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Conversations in the Gym
Bicep curls, by Ron Burgundy. Yesterday I was chatted up by the manager of the gym where I (sometimes) work out. Cinco Pirouettas is a stout man in his forties who claims to have been a ballerino when he was young. He spends most of his time talking to girls at the machines. He also bosses around skinny young men who appear to have never lifted weights before. He sometimes talks to mothers. “Did you do ballet?” he asked me point blank one afternoon, about a month ago. I was stretching on the floor. Yes, I told him, a long, long time ago. He puffed up his chest. “I did ballet. How many pirouettes in a…
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The Hare Krishnas Cure My Allergies
Zowie! as Osgood says in Some Like It Hot. Just got back from Govinda’s vegetarian restaurant, in Miraflores, where after lunch El Fotografo and I had some hot ginger tea. It was real ginger, chunks of it, ground up with honey and lemon, emulsified in a cup of hot water. The menu calls it a tisane. They need to correct that to a spice exorcism. Holy Mother of Purging, I’m allergy/demon-free — for now. DATO Tisane kion (ginger tea): 2.50 soles Govinda Vegetarian Restauant Av. Shell 634, Miraflores 445-8487 http://www.restaurantevegetarianogovinda.com/
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Thoughts on Vargas Llosa’s Win
I first became aware of Margio Vargas Llosa and his work in the 1990s when I heard him speak at the Miami Book Fair International. He was always a hit with Cuban Miami (anyone who is an enemy of Fidel….), but political issues aside, what drew me (and many readers) to his work is the authenticity and power of his fiction. Today the Swedish Academy said that it is honoring Vargas Llosa for outlining the “structures of power” and for “his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” The Academy’s permanent secretary, Peter Englund, called him “a divinely gifted storyteller” whose writing touches the reader. I agree on…
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Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Lit Prize
Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Academy in Stockholm announced early today. Vargas Llosa has written more than 30 novels, essays and plays, including Conversation in the Cathedral, Feast of the Goat and Death in the Andes. He’s racked up scores of literary honors, including Spain’s highest, the Cervantes Prize, in 1995, but the Nobel eluded him for decades, probably, many believe, because of his right-leaning political identity. (See article from Christian Science Monitor here.) A former leftist, Vargas Llosa gradually embraced economic liberalism and was an outspoken critic of Peru’s two-term president Alberto Fujimori, who shut down Congress and the judiciary…
