Happy first night of Passover, Good Friday, and Ramadan Mubarak to all who celebrate. And a warm welcome as well, of course, to our comrades who do not.
Julio Cortázar is my favorite Spanish-language author, so I'm making today's mega about him. If you'd like to share something random with the class, please feel free to make a mega in the future!
Anyway...
Cortázar is an Argentinian writer, and according to Wikipedia, "He is considered one of the most innovative and original authors of his time, a master of history, poetic prose and short story in general and a creator of important novels that inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking the classical moulds through narratives that escaped temporal linearity."
So that's pretty cool. He was particularly active in the 50s and 60s.
In general, what I really like about Cortázar's writing is the clarity and purposefulness with which he writes. He neither condescends to the reader, nor seems to go out of his way to try and impress. He is certainly clever in his writing and it's by no means simplistic, but it feels like every literary flourish has genuine purpose. And contrary to what my Spanish literature professor said, I maintain that his story about getting trapped in a sweater is simple, funny, and not some bizarre allegory for a penis. Sometimes a sweater is just a sweater. (My professor was sort of obsessed with seeing phallic and/or sexual imagery, motifs, and innuendo in everything we read.)
I think his works sadly lose a lot in translation, as with many Spanish-language authors, particularly from that era. But maybe I'm just a fuckin hipster?
I'm still planning to do a mega on sleep, btw, but it has gotten postponed.
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Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:
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Monthly Neurodiverse Megathread and Monthly ND Venting Thread :Care-Comrade:
just taking a minute to appreciate the surgeon who told me that it wasn't possible to give me the result I wanted cause of limitations in how they actually perform the procedure and then went ahead and delivered anyway. the man is my hero this year. the man also some how cut me up and left me with almost no visible scars on the outside - there's one if you know what to look for but it looks like my normal variation in skin tone, with my skin pressed together kinda funny along the line where there were stitches for a while. when that skin tightens up, there's gonna be no way to tell. on the inside there's more visible scars but all that skin is also still visibly healing - there's a few white lines where new skin looks to have formed really recently but it doesn't look the way scars do on the rest of my body. it's just new skin that hasn't pigmented yet. we'll see what that looks like in a few months.
I have my complaints too but just taking a minute to be happy about what worked out better than I dared hope.