vondell-swain:
notrudeandnotginger:
vondell-swain:
thetideturning:
rhamphotheca:
Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum)
What is this glorious creature, and where can I get one?????
it says what it is right there
Arthur Darvill said at the DW con I went to that that was his favorite word. He never said that it was a lizard/fish. I looked it up when I got home but forgot to look for pictures. It’s cute!
it is neither a lizard nor a fish! it’s a kind of salamander, which is an amphibian, closely related to frogs and toads.
Julio Cortazar has a great short story about this little creature.
Drive the head like a reluctant bull through the transparent mass at the center of which we take a coffee with milk and open the newspaper to find out what has happened in whatever corner of that glass brick. Go ahead, deny up and down that the delicate act of turning the door knob, the act which may transform everything, is done with the indifferent vigor of a daily reflex, “See you later, Sweetheart. Have a good day.” Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it to stir the coffee.
— Julio Cortazar, The Instruction Manual
Interview with Julio Cortazar, by Evelyn Picon Garfield
EPG: You like to compare the art of writing to boxing, to jazz and to photography. They’re your favorite hobbies. When did you become interested in them?
JC: What I do is pretty deliberate. For example, when I use metaphors or comparisons. In Latin America there is still the Romantic and somewhat quintessential tendency to search for metaphors and similes, the most noble comparisons possible. Now one can no longer compare someone to a swan but if one could, he would. Very early in life, I felt that one ought to approach the everyday elements in life that could be filled with beauty. A good boxing match is just as beautiful as a swan. So why not utilize it within a system of comparisons, within a scale of values. That’s why, almost from the start, there are many references of that sort in my books. It is purposely in order to desacralize, to bring literature down to earth because it should also have its feet on the ground. "High" and "low" are references in a Western scale of values, but at this moment they are changing and may already have changed for many people. When I was very young and began to work and had some money to buy a very poor camera, I began to take photos in a very systematic way, trying to perfect my technique. Later, my second camera was a little better. With it I took good pictures. I don’t know how to explain to you the reason for that interest. Down deep I think it was a literary one. Photography is sort of a literature of objects. When you take a photo, you make a decision. You frame some things and eliminate others. A good photographer is one who knows how to frame things better. And besides he knows how to choose by chance and there’s where surrealism comes into play. It has always seemed marvelous to me that someone can photograph two or three incongruous elements, for example, the standing figure of a man who, by some effect of light and shade projected onto the ground, appears to be a great black cat. On a profound level, I am producing literature, I am photographing a metaphor: a man whose shadow is a cat. I think I came to photography by way of literature.
EPG: So that for you photography holds a certain relationship to literature with regard to your approach to reality and perspective.
JC: Yes. And after, it became a way of completing certain texts of mine like Ultimo Round (The Last Round), where many photos are placed intentionally so that the reader may complete the selection with a visual image. The idea of collage—photo and text—fascinates me. If I had technical means to print my own books, I believe I would keep on making collage-books.
“Oh the swinging motion of the phaeton to get her back into the whole aquarium of her previous visit to Los Horneros. Everything smaller, more crystalline and pink, without the tiger then, don Nicanor with fewer white hairs, barely three years ago, Nino a toad, Nino a fish, and Rema’s hand’s which made you want to cry and feel them on your head forever, a caress like death almost and pastries with vanilla cream, the two best things on earth.”
“Right now (what a word, now, what a dumb lie) I was able to sit quietly on the railing overlooking the river watching the red and black motorboats passing below without it occurring to me to think photographically of the scenes, nothing more than letting myself go in the letting go of objects, running immobile in the stream of time. And then the wind was not blowing.”
I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit. Always I have managed to be alone when it happens, guarding the fact much as we guard so many of our privy acts, evidences of our physical selves which happen to us in total privacy. Don’t reproach me for it, Andrea, don’t blame me. Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny. It’s no reason not to live in whatever house, it’s no reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one’s mouth shut.
— Excerpt from Letter to a Young Lady in Paris by Julio Cortázar.
Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar
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Just bought this yesterday! Forever thankful to Christmas giftcards.
