a convertirse en un laboratorio mientras que él mismo, el dueño del jardín, no era sino una sombra pasajera en este, una sombra que no existía sino en sueños, a cien kilómetros de allí"

[las-microfisuras]

Generación de los 50' : Gil de Biedma, Agustín Goytisolo, Carlos Barral y José María Castellet. El grupo de Barcelona posa en los viejos talleres de Seix Barral en 1961.

Oriol Maspons.

[contemporaryartsgallery]

GONZALO GOYTISOLO GIL

[levtolstoiz]

[rainingmusic]

KC & The Sunshine Band - Get Down Tonight

[hyperions-fate]

wouldn’t it be better to plunge once and for all into the infinitude of the poem, accept the impenetrability of its mysteries and opacities, free your own language from the shackles of rationality, abandon it to the magnetic field of its secret attractions, encourage the wave of its expansion, admit plurality and simultaneity of meaning, purify the verbal incandecence, the flame and gentle cautery of its living love?

Juan Goytisolo, The Virtues of the Solitary Bird (1988)

[cantinalaboheme]

Algunas veces llego

presuroso, rodeo

tus rodillas, toco

tu pelo. ¡Ay Dios, quisiera

decirte tantas cosas!

Te compraré un pañuelo,

seré buen chico, haremos

un viaje....No sé,

no sé lo que me pasa.

Quiero morir así,

así en tus brazos.

José Agustín Goytisolo

[mayolfederico]

Juan Goytisolo - Alla ricerca di Gaudí

Se tutte le biografie sono delle finzioni, perché quella di Gaudí dovrebbe essere veritiera?   Il viaggiatore barcellonese che, sul tragitto da Nevsehir a Ürgüp, svolti a sinistra verso la valle di Avcilar, in direzione delle celebri chiese rupestri di Göreme e di Zelve, penetra in un paesaggio in cui il prodigioso e l’insolito non riescono a cancellare completamente un’impressione diffusa e…

[wisegardenbluebird]

SERRAT: PEQUEÑAS GRANDES COSAS

EUFEMÉRIDES El noi de Poble Sec cumple 80 años Francisco R. Pastoriza          En aquella España de principios de los sesenta el panorama nacional de la música estaba monopolizado por las líneas que marcaban el pop de Los Brincos y Los Pekenikes, los alegres temas de Karina y las tonadillas de Raphael, que a su vez habían sustituido a las de Concha Piquer, a las baladas de José Guardiola, a…

[herederosdelkaos]

"Poesía desde el abismo: Doce ejemplos finales"

En la historia literaria, emergen escritores cuyas plumas forjaron obras profundas y conmovedoras. A medida que exploramos sus vidas, nos adentramos en un mundo marcado por la tristeza y la tragedia. Figuras como Miyó Vestrini, Marina Tsvetáeva, Hanni Ossott, Martha Kromblith, Andrés Caicedo, Cesare Pavese, José Agustín Goytisolo, Gabriel Ferrater, Amelia Rossell, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Pedro Casariego y Ana Cristina Cesar, encontraron en la escritura un refugio. Un lugar donde las palabras retumban con una intensidad sombría, una reflexión desgarradora de sus luchas personales que culminaron en finales insondablemente trágicos. Leer post completo»

[nathanabhaltersmith-shelf]

[4rtific]

A veces. José Agustín Goytisolo

A veces. José Agustín Goytisolo

A veces A veces alguien te sonríe tímidamente en un supermercado alguien te da un pañuelo alguien te pregunta con pasión qué día es hoy en la sala de espera del dentista alguien mira a tu amante o a tu hombre con envidia alguien oye tu nombre y se pone a llorar. A veces encuentras en las páginas de un libro una vieja foto de la persona que amas y eso te da un tremendo escalofrío vuelas…

[las-microfisuras]

Amar es una palabra cuyo uso solía evitar tanto al escribir como en la relación amorosa. Por lo general utilizaba querer, como si su significado fuese el mismo. Se trataba de una intuición: la de que amar era una palabra de la que debía protegerme, ante la que había de hacerme fuerte. Cabe en lo posible que tal inhibición no fuese sólo mía, que sea la sociedad entera quien la padece en virtud de una retracción generalizada. Desvincular sexualidad de erotismo y éste de amor. Es decir: disociar el hecho de amarse del verbo amar, una palabra que avergüenza. La ventaja es que entonces se convierte en un secreto, como todo lo que es valioso.

- Diario de 360º Luis Goytisolo.

[contemporaryartsgallery]

GONZALO GOYTISOLO GIL

[justforbooks]

In 1990 the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo published a short essay called Paris, Capital of the 21st Century. By the end of the 20th century, he had decided that Paris was exhausted. The city of avant gardes, ideas, revolutions and class struggle, which had defined so much of European and world history, was now no more than a museum. As almost a lifelong Parisian and a lover of the place, Goytisolo desperately wanted Paris in the 21st century to retake its place as a great metropolis. But this could only happen, he argued, if Paris reinvented itself by “de-Europeanising” itself. By this, he meant it had to look towards the world beyond Europe, welcoming its sometimes dissident non-French, non-European voices to make itself a truly global city. Only in this way could Paris be brought back to life.

More than 30 years on from that essay, Simon Kuper has written a book about what it has actually been like to live in Paris during the past two decades. I have lived in the city for exactly the same period, in the working-class district of Pernety, and seen all the changes that Kuper has. The view from Pernety and the view from his hipster right bank world have not always been the same. He often underestimates, for example, the severity of racial and class tensions in Paris. To his credit, however, he is always aware of his limitations as a foreigner and as an apprentice Parisian.

The author, a journalist for the Financial Times, begins by describing his arrival in the city in the early 00s, a refugee from extortionate property prices in London. He finds in Paris an alternative economic universe, where decent city centre apartments were affordable along with a good quality of life that wasn’t dependent on a big salary.

Initially, Kuper bought into the shibboleth that Paris was a dead place – economically moribund, artistically bankrupt, something very much like Goytisolo’s museum. Over the years and decades, however, as he settled in, established a family and a way of life, Kuper began to change his mind as he navigated the unpredictable joys and vicissitudes of Parisian daily life. This involved wrangling with tough neighbours, taking kids to football matches in the banlieues (the outer suburbs, which are definitely not museum-ified), learning schoolyard slang from his kids (which contains a surprising amount of street Arabic), dealing with his wife’s cancer diagnosis, negotiating the daunting French social security system and, perhaps hardest of all, learning how to act as a proper Parisian – a performance that demands mastery of an almost infinite number of behavioural codes.

Kuper is a self-confessed “Bobo”, a member of the middle-class elites and as such most of the behaviours he has to acquire revolve around the right way to wear clothes or making the right sort of conversation. Above all, you should never appear to be provincial (an old Gaulish word, plouc, is still used by Parisians to describe out-of-towners) or from the banlieues (wearing sports clothes is a giveaway). As he learns to be a local, however, Kuper can seem a little too pleased with himself and there are moments when, as he yet again cycles down a lovely cobbled street to another designer coffee shop, you wish he’d get a puncture.

Nonetheless, Kuper is a clear-eyed observer of the history that is happening all around him. He witnesses the revolt of the gilets jaunes, which he notes are in part a protest “against Paris itself” (against people such as Kuper, in fact), sees the burning of Notre Dame, sweats through historically unprecedented heatwaves and copes with the pandemic. The most momentous – and terrifying – event that marked Kuper’s Parisian life was the night of 13 November 2015, which no Parisian who lived through it will ever forget. He was in the Stade de France when the first bombs went off, the prelude to a night of massacre that finished with 130 innocent people dead. Ever the professional reporter, Kuper keeps his feelings to himself, until a few days later he cries in front of a friend, broken by the strain of living in a city that seemed about to go mad.

Now the Olympic Games are on the horizon and Paris looks set to announce itself again to the world as a global leader, as the multicultural city imagined by Juan Goytisolo. For all of the transformations of the past two decades, however, Kuper is always alert to the city’s particularity. This is the immutable essence – to be found in the daily pleasure of the menu du jour or just the snarky, nasal banter at your local zinc (bar) – that makes Parisians love their city, and foreigners such as Kuper (and me) love it even more.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[mhsteger]

“Black Cat,” a 1945 photograph by Brassaï (1899-1984).

A poem by Juan Goytisolo (born 6 January 1931; died 4 June 2017):

A cat eyes me 

like an English duchess.

What does it expect from me?

Why stare so hard?

Does it silently reproach 

an evil act I conceal?

Is it an invitation 

to accept a sentence?

The cat is no cat.

It is my soul and my conscience.

(translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush)