They were not.

But they would be.

All his people, all his loves.

The dead walk. He was with them on the train. He had drunk with them, this evening. They carried him home; he was looking at them now. On the walls in black and white, but also in this bed, in full Technicolor. A child knows this, and is told to get over it. A famous Irishman knew it and made peace with it and said all that needs to be said on the matter. He was having trouble with it, basic as is may be. Ten years ago, Sarah’s sister had visited with her young children and Alex’s cousin Naomi refused to sleep in this room because she was scared of the dead ones on the walls. Everybody laughed, over breakfast. He had laughed. Everybody had laughed. Because it is wrong, says everyone, to take it so personally – and so he hadn’t, he was a grown man (this is probably what everybody means, he thought, by this stupid phrase; they mean Don’t take it personally, don’t take growing personally, being grown). He hadn’t taken it personally, not for years. He took it cinematically, or televisually – if he took it all.

grifos meus sobre The Autograph Man, da Zadie Smith.

When she woke from a post-coital nap that Saturday afternoon, in her bedroom under the eaves, the Amazing Cavalieri was standing in front of her scarf-draped mirror, looking with remarkable interest at his own naked reflection. Rosa pulled a pillow over her head and lay very still so that she could watch him watching himself. She could smell the trace os his breath in her own exhalations, the indeterminate but distinctive flavor of his lips, somehere between maple and smoke. At first, as she watched him, she thought that he was engaging in rank self-admiration, and since she considered his lack of vanity about his appearance – his ink-stained shirtfronts, rumpled jackets, and ragged trouser cuffs – to be itself a kind of vanity, one for which she loved him, she was amused. She wondered if he could see how much wight he had added to his long, spare frame over the last several months. When they had first started going out, he was so absorbed by his work that he rarely took time for meals, existing quite mysteriously on coffee and bananas, and as Rosa herself, to her considerable satisfaction, had begun to absorb Joe more and more, he had become a regular guest at her father’s dinner table, where there were never fewer than five courses and three different varieties of wine. His ribs no longer stuck out, and his skinny little-boy’s behind had taken on a manlier heft. It was as if, she thought, he had been engaged in a process of transferring himself from Czechoslovakia to America, from Prague to New York, a little at a time, and every day there was more of him on this side of the ocean. She wondered if this could be what he was looking at now – this evidence of his irrefutable existence here, on this shore, in this bedroom, as her Joe.

meus grifos sobre The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,  Michael Chabon

Ele brinca com a minha absorção das coisas, faz suspense, anuncia algumas coisas que logo conta e fala de outras corriqueiramente como se delas eu devesse saber, mas não sei (e nem saberei, pelo simples fato de ele querer que eu as descubra dentro de mim).

Enfim, o princípio é o mesmo de qualquer bom roteiro cinematográfico, o que talvez explique essa saciedade dramática que eu sinto. Tudo o que me resta agora é esperar as horas longínquas e infindáveis da madrugada e voltar pro ritmo paralelo daquele mundo que deixou de ser do senhor Kazuo e agora é (quase) todo meu.

Aí está o volume lindão de Zumbis – O Livro dos Mortos, livro do Jamie Russell que eu traduzi em parceria com o Érico Assis. Fala extensivamente, e com propriedade, sobre filmes de zumbi, desde as origens haitianas do monstro até os dias atuais. Leitura muito divertida.

Já está em pré-venda em vários lugares: Livraria Cultura Livrarias Curitiba Extra Cia. dos Livros Livraria da Folha

This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t
You try until you can’t
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath

Regina Spektor, On the Radio

Porque está anoitecendo?
Peço o contrario, ver o sol se por

uma paráfrase e uma brincadeira com o tempo.

confesso que me apaixonei por um pedaço do entardecer de sábado.