Archive for 'November,2011'
Tanguero
by Seraphina Malinche A smile and a wink So simply began A stolen kiss in the stairwell A midnight cup of coffee Oh hopeless Tanguero You fed me your chamuyo You led me through the milonga No [...]
Quit using that Credit Card Abroad (explained)
Having navigated the banking system in Chile for sometime now I feel confident in explaining it to you. Here is what you need to know to open a banking account in Chile, get a credit card, [...]
The Labyrinth of Solitude
review by J. Michael Hayes Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize winning Mexican poet, in 1961 explained the Mexican peoples in his long and densely written “The Labyrinth Of Solitude”. Beginning with the fall of the Aztecs [...]
Nolita Restaurant Review
by Vivi Rathbon For our first official dinner in Santiago we chose NoLita Restaurant, which was recommended by our hotel doorman. NoLita is located in the lovely Las Condes neighborhood of Santiago de Chile. The unassuming [...]
The Rum Diary
By Laura Burgoine The beauty of every Hunter Thompson story is the author’s overpowering presence within the narrative. The American journalist was a master of the subjective, first-person writing style that would later become world renowned [...]
YaYa Bean: Behind the Sauce
by Vivi Rathbon They wouldn’t tell me what Ya Ya Bean means. But they did tell me a little more than the straight-forward story that you’ve read on the back of La Boca Roja hot [...]
Why Christopher Hitchens Matters
The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.–Christopher Hitchens The reason I like [...]
Atonement
Having read Christopher Hitchens memoir and written about it here, I wanted to circle back and reread the British writers I have already read and read for the first time those I have not. The English [...]
Mao’s Last Dancer
One of my coworkers is a Chinese guy who in his youth had been a red guard. Most Americans would not what that means but when he told me that it sent a shudder down my [...]
Everything and More A Compact History of Infinity
David Foster Wallace (DFW) writes in “Everything and More A Compact History of Infinity” that the mathematician Cantor peered at the problem of infinity until it drove him mad. Well, sort of. He explains that [...]
The Gringo and the Harvest
Fernando Botero’s paintings of torture at Abu Ghraib prison
Thought-provoking...
Give me a Grandparent
I am blessed with 7 grandchildren. I am making copies of this poem t
Give me a Grandparent
As I spend more and more time with more and more wonderfully different
George Orwell’s other Novels
In Latin America, kids don't read Orwell. I wish they did.
George Orwell’s other Novels
Animal Farm and 1984 are about any kind of dictatorship, not just comm