Recent content by Eric

As English is used as the international language, maybe it should be used properly wherever it is employed. This not always the case. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/signlanguage/9536443/Sign-Language-week-221.html...

In Britain, when two unarmed women police officers are killed on duty, it is the main headline in all the newspapers. In Syria, scores, if not hundreds of people die every day anonymously, civilians, police and soldiers. Should we be living in a world where things such as these are so relative?

The other Spanish-language Gombrowicz website is: http://www.literatura.org/wg/wgea2.htm That is separate to the Elortiba one I mentioned a few postings ago. To answer Stevie B's question, I think that "Ferdydurke" is a better starting point. Actually, his diaries incorporate all sorts of...

Has anybody noticed that the countries in North Africa, plus Iran, where there was a knee-jerk reaction to the film clip are all undemocratic countries with high unemployment and where the proportion of young people under the age of 25 is too large? And now there are demonstrations in China...

You will have noticed the decline in quality of the surname "James" over the past century or so for authors: Henry James: pretty sophisticated stylist. P D James: crime novelist. E L James: chick lit soft porn merchant. I rest my case.

Interesting. An Egyptian Arab Coptic Christian with a reputation for fraud makes a B-film in the USA, tricking the actors, so that they don't know the film is about Mohammed and against him. Then riots break out in several Muslim countries. The American ambassador in Libya is killed and the USA...

When I was young, it took some effort to get a place at university. Is it still so hard? See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/9542312/Third-of-Britains-elite-universities-still-looking-for-students.html Do school qualifications still mean anything, or should everyone...

Do people read Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina nowadays? He lived there for twenty-three and a half years, and there is a website in Spanish dedicated to him. But is he still read and discussed? Here's that Spanish-language webnsite again (the URL has been posted up before)...

Just reading a book called, intriguingly, "The New Cold War" (2008). It is somewhat sceptical about the progress that Russia has made under Putin. While the economy has been boosted by fits and starts, freedom of speech (not perhaps what workers in small towns are most concerned about) is not...

Re: Spanish Literature As the person whose book I'm translating right now is interested in, and knowledgeable about, Spanish & Latin American literature, I've been trying to find a little more about various authors. For instance, Mario Benedetti, Carlos Fuentes and Juan Carlos Onetti. Have any...

I read just now that two leading British newspapers are in financial straits and are merging what are termed the business "desks" and sports "desks". Now they may merge the news "desks". "Desk" in this context means the group of editors working on the same subjects. The newspapers in question...

During the course of their studies, U.S. or UK students doing a a PhD at university in literary theory or philosophy can read, for example, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Unamuno, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Husserl, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva...

I was reading an essay about Latin American literature late last night, and came across several names of authors I'd never heard of, which is hardly surprising as Latin-American literature is not my central field of interest. But I wonder what people in the know, such as Daniel and Stiffelio...

Electronic wars: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9498541/Apple-wins-1.05bn-from-arch-rival-Samsung-in-patent-case.html How much does this affect you?

I didn't know that New Zealand was Guest of Honour at Frankfurt. There's not been much, if anything, in the English-language press outside of New Zealand itself over the past six months to remind us. It is, potentially, a very interesting literature, though what is written in Maori does need...