Nepenthe

Here's an interview from El Pais (in Spanish)

Rock in Río se celebrará en 2007 en Madrid LISBOA .- Madrid acogerá en 2007 la próxima edición del festival de música Rock in Río, según una fuente próxima al empresario brasileño organizador del certamen, Roberto Medina, citada por la agencia Efe. La fuente explicó que el festival tendrá cinco días de conciertos y la misma "dimensión y dinámica semejante" a las ediciones de Lisboa, que lo acoge desde el pasado día 26 por segunda ocasión, después de que la cita en 2004 tuviese cerca de 385.000 espectadores. La fuente indicó que ya tienen firmado un protocolo con las autoridades de la Comunidad de Madrid y del Ayuntamiento de la capital de España y que "sólo resta cerrar algunos detalles ".

thanx Leon :) more postcards on the Samádhi and Dharma blogs

listening to...

This man I know (about a year ago, when he was young) blew his arm off in the cellar making bombs to explode the robins on the lawns. Now he has a hook instead of a hand; It is an ingenious gadget, and comes with various attachments: knife for meals, pink plastic hand for everyday handshakes, black stuffed leather glove for social functions I attempt pity But, Look, he says, glittering like a fanatic, My hook is an improvement: and to demonstrate lowers his arm: the steel question- mark turns and opens, and from his burning cigarette unscrews and holds the delicate ash: a thing precise my clumsy tender- skinned pink fingers couldn't do. - Margaret Atwood

For years, Koreans have clung to the notion that kimchi, the pungent fermented cabbage that is synonymous with their culture, has mystical properties that ward off disease. But what was once little more than an old wives' tale has become the subject of serious research, as South Korean scientists put kimchi under their microscopes. Last month, scientists at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute unveiled a kimchi especially developed for astronauts to prevent them from getting constipated in space. A researcher at Ewha Woman's University in Seoul reported that kimchi lowered the stress levels of caged mice by 30%. At the Kimchi Research Institute in Busan, hairless mice fed kimchi were reported to develop fewer wrinkles. With a government grant of $500,000, the institute is developing a special anti-aging kimchi that will be marketed this year. Other new products are anti-cancer and anti-obesity kimchi. "We are proud that we can use scientific methods to confirm the ...

From High Fidelity which has been recently revisited: Laura : Listen, Rob, would you have sex with me? Because I want to feel something else than this. It either that, or I go home and put my hand in the fire. Unless you want to stub cigarettes out on my arm. Rob : No. I only have a few left, I've been saving them for later. Laura : Right. It'll have to be sex, then. Rob : Right. Right. Rob : I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments. Barry : OK, buddy, uh, I was just tryin' to cheer us up so go ahead. Put on some old sad bastard music, see if I care. Rob : I don't wanna hear old sad bastard music, Barry, I just want something I can ignore.

Input your tips about Lisbon :) Registration required, but one of the most no-fuss I've ever encountered, thank heavens|

"What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. ... What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though." So noted Holden Caulfield, the sardonic prep-school dropout in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), who, by age 16, had already had his fill of phonies. From the fanfare that recently greeted Benjamin Kunkel's debut novel, Indecision (2005), you'd think that Holden's creator, the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger, had come out of seclusion. Jay McInerney raved about the book on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, and the paper's usually implacably tough daily reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, went so far as to channel Holden's voice in her laudatory review. Kunkel's is the latest in a spate of books that have collectively been dubbed ...

Measuring things is one of the greatest sources of unhappiness. Comparison always comes hard on the heels of measurement, and envy and bitterness follow shortly after. Some primitive tribes had a taboo on counting, and they may well have been on to something. Men know three measurements off by heart: how large their salary is, how long their penis is and how big their car's engine is. Happiness for men is when salary over engine times penis equals 20. Women are much more sensible, and are more concerned with quality than quantity, except when it comes to shoes. People tend to remember their vital measurements at different times in their life. For example, most people will remember what their waist measurement was when they were 32 and wonder for ever afterwards why their trousers no longer fit. Some people, especially at work, like to measure everything, because this makes them feel as though they are in control. In reality, for everything that's accurately measured, there'...

I listened to this while driving back from the airport today (God bless AM). Quite interesting, Terry Jones deriding the Romans in praise of the Celts and Anthony Beevor (at the end of the broadcast, I believe) on the Spanish Civil War and his book.

My Dog is the saddest thing I owned, my Dad used to pickup injured or astrayed dogs that my brothers and I now refer as family memories; them and their injuries funny how they moved about in their handycapped twisted ways but they all were faithful and loving even if they had been abused. Then one day i decided to get my own Dog, got him for $75.00 a pure (pedigree and all) chow-chow (food in china about 500 years ago, you know?!) beautiful and not vicious at all!! named him “tylo” after my husband’s favorite childhood movie (about a dog that had been granted to be human for a day) and now I have this dog in a prison(my house) I leave him all day alone, watch his behaviour via internet from work , he is lonely sits by the door most of time , sleeps 78% of the day since I’m too tired to walk him when I come home at nite (my husband and I carpool) and yet he’s there…old faithful, it’s sad, sad how we turned animals into possessions and victims of slavery.

Tim Wilkinson, the English translator of Imre Kertész, talks about the lack of literary translations in the UK and US, and assesses past, present, and forthcoming efforts to bring Hungarian literary fiction to the English-speaking market. Why does anyone translate? The question is not mine, but comes from a typically bracing comment by Thomas Bernhard: "Translators are ghastly: poor devils who get nothing for a translation, only the lowliest fee – shamefully low, as they are wont to say – and they accomplish a ghastly job. In other words: the balance is restored. If a person does something that is worth nothing, then they should get nothing for it. Why does anyone translate? Why don't they write their own stuff instead?" As someone who has been trying to make a livelihood from translating contemporary Hungarian fiction, the comment rings so true that I increasingly ask myself why I thought, eight years ago, that this might be viable. Having learned the language through wo...

Hands down, as usual: And some others: London: Andalucia, Sept 1936

Leia mais:

The setting this time is Mamarrosa, a dead-end village in a minimally described corner of the Alentejo area of Portugal. Ali peoples the village with locals and an assortment of estrangeiros . In nine chapters, the many residents meditate on life's purpose or purposelessness. While it was still a work in progress, Ali referred to Alentejo Blue as a "novel," but it is now being advertised alternatively as a "collection of stories" and as "fiction." None of the chapters coheres well enough to be read as a short story; the sum of them does not add up to a novel. In her acknowledgments, Ali tells us more clearly how not to approach the book than how to, describing it as "neither a history book nor a travel book, only a work of fiction." Mamarrosa is intended to be viewed as an allegorical place. Except for insistent references to cork trees (and to the decline in international demand for cork) and the occasional cataloguing of Alentejo f...

The death of General Franco in November 1975 triggered a design revolution in those regions within Spain repressed since the Caudillo seized power in 1939. In Barcelona, street signs along the Avenida Generalissimo Franco were torn down, a satisfying moment for Catalans whose language, culture and politics had been suppressed. In 1980, Catalonia regained its autonomy. Two years later, Pasqual Maragall was elected mayor of Barcelona. Maragall championed a strenuous reconstruction of this magnificent seaport. Architecture played a key role. The city planner, Oriol Bohigas, brought intelligent redevelopment to its poorest squares, while a cluster of bright young architects shone through with the design of enticing new bars, clubs and restaurants. And then came the 1992 Olympics. Investment in ambitious new buildings, parks and civic engineering pole-vaulted. Barcelona became a magnet for architectural innovation as it had been in the heyday of Antoni Gaudi, designer of the sensational Sag...

Found the exhibition (now over) site in Tokyo

There's a story I've been touting round the national papers recently which has been touched upon by a few columnists and raised some interest from women's magazines, but that has not been given the mainstream coverage it deserves. The story is this: in Zimbabwe there has been a massive dip in the amount of sanitary products - tampons and towels - available to women due to the relocation of the manufacturers of these products from Zimbabwe to South Africa because of the current economic crisis. Those that are available are hugely expensive - a single box of tampons (most women use three boxes a month) costing nearly a third of the average wage for a woman in Zimbabwe (and practically 100 per cent of the wage of farm workers, domestic workers and women in the informal economy). Consequently women are being forced to find alternate means of containing their menstrual blood. In many cases this means using old newspaper or cloth, leading in many cases to infection. Infectio...

BottomLiners

I am a digitally-enabled, network-ready scholar. I check e-mail and browse the Web. I read RSS feeds. I leverage Web 2.0’s ambient findability to implement AJAX-based tagsonomy-focused long-tail wiki content alerting via preprint open-access e-archives with social networking services. I am so enthusiastic about digital scholarship that about a year ago I published a piece in my scholarly association’s newsletter advocating that we incorporate it into our publications program. The piece was pretty widely read. At annual meetings I had colleagues tell me that they really like it and are interested in digital scholarship but they still (and presumably unlike me) enjoy reading actually physical books. This always surprised me because I love books too, and it never occurred to me that an interest in digital scholarship meant turning your back on paper. So just to set the record straight, I would like to state in this (admittedly Web-only) public forum that I have a deep and abiding passion ...

See all at The Observer : (and the only European site is...) Dubai - Al Maha Mozambique - Nkwichi Lodge Morocco - Kasbah Du Toubkal Namibia - Damaraland Camp Tanzania - Chumbe Island Coral Park Australia - Kooljaman Romania - Danube Delta Chile - Rio Futaleufu Ecuador - Kapawi Tonga - Vava'u [kinda disclaimer :] The real cost Of course an 'eco holiday' that involves flying to the other side of the world is a contradiction in terms. Your flight will emit vast quantities of carbon dioxide, contributing to global warming. One answer is to offset the emissions by paying money to a company which will invest it in energy saving and green technology projects around the world. Purists see this as a cop-out, like dropping litter on a pristine beach then buying a big litter bin to compensate, but the unarguable fact is that it's better than nothing. Go to www.climatecare.org to calculate your emissions, and offset them.

You're Already Part of the Phenomenon Like millions of people around the world, I have thrilled to the phenomenon of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code . I've been intrigued by the theory ( borrowed , as everybody now knows, from an earlier, nonfiction book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail ) that literal descendents of Jesus Christ are walking the earth today. I salute Brown's recovery of the "eternal feminine" in church history, which is long overdue even if I'm not totally sure of the evidence he uses to support it. I got a kick out of the Nabokovian puns, puzzles, anagrams, and Fibonacci sequences —and I think it's great that this kind of postmodern trickery is finally finding a popular audience. I enjoyed the revisionist tour of art history, and was even taken in by the plot, rooting for Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu to solve the mystery, clear Robert's name, and maybe hook up. Who wouldn't enjoy their bravura escape from the Bank o...

The New Yorker ’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman talks to Ismail Kadare about his fiction and his life in communist Albania. DEBORAH TREISMAN: The situation you describe in “The Albanian Writers’ Union as Mirrored by a Woman” is based on real events in Albania in the nineteen-sixties, and the last line of the story suggests that it is quite autobiographical. Is it? ISMAIL KADARE: Yes, it is. The story is based on events that were well known among writers and also in wider circles in Tirana. Life there was pretty dull, just like it was in the capital cities of all the other Communist-bloc countries. So everyone thought that what was going on at the Writers’ Union was really interesting. Was there a real Marguerite? Yes, there was, but not the one described in this story. Let me explain. In Communist countries, women with liberal attitudes toward life—and, especially, toward love—were often treated as shameless hussies. But they included ...

Der Spiegel

Wine exposed to air oxidises - becoming harsh and unpleasant. The Romans used to pour a little olive oil on top of the wine to prevent contact with air. After experiments with pitch, leather and even glass stoppers, the Victorians happened upon cork, which comes from the bark of a particular species of oak tree. Unfortunately, corks can contain microbes that produce the powerful musty-smelling chemical 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA), which causes a "corked" or "off" taste. To reduce the risk of TCA taint, some manufacturers are replacing cork with sterile plastic stoppers or screw tops. Plastic "corks" do reduce the proportion of bottles that become "corked", but they do not give quite as good a seal as traditional cork, and therefore the wine can, very slowly, oxidise. This won't matter for most wine, which is drunk within a year or so of bottling, but is a problem for fine wines that are aged for years in the bottle. However, screw tops offer...

Why these Americans, these English-speaking gits have to fuck up other people's names? It's Vasco dA Gama!! It's like when they talk about Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, for f*** sake do not say Caeiro, Soares, Reis, De Campos, it is Campos, Campos, Campos!!! Jeez...

Some of his drawings for movies like Ran or his Dreams:

The airing last week on Hispanic radios of Nuestro Himno, a Spanish-language adaptation of the American national anthem, has been greeted with an unprecedented wave of denunciations all over the United States. Talkshow hosts and academics have indignantly called this loving rendition by a group of Latino artists a desecration of a national symbol. Senators - both the conservative Lamar Alexander and the liberal Edward Kennedy - have expressed that The Star Spangled Banner needs to be sung exclusively in English. And President Bush has warned the citizenry that "one of the important things here is, when we debate this issue, that we not lose our national soul". The national soul? In danger of being lost? Because Wyclef Jean and hip-hop star Pitbull are crooning a la luz de la aurora rather than by the dawn's early light? Would such an outcry have erupted over translations into Navajo or Basque, Farsi or Inuit? Would anybody have cared if some nostalgic band had decided to ...