The light was growing soft in the barn

Now it´s Curley's wife who relieves herself with Lennie and tells him that if some things had not been distorted she wouldn´t be there.

72 horas

Dear Fran,

Possibly the best thing that has happened to me in these last two years has been to join the painting workshop. I am living a kind of second youth that, unlike the first one, is providing me with experiences that I had never imagined before. Already the fact of going once a week to Carlos's workshop and being two and a half hours changing impressions and laughs — how little we laughed when we were young! — with my classmates, time passes without realizing it.

Don´t come in a place where you´re not wanted

There were still the noses of the males perceiving the smell of female when the narrator introduces us to Crooks. Crooks is a stable buck and also cripple, therefore he was the worker who spent more time in the same job. Steinbeck makes a correlation of the most naive? natural? between being disabled and moving from one ranch to another, from one city to another. Also, as he was accumulating personal belongings — he had a room for himself — this was a real nuisance every time he had to undertake a transfer.

You can have a pup if you want to

George is honest with Slim and tells him why he´s with Lennie. It was a responsibility that George assumed when Lennie´s aunt died and he was helpless. Although George admits that ‘Lennie´s a God damn nuisance most of the time’ has got used to his company. Somehow they complement each other. What one doesn´t have, the other has. And then he tells Slim what happened at Weed.

He ain´t much of a talker, is he?

On the second day, the narrator begins by describing the barracks with the bunk beds where workers can leave their belongings and rest.

I like beans with ketchup

The first six or seven pages have taken me to my neighbourhood and I couldn't help comparing the relationship between Lennie and George and the one between Mike and me.

New emperors

Celebrities like Trump, Putin and some Trump and Putin trainees have in common a self-esteem beyond doubt that rests primarily on the conviction that they belong to a select race and a country that deserves its Lebensraum - nowadays economic - because 'all nation needs enough space to meet its growth and ensure its survival.’

Against the tide

What´s philosophy for? The history? What can we do with our mother tongue?

Dear Fran,

my friend says goodbye to Estonia, returning to Tallinn and travelling to Rakvere

Godoy in Tartu

Dear Fran,

my friend also spent three days in Tartu. From there he tells me the following

Godoy in Pärnu

Dear Fran,

this is what my friend has sent me

Godoy in Haapsalu

Dear Fran,

I send you what my friend Godoy wrote about his stay in Haapsalu

Godoy in Tallinn

     Dear Fran,

     my friend Godoy has just arrived from Estonia and  has immediately sent me some photos and his first impressions about the country.

To the Lighthouse  

No thanks.

I just rejected a plastic bag. The pleasure of reading begins when I pick up the book from the bookshelf; no, before, when I look around the backs of books looking for a title that catches my attention, or maybe an author who hisses me.

Then I take it and take it home. The part of my body that begins to savour the reading begins with the fingertips of my fingers and the palm of my hand.

Passenger Z

     Dear Fran,

     I have to give you a good news.

     I have just been to the CODAC (Centro Olontense de Arte Contemporáneo) in Gibraleón and you know what I discovered?

Are you breathing too much mercury, Mr Trump?

On the EN125 road of the Algarve, just the right at the roundabout of Vila Nova de Cacela, you find a sign with the following message: Não há Planeta B.

Novos contos da Montanha

Era de sua natureza um tipo macambúzio, de olhos grandes e vidrados, boca rasgada e um espeso bigode a cair-lhe da cara.

It had to be shared

     Dear Fran,

     First of all, please, watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqVRcFQagtI

     Vidas e Vozes do Mar e do Peixe

     The first thing you can see when you enter Portugal through Ayamonte is a large sign with this message: Vila Real de S.to António cidade do iluminismo. With a map of the city divided into grids, with a large square in the urban centre.

O Projecto do Museu da Liberdade e da Resistência em Peniche

Although I have been very daring in many things, I have never had the courage to face face to face with an antiriot and I have to admit that the mere fact of seeing one of these individuals armed with all their clothing and weapons gives me physiological reactions that recommend me not to interfere too much in protests and demonstrations that could turn violent. I own up it.

We will always have Oslo

The columnist writes that the army seldom takes sides with democracy. Genetic issue He is also right when he says that the multitude, sooner or later, returns to his home, and I agree with him that where the crowd can be most effective is when deployed tactically against a specific, winnable goal.

Too big for his britches

What they could not take away from me in that fucking institution were the two drops of ingenuousness with which my mother bored me. Although, thinking about it, those two drops would come in the 'information' that my father had to contribute for me to present myself in this world. Because of them two, I have no doubt that my father was the most naïve. That's what I realized over the years.

A trip to La Puebla de los Infantes

    Last weekend I drove my lady to La Puebla de los Infantes.

    She had planned to meet with her cousins whom she had not seen since her aunt's funeral. So, after greeting her family members, I settled on with her to eat and in that way let them talk in privacy and I had time to take some pictures of the town.

Prisioner nº 32269 

In O Martírio de Ravensbrück, José Milhazes stops to give an account of the characteristics of this German concentration / extermination camp. Located 90 kilometres north of Berlin, Leida had the 'privilege' of being the first of a list of Estonian inmates who - heaped in a cattle train - travelled for seven days to the terrible scene of stinking crimes.

Os amados que dormem na eternidade

The longest chapter of the book is illustrated with photographs

    Casa clandestina de Ida e de Leida

Lista de envio para Ravensbrück. Leida Holm é a primeira

Gulag Vorkuta

Prisioneiros constroem camino-de-ferro

Campo de concentração de Ravensbrück

Barracão e crematório do campo de concentração de Ravensbrück

Residentes de Leninegrado recolhem agua de un cano destruído na Avenida Nevsky durante o cerco nazi a cidade. URSS,1941

     

Moroccan women in the strawberry fields

     It is born from a humble plant that you have to help to get up by putting some suspenders —at least that's how dad used to grow them in the sunniest corner of our farm— to take a little height and ventilate its tendrils and leaves. It is a delicious food.

Other circles

     Dear Fran,

     Today I have realized how little we value the people around us; that are our neighbours and whom we crossed the street for years and years with and that, suddenly, one day we miss.

Art. 58-8, terror

Gulag (Glavnoie Upravlenie Lagerei), acronym of Main Administration of Camps.

Photographs of the Blumthal family:

    Erich Sõerd and his mother

    Oskar Sõerd

    Erich and Leida 1930s

    Leida and her son, Jaak

    Liisa Ots Blumthal, Leida´s mother

    Linda's police portraits

    Helene-Marie

    Ida

    Adolf

…entre nazismo e comunismo, venha o diabo e escolha

A few weeks ago I was talking about an interview published in the newspaper Público with the writer José Milhazes about his book Os Blumthal. Today I write my impressions on the first pages of the author that reflect the first twenty-two years of Estonia independence.

Three acre

All springs are the same and different. Different because each year that your eyes pass have aged three hundred and sixty-one days. The same because the breeze, colour, aroma and light of this moment were repeated last year and the previous one and will be repeated next year and the next.

At home without mask

It´s not uncommon to hear stories like the one told by Ian Jack. Very often cases similar to what seems to be happened to his great grandmother are heard. And I say it happened to her great grandmother because it was really she who suffered it.

Truant student

I am ashamed that some teenagers will be ahead of those of us who already have an age, and we have also been responsible for "blackening" the future of these generations. What's going on?

Os Blumthal

God, how many people are disapointed with comunism! The Portuguese newspaper number 10513  (Público 03/02/2019) reproduces an interview between the journalist João Ruela Ribeiro and the writer of the book Os Blumthal, about one Estonian family.

Dear Fran,

 my painting teacher has de habit of putting some music on classes and has the skill to choose the one we like to all. It is usually a music that helps us to concentrate on what we are doing and enjoy, at the same time of two arts, or rather, in the art of music, because among all the classmates that we are in the workshop, we cannot say that what we do is art.

Epilogue

From the first words I warned you that reading the first three or four paragraphs you would have enough, curious reader. Do you remember the beginning of everything? 

Serins

Fran, dear Fran,

It is time of serins. The last days of January are involved in the joyful and unstoppable song of these little finches. Serins, as we call them —you call them chamarines, which apparently is a word that comes from Portuguese language— are little birds of a green similar to the wild canary and a little smaller than this one.

Don´t you believe in Providence? 

It was already after midnight when I went to bed. Yesterday I was watching a film on television: at the end of the Second World War, Russian soldiers had entered a Polish convent and had raped the nuns for several days.

Sigha  

«…le monde d´aujourd´hui ne ressemble pas à l´image que vous vous en faites! Ce nést pas vrai qu´il est dirigé par des forces obscures, omnipotentes!»

Fast food 

«De fait, nous sommes tous infinement plus proches de nos contemporains que de nos ancêtres. Serais-je en train d´exagérer si je disais que j´ai bien plus de choses en commun avec un passant choisi au hasard dans une rue de Prague, de Séoul, ou de San Francisco, que´avec mon propre arrière-gran-père?»