A sonnet by Lorca!
"The poet asks his love to write to him."
One of his sonnets of dark love.
In red ink, on my back, under my right shoulder blade.
Tattooed!
Tatuat: "Love of my bowels, long live death / in vain I wait for your written word...". Little skin is left for me to tattoo.
Here I see other verses...
"How much smell in the air, and the air takes it away." By Francisco Brines.
What does he put on the nape of his neck?
"By far, everything is more." Munoz Molina.
On the chest: "Bad Star".
And an epitaph by Manuel Machado for Alejandro Sawa.
Sawa, model for Max Estrella.
Luces de bohemia, by Valle-Inclán: I read it when I was 13, Max is my great anti-hero.
Read me this epitaph.
“Never a man more born for pleasure went to more direct pain. He is better to die and forget than to love and live ”.
Do you identify with it?
Yes: "It is more meritorious to leave than to achieve". I tattoo phrases that mark me.
Read me this other one.
"Whoever loves you, invents you". By Antonio Lucas. And tattooed on the sternum, where it hurts the most.
And here it says...
"Reading is finding what you weren't looking for". From Vila-Matas. "If I don't read, I've only lived", I paraphrase Annie Arnaux ("if I don't write, I've only lived"), because life is not enough.
A reader who gets a tattoo of what he's read?
Reader and professor of Literature.
A tattooed teacher! Do they allow it?
Fortunately, since I was born to teach, it is my vocation: either a teacher of Literature or nothing!
What do your students say?
Boys aged 12 to 16, from 1st to 4th ESO: they are curious and listen to me.
It's already a lot.
"You only have one chance to make a good first impression", says Carlos Marzal: this macaroni comb helps me educate them not to be macaroni.
And what do you want them to be?
Readers! If they read they will be virtuous and lucid citizens, Diderot proposed.
Do their tattoos encourage them to read?
They are motivated by my commitment to reading.
Does he show all his tattoos?
They see the visible. Like this one from the twin...
A boy with a cap: beautiful drawing.
Holden Caufield, from The Watchman in the Rye Field: a student, Ainoa, from the 2nd grade of ESO, drew him and I tattooed him.
And what do parents say?
Parents consent because they see their children defending me.
And the school management?
They defend me, and let me take the students one afternoon a week to the neighborhood bookstore: there, without screens, surrounded by books, just paper and pen, we write.
what do they write
stories And we read And we talk At the end of the course we will knit a book: Yarn tales, with its spine sewn with thread.
What other books would you recommend to readers of the first cycle of ESO?
Ahora lega el silencio, by Álvaro Colomer. And any work by the great Roald Dahl.
And which ones for the second cycle of ESO?
I wish to be punk, by Belén Gopegui. And Lord of the Flies, by Golding.
Month.
The house of Bernarda Alba, Lorca: it affects them more than them, the girls are more mature, more sponges... And much more sensitive to injustice.
Lorca has quoted me twice.
The best man in Spain, a true saint of friendship.
What is literature?
A consolation Help to survive.
And the tree next to Holden Caufield?
Illustrates the story The last leaf, by O. henry A woman looks at the tree through the window and says to her sister: "Tomorrow the last leaf will fall and I will die". A neighboring painter hears the conversation through the wall. This artist has not yet made his masterpiece... and sees this as his great opportunity.
What's he doing?
Paint a leaf on the tree at night. The leaf does not fall. And so he saves the woman's life.
L'art saves.
But painting at night has made our painter sick with pneumonia. And... he dies.
Oh... Do you identify with that painter?
I asked the students to read a book and one wrote to me on Sunday evening: "Professor, I loved the book. I cried a little at the end. And it's no joke."
And it's no joke.
This is my masterpiece! Maybe I save a life... I trust not at the expense of mine.
