Miquel O'Dochartaigh
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Communications or Media |
| Occupation | writer observer thinker |
| Location | Les Corts, Barcelona, Spain |
| Introduction | East Village activist-writer-ltnp exiled to Catalunya to finish a book. Lives in 200 ft2 ático apt. w- partner & dog in working class neighborhood of Les Corts, for which they pay an absurd $1,012/mo. Am told Les Corts is Catalán for "pigstye". No joke. Seems this is where the livestock were kept back when Barceló was just the walled seaport area. All but the poshest neighborhoods here seem drearily Third World once the magic of the Eixample façades wears off, but then that's part of the adventure, ey? These short lists have become my lifeline to something approaching sanity here. I imagine if you have hundreds of thousands of Euros at your disposal, the city can be magnificent indeed. Would probably be useful to learn the language of Verdaguer, Pla and Casanovas, but I figure by the time I do it will no longer exist--EU parliamentary supplications notwithstanding. mike2008nyc -AT- gmail PUNTO com |
| Favorite movies | B&W's, French/Polish, some US: Dolores Claiborne, Gods&Monsters, American Beauty, Central do Brasil (I know, it's not US). The Way We Were? |
| Favorite music | Classic, jazz, alternative rock, ambient. Not room to go into detail really. I play piano, French horn, bit of guitar & flute. Miss the high school orchestra and jazz ensemble. Ettore Chiudioni ruled!! Malabar HS. |
| Favorite books | Was halfway into '1491' 'til daily domestic duties (and 10 p.m. lights out) put a brutal end to my reading life. Sweet pipican friend loaned me 'Water for Elephants' (23 weeks on NYT bestseller list, among others surely) with great excitement, but it's so poorly written I feel guilty reading it. Still, it affirms my faith in the wholesale mediocrity of the US public when it comes to things literary. Alas, this experience with page after page of pablum is likely to render living with the impending certain failure of my own epistilic undertaking a bit less heart-wrenching. Waiting for other books (Dawn Powell stories among them) to arrive at port. Am Ian McEwan fan who probably should have skipped the sour reviews of Chesil Beach. Forging ahead, late nights on the tiny terrace, anyway. Will likely return to Barbara Tuchman once I get back to the LES apt. |