biberius caldius mero
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2012-05-18
Source: ayjay
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2012-05-13
El fotoreportero alemán Horst Faas murió el pasado 10 de mayo a los 79 años.
(via elvigueserrante)
Source: unahabitacionconvistas
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2012-05-12
Judith by Francis Picabia
I saw this in December at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, in an exhibition of Surrealist art. There was a lot of stuff I didn’t care for, but I really liked this one.
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2012-05-09
Read it and weep. Or laugh.
This is really relevant for me, because a lot of my students can’t “hear” the glottal stop, or don’t identify it as a sound, so I often have to overenunciate in a really unnatural and vaguely british way.
Source: ayjay
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2012-05-06
There is a slippage from “is” to “ought” in nearly all evolutionary theorizing, with arguments about natural behavior sliding into claims about the human good. It may be true—though any account of how precisely this occurred can at present be little more than speculation—that much of what we see as morality evolved in a process of natural selection. That does not mean that the results must be benign. Freud tried to develop a view of human nature in terms of which morality could be better understood; but he accepted that much that comes naturally to humans—such as sexual predation and other types of violence—had to be repressed in the interests of a civilized life. Civilization sometimes requires the repression of natural human traits, including some that may be sanctioned by prevailing moral codes. The moralities that have emerged by natural selection have no overriding authority.
— John Gray: The Knowns And The Unknowns | The New Republic (via ayjay)
Source: ayjay
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2012-05-02
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
-Barack Obama (!!!!!!!!!!)
(www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/06/young-barack-obama-in-love-david-maraniss)
I haven’t actually finished reading the whole excerpt on the VF website, and I don’t actually have any incisive comments on the contents of the quote above, but I had to post it anyway. As often when I read writers’ correspondence, I feel a mix of incredulity and inferiority. Why are the letters I write so stupid? As consolation, at least once in a while you come across letters like the one where Saul Bellow writes about his nightmare that he had mysterious Chinese characters inscribed on his penis.
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2012-04-29
For those of you who asked, here is the square crop of Venice III
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Source: elvigueserrante
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2012-04-27
Street scene in Lisbon, by W. Robert Moore, (1940’s)
Source: luzfosca
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2012-04-22
Las consultas más arduas eran las etimológicas, pero al poco, y llevado de la impaciencia y los deseos de agradar, no tuve reparo en ir inventando etimologías delirantes sobre la marcha y para salir del paso, en la confianza de que ningún alumno ni el colega de turno que me acompañaba tendrían nunca la curiosidad suficienta para comprobar más tarde lo verídico de mis contestaciones. (Y en el caso de que la tuvieran, estaba convencide de que también tendrían la compasión suficienta para no echarme el disparate en cara al siguiente día.) Así, ante preguntas que me antojaban tan malintencionadas y absurdas como cuál era el origen de la palabra papirotazo, no tenía inconveniente en ofrencer respuestas todavía más absurdas y peor intencionadas.
—Papirotazo, en efecto. A este tipo de golpe propinado con el dedo índice se lo llama así porque era de este modo como se golpeaban los papiros hallados en Egipto a comienzos del siglo xix para probar su resistencia y empezar a determinar su antigüedad.
Y al ver que nadie reaccionaba violentamente ni a nadie se le ocurría argüir que un solo papirotazo habría convertido en confetti cualquier papiro dinástico, sino que los alumnos tomaban nota y el colega inglés —aturdido sin duda por la grosera sonoridad de la palabra y tal vez embriagado por la repentina visión de un Egipto napoleónico— aprobaba mi explicación (‘¿Lo oyen ustedes? Papirotazo viene de la palabra papiro: pa-pi-ro, pa-pi-ro-ta-zo’), aún encontraba valor para insistir y completar la falsedad con una nota erudita.
—Es por tanto una palabra bastante reciente, que se asimiló a la más antigua capirotazo, como también se llama a este golpe doloroso y vejatorio —y hacía una pausa para ilustrar el vocablo con un papirotazo al aire—, por ser el mismo que se acostumbraba propinar a los penitentes encapuchados durante las procesiones de Semana Santa, en la punta de sus capuchas o capirotes, para humillarlos.
—Javier Marías, Todas las almas
Most arduous of all were the etymological questions, but before long, led by impatience and the desire to please, I had no alternative to inventing delirious etymologies on the fly in order to move on, in the assurance that none of the students, nor the colleague who I was with at the time, would ever have the necessary curiosity to verify how truthful my answers were. (And in the case that they did, I was convinced that they would have the necessary compassion to not throw my idiocies in my face the following day.) So, facing questions that seemed as malicious and absurd as to ask what was the origin of the word papirotazo, I had no objection to offering responses that were even more absurd and malicious.
“Papirotazo, precisely. This flick dealt with the index finger gets its name because this was the manner in which the papyruses discovered in Egypt at the beginning of the nineteenth century were flicked, in order to test their durability and begin to determine their age.”
And seeing that no one reacted violently, and that no one thought to point out that a single papirotazo would have reduced a dynastic papyrus to confetti, but rather that the students were taking notes, and my English colleague —surely stunned by the crude sound of the word and perhaps intoxicated by the sudden vision of Napoleonic Egypt— approved of my explanation (“Got that, everyone? Papirotazo comes from the word papiro: pa-pi-ro, pa-pi-ro-ta-zo”), I even found the courage to double down and finish off my lie on an erudite note:
“Therefore it is a a fairly recent word, which assimilated with the older capirotazo, which is another name for this painful and humiliating blow,” and I paused to illustrate the word with a papirotazo in the air, “since it was in the very same way that one would traditionally hit the masked penitents during the Holy Week processions, on the points of their conical hoods, to humiliate them.”
—Javier Marías, All Souls
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Source: jesuisjesus
