Being Against the Eternal Now

I have been com­ing to Oaxaca for 16 years now. I come for weeks or even months at a time, and yet I am so far unable to mas­ter the lan­guage. In spite of all the time I’ve spent going to din­ner, rid­ing in taxis, and attempt­ing to deci­pher the labels in the gal­leries and museums. … 

The Books Of January

Fiction: Artemis — Anthony Weir From the guy who brought you The Martian, one of the finest sci-fi adven­tures of the last 20 years, Artemis is anoth­er adven­ture in space. This time on the moon with lots of sci­ence: lunar shel­ters and man­u­fac­tur­ing in zero G and more than most of us need to know about … 

Things that Make You Think

From the exhi­bi­tion “Guex Liu, Kuu ñun­ro, Totlalhuan” por Fernando Palma Rodríguez — shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca.  These are only a lit­tle taste of the many mov­ing con­struc­tions.  It is amaz­ing what a cre­ative per­son can do with some qual­i­ty ser­vos and a cou­ple of Arduino boards. Sewing machines and … 

The Books of December

More or less. I’ve got a lot of books to catch up on. Here’s the first batch.   Fiction: Beartown — Fredrik Backman (2017) Dropped it after just a cou­ple of chap­ters. I like hock­ey but not this much. And I don’t sim­pati­co with the char­ac­ters. The idea of an entire town’s future rest­ing on the … 

The Books of November

Several books in this issues point to a trend: writ­ers seem to be los­ing the mag­ic in their work. Is it age, too much writ­ing, or the unbe­liev­ably car­toon­ish real­i­ty of the times? Whatever, the mag­ic is gone from a lot of writ­ing at the moment. * Magical Realism can’t keep up with the zeitgeist. * …