Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 31

My cat Saffy, 17 and 1/2, goes to the dentist

Update: Saffy has recovered fully and is eating twice as much as she used to. Saffy in her carrier I’ve just read this inspiring investigative report on the Online Cat-Industrial Complex, and I’m thinking of starting a new career as a feline interpreter. Having lived with cats for 19 years, I have figured out what […]

Japan is so exquisite it makes me feel like a barbarian

For schedules and details, visit the TPAM 2018 site. I was in Japan for three days to meet with our team for the World Domination Project, and to inspect the venues for our shows on February 16 and 17. For weeks I had been wracking my brains, unable to complete the script to my satisfaction, […]

Handmade and handwoven: Malong and pouches from Mindanao

I love traditional hand-made fabrics because they’re beautiful, distinctive, and locally-produced, and because there’s little probability that you will run into someone wearing or carrying the exact same thing. Over the years I’ve come to know the Ilokano textiles called inabel through the BLB—I have a whole bunch of abel blankets, and tote bags that […]

When you wish for a normal life and realize it doesn’t exist

Reine I’ve just reread Reine Melvin’s short story collection, A Normal Life, and was floored all over again. The writing is exquisite, the stories intense: she fillets her characters with a very fine blade. Most of the stories happen in the Philippines in the late 80s, and the revolutions and coups that were occurring at […]

100 Favorite Books, 2018 edition

100 Books, 2018 edition (authors listed in alphabetical order) The Oresteia, Aeschylus Without Feathers, Woody Allen Life After Life, Kate Atkinson The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden Persuasion, Jane Austen SPQR, Mary Beard Stalingrad, Antony Beevor HHhH, Laurent Binet The Decameron, Boccacio Any Human Heart, William Boyd Possession, A.S. Byatt The Baron in the Trees, […]

What are your personal projects for 2018?

I’m so eager for the new year to begin that I’ve been going around asking friends about their plans for 2018. You have to have projects, especially if you feel that the world is going to hell in a hand basket; otherwise you may as well bury yourself. (This would be a really good time […]

Reading is not a vice; fake-complaining about all the books I have to read is the vice.

Reading has been called the solitary vice (a title it shares with the more obvious one). I think the real vice that readers enjoy is fake-complaining about how many books we have in our backlog, how the stack of unread books on the bedside table grows higher and higher, and how half the floor has […]

Reading is not a vice, fake-complaining about all the books I have to read is.

Reading has been called the solitary vice (a title it shares with the more obvious one). I think the real vice that readers enjoy is fake-complaining about how many books we have in our backlog, how the stack of unread books on the bedside table grows higher and higher, and how half the floor has […]

Books of the Year, Angus Miranda’s pick: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Galignani Bookstore in Paris, two or three blocks from the Louvre Reader: Angus Miranda My favorite book this year is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. How predictable! Isn’t this the recent winner of the Man Booker Prize? Shouldn’t Americans be banned from the Booker? (I said that — JZ) And haven’t there been […]

ProBernal AntiBio is the best Filipino film book of the year, maybe of all time

I got my copy from Butch Perez at lunchtime, opened to page 1, and did not stop reading until I finished the whole book. So no work was done today, and it was a day very well spent. Intelligent, wicked, sometimes vicious (Bernal did not spare anyone, especially himself), this anti-biography is presented as a […]