Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 98

Neal Stephenson’s comic book Cimarronin is set in 17th century Manila

Cimarronin: A Samurai in New Spain A disgraced outcast samurai living in early seventeenth-century Manila, Kitazume is contemplating ritual suicide when a divine force (of a sort) intervenes: Luis, a rogue Jesuit priest and Kitazume’s longtime friend. At Luis’s insistence, the samurai agrees to help smuggle a Manchu princess to Mexico. But little does he […]

Cryptic book spine verse

By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept under three flags. All that is love among the chickens. While the women are sleeping, dancing lessons for the advanced in age. When will there be good news?

Have a love-hate relationship with Girls

Mamet, Kirke, Dunham and Williams of Girls. More grist for hate-watchers: They are all children of famous people. I was so repelled by the characters that I had to watch the next episode in the hope that they had fallen onto some train tracks. And the next one, and the one after that. By the […]

Should we watch the new Cinderella?

So far we’ve heard only two types of comments: “Robb Stark’s pants!!!” “Cate Blanchett’s clothes!!!” And nothing about the movie itself. Do you recommend it? How is the niece from Downton Abbey, is she sufferable? Do the stepsisters…alter…their shoe sizes? We do owe Kenneth Branagh, who’s brought us Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, and now […]

By Jove, Thor and Toutatis! and other childhood cusswords

Supposedly all women turn into their mothers, and we thought we were spared because we don’t have children (never liked them, even as a child), but we live with cats and the youngest, Drogon, can be a pain. He’s extremely affectionate and hyperactive, and the other night while jumping from our desk he upset a […]

Art in the Park on Sunday

The name of the biscuit

Blue Kitchen was all out of Arrowroot (a.k.a. uraro) cookies. We were a little relieved, because once we start eating them we cannot stop. For snacking carbs, we bought a bag of thin square biscuits called Jacobina. They were a childhood merienda treat, like otap or rosquillos, but we never knew they were called jacobina. […]

Ursula K. Le Guin slams Kazuo Ishiguro for prejudice against fantasy. Updated with free book winner.

The Buried Giant is now available at National Bookstores, Php799. Ishiguro’s previous genre-ish novel Never Let Me Go, Php315. Ooh, major writers fighting. Well, Ursula Le Guin attacking and Kazuo Ishiguro defending. It started with this interview in the New York Times, in which the author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let […]

Ursula K. Le Guin slams Kazuo Ishiguro for prejudice against fantasy

The Buried Giant is now available at National Bookstores, Php799. Ishiguro’s previous genre-ish novel Never Let Me Go, Php315. Ooh, major writers fighting. Well, Ursula Le Guin attacking and Kazuo Ishiguro defending. It started with this interview in the New York Times, in which the author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let […]

Every movie we see #41: Stop it, Hugh Grant, just stop it.

Hugh Grant’s new movie The Rewrite isn’t terrible, we just wish it didn’t exist. It makes us feel old. Hugh Grant has always played adorable losers—in Four Weddings and A Funeral he was the friend who couldn’t find love, in Notting Hill he was the average guy who fell in love with the most famous […]