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elisa

elisa

has 12 followers and is following 11 people

The thing about life is, no matter what happens to you,it goes on. What seems like an ending is really a beginning in disguise. - Shadow Spinner, Susan Fletcher
  • member since November 14, 2007

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elisa’s last login was 2 days ago. show recent activity »

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Public Notes

  • M

    M says

    hi elisa! i just read your short review of 'broken memory', and would you indulge me with an explanation of what it means?

    posted 3 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    Hello elise! Glad to hear from you again!

    Fahrenheit 451 is one of your favorites? What aspect of the book did you like best? The dystopian concept, the defense of books, Montague's enlightenment, or the characters themselves? I thought Clarisse was alright-- I don't admire her that much, she was born into a different family that could so completely explain who she was.Montague, though, I thought, was amazing-- he really had some internal yearning for a more...hmm...Keatsian world, even before he met Clarisse he had already stolen all those books he kept behind the ventilator. The process of his journey-- even when he thrashed around and made mistakes sometimes--- was very hopeful in that it showed that even if man is denied and kept blind something inside him will push to reconnect with hope/beauty/emotions whatever. And of course I would have loved to be running through all those railroad tracks meeting the walking books :) There was one thing in the book that I now remember which was left unanswered-- how Clarisse swiped the dandelion (?) below her chin and said it was proof she was in love? Did it mean she was in love with Montague? Or did it mean metaphorically in love with the world in general?

    I saw you were reading 'The Girl Who Played With Fire'... how are you liking it so far?

    Take care, so nice to hear from you again, Lord M

    posted 5 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Maria Elena B

    Maria Elena B says

    Glad you liked it. It is a long complicated book that sometimes seems to give too many details and as the end approaches you understand it all. The character of Lisbeth is such a strange and brilliant character.

    As for the drought, it has been hard. We have had, I think, over 40 days over 100 and little to no rain. Keeping the house cool is challenging. But we are fine. How is life on your end of the world?

    posted 6 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Maria Elena B

    Maria Elena B says

    I see you are now reading The girl with the dragon tattoo, let me know what you think when you finish.

    Take care and enjoy the rest of your summer :)

    posted 6 months ago. ( send a note )
  • Maria Elena B

    Maria Elena B says

    Hello,

    Long time... how are you? I see you are reading the Hunger Game trilogy. Good books. The movie will be out this year I think. Something to look forward to I guess. I also saw that you read the Millenium trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). That I read and saw the movies as well. Both excellent even for the movie which are hard because of the level of detail they were all very well done. There should be an American version soon but the original was so good and not over the top that I wonder what the US version will bring other than English speaking actors.

    Anyway just wanted to drop you a line to see how you were doing.

    Take care and stay in touch.
    M

    posted 7 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    dear elisa,

    i am thankful that you signed the petition albeit i know that you would have done so, had anybody else brought it to your attention, i recall our talk not so long ago (i think it as after you had read 'half of the sky') and you said that we have to contribute however small we can to effect social change, and i had no doubt you would participate in any sincere cause for good, which i hope is what this petition ill successfully engineer.

    However, i feel a little bit embarasssed to correct what seems to be a wrong impression i've given: that i'm from brazil! no, it simply has been my dream to explore those kilometers of jungle canopy and take a tour through the amazon river, but i have never ever set foot on the boundaries of brazil though i want to :( not yet anyway :) as i am in toronto right now... have you been to brazil or to any latin american countries? i hear that in some ways it is like my home country, the philippines, since the climate is warm, the people are warm, the countries are spanish-influenced-- and on the bad side both countries seem to have reputations for political and economic turmoil, as well as a historic (though probably wrong!) perception of indolence. i sure hope that petition passes through and they make the hard decision to sacrifice for the forest-- and open the chance for me to stand in thrall of it someday :)

    i have heard of the hunger games (i guess everybody has), but i was under the perception it as a young adult book. would you say it to be similar to ender's game in style, intelligence and intent? incidentally, i have heard that its plot of placing kids to fight each other is similar to the japanese 'battle royale'-- which is over 600 pages long. have you heard of that book or movie?

    i hope all is well with you,

    posted 8 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    *i meant the amazon rainforest, i seem to have left that one out :|

    posted 8 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    hello elisa,

    just dropping by to share with you that in brazil right now, laws are on the verge on being passed to allow consummate logging in one of the most beautiful rainforests and i think natural wonders ever! I hope that you could spare about 5 seconds of your time to sign up to this global petition: http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_amazon/?cl=1127359272&v=9435
    visiting the amazon has been one of my dreams since i was a kid and i have been personally frantic about this news :( i have been sharing this petition with friends, and i hope you wont think it presumptious if i share it with you. the thing is, i had been watching the signatory count of the petition for about 15 minutes, and all through that time the united states did not represent :(

    yours sincerely

    ps. no i havent read 'markings' yet. soon perhaps :) what about you, what are you reading?

    posted 8 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    dear elisa,

    i had a long response to your note the other day but apparently i had refreshed the page before posting it :| it is quite disheartening when it happens. in any case, althoug i agreed with you on your post, nothing rang so true with me as when you said: the lonely human is rarely happy, an that we all need connections. that is very true! the most profound and transcendental of book can become only so much dry paper after a time, and not as memorable and meaningful as the most earthy and comonplace of relationships.

    To tell the truth beyond the requisite blockbusters I havent been seeing a lot of movies lately, which is sad because i miss the long imprint in memory of the arthouse movie :| is into the wild based on that book that i have been seeing around everyone's shelves but have no idea about-- the one involving snow or some such?

    btw, i was surprised to see dag hammarskjold's 'markings' on your shelf. i had borrowed the book at quite the same time i saw it appear on yours here! it looked like a psalm-book from a mystic man, like 'the prophet' of kahlil gibran.

    I hope everything is fine with you as well :) are you back in canada or are you still in louisiana, which is the impression i had that you were in lately...?

    posted 8 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    hi elisa!

    i have finished reading elegance of the hedgehog. thank you for recommending it to me! which of the two narratives- mme michel's or paloma's-- appealed to you more?

    i am so excited to finally hear again from you :)

    posted 8 months ago. ( send a note )
  • MovieNut14

    MovieNut14 says

    I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't really say.

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    Hey elisa,

    Wow I've heard of the King's Speech and I do want to see it! Well... I suppose it doesn't really mean much to say I have heard of it, seeing as Colin Firth just won Best Actor... I admit though I love words on the page rather than screen visuals. I find it hard to sit still for 30 minutes and often wish I had a book along with me... In any case, how is Catcher of the Rye? Yes it is profane but do you like it? It has been a long time since I had read it and I was wondering... it was praised as capturing the questions and agonies of the youth generation, but reading it now do you think it had any such supreme value, when compared to some other books? I loved it but I remember how even the most unknown book could resonate with me sometimes... In any case I would love to hear what you thought about it.

    I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as with the Elegance of the Hedgehog it is famous enough that I am sure you have heard of it already. I don't see it in your shelf-- have you seen it in the movies, perhaps?

    All the Best
    Lord M

    posted 11 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    hello elisa,

    no I haven't seen it, what is it about? And I agree: once a person's as given to books as we are he realizes that for every book he reads he has 20 more waiting for him! Right now I'm reading the Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, although in stock are Baudrillard, Waiting for Godot, Somerset Maugham, Carl Sagan, Rand etc. and of course the ever-eluding Elegance of the Hedgehog! How about you what are you reading?

    posted 12 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    hey elisa,

    i KNOW! i've heard of it for months now but it's way too popular in the libraries, never even sees the light of the shelf as it goes from one borrower to another :( will discuss it with you if i land my hands on it :) i hope you're doing well

    posted 12 months ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    Merry Christmas too! And, if it is not prying, may I know if you have finalize the course you wanted to study for your reentrance to university this January? Any spark of inspiration or direction is welcome at this point ;)

    Again Merry chrsitmas!

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    oh, and i am reading "a long way gone" by ishmael beah and there is one thing i learned from his memoirs as a rehabilitated child soldier that i thought would interest you: people, perhaps,like you and me, who have been blessed with enough good things and peace, dont enter into humanitarian contributions to feel good, but to help. I learned that some people come bringing aid through medical supplies and textbooks and love and expect, sweetly but naively, that the warring natives would smile back and be thankful, and be won over to harmony. They were wrong. These people had been brainwashed into soldiering: most of them could not live without guns in their hands: they disdained the gifts of peace and found their identity from their army squad. Some of the child soldiers tried to murder these aid workers. Im not saying theyre bad or even ineffective but I learned that to enter humanitarian work requires real dedication, not a Christmas holiday of jumping into a plane to some African country to hand over medicines (probably all Im good for). The people they were trying to save tried to kill them or strangle them. The process of rehabilitation takes time. There is no instant gratitude. I realized people took the beatings and came back the next day still smiling and ready to help these African child soldiers because they were there not for a dose of feel-good, but because internally they truly wanted to help these people have better lives, without asking of what benefit- even emotional- it had for themselves. I learned a lot, and learned how far out I was from these people.

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    and similarly, i didnt plan to sound pompous! no pompousness was on my mind, so sorry for any appearances of it...

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    Again, my bad, I'll have to postpone a worthy reply, but let me just say as regards the "oppressed people" part: I agree. A whole branch of- shall I say thought- has been built along the lines that the oppressed people never speak for themselves, always there are nice unoppressed, educated people who speak for the oppressed, and this in turn, according to their theory, becomes in itself oppression, because of the distance, or the failure in translation, or the fact that by appointing themselves speakers they have forever situated the oppressed into victim mode. It's called "subaltern studies" by Chakravorty Spivak, comes around from the monumental book "Orientalism" by Edward Said, where he first popularized or introduced the view that the Orient was forever placed on the distanced lns of "The Other" of the west, exotic and wonderful- and forever weak and needful of Western support. I suppose something similar is operating today in our view of Tibet.

    Again, thanks for the repl and I hope youre doing well in your life :) As the saying goes, we cant help others till were satisfied with our own lives, or something, and I sincerely wish you that.

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    Oh and there is one cause I have heard about that I would like to share with you: I read on yahoo! news that the entire tiger population in the world is down to a mere 3 200! And here I was thinking, tigers, they are one of the most basic animals we know, I mean growing up as a kid it was one of the first animals I had heard about,unlike some Greater Prairie Chicken or something, yet here it is, becoming extinct! This is just so surprising and so sad for me, because personally they are one of the few majestic animals I have ever seen,yet when I read the comments of people at the bottom of the new page, a lot of respondents were saying "I couldn't care less, tigers kill people and livestock" or "There are more important issues to spend millions of dollars on, apart from romantic notions what do we gain from tigers?" and though I very much don't like their conclusion that we should just let tigers die, I can see their arguments and indeed millions of dollars is a lot of money. What do you think? For now I am confused on how to justify it..

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • M

    M says

    Hello elisa,

    ??? It was not pompous in any way at all! If I was very late in replying, it is only because it often takes me an hour to compose a note, and the prospect brings out the procrastinator in me. I am very sorry for that :( Well today I will not mke a note worthy of yours, so I will probably follow this up once I have thought of a good long reply to your profundity about historical figures, once I figure out how historica figures are made: do they set out to change history or were they just in the right time and place? So in the end who deserves to be written into history and why? For instance, I am pretty sure that a lot of people have been accomplishing the same work that Mother Teresa did, perhaps on a different, smaller scale, but these people will not be written into history and she was. That does not, of course, discount the great work of Mother Teresa :)

    In answer to your question, I am enamored of Che Guevara, but I admit that I do not know enough about him to say that I admire him for anything more than I know him now: as a symbol. I have heard that he encouraged Cuba to nuclear bomb the imperialist Los Angeles or something :| and my opinion of him has- perhaps not plummeted, but now I have began to separate the sides of him and accord varying degrees of admiration for each. But for you, elisa, I have great admiration, since you are one of the people you yourself describe: in spite of everything you are not weary and passive in the face of circumstance, you still hope to make a positive change in the world. This is not idle flattery, for I confess, reading your post, I discovered that I am not close to the passion and idealism that you have: I think more about my own dreams and my corner of the world, and that is not good. Well I hope you will accomplish your desire to make a positive change elisa, perhaps you might even tell me someday of your volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity or something, or even if you had turned it into a career with some NGO, and then I will have lots of wonderful idealistic stories from you.

    As for the Motorcycle Diaries, thank you for the suggestion, I might watch it over the weekend, and it is an actual diary book written by Che Guevara, I believe. Thank you for sharing with me your history from Quebec! My mom has been there and she says in terms of races it is not as diversified as Toronto, she was quite intimidated; although the people were very cheerful and nice.

    Oh and the Liberty book was one I wanted to discuss further with you, but having put it off so long I have forgotten what it was I wanted to ask :| In any case, do you agree with the point of view propounded by the book?

    I hope, sincerely, that you are unfettered by any sadness in your life.

    Lord M

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )

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