Nepenthe

Esta gente é tontinha, really: 13 Reasons For List Lust Have you stood in front of a newsstand lately? 400 Star-laden Pages. 115 Things To Do With Cheese. The 27 Faces Of Infidelity. Numbers and lists dominate the mediascape. Why? Is it a brutish apotheosis of private property—thoughts as things, and the more the better? Is it the end of civilization? In a word ( actually, over 1,500 of them! ), yes. I don't want to be curmudgeonly about our modern lust for lists. Culture and language sometimes evolve in slatternly ways, and today's guilty pleasure can become tomorrow's fresh new aesthetic. I understand the lure of lists. I recently found myself sitting in my parked car, unable to turn off Jian Ghomeshi's cbc radio show 50 Tracks —a public debate about who belongs on a list of the fifty most important Canadian songs ever. And although critics scorned The Greatest Canadian , I thought the show at least nudged...

A rational Quixote Cervantes is celebrated as the first and greatest of novelists. Less appreciated is Don Quixote's own role as the founding father of the Enlightenment. His delusion is the key to reason. More from Prospect Magazine :-D

Madredeus en el Palau de la Musica Catalana

La prestigiosa revista literaria 'Granta' dedica su número primaveral a Barcelona La edición española de la revista literaria 'Granta', referente de las letras internacionales, ha dedicado su primer número anual --es una publicación de periodicidad semestral-- a la ciudad de Barcelona. Juan Marsé, Pere Gimferrer y Vila-Matas ofrecen, a través de los cuentos editados en la revista, diversas visiones sobre la ciudad. En concreto, participan en este número escritores como Colm Tóibín --que aborda en su texto el despertar sexual de la ciudad en 1975--, Jesús Moncada --que habla sobre una nueva especie de hombre catalán--, Tibor Fischer --que narra las peripecias de un turista en Barcelona--, Carlos Ruiz Zafón y Juan Goytisolo, entre otros. La revista, que incluye diversas instantáneas de la ciudad, es para los escritores catalanes que, gracias a esta iniciativa pueden participar en ella, "un referente en toda regla", según indicó Vila-Matas. En el...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Emails 'pose threat to IQ' The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers. Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip. Respondents' minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night's sleep. "This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," said Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist from King's College, London University, who carried out 80 clinical trials for TNS research, commissioned by the IT firm Hewlett Pac...

José Saramago estará en Barcelona firmando libros y celebrando Sant Jordi (libros + rosas) de las doce a una en Casa del Libro (cerca de la oficina). Casa del Libro regala el libro de recetas de El Quijote: También: Pilar Bardém, el gallego Suso de Toro , Javier Cercás, el vasco Bernardo Atxaga , Amin Maalouf, Jorge Edwards, Paul Preston, José Luís Sampedro...

The Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has printed one million copies of Don Quixote to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes' novel. This week they are being handed out free in public squares for the improvement of his citizens, while at the same time our (Great Britain] politicians are also on the streets distributing material of infinitely less literary merit (campaigning]. So, for making this wonderful novel freely available to Venezuelans, hats off to Hugo [read on at the Guardian website ]

Manual Del Perfecto Escapista: Regla Número 1 Siempre existe -al menos- una salida. Kraus Kislyakov , 1924 ______________________ " ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street..." "and above the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT." [Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho] ___________________________________ On Work (II) We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work. John Dos Passos , 1896–1970

"[...]a strange thing has happened in the American arts during the past quarter century. While income rose to unforeseen levels, college attendance ballooned, and access to information increased enormously, the interest young Americans showed in the arts -- and especially literature -- actually diminished." Why literature matters

El mito del Tanuki Dentro del folklore japonés hay mil historias sobre el Tanuki. Según la mitología el Tanuki es capaz de transformarse y adoptar cualquier forma. Hoy en día en la entrada de muchos restaurantes japoneses suele haber una estatua de un Tanuki. En la mano izquierda lleva una botella de sake, la bebida preferida del Tanuki, y en la mano izquierda un libreto de contabilidad. Dicen que la figura del Tanuki trae buena fortuna y beneficios. Otra caracterísitica de las estatuas de Tanuki es el gran tamaño de los testículos . Si os fijáis en la foto, la base de la estatua no son pies, sino literalmente Kin-tama ( Huevos de oro ). Estos grandes testículos son símbolo de suerte y en muchos cuentos sobre el Tanuki se hace uso de la piel del escroto para tocar el tambor o incluso como paracaídas. Lo de usar los “Huevos de oro” como tambor ( ouch! ) se puede ver en la película de Ghibli Heisei tanuki gassen pompoko . Se trata de un ejemplo típico de humor al más puro...

El colombiano Fernando Botero retrata el horror de Abu Ghraib

Hanami has arrived!

Also from the Washington Monthly , Which USA President told the biggest whoppers? from Reagan's killer trees to Clinton's «that woman» (and both Bushes, of course).

Why the latest action-babe flicks flopped Four years ago, just as beefy, formerly bankable action stars like Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were getting a little grayer, a little slower, and a whole lot less popular at the Cineplex, Hollywood rediscovered women. After years of casting actresses as perky love interests and weepy crime victims, movie studios finally realized that women can kick butt. Literally. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Charlie's Angels , and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon all vaulted, jabbed, and roundhouse-kicked their way well past the $100-million benchmark of a cinema blockbuster. Male audiences, it turned out, didn't mind seeing the ladies on top, watching kick-boxing action babes such as Cameron Diaz and Angelina Jolie whirl their way through fight scenes (studio estimates show Charlie's Angels 's audience was 45 percent male; Tomb Raider's was 55 percent); the fact that the heroines were also visually k...

How Do They Do It? Garden snails, and many other related species of snails, are hermaphrodites, equipped both with a penis that can deliver sperm to other males and with eggs that can be fertilized by the sperm of others. Two hermaphroditic snails can fertilize each other, or just play the role of male or female. Snail mating is a slow, languorous process, but it also involves some heavy weaponry. Before delivering their sperm, many species (including garden snails) fire nasty-looking darts made of calcium carbonate into the flesh of their mate. In the 1970s, scientists sugested that this was a gift to help the recipient raise its fertilized eggs. But it turns out that snails don't incorporate the calcium in the dart into their bodies. Instead, love darts turn out to deliver hormones that manipulate a snail's reproductive organs. Evolutionary biologists have hypothesized that this love dart evolved due to a sexual arms race. When a snail receives some sperm, it can gain some ev...

«The Hunt of the Unicorn» tapestries and computer science, from The New Yorker

Did the Vikings make a telescope? The Vikings could have been using a telescope hundreds of years before Dutch spectacle makers supposedly invented the device in the late 16th century. This remarkable possibility has emerged from a study of sophisticated lenses just recognised from a Viking site on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. They were initially thought to be merely ornaments. "It seems that the elliptical lens design was invented much earlier that we thought and then the knowledge was lost," says Dr Olaf Schmidt, of Aalen University in Germany. The late Dr Karl-Heinz Wilms first heard of the so-called "Visby" lens in 1990 when he was searching for exhibits for a Munich museum. It was named after the major town on Gotland. Dr Wilms found a picture of the lens in a book and planned to examine the original. But it was not until 1997 that a team of three scientists went to Gotland to take a close look at what were actually 10...

The European Model for Falling in Love with Your Hometown James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape , insists that there is an even deeper way we pay for this folly of poor urban planning. “It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage depots,” he says. “It matters that our junior high schools look like insecticide factories. It matters that our libraries look like beverage distribution warehouses.” When so much of what you see on a typical day is so drab, it’s hard to care about what happens to these places. I have fallen in love with Paris, Stockholm, Oxford, Florence and Gouda, Netherlands, as well as New York, New Orleans and even Madison, Wisconsin, because they stir something in my soul. It’s more than scenic charm; it’s a feeling they inspire as I walk around them with my family or soak up their atmosphere just sitting at a café table or on a p...

Daylight Saving Time, whyyy? From The Boston Globe

Another curio, from BookForum as well: In these days of the War on Terror (or on Tyranny, depending which rationale for war the White House is using this week), immigration is discussed largely in the context of national security. If we give driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, will we unwittingly aid and abet terrorists in the sequel to 9/11? That Mexican day laborer on the street corner—is he an al Qaeda sleeper in disguise? Traditional prejudice against immigrants has become conflated with homeland defense—immigration as invasion; immigration as terrorism (indeed, the office of US Custom and Border Protection now falls under the Department of Homeland Defense). Nevertheless, with or without licenses, triple border walls be damned, immigrants from south of the United States continue to arrive. Regardless of the Beltway's reductionist rhetoric and mainstream journalism's yellow streak, argues Héctor Tobar, a new multilingual, multiracial America is being born, a ...

Curio (or much more :-): When Marc Estrin, in the preface to his second novel, poses the question of what an education in post–World War II America would be like "for someone whose second name was Hitler," the project sounds curiously academic. Happily, the novel that follows is no theoretical exercise but a lively, sure-footed tale of a young man's struggle with language and what lies beneath it. The lone connection between the Führer and the novel's protagonist, Arnold, is a name, signifying nothing. As Arnold's mother says when she marries his father, it's clear "who was Hitler and who was only 'Hitler.'" And for much of Arnold's childhood, this distinction holds. He grows up in a small town in Texas during the era of reluctant integration; no one raises an eyebrow at his last name because there are far more incendiary words in circulation. Arnold's earliest memory, for example, centers on learning the word nigger , then...