Haruki Murakami

This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

...

Then it occured to me to worry about the air.

...

The mere act of opening my eyes was an impossibility.

...

I had to make this thing I called 'I'- or, rather, make the things that constituted me.

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/murakami/site.php?id=

City Lights Bookstore

After crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the United States, we arrived in San Francisco. Like pilgrims, we visited the City Lights Bookstore and the Vesubio pub. I went up the stairs and I sat on a wooden chair. It was the first time I felt that city could be my place in the world. Surrounded by the silence I heard HOWL.

Jack Kerouac

What is that feeling when you're driving away

from people and they recede on the plain till

you see their specks dispersing?- It's the too-huge

world vaulting us, and it's good-bye.

On the road

Speeding kills bears

Last summer, I visited Yosemite Park in California. On the road you can see a lot of signs like this.

I was surprised when I knew the meaning.

Speeding cars hits dozens of black bears, hundreds of deer, and countless other animals on park roads every year.

The Red Bear, Dead Bear signs along park roads mark a place where a bear was recently hit.

Driving the speed limit can help save wild animals.

A man from Pamplona on Ernest Hemingway

It’s a man. It is actually the head of a man, a strong man. Somebody told me he was a writer and I thought “like me”.

Years later, I found his name written on the cover of an old book.

Some people from my little town say that he was bad for us, they say his description of our fiesta was wrong.

Then I read:

“In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. Every village had a pelota court and on some of them kids were playing in the hot sun.”

Or:

“You could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona.”

I can imagine Hemingway in the streets that the bulls pass along when they run early in the morning on their way to the ring.

The same streets I have walked along since I was a child.

He even said that he thought that the facade of the cathedral was ugly the first time he seen it but after he change his mind. I think this facade can only be beautiful for somebody who loved this town.

What about the fiesta?

As Hemingway said in “The Sun Also Rises":

“At noon of Sunday, the 6^th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it.”

Just Jazz

It is true that jazz can be listened in macro concerts or even in pretentious macro festivals.

But the Jazz, as I see it, must be another kind of experience. It evokes me a handful of people who follow the soft rhythm with their feet while drink and look at the musicians or close their eyes and dream.

Maybe, John Coltrane.

I imagine people who fall into a trance.

Out of the small and dark pub, it is likely raining.

From the darkness, some notes come… 

Everybody look everybody.

It is just jazz.