Starting my blog

Whee!

First of all, be advised that my first language is Spanish. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, never traveled at all. Never had the chance of speaking English day in and day out.

Still, almost everything I read and watch is in English. I feel that my vocabulary is MUCH wider in it than in Spanish.

Plus, i am prejudiced against it.

I have come to believe, like Borges, that Spanish literature is somewhat retarded. (I would love to provide a link to this, but was unable to find it on the Net. I read it in some article a professor gave us, years ago.)

So cool, we get the crazy hidalgo. We get Macondo. We got El Cid.
Spanish literature is too tame!

Don Quijote fought windmills. Beowolf killed a dragon.

Macondo had decades of rain. Shakespeare had sex, drugs, violence and a choir of cross-dressers, all necesary ingredients for quality drama.

The most impressive thing El Cid Campeador does is take a loose lion and take it back to its cage. And when you think about it, the lion was probably captured early as a trophy, kept in a small, dark cage and badly fed. It might have been sick. Maybe the lion was so scared it actually wanted to go back.

Anyways, El Cid does not count 'cause it really happened.

What I would like to know is, where is our Hitchhiker's Guide to The Universe? Where is our Diskworld? Where our Arthurian mythology?

Where is our creative force?

I wish to become a writer someday. And of course I dream of writing something truly memorable. But this lack of collective creativity is so strange, that I sometimes wonder if Spanish lacks the vocabulary or flexibility that the literature I envision demands. (How do you translate into Spanish the word "parsec"?)

So, this is my half-hearted apology for going to the dark side and writing in English.