Síndrome post-vacacional:
Mensagens
Until recently the best cancer prevention advice has been: don't smoke, don't get fat, and cross your fingers. But a strange-tasting drink from South Africa could provide new hope.
Scientists say there are three major ways to cut the risk of cancer. Don't smoke, don't become fat, and follow a balanced diet. Now from South Africa comes a potential fourth tip: drink rooibos tea. If you have never heard of it, you are not alone. Rooibos has been one of the more esoteric products in the herbal-remedy section of health shops, a strange-sounding name to match a strange taste drawn from the needle-like leaves of a plant found only on the slopes of the Cederberg mountains outside Cape Town. For centuries, indigenous bushmen have sworn by the health-giving properties of the tea. European settlers who picked up the habit agreed there was something special about rooibos - Afrikaans for red bush - and even bathed their children with it. Now science suggests they may have been ...
Somewhere in the middle pages of “1984,” Winston Smith is being inducted into the shadowy and, as it turns out, nonexistent “Brotherhood” of resistance to Big Brother, and, to celebrate, the Inner Party member O’Brien pours him a glass of wine. Winston has never had wine before, but he has read about it, and he is desperately excited to try it, since he expects it to taste like blackberry jam and to be instantly intoxicating. Instead, of course, the wine tastes the way wine tastes the first time you taste it—a bit acidic and bitter—and a single sip, or glass, isn’t intoxicating at all. The intensity of this experience as a model of disappointment was significant enough for Orwell so that he inserted it in his dystopia right there among all the greater horrors—as though the future weren’t bad enough, that whole wine thing will go on, too.
[ read on ]
Tonto el que no entienda.
Cuenta una leyenda
Que una hembra gitana
Conjuró a la luna
Hasta el amanecer.
Llorando pedía
Al llegar el día
Desposar un calé.
"Tendrás a tu hombre,
Piel morena,"
Desde el cielo
Habló la luna llena.
"Pero a cambio quiero
El hijo primero
Que le engendres a él.
Que quien su hijo inmola
Para no estar sola
Poco le iba a querer."
Luna quieres ser madre
Y no encuentras querer
Que te haga mujer.
Dime, luna de plata,
Qué pretendes hacer
Con un niño de piel.
Hijo de la luna.
De padre canela
Nació un niño
Blanco como el lomo
De un armiño,
Con los ojos grises
En vez de aceituna --
Niño albino de luna.
"¡Maldita su estampa!
Este hijo es de un payo
Y yo no me lo callo."
Gitano al creerse deshonrado,
Se fue a su mujer,
Cuchillo en mano.
"¿De quién es el hijo?
Me has engañao fijo."
Y de muerte la hirió.
Luego se hizo al monte
Con el niño en brazos
Y allí le abandonó.
Y en las noc...
It's been a while since I last heard (or rather read) about Habermas (ahhh, do I miss my Marxist Literary past) so it's always nice to come back to him. The interview has an enticing start (for a Spaniard):
Q: Professor Habermas, let me begin by congratulating you on receiving the Prince of Asturias Prize and also the gold medal of the Bellas Artes Foundation of Madrid. You must have surprised many Spaniards, as you did me, when you confessed your admiration for two fiercely existentialist writers, Miguel de Unamuno and Miguel de Cervantes. A: This love goes back to school days and my university years. After the Second World War, when the Keller Theater was presenting masterful productions of French plays by Sartre, Mauriac and Claudel, Existentialism gave expression to our sense of life. A book by the Tuebingen philosopher, Friedrich Bollnow – who would now be 100, like Adorno – brought Unamuno’s Don Quixote to my attention at that time. By similar paths, I also fo...
Now there's scientific proof: according to 60 of the most influential scientists in the world , including British biologist Richard Dawkins and Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) is the best science fiction film. Late Mr. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) finished 2nd, followed by George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980)."
Scene: A large posh office. Two clients, well-dressed city gents, sit
facing a large table at which stands Mr. Tid, the account manager
of the architectural firm.
Mr. Tid: Well, gentlemen, we have two architectural designs for this new
residential block of yours and I thought it best if the architects
themselves explained the particular advantages of their designs.
There is a knock at the door.
Mr. Tid: Ah! That's probably the first architect now. Come in.
Mr. Wiggin enters.
Mr. Wiggin: Good morning, gentlemen.
Clients: Good morning.
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features
with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here
and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme
comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the
rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corr...
Ramón (Javier Bardem) lleva casi treinta años postrado en una cama al cuidado de su familia. Su única ventana al mundo es la de su habitación, junto al mar por el que tanto viajó y donde sufrió el accidente que interrumpió su juventud. Desde entonces, su único deseo es terminar con su vida dignamente. La llegada de dos mujeres alterará su mundo: Julia (Belén Rueda), la abogada que quiere apoyar su lucha y Rosa (Lola Dueñas), una vecina del pueblo que intentará convencerle de que vivir merece la pena. La luminosa personalidad de Ramón termina por cautivar a ambas, que tendrán que cuestionar como nunca antes los principios que rigen sus vidas. Él sabe que sólo la persona que de verdad le ame será la que le ayude a realizar ese último viaje.
Basada en hechos reales, narra la historia de Ramón Sampedro, un hombre tetrapléjico que durante 25 años luchó para conseguir una muerte digna y cuyo caso desencadenó un gran debate social. Prohibida la eutanasia en España, Sampedro acudió vari...
"The minute a young Chinese girl bagged the gold medal in the women's table-tennis singles final on Sunday, a Beijing TV network reporter stuck a microphone under the nose of her parents. The father, without batting an eye, told the audience that his good daughter was a good Communist Party member and her success was a tribute to the party organization . We can only imagine the hyperbolic tributes, straining credulity, when Beijing hosts the 2008 Summer Olympics."
[ read on ]
Einstein e Picasso
Em 1904, num bistrô boémio de Paris, o “Lapin Agile”, Pablo Picasso e Albert Einstein encontram-se pela primeira vez (numa reunião que nunca aconteceu realmente). Aí se trava, na procura da atenção de uma jovem e do respeito de todos os outros, uma hilariante batalha de ideias sobre arte, probabilidade, desejo e o futuro do mundo, num texto do famoso actor norte-americano Steve Martin . Um ano depois, Einstein, publicará a Teoria de Relatividade e três anos depois, Picasso, pintará Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. “ Picasso no Lapin Agile ” foi premiada em 1996 com o New York Outer Critics’ Circle Awards para a melhor peça e para o melhor dramaturgo. No Teatro da Trindade em Lisboa a partir de 23 de Setembro. Imagem de The Compleat Steve
No democracy can flourish against plutocratic, imperial forces, says Cornel West , without citizens girded by Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope...
" The greatest threats come in the form of the rise of three dominating, antidemocratic dogmas. These three dogmas, promoted by the most powerful forces in our world, are rendering American democracy vacuous. The first dogma of free-market fundamentalism posits the unregulated and unfettered market as idol and fetish. This glorification of the market has led to a callous corporate-dominated political economy in which business leaders (their wealth and power) are to be worshipped—even despite the recent scandals—and the most powerful corporations are delegated magical powers of salvation rather than relegated to democratic scrutiny concerning both the ethics of their business practices and their treatment of workers ."
[ read on PDF for the printer-savvy ;)]
"SEÑOR, SOY ESPAÑOL"
It was about time:
" Los republicanos españoles que, hace 60 años, participaron en la liberación de París han sido homenajeados como "campeones de la libertad" en un emotivo y solemne acto en la capital francesa, en el que participaron ex compañeros de armas y personalidades parisinas y españolas. A través del homenaje de París a los veteranos españoles de la división Leclerc y, en particular, de la compañía conocida como 'La Nueve' , que entró en París el 24 de agosto de 1944, se recordó a los miles de exiliados de la Guerra Civil española que, integrados en las tropas de la Francia libre o en la resistencia, lucharon por liberar a Francia y Europa del yugo nazi"
[read on in El Mundo ]
Coverage in French in Le Monde . More on the liberation of Paris
on The Paris Review .
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
__________________________
Robert Lee Frost
Simone de Beauvoir: Lost in Translation
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,'' Simone de Beauvoir wrote in ''The Second Sex'' in 1949, shocking readers with her contention that the wife-and-mother destiny was a myth devised by men to deny women freedom. Rejecting such notions as the maternal instinct, her book attracted both controversy (it was banned by the Vatican) and sales (it sold more than 20,000 copies in France in its first week). Today ''The Second Sex'' is widely acknowledged as the founding text of modern feminism. The English translation, a best seller when it was first published in this country by Alfred A. Knopf in 1953, has sold well over a million copies. A staple of women's studies courses, the Knopf translation -- available in Vintage and Everyman editions -- is still the only version in print in the United States today. Yet American readers may not have been reading the real ''Second Sex.'' ...
The Racketeers ' favourite books of 2003
1 Waterland by Graham Swift
2 The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene
3 Brick Lane by Monica Ali
4 Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
5 Black Boy by Richard A Wright
6 Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
7 The Secret History by Donna Tartt
8 The Golden Age by Gore Vidal
9 Stars and Bars by William Boyd
10 Cheaters by Eric Jerome Dickey And who are The Racketeers, you might ask? An all-male reading group who gathers in a pub to drink and talk - it reminds me of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and others, only these ones actually wrote :-). Find out more in The Guardian
Language may shape human thought Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two. Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study. Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support yet for the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts. So-called “linguistic determinism” was first proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever since. “It is a very surprising and very important result,” says Lisa Feigenson, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who has tested babies’ abilities to distinguish between different numerical quantities. “Whether language actually allows you to have new thoughts is a...
What has Tibor Fischer learnt from judging this year's Booker Prize? That publishers don't have a clue about books – or bribes
One of the most puzzling phenomena about the success of publishing in this country is the publishers themselves. Once, on a slow day, a senior literary agent (Nobel laureate in his stable) wagered his colleagues that he could sell anything to anyone. They could pull any manuscript out of the slush pile and name any editor, he boasted, and he'd do the deal. The deal was for "a substantial six-figure sum" – and the book didn't fare badly in the end either. I kept thinking of this story (not in the least apocryphal) as I digested the 126 novels that, as a judge for this year's Man Booker Prize, I was required to read, because it's clear most publishers don't have a clue what they're doing. Ordinarily, when we say: "I think this book is better than that one," what we mean essentially is: "I enjoyed ...
(descaradamente) roubado ao Gato Fedorento :
The Dr. Stephen Hawking Action Figure stands approximately 5 1/2-inches-tall and comes with a mug of beer and a flying wheelchair. Place Dr. Hawking on any compatible Springfield Environment to hear him talk! Recommended for ages 4 and up. Stephen Hawking in The Simpsons : Skinner : I'm sure what Dr. Hawking means is -- Hawking : Silence. I don't need anyone to talk for me. Except this voice box. (…) Lisa meekly asks the crowd to stay calm, but a full-scale Springfieldian riot quickly develops. Hawking figures it's time to make his escape and activates ... his automatic toothbrush. Oops -- wrong button. (…) Hawking : Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it. Homer : Wow, I can't believe someone I never heard of is hanging out with a guy like me. Moe : All right, it's closing time. Who's paying the tab? Homer : [imitating Hawking's voice box] I am. Hawking : I didn...
LEONARDO DA VINCI AT THE BEACH.
Pop Esoterica!
espite prevailing gossip in the groves of academe, people still like their Renaissance, with its prancing nymphs, striplings in hose, and Venus on the half-shell, an endless Primavera with Lorenzo de' Medici presiding benignly over the pagan rites. The fact that this Renaissance is a myth gives them no pause whatsoever, nor should it: the Renaissance was always a myth, and also, on occasion, a chivalric lay or an instructive fable, depending on who told the story, why, and to whom. For Angelo Poliziano, currying the favor of Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano with superabundant talent, the Medici brothers posed as modern Arthurian knights in Stanze per la Giostra , or Verses for the Joust . Botticelli, in the same years, acted as the city's great mythographer, painting glossy riddles in tempera for a restless Medici cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco. If Machiavelli sent it all up with masterful cynicism in The Prince , he did s...
Circle of clichés, or a guide to reviewese
When did you last come across the words "coruscating" or "magisterial"? It's unlikely to have been in a holiday brochure or a recipe. Surely it was on the back of a book or in a book review. achingly beautiful
anything-fuelled – narratives of a new, edgy type of fiction sometimes called Britfic tend to be fuelled by a range of uppers – amphetamines, caffeine, cocaine, Robbie Williams
as good as any novel – why should writers of fact aspire to the standards of novelists? Cf the truth is often stranger than fiction, infra
at its core, **** is a deeply moral work – a handy way for a critic to say that those who don't like the shocking book under review simply don't understand it
breakneck speed – no successful thriller will go any slower
bursting to get out – of novellas in vast, sprawling epics
by this stage , I was ready to hurl the book across the room
cocktail – the result of stirring one autho...
Esta é a milésima vez que afixamos qualquer coisa (tinha que fugir ao termo que, para variar, não se tem traduzido, post ). Conheci-o na América. Nos Estados Unidos da América, no estado que se pretende mais emblemático, a Califórnia. No coração do Silicon Valley - que não se podia ter revelado mais disperso nem maior - porque somos ambos tradutores informáticos. Grande palavrão, muita parra pouca uva, isto depois de sermos ambos ratões de biblioteca e apaixonados por línguas. Somos ambos ibéricos - coisa que não podia ser mais díspar, tanto que nunca me dá para dizer isto - eu sou portuguesa e ele é espanhol. Tem havido mais amizade e cooperação do que a pertença à mesma multinacional deixaria entrever. Em língua franca, a inglesa, ou a americanizada. E por isso gostamos sempre da América. Viva a blogosfera, até daqui a mais mil posts ! (e pronto!) Nepenthe! Esta es la milésima vez que vamos a publicar algo. Ya parece que fue ayer cuando echamos a andar este blog, con el ...
O bailado D. Quixote é pleno de vivacidade e emoção, é uma história cómica com um final feliz. A aparição em cena de D. Quixote com o seu romantismo idealista proporciona o pano de fundo ideal para a resolução bem humorada do conflito, de outra forma insanável, entre um pai e uma filha.
D. Quixote serve de enquadramento para este bailado que se concentra na história de amor entre Kitri e Basil, encontrada no segundo volume do romance de Cervantes .
A descoberta deste episódio deve-se a Maurice Petipa que terá escrito o primeiro guião e concebido a primeira coreografia. A estreia húngara em 1997 apresentou uma versão criada especificamente para a companhia.
Coliseu dos Recreios
[lembrança da Carlita :-]
[In] a certain Chinese encyclopedia…it is written that animals are divided into:
(a) those belonging to the Emperor
(b) those that are embalmed
(c) tame ones
(d) suckling pigs
(e) sirens
(f) fabulous ones
(g) stray dogs
(h) those included in the present classification
(i) those that tremble as if mad
(j) innumerable ones
(k) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
(l) others
(m) those that have just broken the water pitcher
(n) those that look like flies from a long way off
Jorge Luis Borges
[thanx to Marc :-]
________________________
Apostillas al post :
Ya que hablamos de Borges, he pensado conveniente poner aquí el original
en español:
[En sus remotas páginas está escrito que los animales se dividen en
(a) pertenecientes al Emperador,
(b) embalsamados,
(e) amaestrados,
(d) lechones,
(e) sirenas,
(f) fabulosos,
(g) perros sueltos,
(h) incluidos en esta clasificación,
(i) que se agitan como locos,
(j) innumerables,
(k) dibujados co...
Writing on January 28, 1754, to the British diplomat Sir Horace Mann, Horace Walpole—an antiquarian and son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole—boasted about a recent discovery he had made in an old book of Venetian arms:
This discovery I made by a talisman, . . . by which I find every thing I want, a pointe nommée [at the very moment], whenever I dip for it. This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity .
As Walpole himself was the author of the term, he felt obliged to give Mann its derivation:
I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip [the ancient name for Ceylon, or Sri Lanka]: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand Se...
Summer reading specials in The Guardian:
" The weather gods may not have noticed yet, but summer is well and truly here - and as ever, you can't open a paper without coming across a list of summer reading recommendations from the current crop of in vogue writers and celebrities. But when it comes to the success or failure of a holiday book, factors other than the quality of the prose come into play - as anyone who has embarked on a holiday romance while reading Pride and Prejudice or spilled sun cream over the concluding pages of their Ian Rankin will testify. We asked Guardian Unlimited writers to tell us about their very best - and very worst - holiday reading experiences. "
Also, five unbreakable rules on what books you and your bibliophile better half should take on holiday. No need to agree, again, what's wrong with reading Auster? Excerpt:
" 1. Do not allow him to take any books that are more than 600 pages long. Men toil under the misapprehensi...
The Genius of Language
If possession of one language gives us such a leg up on this material world, two ought to be doubly advantageous. As the contributors to this collection suggest, however, things are not that simple, especially for writers. Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, succeeded in forging a unique and powerful style out of his acquired English — but he was an exceptional talent, even among great writers. Can other writers follow his example?
To explore the problem, Lesser, an editor and critic based in California, recruited 15 writers whose mother tongue is a language other than English but who now write in English, at least part of the time. Perhaps the best introduction to the collection is an essay by Amy Tan, a writer of Chinese heritage. In this essay, she tackles head-on the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is of interest not just to writers but to anyone interested in language. The thesis roughly states that an individual's perception of the world is mould...
Alzheimer's linked to lowbrow jobs or Mentally stimulating careers may protect against dementia A mentally stimulating career may help to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease, research suggests. According to a study carried out in the United States, those who develop the debilitating form of dementia are more likely to have had jobs that do not tax the brain. The discovery lends weight to the 'use it or lose it' theory, says Kathleen Smyth of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who led the research. Experts have previously suggested that keeping the mind active, through reading or crossword puzzles, can help to stave off dementia in old age. The latest work, however, shows that mental stimulation throughout life can influence the development of Alzheimer's. The researchers examined 122 people with Alzheimer's disease and 235 healthy subjects, and compared the mental demands they had faced throughout their careers, from their twenties righ...
JOB opportunity :-) Theatre officials hope captioning plays could capture reluctant audiences For people who have trouble following a stage production of Shakespeare, here's hope. It's called CART, for Computer Assisted Realtime Translation, or captioning. Captioning differs from the surtitles that have helped popularize opera. Surtitles, usually flashed on a screen running across the top of the stage, summarize in English the Italian, French or German of most operas performed in the United States. Captions are smaller, and give the full text of plays being performed in English - including the difficult English of Shakespeare. "I love it," said Carol Anderson, an usher at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. "I even turn on the captions on the TV at home." A sold-out matinee on Sunday at the Kennedy Center, one of the pioneers, furnished CART as a moving sign in red on a black background. Placed at one side of the stage, it scrolled three...
Style: a Pleasure for the Reader, or the Writer?
The premise that in many cases writers entertain, move, and inspire us less by what they say (their matter) than by how they say it (their manner) would seem irrefutable. To name some obvious examples, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Dave Barry are read and honored hardly at all for their profound insights about the human condition, much more for their intoxicating and immediately identifiable ways of expressing themselves -- their styles.
This idea, that the how is more important and revealing than the what, goes without saying when it comes to other creative endeavors. Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a 20-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster playing a chorus of "All the Things You Are," of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme fixing a duck à l'orange, or of Pieter Brueghel and Vincent van Gogh painting the same farmhouse. Everyone understands that the content...
PATENTE DE CORSO (weekly column)
La mariposa y el mariposo
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Todavía quedan flores a uno y otro lado de la carretera, y los campos manchegos aún no están del todo abrasados por el sol del verano. De Argamasilla de Alba a Sierra Morena, el viajero que sigue la ruta de don Quijote, el recorrido inmortal de la primera y la segunda salidas del hidalgo, se enfrenta a la desilusión propia de cuando uno emprende en España esta clase de cosas. En Francia, por ejemplo, pueden seguirse las huellas de la historia o de la literatura a simple vista; y en cuanto a Inglaterra, la mitad de su oferta turística vive de Shakespeare y la otra mitad de Nelson. España es otra cosa, claro. Aquí vivimos de las playas, de la sangría y los discobares bajunos para chusma guiri. Alguna vez les he contado que en el barrio de Madrid donde se imprimió el Quijote, donde está enterrado su autor, y donde vivieron, a pocos pasos unos de otros, Cervantes , Lope , Calderón , Quevedo y Góngora –...
From The Guardian , the lost (and sixth) essay that Virginia Woolf wrote for
Good Housekeeping (yikes) magazine about London:
"Nobody can be said to know London who does not know one true cockney - who cannot turn down a side street, away from the shops and the theatres, and knock at a private door in a street of private houses. Private houses in London are apt to be much of a muchness. The door opens on a dark hall; from the dark hall rises a narrow staircase; off the landing opens a double drawing-room, and in this double drawing-room are two sofas on each side of a blazing fire, six armchairs, and three long windows giving upon the street. What happens in the back half of the drawing-room which looks upon the gardens of other houses is often a matter of considerable conjecture. But it is with the front drawing-room that we are here concerned; for Mrs Crowe always sat there in an armchair by the fire; it was there that she had her being; it was there that she poured out tea....
A funny thing happened on way to disbelief
Time magazine spurred public debate 40 years ago with a startling question on its cover: "Is God Dead?" Some estimate that half the world's population was then nominally atheist. And many in the West were predicting that scientific progress would eliminate religious belief altogether by the next century.
The tide has dramatically turned, however, and Alistar McGrath - a theologian at Oxford University who was once in that camp - charts the shift in currents of thought in "The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World."
In this accessible intellectual history, McGrath explores how atheism came to capture a wide swath of the public imagination as the road to human liberation and progress, and why, in a postmodern world, its appeal has faded. Yet he also makes clear that, despite the resurgence in faith, Western Christianity has not fully recovered from the crisis of the '60s. ...