11/marzo/2025
- libros leídos estos meses: why you should read children’s books, even though you are so old and wise de katherine rundell, the tyranny of flies de elaine vilar madruga, hazel says no de jessica berger gross, julia song is undateable de susan lee, paul up north de michel rebagliati, pas moi de elise gravel. sigo intentando con bel canto pero me da defensiveness como buena peruana <3


11/febrero/2025
- soñé que cantaba runaway con un hombre buena gente. yo cantaba la versión de misfits y nos reíamos.


24/enero/2025

- el 2024 fue súper bonito aunque empezó terrible, pero solo porque debía ser libre para poder ser feliz. viajé mucho, fui a visitar a mi familia y mi persona favorita me acompañó, encontré un mejor trabajo mucho más estable y formal, celebré mis primeras navidades y fiestas de fin de año con una familia de verdad, dejé las redes sociales y ya solo las uso para hablar con mis amigos queridos. el 2024 fue muy, muy bonito y me siento muy agradecida.
- este 2025 no sé qué me deparará. por ahora mi gran meta es tener tranquilidad pues solo sé que la incertidumbre ya está aquí, y tendré que esforzarme muchísimo ... encontrar nuevo trabajo, nueva casa, ahorrar. hacer todo por conseguir todo y sabiendo que, como siempre, yo no tengo el control.


3/enero/2024

- notas de we are free to change the world: hannah arendt’s lessons in love and disobedience, de lyndsey stonebridge:
- no one is better at marking the borders of a terrain than the person who walks around it from the outside. - h. a.
- hannah arendt was committed to what immanuel kant called “an enlarged mentality” which she believed to be the grounding for good judgment. this type of critical imagination is not creative, and nor is it necessarily empathetic. you think your own thoughts but in the place of somebody else,* she instructed her students.
- Kant probably tried not to think about Euler’s Graph on his daily walk. He believed, indeed he lived, for reason and for truths that could be uncovered with the human mind, but the fact that Euler had produced another theorem to prove the existence of God irritated him. God and bridges were not in the same category. You do not experience a bridge in the same way as you experience God, so you had to think about them different. There was Vernunft, reason, the means by which you worked things out, and Verstand, intellect, understanding, and reflection, which we use to search for meaning. Things do not exist just because you rationally conceive of and can control them in your head. You had to think about your thinking if you really wanted to know the meaning of things such as God, freedom, faith, morality, and human existence, even if the end result was just to demonstrate that such things were indemonstrable. It was how you perceived the world that mattered: the categories you put things into, how thought was organized for you, and how you organized your thoughts in response. Reflection, Verstand, he thought crossly, was precisely why he was free -- free -- to determinate whether today would be a six=bridge or a seven bridge walk for himself, theorem or no theorem, graph or no graph.
- Kant’s famous moral maxim is that we must not use other people as a means to our own ends. 
- It requires heroism to live in the world as Kant left it ... Kant’s whole ethics amounts to the idea that every person, in every action, must reflect on whether the maxim of his action can become a general law. In other words ... it really is the complete opposite of obedience! Every person is a lawgiver. In Kant, nobody has the right to obey. (Hannah Arendt)
- For Arendt, this “thinking ego” is not always the same as the “self” of consciousness, and so to an extent she shared with psychoanalysis the idea of a divided self. As she came to argue, there’s a kind of hidden thinking that runs alongside us, keeping check on us and the world. We do not always know quite who we are, in other words, which may not be a bad thing, especially when political and social conformity are being demanded of us. From the perspective of other people, of course we appear as one person, one identity -- she, he they, Black, brown, white, other; this is the given plurality of the world. But as soon as I try to confirm an identity to myself and say, proudly and defensively, or maybe tentatively and curiously, “I am I,” I’ve also revealed my own inner difference from myself. I am inevitably two-in-one -- which incidentally is the reason why the fashionable search for identity is futile and our modern identity crisis could be resolved only by losing consciousness, she wrote in 1971, setting her face against what we would now describe as identity politics.


28/diciembre/2023

- notas en papeles sueltos antes de botarlos:
1) “cat = Mèo (may-o), CBS TV journalist John (Jack) Lawrence, Vietnam war, 1968, “The cat from Hué,” an anti-philosophy of this kind begins not with arguments but with a story, “Perplexity at his behaviour would soon have been followed by indifference. Seldom doing anything when it serves a definite purpose or produces immediate enjoyment, cats are arch-realists. Faced with human folly, they simply walk away,” we (humans) should set aside any notion of being superior beings, the source of philosophy is anxiety, and cats do not suffer from anxiety, religion and philosophy serve the same need, lingüistic fiction / philosophy < senses / cats, humans know the meaning they’ve fashioned is fragile and live in dread of this breaking down, death as the end of the story, philosophy + religion vs. mortality, arthur schopenhauer <3 poodles, all named ATMA and BUTZ, schopenhauer had at least one cat, found next to him when dead, descartes was abusive towards animals and experimented torturing them, conscious awareness can spring up in many living beings and appears by chance / not by evolution or superiority, self-awareness: why is it more important? it’s not, self-consciousness is overrated, anti-philosophy: cant’s don’t doubt life is worth living because it stands in the way of a good life, philosophy is vain <3, michael de montaigne (1533 - 1593): one of the founders of modern humanism was skeptical of humankind as much as of god <3, he aw influenced by Ancient Greek skepticism’s most radical man called Pyrrho of Elis, Michael de Montaigne invented the term “essay” and thought nothing can be known, according to Pyrrho, the goal of life was ataraxia which means tranquility, Pyrrho influenced stoicism, epicureanism and skepticism, but Montaigne’s goal was to dispense with the goal of tranquility even, it was to dispense with philosophy.
2) whether as rat-catchers, stowaways or accidental travelers, cats spread on ships to parts of the world where they had not lived before. unlike other species, house cats’ genome differs in only a small number of ways from its wild kin, unlike other animals, cats are solitary hunters, and whithout alpha leaders or hierarchy mostly. there are many divergent and opposing moralities. for some people today, justica is the core of morality. but justice is neither unchanging nor as important to them as they imagine. 
3) in Ancient Greece and China, the good life meant living for yourself with the nature you have been given. these virtues concern not only what we have been taught to think of as morality. they also include aesthetics, hygiene and the whole art of life, and they are not confined to human beings. ethics is found among non-human animals.
4) Colett’es prose was feline = voluptuous and detached.
5) If its closest human companion leaves for a time, a dog will be distressed. A cat may seem hardly to notice when the most familiar human in its life goes away. Cats may come to love human beings, but that does not mean they need them or feel any sense of obligation to them. Companion that makes no demands or intrusions, that is restful and ever-changing as a tranquil sea that barely moves.
6) When cats love, on the other hand, it is not in order to fool themselves. Cats may be egoists but they do not suffer from vanity – not in regard to humans, at any rate. What they want from humans is a place where they can return to their normal state of contentment. If a human being gives them such a place, they may come to love them. Love is a mix of tenderness and admiration. Chance: McFace (Gattino), Mary Gaitskill’s lost cat, pure colour, disintegration in four parts, a line made by walking.
7) This may sound strange, or comic, or trivial: Nicolas Berdyaev <3, “the philosopher’s steamship,” Bolshevik government to transport potentially troublesome intellectuals and families to Germany.
8) Ambrosial illusions: cats decide to die, patiently wait to die <3
- notas en servilletas: words with <3: disheartened, halfhearted, heartbroken, heartwarming, lighthearted, openheartedly, wholeheartedly, heartbeat, heartburn, sad words with d: dismal, depressing, dingy, downcast, despondent, dispirited, dejected, discouraged, disheartened, words to describe someone: desultory, cherubic, disaffected, discerning, malcontent, renegade.

08/agosto/2023

- citas de blankets de craig thompson que quiero guardar: 1) “as a child, i thought that life was the most horrible world anyone could ever live in, and that there HAD to be something better. every night i would scheme of running away. i’d go through the motions: sneaking some snacks from the kitchen cupboard [‘cheese champs rations’], stuffing my backpack with clothes [‘two pairs of underwear in case one gets dirty...’ ], and feigning a casual interest in geography as i consulted my parents’ atlas [‘how far to california?’]. [looking at the map - ‘ten inches’.] but even then, i knew i was powerless to enact such a maneuver, that the REAL WORLD could only deliver new threats, and that i should be GRATEFUL for the security i did have. and anyway, i’d discovered a much easier means of escape. [phil: ‘hey, craig.’; craig: ‘i’m trying to sleep.’] i was trying to dream.”; 2) “when you are lost or looking for someone suspected lost, the CROWDS of people form a threatening undertow undermining your every effort. but then, that’s how i felt about groups in general -- and church camp awakaned a new SKEPTICISM in my faith (...) it was nearly impossible for me to ACCEPT that a group of people could adhere to the same belief, to be. one in HEART and MIND, much less to join together in a constructive goal (...) the PERSONAL savior concept of christianity is what appealed to me, the GOOD SHEPHERD neglecting the herd to search for the lonely, lost lamb... NOT this MASS MENTALITY.”


01/agosto/2023

- extraño el castellano. algún día me gustaría trabajar en una editorial de habla hispana.


31/julio/2023

- del prólogo de susan sontag que leí como si fuera epílogo: 1) “quiet (or taciturn), courteous, fastidious, learned, and utterly without pretensions, rulfo was a kind of invisible man, who earned his living in ways entirely unconnected with literature (for years he was a tire salesman), who married and had children, and who spent most nights of his life reading (’i travel in books’) and listening to music. he was extremely famous, and revered by his fellow writers.” 2) “everyone asked rulfo why he did not publish another book, as if the point of a writer’s life is to go on writing and publishing. in fact, the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book--that is, a book which will last--and this is what rulfo did. no book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times.”


30/julio/2023

- “oía de vez en cuando el sonido de las palabras, y notaba la diferencia. porque las palabras que había oído hasta entonces, hasta entonces lo supe, no tenían ningún sonido, no sonaban; se sentían; pero sin sonido, como las que se oyen durante los sueños.” vs. “from time to time i heard the sound of words, and marked a difference. because until then, i realized, the words i had heard had been silent. there had been no sound, i had sensed them. but silently, the way you hear words in your dreams.” (pedro páramo y pedro páramo traducido por margaret sayers para grove press ny)
- “allá hallarás mi querencia. el lugar que yo quise. donde los sueños me enflaquecieron. mi pueblo, mi pueblo levantado sobre la llanura. lleno de árboles y de hojas, como una alcancía donde hemos guardado nuestros recuerdos. sentirás que allí uno quisiera vivir para la eternidad. el amanecer; la mañana; el mediodía y la noche, siempre los mismos; pero con la diferencia del aire. allí, donde el aire cambia el color de las cosas; donde se ventila la vida como si fuera un murmullo; como si fuera un puro murmullo de la vida.” vs. “there you’ll find the place i love the most in the world. the place where i grew thin from dreaming. my village, rising from the plain. shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. you’ll see why a person would want to live there forever. dawn, morning, midday, night: always the same, except for the changes in the air. the air changes the color of things there. and life whirs by as quiet as a murmur... the pure murmuring of life...”


19/julio/2023

- “in other words, we’re reasonable human beings (poor, but reasonable), not spirits out of a manual of magic realism, not postcards for foreign consumption and abject national masquerade. in other words: we’re beings who have the historic chance of opting for freedom, and also--paradoxically--life. to the countless number of those killed by the repression one must add the suicide victims who killed themselves for the sake of reason, in the name of reason, which is also the abode of humor.” es la segunda vez que cito este ensayo, quiero leer a rodrigo lira. 
- hace 4 días se cumplieron 20 años de la muerte de roberto bolaño y desperté pensando, espero que nadie muera en la marcha hoy.


18/julio/2023

- “parra writes as if the next day he’ll be electrocuted.” -rb 


12/julio/2023

- terminé de leer the castle de kafka y me gustó toda la novela. es graciosa y absurda y rara y crítica y política de manera indirecta -- si bien para mí habla directamente de la migración, la segregación, la burocracia, y la alienación. también, incluso si la historia pareciera no editada y si kafka la dejó a medias, siento que ambos factores le dan mayor sentido. es más absurda así, cruda e inconclusa, porque klamm (el poder) termina siendo más inalcanzable y abstracto. uno nunca llega a entender cuál es el camino a él, si acaso tanto el camino como él existen, o si simplemente se trata de un perro persiguiendo su cola. y en este caso el perro es toda una comunidad, toda una cultura.
- el no-fin también me gusta mucho: “She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said”
- me gusta este no-fin, esta no-última frase, porque describe a una viejita lectora, un personaje que recién aparece en la última página. ella va a decir algo, que podría ser decisivo con respecto al propósito del protagonista y de toda la historia en sí, sin embargo, ni los lectores ni el autor podemos poner las ideas de esta viejita en palabras, no tenemos la capacidad. es como si la posible respuesta a la pregunta (porque el libro es solo constante pregunta) quedara congelada en el tiempo, inenarrable, puro presente. como si el poder solo se pudiera describir en el continuo, mas no definir, estudiar, ni mucho menos, concluir o encerrar.


11/julio/2023

- estoy viviendo a una cuadra de la casa de jane jacobs: tamaña bendición <3!


05/julio/2023

- dos fragmentos que me gustan de confessions of a small press racketeer de stuart ross: 1) “poetry is about generosity. it is about sharing our language, our thoughts, our ideas. poetry is what my eyes tell your eyes and what your eyes tell my eyes, and our eyes can pickpocket each other’s sockets (perhaps making of them ‘picksockets,’ if you’ll indulge me - which you better, or your career is finished), because ideas and images and beauty - yes, beauty - cannot be copyrighted. i propose that we do not sign our poems in the future, because does it truly matter who writes what? a poem is a poem, and inherently it belongs to the world, the earth, the people.” y 2) “Stephen Crane, my favourite poet when I was a teenager, wrote: In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, ‘Is it good, friend?’ ‘It is bitter -- bitter,’ he answered; ‘But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.’”
- punto aparte: todo lo que no me pasó cuando pasaron de mí fue lo mejor que me pudo pasar. ahora estoy aquí y me pasan cosas <3


04/julio/2023

- probablemente este sea el mejor verano de mi vida. (el 2024 fue mejor -- 21/enero/2025)
- en la noche vi de nuevo a la familia de cuatro raccoons, comiendo plantitas afuera de mi ventana, haciéndose mimos.


03/julio/2023

- una araña acaba de matar a una mosca en la terraza. la mosca se llama common green bottle fly o lucilia sericata. lucilia significa luz y sericata, vestida de seda. quizá si solo se hubiera llamado common green bottle fly me hubiera dado pena.
- incidentalmente, feliz cumple, kafkita. hoy leo la edición de schocken books de the castle, traducida por mark harman y hallada en los libreros de esta casa. acontecimientos por y para ti.


30/junio/2023

- esta mañana vi una familia de raccoons pasar por la ventana de la cocina y ayer encontré huellas de patitas de raccoons en la terraza. hace unas cuantas noches, también, escuché ruidos y pensé que eran fantasmas - o que vivía en la casa de parasite - pero ahora soy feliz porque seguramente eran uno o más raccoons explorando, intentando comunicarse.


28/junio/2023

- kurt vonnegut siempre me hace llorar.


23/junio/2023

- adverbios en the glorious nosebleed de edward gorey: aimlessly, balefully (menacingly), clumsily, distractedly, endlessly, fruitlessly, giddily, hopelessly, inadvertently, jadedly (unenthusiastically), killingly (sidesplittingly funny), lewdly (obscenely), maniacally (manaiakli), numbly, ominously, presumaby, quickly, repressively, slyly, tearfully, unconvincingly, vapourously, willfully, excruciatingly, yearningly, zealously (eagerly).
- also: wander among the trees, look out the window, fall off the pier, get themselves up (dress oneself up), run through the hall, sit in the train, dispose of the fragments, run out of the room, explain himself, struck her down, watch him go.


18/junio/2023

- ayer anoté: lo que siento es que alguien de verdad me está cuidando, no sé quién es. eso me da ganas de cuidarme. nunca me había pasado.
- jonas mekas escribió, “you just have to make yourself ready. everything will come by itself.” jamás lo había experimentado como ahora. todo lo que me va sucediendo este año, específicamente. lo que es para mí me encuentra -me quiere cerca- y lo que no me quiere, pasa de mí. pienso en los desposeídos de ursula k. le guin, en ser como un alien de anarres, sin posesiones, sin lo innecesario. 


17/junio/2023

- pasé de tener media ventana a muchas ventanas. muchísima luz. nunca había vivido en un lugar que me motivara a descansar de las redes sociales. siento que estoy de viaje dentro de un viaje. siento que estoy en un retiro.
- ayer en el taxi recordé que había soñado que tenía muchos dientes de más, en la zona molar. eran como varios dientecitos, muelitas que estaban creciendo dentro de mi boca. me daba un poco de tripofobia pero no fue una pesadilla.
- ahora que tengo tiempo para elegir lo que quiero hacer sobre lo que tengo que hacer, cuáles son mis prioridades, qué quiero aprender/conocer?


15/junio/2023

- hoy al teléfono: “es como si el país quisiera que me quede.”


14/junio/2023

- lista para el moving out, moving in, moving on <3 
- aun si la casa estará sola, me entusiasma la futura sensación de hogar.
- me siento happy, como etimológicamente con hap, buena fortuna, suerte.


30/mayo/2023

- parallel play: open arms - sza / “The good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is that you learn to live without it. You’re all chasing after Dad, saying, ‘Love me, please love me. I need love. I need attention.’ You’re needy love sponges. And I’m a plant that grows on rocks and lives off insects that die inside of me. If Willa doesn’t come back, that’s fine. Because I don’t need love. It’s like a superpower.” - connor roy


29/mayo/2023

- tokenism.


24/mayo/2023

- sigo leyendo between parentheses de roberto bolaño: “If literature isn’t all of that (something reasonable and visionary, an exercise of intelligence, adventure, and tolerance) plus pleasure, what the hell is it?”


23/mayo/2023

- leer las primas de aurora venturini ha sido como leer a una punki octogenaria que vomita una trama repugnante y oscura y cruel en una cadencia tan violenta tipo metralleta que da la impresión de que hubiera escrito esto furiosa y queriendo enfurecer al mundo. o como si ya todo le importara tres carajos, que es casi lo mismo <3. cuando al inicio yuna confiesa que recién a los 20 años ha aprendido a leer el reloj, quizá esa sea para aurora una forma de decir: esto es sobre aprender a leer el tiempo, a mirar en retrospectiva. y porque el tiempo es la historia singular, la consciencia, es determinante el ritmo, la puntuación. por ello el juego con (sin) puntos y comas, los breves capítulos, y la prisa por expandir el vocabulario, por hacernos pasar las páginas para que veamos que ella puede ser también cultivada, controlada, que puede articular lejos de lo patológico y salvaje, lo considerado ignorante para la gente de bien aka lxs normales. pero que en suma, al final, va a romper y rehacer las reglas porque no se puede digerir lenta/saludablemente la vida, las muertes, los partos, las heridas, los abusos, la falta de amor. solo queda el arte para vomitar el pasado, expectorarlo, defecarlo, extraerlo del cuerpo.


18/mayo/23

- parallel play: “With Las primas Aurora Venturini achieved the acclaim she’d been seeking all her life and enjoyed it in characteristic fashion: baring the scars of the monstrous persona she cultivated with ironic lucidity.” - Mariana Enriquez / “In Chile quite a number of books--most of them bad--are published. Rodrigo Lira’s elegance, his disdain, make him off limits for any publisher. The cowardly don’t publish the brave.” - Roberto Bolaño
- cherish my brain and satisfy me.


17/mayo/23

- leo between parentheses de roberto bolaño y me da flojera empezar poeta chileno de zambra, porque aunque le aprecio y escribe bonito, no puedo evitar pensar que es como el tipo de hermano menor que, pudiendo ser único en su especie, al final remeda.
- comparto las ideas de bolaño sobre los nacionalismos, el exilio, la nostalgia y los límites. es decir que básicamente no creo en esos conceptos. no los vivo como míos porque me sentía tan (o más) fuera de lugar en lima. también comparto el respeto a nicanor parra, el resentimiento a la patria y a su fijación por el poder, un poder que es ridículo porque es vergonzosamente mediocre.
- ayer terminé the galloping hour de alejandra pizarnik en edición de new directions y quiero corregir las traducciones.
- alejandra pizarnik se suicidó a los 36 años, pero yo aún tengo deudas que saldar, libros que leer y sueños que cumplir.
- la semana pasada terminé un libro llamado disintegration in four parts que contiene cuatro novellas de cuatro autores contemporáneos canadienses. son cuatro historias creadas con el concepto de pureza como punto de partida. mi favorita fue la última, the green notebook de devon code. es sobre la muerte, la soledad, el sentido de la vida, todos los temas favoritos. también me gustó la primera novella, merz in the arctic circle de lee henderson, sobre los días del artista dadá kurt schwitters en un campo de concentración nazi. es ficción y me recordó a vonnegut por la ternura e inocencia. también me gustó porque desde el colegio mi vanguardia favorita siempre fue el dadá.
- he dejado de extrañar o imaginar mi vida en perú. no es que aquí la vida sea ideal, la atmósfera está cargada de una energía muy competitiva. sin embargo en lima, me da la impresión de que ni siquiera tenía la oportunidad de competir. y mi libro favorito es franny y zooey. quien sepa leer, puede deducir mi postura frente a la competencia.


15/mayo/23

- conteo regresivo de gilberto santa rosa mode on. en un mes me voy a otro sitio. casa número 14 por tres meses. sé que en estas épocas es muy difícil, pero espero que la número 15 dure mucho más. todo, todo lo humanamente posible. (estoy viviendo en la número 16 y espero que la 17 dure mucho más. todo, todo lo humanamente posible. -- 24/enero/2025)