ALEXANDRE O'NEILL (1924-1986)

AOS VINDOUROS, SE OS HOUVER...

Vós, que trabalhais só duas horas
a ver trabalhar a cibernética,
que não deixais o átomo a desoras
na gandaia, pois tendes uma ética;

que do amor sabeis o ponto e a vírgula
e vos engalfinhais livres de medo,
sem peçários, calendários, Pílula,
jaculatórios fora, tarde ou cedo;

 computai, computai a vossa falha
sem perfurar demais vossa memória,
que nós fomos pràqui uma gentalha
a fazer passamanes com a história;

que nós fomos (fatal necessidade!)
quadrúmanos da vossa humanidade.  

Alexandre O'Neill, De Ombro Na Ombreira (1969)

The Story Of Food from USC Canada on Vimeo.

os sete samurais (1957) - Kurosawa

Lovis Corinth (1858-1925)

Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair  1919
Magdalena mit Perlenkette im Haar

por sugestão de um marcador de livros de 1997 da TateGallery.

"All Praise Be To God To Whom All Praise Is Due" John Coltrane

Jazz on a Summer's Day (1959) - o filme

"There is a parable on film of the changeover of power between jazz and rock and roll, in Jazz on a Summer’s Day — a hugely important film for aspiring rock musicians at the time, mostly because it featured Chuck Berry at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, playing “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The film had Jimmy Giuffre, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, but Mick and I went to see the man. That black coat. He was brought on stage — a very bold move by someone — with Jo Jones on drums, a jazz great.  Jo Jones was, among others, Count Basie’s drummer. I think it was Chuck’s proudest moment, when he got up there. It’s not a particularly good version of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” but it was the attitude of the cats behind him, solid against the way he looked and the way he was moving. They were laughing at him. They were trying to fuck him up. Jo Jones was raising his drumstick after every few beats and grinning as if he were in play school. Chuck knew he was working against the odds. And he wasn’t really doing very well, when you listen to it, but he carried it. He had a band behind him that wanted to toss him, but he still carried the day. Jo Jones blew it, right there. Instead of a knife in the back, he could have given him the shit. But Chuck forced his way through."

Life (Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor)) - Highlight Loc. 1643-46 

Love Streams - John Cassavetes

So Long Marianne - Bill Callahan

"Quem é contra o suicídio assistido e a eutanásia tem de admitir que há pessoas que, diante do sofrimento físico e da perspectiva de não sobreviverem desligadas de uma máquina, querem pôr fim à vida.

Gostaria de contribuir para que, no meu país, a indefinição que rodeia este assunto terminasse. A actual situação leva a que os que desejam suicidar-se, por motivos compreensíveis, se defrontem com dificuldades inúteis. Note-se que o suicídio, outrora tido como crime, é hoje aceite pelo Código Penal. É aliás o único acto em que alguém que participa num gesto legal é considerado cúmplice de um crime. No fundo, aqueles que precisam de ajuda para se suicidar não estão a pedir mais do que um direito concedido a toda a gente. Uma democracia laica, como é o caso de Portugal, deve respeitar os sentimentos que a fé religiosa faz brotar na alma dos crentes, mas não pode autorizar que seja ela, a fé, a ditar a formulação das leis. Os católicos têm o direito de se abster de actos que consideram pecaminosos, mas não podem impor aos outros os seus valores. (76)

De acordo com J. S. Mill, nenhuma questão, moral ou empírica, pode ser resolvida em absoluto, o que nos obriga a admitir que as nossas respostas deverão ser temporárias, pelo que temos de aceitar a sua revisão. A verdade, ou mais correctamente, a «maior» verdade - uma vez que, segundo ele, a Verdade nunca poderá ser atingida - surge do conflito entre as opiniões falsas e as verdadeiras (ou, seguindo-o, as mais falsas e as mais verdadeiras). Isto leva-o a defender que nunca se deve suprimir uma opinião, por mais chocante que seja, porque, se o fizermos, nunca chegaremos à mais justa. Mais do que noutros campos, é na moral que se torna necessário adoptar uma atitude humilde. (...)

É provável que morra nos próximos dez, quinze anos. Tenho filhos e netos, amei e fui amada, escrevi livros, ouvi música e viajei. Em princípio, poderia dar-me por satisfeita, o que infelizmente não me faz encarar a morte com placidez. Como Montaigne afirmou, com o tempo, o dilema Vida versus Morte vai-se transformando, num outro, Velhice versus Morte. Sei que as minhas células foram morrendo, as minhas articulações se tornaram rígidas e até o meu crânio diminuiu, mas nada disto conta quando se trata de pensar no fim. Se amanhã um médico me disser que sofro de uma doença incurável, terei um ataque de coração, o que, convenhamos, resolveria o problema. Mas, se isso não acontecer, quero ter a lei do meu lado." (80)

Maria Filomena Mónica, A Morte, FFMS, 2011.

Maria Filomena Mónica (MFM) é uma mulher que admiro. Aprecio a sua frontalidade, a sua sinceridade e o seu sentido de justiça. Identifico-me com ela quando diz que é liberal, anglo-saxónica e de esquerda por não ser de direita. 

Acontece que o livrinho que ela escreveu sobre o tema da morte assistida e da eutanásia está muito bem escrito. Coisa que, embora possa parecer fácil, não o é. Em poucas páginas, num tom descontraído e, muitas vezes, pessoal, é-nos dada uma visão cuidada das principais posições a ter em conta no debate sobre o complexo problema da eutanásia. Em Portugal são raros os ensaios sobre temas éticos que resultam bem. Recordo um outro texto bem intencionado, no caso sobre o aborto, escrito por Miguel Oliveira da Silva e intitulado Sete Teses Sobre o Aborto (Caminho, 2005). Apesar de esclarecedor nas questões médicas relacionadas com o aborto, acaba por resultar num texto confuso, de leitura arrastada e, ainda que não seja esse o seu propósito, pouco recomendável para ser trabalhado em aulas de ética. O contrário daquilo que se passa com o livro de MFM. Lê-se num ápice, é de uma clareza exemplar e é muito recomendável para ser lido por alunos de ética aplicada.

(LFB)

Master Song - Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo, from the album The Songs of Leonard Cohen Covered.

Ophelia, John E. Millais (1829-1896)

 

Por sugestão de Hélia Correia, hoje no Câmara Clara.

Saímos de casa para dar conta de que o mundo é sofrimento, tristeza, dor e morte!

Escola caverna

As escolas são cada vez mais como a caverna de Platão. Janelas fechadas, cortinas corridas e Powerpoints projectados. Se aceitarmos a analogia do sol/ conhecimento então estamos cada vez mais na escuridão/ignorância e adoramos as sombras projectadas. Acender a luz, abrir a janela e receber a luz do sol, ou até mesmo querer sair da sala, provoca dor e qualquer movimento nessa direcção merece reprovação imediata dos espectadores. Agrilhoados mas felizes.
É assustador pensar que todos os dias, à mesma hora e nos mesmos locais, milhares de crianças são lançadas na caverna da ignorância.

A imagem foi retirada daqui.

NY, NY

Nada como um bom prisma para libertar os olhos. (DO)

The Chomsky Reader

"There are things that I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature. In fact, I’ve been always resistant consciously to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history.

Loc. 324-26 

If I think back about my experience, there’s a dark spot there. That’s what schooling generally is, I suppose. It’s a period of regimentation and control, part of which involves direct indoctrination, providing a system of false beliefs. But more importantly, I think, is the manner and style of preventing and blocking independent and creative thinking and imposing hierarchies and competitiveness and the need to excel, not in the sense of doing as well as you can, but doing better than the next person. Schools vary, of course, but I think that those features are commonplace. I know that they’re not necessary, because, for example, the school that I went to as a child wasn’t like that at all.

Loc. 361-66

I think schools could be run quite differently. That would be very important, but I really don’t think that any society based on authoritarian hierarchic institutions would tolerate such a school system for very long. As Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have pointed out, it might be tolerated for the elite, because they would have to learn how to think and create and so on, but not for the mass of the population.

Loc. 366-69

I was planning to drop out to pursue my own interests, which were then largely political. This was 1947, and I had just turned eighteen. I was deeply interested, as I had been for some years, in radical politics with an anarchist or left-wing (anti-Leninist) Marxist flavor, and even more deeply involved in Zionist affairs and activities—or what was then called “Zionist,” though the same ideas and concerns are now called “anti-Zionist.” I was interested in socialist, binationalist options for Palestine, and in the kibbutzim and the whole cooperative labor system that had developed in the Jewish settlement there (the Yishuv), but had never been able to become close to the Zionist youth groups that shared these interests because they were either Stalinist or Trotskyite and I had always been strongly anti-Bolshevik. We should bear in mind that in the latter stages of the Depression, when I was growing up, and even in subsequent years to an extent, these were very lively issues.

Loc. 379-86

I was very strongly opposed to the idea of a Jewish state back in 1947–48. I felt sure that the socialist institutions of the Yishuv—the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine—would not survive the state system, as they would become integrated into a sort of state management and that would destroy the aspects of the Yishuv that I found most attractive.

Loc. 423-26

I didn’t have any affiliation to any group, the Zionist left or elsewhere. Partly it was that I’m not much of a “joiner,” I guess. Furthermore, every organization that I knew of, on the left at least, was Leninist, either Stalinist or Trotskyite. I was always very anti-Leninist, and I simply didn’t know of any group at all that shared my views. This was true of the Zionist left, and of much of the American left at the time, as far as I knew. This was the early forties that we’re talking about. Quite frankly I didn’t see any significant difference between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists, except that the Trotskyites had lost.

Loc. 442-47

The Jewish working-class culture in New York was very unusual. It was highly intellectual, very poor; a lot of people had no jobs at all and others lived in slums and so on. But it was a rich and lively intellectual culture: Freud, Marx, the Budapest String Quartet, literature, and so forth, That was, I think, the most influential intellectual culture during my early teens."

Loc. 462-65

Nunca me revi nas teorias políticas de Noam Chomsky. Depois de ler a entrevista aqui citada fiquei a perceber melhor porquê. LFB

Teenagers

"The record wormed its way into the top twenty, and suddenly, in a matter of a week or so, we’d been transformed into pop stars. This is very difficult with a bunch of guys that are really like “get outta here,” you know, “fuck off.” And suddenly they’re dressing us up in dogtooth-check fucking suits and we’re rushed along on the tide. It was like a tsunami. One minute, hey, you wanted to make a record, you’ve made a record and it’s in the goddamn top twenty, and now you’ve got to do Thank Your Lucky Stars. TV you’d never thought about. We were propelled into show business. Because we were so anti-showbiz, it was the cold shoulder to us, enough already. But then we realized that we did have to make certain concessions.

Loc. 1923-28

We don’t want to be some fucking ersatz Beatles. Shit, we’ve worked this hard to be a very, very good blues band. But the money’s better, and suddenly with the size of the audience, like it or not, you’re no longer just a blues band, you’re now what they’re going to call a pop band, which we despised.

Loc. 2006-8 

I’d say, we never finished a show. The only question was how it would end, with a riot, with the cops breaking it up, with too many medical cases, and how the hell to get out of there. The biggest part of the day was planning the in and the out. The actual gig you didn’t even get to know much about. It was just mayhem. We came there to listen to the audience! Nothing like a good ten, fifteen minutes of pubescent female shrieking to cover up all your mistakes. Or three thousand teenage chicks throwing themselves at you. Or being carried out on stretchers. All the bouffants awry, skirts up to their waists, sweating, red, eyes rolling. That’s the spirit, girl. That’s the way we like ’em. On the set list, for what it was worth, we had “Not Fade Away,” “Walking the Dog,” “Around and Around,” “I’m a King Bee.”

Loc. 2017-23

We used to play “Popeye the Sailor Man” some nights, and the audience didn’t know any different because they couldn’t hear us. So they weren’t reacting to the music. The beat maybe, because you’d always hear the drums, just the rhythm, but the rest of it, no, you couldn’t hear the voices, you couldn’t hear the guitars, totally out of the question. What they were reacting to was being in this enclosed space with us—this illusion, me, Mick and Brian. The music might be the trigger, but the bullet, nobody knows what that is. Usually it was harmless, for them, though not always for us. Amongst the many thousands a few did get hurt, and a few died. Some chick third balcony up flung herself off and severely hurt the person she landed on underneath, and she herself broke her neck and died. Now and again shit happened. But the limp and fainted bodies going by us after the first ten minutes of playing, that happened every night. Or sometimes they’d stack them up on the side of the stage because there were so many of them. It was like the western front. And it got nasty in the provinces—new territory for us.

 Loc. 2030-37

Hamilton in Scotland, just outside of Glasgow. They put a chicken wire fence in front of us because of the sharpened pennies and beer bottles they flung at us—the guys that didn’t like the chicks screaming at us. They had dogs parading inside the wire. The wire mesh was quite common in certain areas, especially around Glasgow at that time.

Loc. 2037-40 

“Very good show. Not a dry seat in the house.”

 Loc. 2046

The ’50s chicks being brought up all very jolly hockey sticks, and then somewhere there seemed to be a moment when they just decided they wanted to let themselves go. The opportunity arose for them to do that, and who’s going to stop them? It was all dripping with sexual lust, though they didn’t know what to do about it. But suddenly you’re on the end of it. It’s a frenzy. Once it’s let out, it’s an incredible force. You stood as much chance in a fucking river full of piranhas. They were beyond what they wanted to be. They’d lost themselves. These chicks were coming out there, bleeding, clothes torn off, pissed panties, and you took that for granted every night. That was the gig. It could have been anybody, quite honestly. They didn’t give a shit that I was trying to be a blues player.

Loc. 2048-53

One minute no chick in the world. No fucking way, and they’re going la la la la la. And the next they’re sniffing around. And you’re going wow, when I changed from Old Spice to Habit Rouge, things definitely got better. So what is it they want? Fame? The money? Or is it for real? And of course when you’ve not had much chance with beautiful women, you start to get suspicious. I’ve been saved by chicks more times than by guys. Sometimes just that little hug and kiss and nothing else happens. Just keep me warm for the night, just hold on to each other when times are hard, times are rough. And I’d say, “Fuck, why are you bothering with me when you know I’m an asshole and I’ll be gone tomorrow?” “I don’t know. I guess you’re worth it.” “Well, I’m not going to argue.”

Loc. 2058-64

The first time I encountered that was with these little English chicks up in the north, on that first tour. You end up, after the show, at a pub or the bar of the hotel, and suddenly you’re in the room with some very sweet chick who’s going to Sheffield University and studying sociology who decides to be really nice to you. “I thought you were a smart chick. I’m a guitar player. I’m just going through town.” “Yeah, but I like you.” Liking is sometimes better than loving.

Loc. 2064-67 

By the late ’50s, teenagers were a targeted new market, an advertising windup. “Teenager” comes from advertising; it’s quite cold-blooded. Calling them teenagers created a whole thing amongst teenagers themselves, a self-consciousness. It created a market not just for clothes and cosmetics, but also for music and literature and everything else; it put that age group in a separate bag. And there was an explosion, a big hatch of pubescents around that time. Beatlemania and Stone mania. These were chicks that were just dying for something else. Four or five skinny blokes provided the outlet, but they would have found it somewhere else.

Loc. 2067-72

The power of the teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they’re in a gang, has never left me. They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them—it’s hard to express how frightening they could be. You’d rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than to be faced with this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is—it’s unknown even to them. The cops are running away, and you’re faced with this savagery of unleashed emotions.

Loc. 2072-76

I think it was Middlesbrough. And I couldn’t get in the car. It was an Austin Princess, and I’m trying to get in the car and these bitches are ripping me apart. The problem is if they get their hands on you, they don’t know what to do with you. They nearly strangled me with a necklace, one grabbed one side of it, the other grabbed the other, and they’re going, “Keith, Keith,” and meanwhile they’re choking me. I get hold of the handle and it comes off in my hand, and the car goes zooming off, and I’m left with this goddamn handle in my hand. I got left in the lurch that day. The driver panicked. The rest of the guys had gotten in the car, and he just wasn’t going to stick around any longer. So I was left in this pack of female hyenas. Next thing, I woke up in this back alley stage door entrance, because the cops had obviously moved everyone on. I’d passed out, I’d suffocated, they were all over me. What are you going to do with me now you’ve got me?

Loc. 2077-83

Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor), Life, kindle.

black motherfuckers

"And we didn’t want to make money. We despised money, we despised cleanliness, we just wanted to be black motherfuckers. Fortunately we got plucked out of that. But that was the school; that’s where the band was born.

Jimmy Reed was a very big model for us. That was always two-guitar stuff. Almost a study in monotony in many ways, unless you got in there. But then Jimmy Reed had something like twenty hits in the charts with basically the same song. He had two tempos. But he understood the magic of repetition, of monotony, transforming itself to become this sort of hypnotic, trancelike thing.

Minimalism has a certain charm. You say, that’s a bit monotonous, but by the time it’s finished, you’re wishing it hadn’t. There’s nothing bad about monotony; everyone’s got to live with it."

Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor), Life, kindle.

Cyclops, Odilon Redon

 Por sugestão de Bolaño, 2666, "A parte dos críticos".

Ortografia

A palavra «ata» para referir uma acta é uma palavra muito feita.

E sabiam que Angola e Moçambique não assinaram o acordo?

E como ler as palavras  folheto, amuleto, esqueleto?

quem sou eu?

"(...) Agora os cientistas querem conduzir um teste final.

Querem duplicar um ser humano e escolheram-nos para essa honra. Se concordarmos, será feita uma cópia nossa que terá as nossas memórias, crenças, desejos e personalidade. Ela acreditará que somos nós e ninguém - nem mesmo os nossos amigos e familiares mais próximos - será capaz de notar a diferença. Para todos os efeitos práticos, ela será nós. Há apenas um senão: não podemos ter dois nós por aí, pelo que, depois de o procedimento estar concluído, o «eu» original será destruído e o novo «eu» continuará a viver como antes. Pagar-nos-ão um milhão de euros pelo incómodo.

Aceitaríamos a proposta? (...)

(Rachels, J., Problemas da Filosofia, Gradiva, p. 94)

Ícaro

Para quem gosta de comer comida americana, também pode ver aqui.

Se não mudamos por razões éticas pode ser que mudemos pela nossa saúde, enquanto a tivermos.

NOSFERATU

2081

a música e a existência de Deus

"Se eu alguma vez morrer, queira Deus que não, que seja este o meu epitáfio:

A ÚNICA PROVA DA EXISTÊNCIA DE DEUS 

DE QUE ELE PRECISAVA 

ERA A MÚSICA

(...)

A música faz quase toda a gente gostar mais da vida do que seria possível sem ela. Até as bandas militares, embora eu seja um pacifista, conseguem sempre animar-me. Eu gosto realmente de Strauss e de Mozart  e disso tudo, mas a dádiva inestimável que os afro-americanos deram ao mundo quando ainda eram escravos foi uma dádiva  tão grande que é hoje praticamente a única razão pela qual muitos estrangeiros ainda gostam de nós, pelo menos um bocadinho. Esse remédio específico para a epidemia mundial da depressão é uma dádiva chamada blues."

(Kurt Vonnegut, Um Homem sem Pátria, 76-77)

A propósito de muitas outras coisas e do filme  2081. Uma adaptação do conto "Harrison Bergeron" de Vonnegut. 

todos os sons do universo

"Se tentássemos escutar todos os sons do universo de uma só vez isso seria ensurdecedor. Todos os múltiplos significados se anulariam mutuamente. Ouviríamos o caos do ruído branco em vez da única verdade escondida de um universo racional. Isto é em tudo semelhante àquilo que aconteceria se tentássemos ver todas as cores do mundo de uma só vez. Pareceria uma coisa com sentido, seríamos levados a averiguar qual era esse sentido, mas enlouqueceríamos durante a busca. Porque, quando é universal, é ensurdecedor, é um caos; e embora este caos seja a natureza derradeira do universo, nós só podemos sondá-lo olhando de uma perspectiva de cada vez."

Um mundo iluminado, de H. Dreyfus e S. D. Kelly (194)

A queda

"Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by the expression "the fall into the quotidian". When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?"

Saul Bellow, Herzog.

La vida es sueño, Calderon de la Barca

Damon Horowitz: Filosofia na prisão

cartazes dos artistas de Terezin

 Copiado daqui.

" 'Man liveth not by Self alone but in his brother's face. ... Each shall behold the Eternal Father and love and joy abound.' When the preachers of dread tell tou that others only distract you from metaphysical freedom then you must turn away from them. The real and essencial question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us. Without this true employment you never dread death, you cultivate it. And consciousness when it doesn't clearly understand what to live for, what to die for, can only abuse and ridicule itself." (272-3)

Saul Bellow, Herzog. 

Quotations

"The whole of a life may be summed up in a momentary appearance."

Sunsan Sontag, On Photography, p.159.

 

 Copiado daqui. 

Os artistas de Terezin

"(...)
Quando o jovem e brilhante condutor Rafael Schächter conduziu o Requiem, o próprio Eichmann foi à estreia, acompanhado pelo seu ajudante, o capitão Moes das SS, o homem que era conhecido entre os judeus como "o pássaro da morte". Uma descrição do incidente descreve um Eichmann confuso, perdido, entrando como que numa espécie de devaneio quando os seus Judeus cantaram Dies Irae, Lebera me, libera nos! Em muitos alemães há, em relação às artes, uma boa dose de diletantismo, de amadorismo. Penso que reagiram com curiosidade diletante ao florescimento das artes em Terezin. Permitiram os concertos, as palestras, a biblioteca, os espectáculos e, por vezes, parecia que os incentivavam.
Mas quando a arte se tornou um adversário, tinha que ser esmagada. (...)"

Gerald Green, The Artists of Terezin, Schocken Books, 1978, p.32-35, tr LFB)

Os artistas de Terezin

Os fóruns taurinos

Corre, no ciberespaço regional, um protesto contra o "II fórum da cultura tauromáquica" a acontecer na ilha Terceira, no próximo fim-de-semana. Os convidados são, como no primeiro que até incluiu um filósofo, de alto nível. Pena é que nunca se tenham lembrado de convidar alguém que discorde da cultura taurina. A ausência de contraditório é sempre criticável, ainda para mais num fórum.

Dizem-nos que devemos protestar contra a realização do fórum porque esse acto será mais um passo para a aprovação da sorte de varas e, posteriormente, para as aceitação das corridas de morte.

Querer impedir a realização do fórum é como querer impedir as crianças de jogar jogos violentos no computador, porque se tornarão pessoas violentas e anti-sociais.

Até pode ser verdade que os defensores das touradas pretendam voltar a submeter, no parlamento regional, nova proposta legislativa, mas ninguém pode ser condenado por coisas que ainda não fez (se bem que o filme Repórter Minoritário coloca questões éticas pertinentes sobre o tema). Ainda para mais, a discussão sobre a cultura dos toiros - o exercício da liberdade de expressão - não provoca sofrimento a ninguém, se descontarmos o causado aos autores do protesto.

É verdade que as campanhas pró-toiro, desde que a tentativa de legalização da sorte de varas chumbou no parlamento regional, têm sido de elevada qualidade. O I fórum, o grande monumento ao toiro, os prémios em Espanha, os outdoors com os Açores suportando os cornos da europa e das américas, etc.

Outra questão, porventura mais importante e também realçada no referido protesto, é a de o Fórum  ser pago com dinheiros públicos. Por um lado, gostaríamos que a aplicação dos dinheiros públicos fosse melhor gerida e é defensável que os dinheiros públicos não devem ser usados para suportar tertúlias que organizam eventos contestáveis. Por outro lado, compreendemos (mas não apoiamos) pois a política vigente tem sido a de apoiar tudo o que possa oferecer alguma recompensa política; desde telenovelas na TVI, a edição de discos e dvd's, a congressos de todo o género, a monumentos desmesurados  e a jornais (já agora aproveito: se os jornais regionais são subsidiados publicamente, não deveriam estar disponíveis gratuitamente na internet?). Aquele que estiver disposto a dispensar o seu apoio que se levante e atire a primeira pedra!

Recusar esse apoio seria indefensável para um governo que, pelo menos até 2013, tudo apoia.

O ponto mais importante da discussão ética sobre o sofrimento animal volta a estar ausente. É que a questão do sofrimento dos toiros é mínima quando comparada com o sofrimento dos animais que são barbaramente criados para alimentação. E as coisas não são separáveis como muitos, fugindo a sete pés da questão, querem crer. As vacas, os porcos e as galinhas sofrem muito mais durante a sua curta vida e de maneira mais cruel do que qualquer toiro. Este sofre, é verdade, mas na maior parte dos anos da sua vida vive bem e sem dor. O mesmo já não se pode dizer dos outros (outra nota: anda aí um curioso outdoor ( fora da porta?) que diz que determinado produto vem da vaquinha que eu conheço; um dia escreverei sobre essa vaca). Portanto, se queremos diminuir o sofrimento, o melhor é começar por, ou simultaneamente, incentivar o abandono da alimentação baseada em carne produzida em regimes intensivos.

Da mesma maneira que não se pode proibir, sem mais nem menos, as pessoas de comerem carne vinda de animais criados de forma cruel - não se pode impedir que a criança jogue ao computador enquanto come um cachorro quente e o pai escreve um mail de protesto contra as touradas - também não se pode proibir, tout court, a existência de uma cultura taurina. Talvez se devesse começar por defender uma idade mínima de admissão a esses espectáculos e uma informação clara e rigorosa sobre a natureza da sua violência. Se os filmes e até os livros têm idade mínima permitida, porque não hão-de ter as touradas?

(LFB)

Quotations

"Fiz um esforço incessante para não ser ridículo, para não me lamentar, para não escarnecer das acções humanas e para as compreender." 

Baruch Spinoza

Hitchens on Sebald

(...)

In a reckoning so ironic and fateful that even Faustus himself might have gasped at it, he and his wife were saved by the immolation of Dresden, on February 13 and 14, 1945, beginning just a few hours after they had been informed that all remaining Jewish spouses must report for deportation, which they both understood to be the end. The now overworked word “holocaust” means literally “destruction by fire”: The old Klemperer couple escaped holocaust in one sense by passing through it in another. On the smoldering morrow they took advantage of the utter havoc, removed Victor’s yellow star, and set off on foot toward survival and, ultimately, liberation.

(...) 

Can the survival of the Klemperers, weighed on a scale of ultimate judgment, balance or cancel the mass killing in Dresden? This is, without its being defined quite so strenuously, the question confronted by the author of On the Natural History of Destruction.

(...)

Looking over Sebald’s evocative paragraphs, though, I find that I pause immediately at the terse way in which he says “war of annihilation.” I also wince a bit at the way he mourns the Luftwaffe crew slightly more than he regrets the “raid” on Norwich. I don’t do this, I trust, for any insular or tribal reason. In a letter left for his sons, the late Heinrich Böll told them that they would always be able to tell everything about another German by noticing whether this fellow citizen, in conversation, described April 1945 as “the defeat” or as “the liberation.”

 (...)

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the most astute and mordant of the German critics, phrased it more dialectically when he argued that this very docility was a source of strength. “The mysterious energy of the Germans” could not be understood, he wrote, “if we refuse to realize that they have made a virtue of their deficiencies. Insensibility was the condition of their success.” The British liked to put this in an unworthily scornful tone. The Germans, one used to hear it said in my father’s circles, are either at your throat or at your feet … But Sebald’s well-chosen excerpts from Janet Flanner’s reportage, and from the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, suggest a missing element of German stoicism. Dagerman noticed that he could easily be identified as a foreigner on a train passing through the leveled city of Hamburg because he was the only one staring out the window.

(...)

do ensaio: "W. G. Sebald: Requiem for Germany", 2003.

Christopher Hitchens on Nabokov

(...)

I once read of an interview given by Roman Polanski in which he described listening to a lurid radio account of his offense even as he was fleeing to the airport. He suddenly realized the trouble he was in, he said, when he came to appreciate that he had done something for which a lot of people would furiously envy him. Hamlet refers to Ophelia as a nymph (“Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered”), but she is of marriageable age, whereas a nymphet is another thing altogether.

(...)

But, just as Humbert’s mind is on a permanent knife-edge of sexual mania, so his creator manages to tread the vertiginous path between incest, by which few are tempted, and engagement with pupating or nymphlike girls, which will not lose its frisson. (You will excuse me if, like Humbert, I dissolve into French when euphemism is required.) For me the funniest line in the book—because it is so farcical—comes in the moment after the first motel rape, when the frenzied Humbert, who has assumed at least the authority and disguise of fatherhood, is “forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was she up to something downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to suggest the abandoned nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter, instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores.” None of this absurdity allows us to forget—and Humbert himself does not allow us to forget—that immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of subsequent rapes, the little girl weeps for quite a long time …

(...)

But, just as Humbert’s mind is on a permanent knife-edge of sexual mania, so his creator manages to tread the vertiginous path between incest, by which few are tempted, and engagement with pupating or nymphlike girls, which will not lose its frisson. (You will excuse me if, like Humbert, I dissolve into French when euphemism is required.) For me the funniest line in the book—because it is so farcical—comes in the moment after the first motel rape, when the frenzied Humbert, who has assumed at least the authority and disguise of fatherhood, is “forced to devote a dangerous amount of time (was she up to something downstairs?) to arranging the bed in such a way as to suggest the abandoned nest of a restless father and his tomboy daughter, instead of an ex-convict’s saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores.” None of this absurdity allows us to forget—and Humbert himself does not allow us to forget—that immediately following each and every one of the hundreds of subsequent rapes, the little girl weeps for quite a long time … How complicit, then, is Nabokov himself? The common joking phrase among adult men, when they see nymphets on the street or in the park or, nowadays, on television and in bars, is “Don’t even think about it.” But it is very clear that Nabokov did think about it, and had thought about it a lot. An earlier novella, written in Russian and published only after his death—The Enchanter—centers on a jeweler who hangs around playgrounds and forces himself into gruesome sex and marriage with a vache-like mother, all for the sake of witnessing her death and then possessing and enjoying her twelve-year-old daughter.

do ensaio:  "Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita", 2005.

Christopher Hitchens on Bellow

(...) How had Bellow managed to exert such an effect on writers almost half his age, from another tradition and another continent? Putting this question to the speakers later on, I received two particularly memorable responses. Ian McEwan related his impression that Bellow, alone among American writers of his generation, had seemed to assimilate the whole European classical inheritance. And Martin Amis vividly remembered something Bellow had once said to him, which is that if you are born in the ghetto, the very conditions compel you to look skyward, and thus to hunger for the universal."

(...)

"Perhaps the best illustration of nobility that Bellow offers is Augie March’s brief glimpse of Trotsky in Mexico, from which he receives a strong impression of “deepwater greatness” and an ability to steer by the brightest stars. Bellow himself had arrived in Mexico in 1940, just too late to see Trotsky, who had been murdered by a hireling assassin the morning they were meant to meet. Like Henderson, Trotsky was a man upon whom life had “decided to use strong measures.” The founder of the Red Army was also the author of Literature and Revolution and a coauthor of Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art. In his own person he united the Jew, the cosmopolitan, the man of ideas, and the man of action. And the speed with which Bellow learned from the experience of Trotsky’s murder is a theme in several of his fictions."

 

“Ghetto nothing!” Ravelstein said. “Ghetto Jews had highly developed feelings, civilized nerves—thousands of years of training. They had communities and laws. ‘Ghetto’ is an ignorant newspaper term. It’s not a ghetto that they come from, it’s a noisy, pointless, nihilistic turmoil.”

(...)

do ensaio:"Saul Bellow: the great Assimilator", 2007..

A função dos livros

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.”

Abraham Lincoln

Anti-Beatles

"The irony is that Oldham, at the start, the great architect of the Stones’ public persona, thought it was a disadvantage for us to be considered long-haired and dirty and rude. He was a very pristine boy himself at the time. The whole idea of the Beatles and the uniforms, keeping everything uniform, still made sense to Andrew. To us it didn’t. He put us in uniforms. We had those damn houndstooth, dogtooth check jackets on Thank Your Lucky Stars, but we just dumped them immediately and kept the leather waistcoats he’d got us from Charing Cross Road. “Where’s your jacket?” “I dunno. My girlfriend’s wearing it.” And he did cotton on real quick to the fact that he’d have to go with it. What are you going to do? The Beatles are all over the place like a fucking bag of fleas, right? And you’ve got another good band. The thing is not to try and regurgitate the Beatles. So we’re going to have to be the anti-Beatles. We’re not going to be the Fab Four, all wearing the same shit. And then Andrew started to play that to the hilt."

Keith Richards and James Fox (Contributor), Life, kindle.

A inquisição e a modernidade

(...) What we now refer to as the Inquisition, with a capital “I,” was begun by Pope Gregory IX in 1231 when he appointed “inquisitors of heretical depravity” — usually Dominican friars — to root out those who disputed the Vatican’s authority. They started with the Cathars, members of a Christian sect, who were ruthlessly eradicated from their stronghold near the Pyrenees. The inquisitors then ventured further afield to enforce the pope’s dictates, particularly against conversos, Jewish converts, and secondarily, Christianized Muslims, Protestants and freethinkers.

Persecution is as old as man. What distinguishes inquisitions are communications, bureaucracy and single-mindedness. It is the last feature that gives rise to what Mr. Murphy calls “the inquisitorial impulse.”

“Moral certainty ignites every inquisition and then feeds it with oxygen,” he writes. But to keep it going, one must also have an organized bureaucracy that establishes a set of repressive procedures that are formalized in law and enforced by an institutional power.

“Moral certainty ignites every inquisition and then feeds it with oxygen,” he writes. But to keep it going, one must also have an organized bureaucracy that establishes a set of repressive procedures that are formalized in law and enforced by an institutional power.

Mr. Murphy notes that the Inquisition walked hand in hand with civilization. In earlier times Rome would be largely unaware of deviant views elsewhere. But once a code of canon law and an administrative infrastructure began to take form, “questionable beliefs could be examined against codified standards,” he writes. “Casual remarks could be sorted into pre-existing categories of nonconformity.”

Inquisitors like Bernard Gui (who appears in Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose”) and Nicholas Eymerich created manuals that outlined model sermons, methods of interrogation and a range of punishments, from wearing a yellow cross to death.

Gui meticulously recorded his expenses, like the wood, stakes, ropes and manpower required for burning four heretics. But it is the similarities between the medieval prosecutorial strategies — play good cop, bad cop; instill a sense of futility; use rapid-fire questioning — and the United States Army interrogation manual that are chilling.

Sobre o livro de Cullen Murphy, GOD’S JURY - The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World,

by P. Cohen, The New York Times,  January 18, 2012.

Bill T. Jones

(...) Mr. Jones is among a handful of choreographers who have found success in very different forms and with different audiences, said Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce Theater, citing Twyla Tharp and Garth Fagan as other examples. “He does it, and he does it well,” Ms. Shelton said of Mr. Jones’s balancing act. “He’s one of the few and he’s been quite successful — two Tony Awards and he is still able to maintain a dance company.” In the world that shaped him (and Mr. Cage, whose centennial is celebrated this year), there was a seemingly unbridgeable divide between what might be called popular and more highbrow culture, Mr. Jones suggested. “I don’t think that’s true anymore,” he said. “My listening tastes, films I see, my friends and I, we love action movies, we love anything that’s mythological or fantastic, we go for special effects.” He added: “How much can you pull an audience along? I don’t know. I believe in the new Broadway, I believe it’s possible, that’s why I’m here.”...

 by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, January 18, 2012

Carlos M. Couto S.C.

VIII. TEMPO

I. ES-FINGE: EM HOMENAGEM

no teu susto já nada se sente de febre roxa e insónia

em oiro de categoria ela escorre e corre em pranto 

ela morre no crispado

desdém de uma elegia

por sob espessa densidão de sombra fria

no teu susto imagina-se a carne das cores endoidecidas      [no teu rosto]

em ferida ruiva de ether e sem a piedade do dom oh

minhas letras sempre rasgadas e ofendidas

sem som

que pesadelo tão só consentido pelo esquema

carrocel partido?

regressarmos ao susto antigo?

onde estou eu que nada me aloira já?

gostava tanto de poder tocar-te

de sentir, no fim.

A educação pela multa

Primeiro, a nível nacional, declara-se a obrigatoriedade de permanecer na escola até aos 18 anos de idade. Como se uma pessoa a partir dos 15 anos não pudesse escolher o que quer, mesmo que isso vá contra os melhores princípios do socialismo. Como se não houvesse coisas melhores para fazer no mundo que não permanecer, na maior parte do tempo, sentado e calado. O Mundo está, felizmente, cheio de pessoas que abandonaram o ensino secundário e conseguiram vingar na vida. Ken Robinson quase que afirma que foi por causa de terem abandonado a escola, tão má que ela pode ser.

Segundo, a nível regional, multa-se os encarregados de educação dos alunos que faltam às aulas. É como prender uma pessoa sem ela ter feito nada e, se ela escapar, prende-se o pai ou mãe. Em eduquês designa-se a esse processo  "chamar os pais à escola" (clique). Tudo feito em nome da igualdade e do progresso. Os sindicatos não vêem nada de errado no processo. Não fosse ser uma coisa difícil de pôr em prática, para uns, e haver  falta de instrumentos, para outros, e tudo estaria bem.

 
Não é de agora que os cesarianos manifestam uma certa atracção pelo coima. Apreciam a ideia de multar as pessoas quando elas não são como eles. César já tinha apresentado a ideia de multar as pessoas que não votam. É uma forma de ensino /aprendizagem e eleva certamente a noção de cidadania. 

Éticamente é errado obrigar as pessoas a permanecer na escola contra a sua vontade porque as pessoas são diferentes umas das outras. E se alguém não quer fazer agora o ensino secundário porque quer ir formar uma banda de Rock, fazer surf, plantar legumes, ou outra coisa qualquer, devemos respeitar isso porque respeitamos a autonomia das pessoas, incluindo a dos jovens. A liberdade de seguir um caminho próprio é uma coisa boa, não só para as regiões, mas também para as pessoas individualmente. Os socialistas regionais, sempre que defendem a autonomia regional contra o centralismo da República, como eles gostam de dizer, fariam melhor em começar por defender a autonomia das pessoas dentro da Região. Certamente isso lhes traria maior credibilidade.  

(LFB)

Edwin Johns, Self portrait

Por sugestão de Bolaño, 2666, "A parte dos críticos".

a mão mumificada do pintor

"This painting, viewed properly (although one could never be sure of viewing it properly), was an ellipsis of self-portraits, sometimes a spiral of self-portraits (depending on the angle from which it was seen), seven feet by three and a half feet, in the center of which hung the painter’s mummified right hand. It happened like this. One morning, after two days of feverish work on the self-portraits, the painter cut off his painting hand. He immediately applied a tourniquet to his arm and took the hand to a taxidermist he knew, who’d already been informed of the nature of the assignment. Then he went to the hospital, where they stanched the bleeding and proceeded to suture his arm. At some point someone asked how the accident had happened. He answered that he had cut off his hand with a machete blow while he was working, by mistake. The doctors asked where the amputated hand was, because there was always the possibility that it might be reattached. He said he’d thrown it in the river on his way to the hospital, out of sheer rage and pain. Although the prices were astronomical, the show sold out. The masterpiece, it was said, went to an Arab who worked in the City, as did four of the big paintings. Shortly thereafter, the painter went mad and his wife (he was married by then) had no choice but to send him to a convalescent home on the outskirts of Lausanne or Montreux."

Roberto Bolaño, 2666 ,  Loc. 913-24 . 

Star, American Nietzsche

“If Nietzsche’s image reached its nadir during the Second World War, when Hitler presented Mussolini with a bound edition of his works and the historian Crane Brinton wrote a book asserting he would have been “a good Nazi,” a resurrection was soon to come. The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”

(...)

For Bloom and other students of Leo Strauss, however, Nietzsche was not just the disease, he was also the diagnostician and possibly the cure. More brilliantly than anyone, Nietzsche understood the peril of modern nihilism and the need to cultivate robust souls who would strive to achieve excellence without authoritative religious belief.

(...)

If Nietzsche was terrible, was he also beneficial? In a 1985 book “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not imply that all beliefs are equally valid but that “one’s beliefs are not, and need not be, true for everyone.” On this reading, to fully accept a set of beliefs is to accept the values and way of life that are bound up with it, and since there is no single way of life that is right for everyone, there may be no set of beliefs that is fit for everyone. At its best, American individualism is not about the aggrandizement of the self or the acquiescent assumption that everybody simply has a right to think what they want. Rather, it stresses that our convictions are our own, and should be held as seriously as any other possessions. Or, as Nietzsche imagined philosophers would one day say, “ ‘My judgment is my judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it.”

 Alexander Star, book review of American Nietzsche - a History of an Icon and His Ideas, 2011, in The New York Times, Jan 15, 2012.

Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor

In “Distrust That Particular Flavor,” Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us as a science-fictional marvel. Gibson’s writing enters the bloodstream like a drug, producing a mild hallucinogenic effect that lasts for hours. In one essay (originally a talk he gave in 2008) he introduces us to “Martian jet lag,” an actual sleep disorder suffered by people whose jobs require them to stay in sync with the Red Planet: it’s “what you get when you operate one of those little RadioShack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an air base in California.” (...)

Such is the power of his prose that when I glanced up from the pages of this book and surveyed the street-side around me, I felt as if I were wearing Gibson-glasses. Cars lumbered past like ponderous elephants of rusty steel, not so different from the cars of 30 years ago, and seemed not to belong in the same world as the tattooed kid punching code into his laptop nearby. Under the spell of this book, I suddenly understood my surroundings not as a discrete contemporary tableau but as a hodgepodge of 1910, 1980, 2011 and 2020. “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” — this quote is often attributed to Gibson, though no one seems to be able to pin down when or if he actually said it.

Pagan Kennedy, book Review of Distrust that particular flavor by William Gibson, in The New York Times, Jan. 15 2012.

  William Gibson é o autor do livro de ficção científica NEURO-MANCER (1984) editado em Portugal pela Gradiva com o título NEUROMANTE (2004), livro que popularizou o termo ciberespaço. A recensão refere-se ao seu recentemente editado primeiro livro de ensaios.