Aprendiendo Chino

El Espanol

Ya me acorde como escribir. Tres anos sin hablar espanol en una Universidad competitiva y con solo dos clases de espanol en dos semestres… pues no es raro que haya pasado.

Se me habia olvidado la belleza del espanol; con sus frases tan floridas y su repertorio tan exuberante. Me hacia tanta falta la forma tan relajada de su sintaxis, sin necesidad de un pronombre explicito o un verbo y un sujeto demasiado egoistas para compartir el espacio de una sola palabra en su union sensual.

No me asombra de que tantos piensen que el Espanol es un idioma muy sensual…

Just writing

What is poetry?

That is the questions that the muse asked, and the poet answered "Poetry is you"

Gustavo Adolfo Béquer was and will always be the corniest and most romantic poet in the Spanish language. I know I am dismissing Neruda and many others that wrote about their passion but I doubt that anyone had ever written similar verses and reached the notoriety Béquer acquired after his life ended. I have been struck with the same question for many days and tonight it is taking away my delicate sleep. What is poetry I asked that one night, she gave me an answer that I did not like for I don't remember it? Is it feelings put into words? Are they ideas bigger than anything plain language can explain? Is it just another fancy way to reserve elevated thought for those who have been exposed to the refined art of putting words together and interpreting them? Language is a craft, sadly, still reserved for those few who can exceed 9^th grade reading level. And as a craft, the ideas it is meant to express are directly related to whom can pay for the product or is willing to pay and knows it's worth. Then again, what is poetry? I would love to take the words of contemporary spoken word poets who say that poetry is for everyone and try to preach to the masses with allusions that are not a popular possession, or even better "los eruditos" that create poetry that requires years of reading and the right preparation to be understood at its fullest. And finally, I just realized that my question is not what poetry is but for whom is it. I would it if it was for everyone, complicated or simple as long as anyone could have access to more complex and truthful ways to understanding the world trough the written word and its beauties.

I would say poetry is my bitchy lover, the one I love with all my heart but beats me every time I try to understand her because she is so far removed from my reality.

Agela Davis and Activism

Fiesta, Fiesta Gay!

To whom I won’t mention

The words slide through your lips like thick honey

The one I would like to kiss off them

They stick to my ear, make their way in the waves and synopsis that make up my amazed confusion

I want to sit there and kiss those words until my eyes close in blissful exhaustion

By now, you should know that my rhetoric steps right behind yours, maybe a little further behind

And that my clumsy attempts to have a real debate and discussion just leave more enthralled and mesmerized by this beautiful woman that talks like the world must hear

And, indeed

It must hear!

I think

I lay naked in the infinite space between my neurons, my brittle intellectual bones crushed by your sweet steel words

And the distance between our eyes does not matter, because in one second

In that small breach of time and space in which I can feel like an equal to you

Can make us more intimate than any corporeal experience can

Although, I would not give up one…

Unhappy America from the Economist

Unhappy America

Jul 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition

If America can learn from its problems, instead of blaming others, it will come back stronger

NATIONS, like people, occasionally get the blues; and right now the United States, normally the world’s most self-confident place, is glum. Eight out of ten Americans think their country is heading in the wrong direction. The hapless George Bush is partly to blame for this: his approval ratings are now sub-Nixonian. But many are concerned not so much about a failed president as about a flailing nation.

One source of angst is the sorry state of American capitalism (see article). The “Washington consensus” told the world that open markets and deregulation would solve its problems. Yet American house prices are falling faster than during the Depression, petrol is more expensive than in the 1970s, banks are collapsing, the euro is kicking sand in the dollar’s face, credit is scarce, recession and inflation both threaten the economy, consumer confidence is an oxymoron and Belgians have just bought Budweiser, “America’s beer”.

And it’s not just the downturn that has caused this discontent. Many Americans feel as if they missed the boom. Between 2002 and 2006 the incomes of 99% rose by an average of 1% a year in real terms, while those of the top 1% rose by 11% a year; three-quarters of the economic gains during Mr Bush’s presidency went to that top 1%. Economic envy, once seen as a European vice, is now rife. The rich appear in Barack Obama’s speeches not as entrepreneurial role models but as modern versions of the “malefactors of great wealth” denounced by Teddy Roosevelt a century ago: this lot, rather than building trusts, avoid taxes and ship jobs to Mexico. Globalisation is under fire: free trade is less popular in the United States than in any other developed country, and a nation built on immigrants is building a fence to keep them out. People mutter about nation-building beginning at home: why, many wonder, should American children do worse at reading than Polish ones and at maths than Lithuanians?

The dragon’s breath on your shoulder

Abroad, America has spent vast amounts of blood and treasure, to little purpose. In Iraq, finding an acceptable exit will look like success; Afghanistan is slipping. America’s claim to be a beacon of freedom in a dark world has been dimmed by Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the flouting of the Geneva Conventions amid the panicky “unipolar” posturing in the aftermath of September 11th.

Now the world seems very multipolar. Europeans no longer worry about American ascendancy. The French, some say, understood the Arab world rather better than the neoconservatives did. Russia, the Gulf Arabs and the rising powers of Asia scoff openly at the Washington consensus. China in particular spooks America—and may do so even more over the next few weeks of Olympic medal-gathering. Americans are discussing the rise of China and their consequent relative decline; measuring when China’s economy will be bigger and counting its missiles and submarines has become a popular pastime in Washington. A few years ago, no politician would have been seen with a book called “The Post-American World”. Mr Obama has been conspicuously reading Fareed Zakaria’s recent volume.

America has got into funks before now. In the 1950s it went into a Sputnik-driven spin about Soviet power; in the 1970s there was Watergate, Vietnam and the oil shocks; in the late 1980s Japan seemed to be buying up America. Each time, the United States rebounded, because the country is good at fixing itself. Just as American capitalism allows companies to die, and to be created, quickly, so its political system reacts fast. In Europe, political leaders emerge slowly, through party hierarchies; in America, the primaries permit inspirational unknowns to burst into the public consciousness from nowhere.

Still, countries, like people, behave dangerously when their mood turns dark. If America fails to distinguish between what it needs to change and what it needs to accept, it risks hurting not just allies and trading partners, but also itself.

The Asian scapegoat

There are certainly areas where change is needed. The credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system. Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fuelled a housing bubble that had to burst eventually. Lessons need to be learnt from both of those mistakes; as they do from widespread concerns about the state of education and health care. Over-unionised and unaccountable, America’s school system needs the same sort of competition that makes its universities the envy of the world. American health care, which manages to be the most expensive on the planet even though it fails properly to care for the tens of millions of people, badly needs reform.

There have been plenty of mistakes abroad, too. Waging a war on terror was always going to be like pinning jelly to a wall. As for Guantánamo Bay, it is the most profoundly un-American place on the planet: rejoice when it is shut.

In such areas America is already showing its genius for reinvention. Both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates promise to close Guantánamo. As his second term ticks down, even Mr Bush has begun to see the limits of unilateralism. Instead of just denouncing and threatening the “axis of evil” he is working more closely with allies (and non-allies) in Asia to calm down North Korea. For the first time he has just let American officials join in the negotiations with Iran about its fishy nuclear programme (see article).

That America is beginning to correct its mistakes is good; and there’s plenty more of that to be done. But one source of angst demands a change in attitude rather than a drive to restore the status quo: America’s relative decline, especially compared with Asia in general and China in particular.

The economic gap between America and a rising Asia has certainly narrowed; but worrying about it is wrong for two reasons. First, even at its present growth rate, China’s GDP will take a quarter of a century to catch up with America’s; and the internal tensions that China’s rapidly changing economy has caused may well lead it to stumble before then. Second, even if Asia’s rise continues unabated, it is wrong—and profoundly unAmerican—to regard this as a problem. Economic growth, like trade, is not a zero-sum game. The faster China and India grow, the more American goods they buy. And they are booming largely because they have adopted America’s ideas. America should regard their success as a tribute, not a threat, and celebrate in it.

Many Americans, unfortunately, are unwilling to do so. Politicians seeking a scapegoat for America’s self-made problems too often point the finger at the growing power of once-poor countries, accusing them of stealing American jobs and objecting when they try to buy American companies. But if America reacts by turning in on itself—raising trade barriers and rejecting foreign investors—it risks exacerbating the economic troubles that lie behind its current funk.

Everybody goes through bad times. Some learn from the problems they have caused themselves, and come back stronger. Some blame others, lash out and damage themselves further. America has had the wisdom to take the first course many times before. Let’s hope it does so again.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11791539