Category: Reading Baca
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On The Rush
Why a storyteller writes their story? One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates in dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page…
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dari meja pembaca
Tahun ini hampir selesai, dan saya ingin merangkum beberapa buku yang saya baca setahun ini. Rangkuman ini sama pentingnya seperti usaha melanjutkan tidur siang yang terpotong. Dan sama tidak pentingnya seperti empat jam tidur siang yang membuat sakit kepala. Berterimakasihlah pada suara adzan maghrib yang akhirnya membangunkan dan mengingatkan untuk berdoa. Namanya juga rangkuman, jadi…
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Sejenis Kekalahan
Baru-baru ini saya mengirim sebuah esai untuk sayembara kritik sastra. Nggak menang sih. Hehehe. Dan sebagai manusia emosionil, saya butuh beberapa menit buat mewek, lalu minta dipuk-puk Bram dan Pepe. Udah sih, gitu aja ceritanya. Hehe. Tapi daripada tulisannya mubazir cuman dibaca dewan juri, lebih baik saya taruh di blog. Sebagai tambahan pengantar, esai ini…
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Membicarakan Buku (Lagi)
Saya baru saja menyelesaikan kumpulan esai Alejandro Zambra, Not To Read (terjemahan Megan McDowell) dan ada satu jenis perasaan yang membuat saya frustrasi ketika membaca buku itu: rasa cemburu. Sebagai penulis Chile yang berhasil mengembangkan bentuk sastra young-adult kontemporer sambil tetap melanjutkan tradisi penulis-penulis Amerika Latin, Zambra memang penulis yang asik untuk kita telusuri cara…
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A Litany of Letting Go
Letter Five, paraphrased The I sounds her cries. “I am part of your fate. Whether our love is worth it or not is irrelevant. So what if there’s someone nicer than you or prettier than you–it doesn’t change a thing. Come and hurt me more. You still mean the same to me. I belong to…
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Vicente Rafael, “Contracting Colonialism”
Conversion is translation is conversion. Contracting Colonialism by Vicente Rafael is about the uneasy relationship between translation and conversion in the Spanish colonization of the Tagalog speakers of the Philippines from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. By reading curated Spanish and Tagalog sources during the period, Rafael examines “the impact of evangelization…
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Feeling Time
When Brigitta Isabella wrote her piece in May 2016, I was in the middle of preparing for my travel to Manchester, UK, to study international development. I, back then, had no serious interest in history as a question because I was still convinced I would do work on policy analysis and such and such. “1955,…
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Toni Cade Bambara, “Gorilla, My Love”
The joy of reading great, funny, and witty stories always overcome my sinister view of many things. I read Bambara’s short stories and writing this short note in bed as I’m currently struggling to recover from omicron. Her stories ease some pain, as I’m excited about the brilliance of her crafts. The plots, the style,…
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Natsuko Imamura, Lucy North (tr), “The Woman in the Purple Skirt”
What a thrill! A kind of thrill that makes me … oh no oh shit oh why. The Woman in the Purple Skirt was not a nameless character, but the narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, made her so (and herself too). We saw the Purple Skirt woman from the narrator’s eyes–she acted like…
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Merve Emre, “Paraliterary”
“Bad readers were not born; they were made,” wrote Merve Emre in her first book Paraliterary. She starts the discussion by citing Vladimir Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers” who, as a teacher, was frustrated with American readers’ aesthetic. But as Emre shows, the emergence of “bad readers” in the US was not so far…
Nik Setiadarma 