Giedre Pavalkyte

"To learn a foreign language is to create a new self, to discover a self that is unknown to you." - Yoko Tawada, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue

Me hace mucha ilusión este homenaje a Roberto Juarroz, uno de mis poetas favoritos. ¡Nos vemos el viernes!

Looking up.

Earth too is a palimpsest.

"Such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future." - Sylvia Plath

"To drill one hole after another into it [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through — I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer." - Samuel Beckett

"Me asombra la poca cuenta que me daba de que cada presente, una vez pasado, me dejaba un bagaje para el futuro. En el después ya no importaba nada la diferenciación entre pasado y presente." - Herta Müller

“…todo relato surge de suspender una exclamación de horror o de maravilla, y ahí, en el claro momentáneamente abierto por la ausencia del grito o del llanto, deslizar unas palabras antes de que se extinga la expectación general.” - Fabio Morábito, Un idioma materno

«Alegría de escribir. Poder de eternizar. Venganza de una mano mortal». Wislawa Szymborska es la autora del mes en la librería Parent(h)esis de Madrid @lib-parenthesis.bsky.social. No os perdáis esta preciosa librería, que abrieron hace un año en Lavapiés @giedrep.bsky.social y Eitan Felner.

“Maybe this is the truly weightless time, after the front page loses interest but before the history books arrive.” - Omar El Akkad, “One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”

No te pierdas nuestras próximas actividades: un conversatorio sobre Georgia O’Keeffe, un encuentro con la autora Vanessa Fabiano (en inglés), el club de lectura de #librosincómodos (en español e inglés), un taller de escritura con la autora María Ovelar y mucho más. linktr.ee/libreriaparenthesis

#PoemOfTheDay XVII Hugo Mujica Animal herido nace el hombre cojeando entre lo que es y el no serlo nunca del todo; bastaría no quererlo todo, bastaría hacer casa en la herida que somos.

A coincidence or do bookstore spiders know how to read… spiderwebs?

“I know now, what I didn't then, that affection can't always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.” - Magda Szabó, “The Door”

I had to read some of it twice, and it still reads like bad joke, only it’s not.

Called my parents in Lithuania about the dates of a potential visit. Dad texts me saying they are in class. A few hours later we confirm the trip and I ask him what class it was. “One where they tell you how to prepare your backpack for emergency.” Yes, emergency=war, in case of doubts. They are 70.

The intensity, the brilliance. “I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip one hour more of sleep and live.” - Sylvia Plath, 1951 (she was 18)

Just a hedgehog snacking on figs at night.

No comments necessary…

“One of the many secrets to writing is paying attention to the small things in life. Making the micro macro.” - Andrew Miller

That rare moment when a bookseller has time to read…

A friend working in a national park in Lithuania shared this note with me, written in a guest book by visitors from Spain… “Visitors from Baeza, Jaen, in the Baltic countries, wish you a prompt integration into the USSR.” A tastless joke or…?

“The word 'freedom' gives rise to an important enticement, perhaps the most important enticement that can be expressed. We always wish to get away, and when there is no name for where we want to get to, when we do not know and there is no border in between, then we call it 'freedom'.” Elias Canetti

In case you had doubts about ChatGPT getting dumber.. got this comment today on a text that mentioned Saturday, July 26th. “Just one small detail: "Saturday 26/07" should be "Saturday 26/07" only if July 26 actually falls on a Saturday. But in 2025, July 26 is a Saturday, so you're good!”

Found my Proust’s madeleine…

“I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor.” Jia Tolentino writes about how the internet broke her brain.

For a happy several decades I seriously believed that ours were better times than ever.. www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-e...

Con lo que está pasando en el mundo, no es fácil dar con una lectura que nos recuerde que el humor (y el amor) puede sobrevivir a los años y tiempos difíciles. No es simplemente un intercambio de cartas entre Szymborska y Filipowicz: se cuelan también alter egos, personajes inventados.. y mucha luz.

¡Qué ganas de que llegue el miércoles, 25 de junio, ya! Jesús Alacid, el experto en la narrativa de Agustín Gómez Arcos, conversará con Laura Casielles de la editorial s@cabaretvoltaire.bsky.social sobre este autor incómodo y profundamente necesario. Apúntate aquí: agustingomezarcos.eventbrite.com

Os dejamos por aquí el resumen de eventos y actividades que hemos planificado para las próximas semanas / Here’s the summary of events and actitivies we’ve planned for the next weeks: libreriaparenthesis.substack.com/p/conversaci...

“There’s something hypnotic to aligning words, something addictive. That’s probably all there is to writing.” - Etel Adnan

It’s raining. #madrid

“Sometimes the best muse is the thing you’re so afraid of you almost cannot speak it.” - Jenny Odell, “Saving Time”

Just gifted myself a three year subscription to this beauty and I’m over the moon!

The cottage cheese sky of Madrid. No filters.

On my way from one faculty to another in my old university in Kaunas. I had forgotten how beautiful my hometown is.

“We are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world <..> on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Who writes villanelles these days? Boris does. And what a joy that is!