9.27.11 Blip Journal: the progress of a NYC writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

Riding the train from one end of the 2 line to another, you see a little bit of everything: Haitian church goers, Hassidum, Wall Street executives and protesters following their footsteps, young families headed to the lesser known nooks and crannies of Bronx neighborhoods and me.

As I sit peacefully thinking about what best to do with the hundreds of pages of writing I've accumulated, I glance to my left and notice a woman immersed in a book. I think of how many bits of information her brain must ignore to accomplish the task of following a plot.
I return to the New York Times to read an article about drug cartels and their control of a town and extortion plots and I imagine many must consider legalization of drugs to be the best option.
There would be a transition period while drug dealers get used to wearing suits and not carrying a gun while they visit hospitals, buying hospital staff monthly lunches to insure when a sluggish patient needs a crack sample, the grateful workers will reach for their brand of crack.

I fold the paper neatly to peruse later. And wait for the show.
On the train, there's always a show.
A Chinese woman walks into the car, pushing a cart. She plops herself down between between reader and writer.
We look up and make eye-contact, above the head of the Chinese lady, like synchronized swimmers.
The Chinese woman fidgets and lunges at the map and sits down again all the while exuding a diversity of funk heretofore unknown to man.
But you can't make assumptions.
She might be completely sane and have no sense of smell or she may have ingested some herbal medicines, which can make one smell like a donkey for a couple of hours or she might have some physical malady.

We, reader and writer, stand, again synchronized, and bemoan our seatless state during a non-rush hour rush hour.
The Chinese woman, her mission accomplished, unpacks some things from her cart and luxuriates, having inherited a whole subway bench to herself -- a rare event in a city where size 24 often crams into size 6 slots.

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Books to read during the aftermath of a breakup

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos
http://editorialtrance.com
I am sitting on my living room floor, waiting for the hurricane to pass through Manhattan.
My neighbors invited me to an afternoon get-together to drink Bustelo, eat cookies and watch the leaves and possibly some trees fly by the two large windows, which serve as a simple white frame to our temporary world. In-between the two windows, there is a gigantic portrait of Jesus or maybe, I should say Jesús since it is a Dominican household.

But I feel like being alone today, alone with my books and my writing. As I was sorting through books today, I was very proud to see how few I had. Book hoarding is neater than hoarding food, but it still creates unnecessary clutter, something I abhor.
My Kindle has certainly helped reduce my book purchases. There are some books I donated to the universal library that I miss, but it was a much-needed purge. People often ask me for a list of books to read, so here is what's left of my library, in paper form anyway. See which ones appeal to you, read them, and next time you see me, we'll talk about a book.

Their Eyes were watching God
Colored People - Louis Gates Jr.
No name in the street Baldwin
Learned Optimism
The Stories of Nabokov
Imperial Spain
Robert Hughes Goya
The Aeneid
The Odyssey
On Writing
Art and Artists
Meridians - a literary journal in which my poetry was featured.
The praise of Folly
Protagoras - Plato
Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
Residencia en la Tierra - Neruda
La devoción de la Cruz - Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Summa Poética Nicolás Guillen
El arbol de la ciencia Pio Baroja
Don Quijote de la Mancha II
Guzmán de Alfarache I Jose Maria Mico
La Dorotea Lope de Vega
Ficciones Jorge Luis Borges
Antes que Anochezca Reinaldo Arenas
Los principes nubios Juan Bonilla
The Cosmic Race
Rex Pickett - Sideways and Vertical
El Bosco
Dylan Willoughy poetry
Larousse diccionairo
Oxford The Oxford classical dictionary
La Diana - Montemayor
El Criticón - Báltasar
Don Quijote I
Los Sueños Quevedo
Los de abajo - Mariano Azuela
Langenscheidt’s Spanish dict
Guzman de Alfarache II - Mateo Aleman
Cuentos fantásticos - Benito Pérez Galdós
Huasipungo - Jorge Icaza
El Caballero de Olmedo - Lope de Vega
Naufragios - Alvar nuñez cabeza de vaca
Hemingway’s chair
El Buscón Quevedo
Travels with Herodotus - Ryszard Kapuscinski
Oresteia - Aeschylus I
Greek Tragedies David Greene and Richard Lattimore - Vol. I
Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid
Novelas Ejemplares -- Cervantes
RAE Diccionario
The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature
Laberinto José M. Espino
Gorgias - Plato
The Serenity of Stone - Michael Fraser
The Inferno of Dante - Robert Pinsky trans.
Invisibility Blues - Michele Wallace
Portugues basico para estrangeiros
Abs Diet Books
Rabelais and his world - Bakhtin
The History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell
The Sounds of Poetry - Robert Pinsky
Poetics - Aristotle
Modern Philosophy - Roger Scruton
Rayuela - Julio Cortázar

Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana 1. de los orígenes a la emancipación

 2. del romanticismo al modernismo

3. postmodernismo, vanguardia, regionalismo - José Miguel Oviedo

The Myth of Freedom - Chögyam Trungpa
Essential Tibetan Buddhism - Robert A. F. Thurman
Introduction to Buddhism -- Geshe Kelsang Gyatso
The way of the small - Michael Gellert
Tropic of Capricorn -- Miller


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