CuencaHighLife

LITERARY DEAD END DEPT.Making sense of it all baffles another great mind as critic and novelist David Foster Wallace abandons the quest

September 4th, 2008

By A.O. Scott Reviewing a biography of Jorge Luis Borges in The New York Times Book Review a few years back, David Foster Wallace attacked the standard biographical procedure of mining the lives of writers for clues to their work, and vice versa. Borges’s stories, he insisted, “so completely transcend their motive cause that the...

English-language bookstore ‘dries out’ in a new location and changes its name after disastrous El Centro fire

August 11th, 2008

It would be a stretch to say to that Carolina Bookstore is rising from the ashes of the former ABC Bookstore. It is more the case of being a victim of the ´trickle-down effect´ that forced the relocation and prompted the renaming of the store following a July 4 fire behind the cathedral. ¨We’re open for business,¨...

Do you like orchids? You´ll find thousands and thousands of them in Gualaceo

July 1st, 2008

One of the best sources for travel tips, especially for discovering off-the-beaten-path jewels, are travel blogs. The following is an entry posted earlier this year in Nancy and Chuck Watson’s blog. The Watsons have homes in Cuenca and in Washington state, where their children and grandchildren live. We went to Chordeleg, a small town about...

Cuenca’s famous Easter soup: the culinary approach to learning Spanish

June 29th, 2008

by Calvin Trillin, September 5, 2005 I try not to let a decade pass without renewing my assault on Spanish, which I keep hearing described as an easy language to learn. In the nineties, in preparation for a trip to northern Spain, I bought myself a videotape Spanish course in the form of a sixteen-episode...