December belongs to Ziemeļnieks. There is frost already, snow and greyness alternate with insensible white, but people have not yet forgotten autumn's generosity, the orange of pumpkins, the red of apples, the roundness of cabbage heads. There is still plenty of everything, abundance of everything, and one can celebrate the solstice. Ziemeļnieks' poetry can be read at length, it is so melodic - but I wish to recall just one poem that is, in my view, timeless.
We read Vācietis' poetry not by cosily curling up on a sofa (as with Čaks), but by going outdoors in autumn, sitting down on grass already covered in frost, feeling the already sharp north wind on our cheeks, lingering in the dim yet lovely autumn sunlight like a mother's caress. I invite you to do the same!
October is, of course, Čaks. A Riga man to the bone, an urbanist, a singer of drainpipes and street girls, a self-made man, the misunderstood lover with his heart on the pavement. I caught myself thinking that I enjoy reading poems not published during a poet's lifetime. Perhaps because they are the most truthful, most bare, unpolished. They have not passed through the censorship of the author himself or the publisher's editor.
The book is easy to read, well-structured and full of key insights on building an effective website for commercial purposes. It is pleasing that such topics now appear not only as individual articles online, but are published as books in Latvian, by local authors themselves.
Attention is energy. When someone looks at you with love, they give you food - very refined food. [...] psychoanalysts make use of this need for attention, because a psychoanalyst is a professional provider of attention.
P. Petterson does not attempt to recount events, facts or his protagonist's life. Throughout the book the author conjures and describes the feelings that arose in the protagonist Trond as he endured, experienced and came to know the adult world. Flashes of memory run through the novel. And particularly important to Trond are memories of a certain summer...
A story about a family living in Britain. About the relationship between a sister and brother, about a mother and father, about the father's sister and about chance people - some of whom became family friends - about human weaknesses and the aspiration to live better. The story begins in the 1960s and continues until the protagonist Ella is around 30 years old.
Today we visited the publishing house Zvaigzne ABC in a reconstructed wooden building - the former studio of architect L. Šmits on Biķernieku Street - and also went on a tour of the adjacent printing house Poligrāfists. We had the opportunity to peek into the spacious warehouse rooms, filled to the ceiling with bales of books, as well as the workshops. Followed by conversations about and around books - already published ones, forthcoming ones, and planned ones.
Reading this book made me think about the value of the individual and their role in society, as well as the fact that the value of a person taken in isolation is quite considerably exaggerated in contemporary society. Yet the question of why the author chose a penguin as the supporting character made me think even more.
I knew him as the director of the Ludza Art School, a Latgalian poet and eccentric who, having invited one into his cramped studio where artistic disorder always reigned, could for hours speak of the beauty and power of the Latgalian word and the artistic soul of a Latgalian that must be preserved - written, painted, made into clay pots.
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