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Tengo ganas de escribir sólo cuando estoy en un estado explosivo, con fiebre o en crispación, en un estupor convertido en frenesí, en un clima de disputas en el cual las invectivas reemplazan las bofetadas y los golpes. Esto suele comenzar así: un leve temblor que va

A Word with Two Meanings We invent words, then let ourselves be subjugated by them. There would be no knowledge without words, but it is words again that grow into independent entities, obstacles that come between us and the real world. They move us closer to and at the

The 1900 Crisis The Break By 1900, no more bets. Pessimism. Denial of progress, return of the cyclic history. Social conflicts. Revolutions. Decline of the West and the yellow peril. Anti-utopia. The Great War. Abstract art. Earthquakes. Halley's comet. The end of the

The year 1900. Europe's countries are divided on the question: does the 20th century begin in 1900 or in 1901? Some opt for 1900, by virtue of the change in the figure of the hundreds. Others are partisans of 1901, for reasons of more sophisticated arithmetic. Particular

(from: Chapter 5 - The Map of Metopolis Scaled 1:1; Chapter 4 - The Rail Car of the Millionaire, and from At the Armenian's Tavern and Once Again at the Armenian's Tavern - Chapters 3 and 6) If you are far, far away from the city and take a completely different

Costache is a clerk of consequence, only a few years away from retirement. He visits his daughters from his first marriage rather infrequently, and secretly, too. They did object to his remarriage, but then neither was his second wife too keen on his damsels. They didn't

excerpt1 Day was a-dawning sluggishly on Saints Eusignius, Nona and Fabius, a Saturday as it happened; like unto a blunt blade scraping at the gloom caked all over our bodies did the daybreak appear, and impotent, too. The bells tolled half-heartedly and a thin film of

To clarify the unities of place, time and action in this world: here, now and thus, when one can no longer believe in the laws of happening, because this place is not in the now, and this now does not thus give temporality to the here. The present reality of things past

I've always been fascinated by this city. Still, I can understand it doesn't easily translate to others. Here is a list of things one should try to perceive as charming, although - by all standards - they don't qualify as such:1. Filth. It is the quintessential

excerpts NOISES OF THE CAPITAL For reasons I cannot exactly explain, the flow of ideas circulated by the independent press has strikingly dwindled to a mere trickle. One can only put it down to the times of fatigued irritation we are living through as we wait for the much

Architecture represents a means of interrogating history. Rather ominous, it is to be feared, when the question applies to the Romanian capital. Why so? The way Bucharest has been subjected to transformations in the last century accounts for the living changes affecting

If you read travel notes by simple tourists or people on journalistic, cultural or political assignments, from the 1920s or 30s, if you peruse recurrent images about a Bucharest imprinted with evil or good charms, equally decrypted and encoded, moving and repulsive, you