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1/24/2008

Better stranger than fiction

Principe e princesa e diretor da realeza na passarela chilena:

Prince and Princess and Hollywood director all here in Chile in less than a week. I just wrote a poem about a Francis Ford Coppola's movie and here he was, dear Francis in person, in Zapallar, a place I almost went last Sunday (a day before he arrived there). I decided for a more cultural entertainment and went to Santo Domingo instead to see a Mesolithic monument, "la Piedra del Sol" an heritage from the giants who lived in Patagonia, and mostly decimated by a cataclysm. As I am fascinated with history in general, especially when I can witness rocks that were once carved by ancient civilizations, I am dazzled to find so many fables. But all those stories were only able to survive throughout thousands of years by word of mouth. Hopefully that same force might protect them from the peril of an environmental destruction. Don't let me even start by saying that a Darwin frog only found in Chile and Argentina are an endangered species already.

While I typed my words on Bram Stocker's Dracula, "The Count", the movie director was here, so near, having lunch in Valparaiso, and touring around the Chilean winery "Casablanca" (nothing to do with the film, to be clear) which we passed on our way to San Antonio and with the name on the top of the mountain slightly resembling the Hollywood sign. And as I think about submitting my novel "The Royal Diary" there it comes the Royal Norwegian Couple to spend a day in Isla Negra, the place I went just last Sunday, and where the writer Pablo Neruda spent his last days. Besides his strange house, there he still lies, beside his wife, in a bedside (well, that phrase sounded accurate though quite odd). Actually there it lies a tomb with the couple, in a romantic view of the Pacific Ocean. Isn't that true that life is so much more impacting and exciting than any fiction? (A story that no television drama could surpass, or only a very skilled and imaginative writer's mind would ever be able to come up with: "Close Encounter of the First Kind") So let's open a bottle of a Chilean wine to celebrate life:

Cheers!

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