Carolina Papaleo is restaging “Yo Adivino el Parpadeo (Our Fortune In A Blink)“. Look in your theater gudes for dates and times.

Every Monday thru Friday, at 12 noon, Carolina Papaleo is live on news and music show Radio 10, AM 710.  For expats this is a great way to practice your Spanish.  For movie, TV, and theater fans, this is a great way to listen to one of your favorite stars.

Every Friday, at 4 PM, Carolina Papaleo hosts a talk show on radio Touché, channel 89.1 FM.

Watch interviews of Ms. Papaleo on Youtube:

The Early-Morning Show

Postscript

Red Carpet

You can follow Caro on on twitter, on facebook, Blogger, or WordPress.

]]> http://bainsidermag.com/blog/do/carolina-papaleo-15/feed/ http://bainsidermag.com/blog/buy/english-writers-group-9/ http://bainsidermag.com/blog/buy/english-writers-group-9/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 02:03:33 +0000 The Poet http://bainsidermag.com/?p=5600

We meet every Wednesday from 11.00am to 1.00 pm at:

Cafe Variete Osvaldo Pugliese
Centro Cultural de la Cooperacion
Corrientes 1543

in the cafe at the back ]]> http://bainsidermag.com/blog/buy/english-writers-group-9/feed/ http://bainsidermag.com/blog/see/stephen-page-reading/ http://bainsidermag.com/blog/see/stephen-page-reading/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 08:45:07 +0000 The Poet http://bainsidermag.com/?p=5625 Stephen Page read poems from the collection he is currently working on inside the U.S. Embassy Stand at the 38^th International Book Fair Buenos Aires.  You can see some of the pics on the page and in the slide how here: U.S. Embassy Phtostream, or here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/embajadaeeuubuenosaires/

This post courtesy of Holly Murten

photos courtesy of Dario Marcelo Perez, Holly Murten, and Donigan Merritt

Stephen Page (Middle) and friends after the reading

A New Path to the Waterfall was Raymond Carver’s last book that he worked on while he was alive. Most of the poems were written after he was diagnosed with cancer. Initially there was hope that surgery and chemotherapy could halt the disease and prolong his life, but that hope was slim and the prognosis for time left on earth was short. I think anyone knowing his death was impending would spend many of his remaining days contemplating how he had lived and what he would leave behind. Carver did, and he recorded his hopes and glooms with a well-written collection of poems.

The first Carver poem of the collection, Thermopylae, goes like this:

Back at the hotel, watching her loosen, then comb out
her russet hair in front of the window, she deep in private thought,
her eyes somewhere else, I am reminded for some reason of those
Lacedaemonians Herodotus wrote about, whose duty
it was to hold the Gates against the Persian army. And who
did. For four days. First, though, under the disbelieving
eyes of Xerxes himself, the Greek soldiers sprawled as if
uncaring, outside their timber-hewn walls, arms stacked,
combing and combing their ling hair, as if it were
simply another day in an otherwise unremarkable campaign.
When Xerxes demanded to know what such a display signified,
he was told, When those men are about to leave their lives
They first make their heads beautiful.
She lays down her bone-handle comb and moves closer
to the window and the mean afternoon light. Something, some
creaking movement from below, has caught her
attention. A look, and it lets her go.

It is interesting that this poem was chosen to open Carver’s sentiments. Even though the poem was written before Carver became ill, it is inserted in this collection for a reason. The outnumbered Greeks represent Carver and the Persians represent cancer. Carver is hoping to fend off a formidable enemy. Hair imagery is sure to catch the reader’s eye as it appears and reappears several times throughout the collection. Hair is something that should worry Carver because if he were to go through chemo, he would lose it. That might be his reasoning for including this surreal poem, Threat:

Today a woman signaled me in Hebrew.
Then she pulled out her hair, swallowed it
and disappeared. When I returned home,
shaken, three carts stood by the door with
fingernails showing through the sacks of grain.

The woman loses her hair but disappears anyway. She dies. Then there is the implication of corpses in the sacks.

The Toes, is a humorous-serious poem:

This foot’s given me nothing
but trouble. The ball,
the arch, the ankle—I’m saying
it hurts to walk. But mainly it’s those toes
I worry about. Those
“terminal digits” as they’re
otherwise called. How true!
For them no more delight
in going headfirst
into a hot bath, or
a cashmere sock. Cashmere socks,
no socks, slippers, shoes, Ace
bandage—it’s all one and the same
to those dumb toes.
They even looked zonked out
and depressed, as if
somebody’d pumped them full
of Thorazine. They hunch there
stunned and mute—drab, life less things . . .

The poem is obviously about those absurd digits we have at the end of our bodies, but Carver uses tropes and associative connotations. The phrasing “terminal digits” not only refers to the end of our extremities, it also implies the end of our lives. In this context it brings to mind a dead body. After all, what is the first thing someone might notice when he sees a corpse laid out? Toes sticking in the air. What pokes up under a sheet pulled over a dead body? Toes. Where is the identity tag on the body at the morgue? On one of the toes.

Caution is a poem about a writer awake in the middle of the night:

Trying to write a poem while it is still dark out,
he has the unmistakable feeling he was being watched.
Laid down the pen and looked around. In a minute,
he got up and moved though the rooms of his house.
He checked the closets. Nothing, of course.
Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.
He turned off the lamps and sat in the dark.
Smoking his pipe until the feeling had passed
and it grew light out. He looked down
at the white paper before him. Then got up
and made the rounds of his house once more.
The sound of his breathing accompanying him.
Otherwise nothing. Obviously.
Nothing.

Obviously some kind of paranoia is going on here. What is he paranoid of? What is he being watched by? Death.

Section three has poems about but is not limited to his childhood. Section four, “Some Prose on Poetry” tells the tale of how, at the age of eighteen, Carver first found out that poetry, which he had been scribbling for some time, could be taken as a serious endeavour. The last section, Foreboding, contains poems of final reckoning, most notably What the Doctor Said and Gravy. The latter is one of his best poems, where Carver uses the slang phrase “it was all gravy” as a rhetorical device to display his love for Tess Gallagher and his years of non-dependence on alcohol; moreover, it is reconciliation with his death, his acceptance of the inevitable, his letting go of any anger. The last poem, Late Fragment, is Carver’s last wish, and his self-eulogy. He does not say he wants to remain a famous writer, he does not say he wants to be read and discussed by intellectuals at ivy-league schools, he does not say he was sorry for his mistakes — he only says that he wants to be “beloved.”

A New Path to the Waterfall was Carver’s preparation for death and his contemplation of life. Carver was putting things in order. The book is chronologically scattered, but I think it works well this way. It better represents the method in which the mind works. A man contemplating his life and his imminent death would not start with his first infant memory then move forward to the present. No. The mind would skip around. One day while waking around he house, a photograph might be found and memories arise from the time of the photograph. The following week, slips of scribbled notes might be found in a robe and more memories appear, which might be occurrences that happened before the photograph. It would seem unnatural if the book were set up from childhood to death. The order in this collection reflects the way Carver prepared for his death with his musings. The fact that several of the poems were written before he was informed that he was ill might be a statement in itself. It might mean Carver was saying that he was unknowingly preparing for death all his life. It might mean Carver was saying that everyone is preparing for death all his life. It might mean Carver was saying, “You will die too. How do you want to be remembered?”

This review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald, 19 December 2010.