A bit of theater

Yesterday we went intellectual: we went to the theater to see Misteriós Assassinat a Manhattan. Yes! That's the adaption of the Allen movie!

It was absolutely great. It is a really funny drama (there is, indeed, a murder, so I wouldn't say it is exactly a comedy...). Of course it is not Woody but our Catalan actors and actresses did amazingly well.

Pep Ferrer was very convincent in his routinary-life accommodated freelance-editor role. And Montse... well, she was great in all senses. This woman is pure theater herself and she embroidered the character of Carol.

I wondered how would they get the whole of New York city on a stage, but they managed it intelligently: there was a scenery of the two appartments, and a third space which served as a joker. All of them where united in a central gear which rotated conviniently to one side or the other.

Worth to see it, by all means! I'm already looking forward to our next theater (or opera!) trip :)

What the Crow Said

So, it was inevitable: here goes a little of the philologist in me... It won't be funny because I'm going to deal mainly with language and how it is treated in a novel, so don't expect the typical "This book talks about..." essay.

What the Crow Said is one of my favourite Canadian novels. It was written by Robert Kroetsch, whom I had the pleasure to meet in a lecture at the Universitat de Lleida.


The novel develops in Big Indian, a town which seems literally apart from the rest of the world. And our main character is a guy called Gus Liebhaber, who apart from being terribly pessimistic and beeing able to see in the future, happens to be a man: the greatest handycap for a person in Big Indian, it sems.

And when I say that he is terribly pessimistic, I really mean it... Just look at some of the sentences he uses to describe the world:
- "the world is a double hernia"
- "A cracked pot. A boiled lemon. A scab and a carbuncle. A mole on a mole's ear. A mouthful of maggots"
- "The world is a dog's tail and we chase it"
- "A bucket of medicated puke. A horse turd everlasting falling"
- "The world, (...) is a pimple on an alligator's ass. The world is a rotten fish, a broken lamestrap, a tub of shit"
And so on, and so on. Let's just say Gus is not exactly happy with the world he has to live in.

He is also obsessed and at the same time disturbed by language. He has a wood type alphabet, and his conflict with language is represented through the novel by means of this alphabet. The problem with Gus is that he tries all sorts of things to free letters (and thus language) from their meaning, but of course he can't: no matter how many times he turns the letters upside down, he continues to read the very same letters.

In some point in the novel we get to know that Gus himself is a bit lost. It is said that he feels himself as "hardly more than a mere tray of alphabet, awaiting the insistence of an ordering hand"(p.68). He feels disordered and broken as his wood type's language.


So, this is just an appetizer. There is really a whole lot of stuff in this book: a bunch of physically and/or mentally handicaped men, a swarm of bees, a never ending winter, a family of women unable to keep one man, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Dramatic, but also funny because of it's irony. Worth a reading or two!

Three Wise Men, the day before

One day to go... Tomorrow is the Three Wise Men´s day!!!!
Look at the Wikipedia to get more of the History-story-legend of these people going to see Jesus the Kid.


And I'm one of the priviledged who has seen the shrine at the Köln Cathedral ;P. It's supposed to contain the bones of the Three Wise Men as originally discovered by Saint Helena. As one can imagine, they had been in a bit of a travel around the world until they reached their final destination: Holy Land, Constantinople, Milan, and finally Köln.


Here you have a picture of the entrance to the Kölner Dom.
There's no way you can get the whole thing in a picture from this side!! Anyway, one can get the idea of its bigness, I think.
Just look how tiny people look like in front of its doors ;P


I strongly recommend you to visit this church if you happen to land on Köln sometime. Just a bit of warning: if you intend to climb the tower, please train as hard as you can a couple of months before you do it: the tower is REALLY high ;)

My first Blog-day

So, here we are then... My first day as the owner of a Blog...

First of all: this is me!! Well, in fact it is me with a delicious "Käsestange".

I was born on December the 2nd, 1979 (not ashamed of my age ;P). I'm Catalan to the bone. That is to say, I'm for the Catalan Republic, although it may be a bit of a utopia... I know some people may not agree with my political opinions, but I'm not ashamed of them either (the opinions, I mean; not the people ;P)

So, it is a rather short introduction to my person, but what use would this Blog have if I where to write everything in the first sitting??