Nepenthe

And long live BiblioOdyssey , to be linked :)

Who is Richard Linklater, really? In the last 15 years he's written and directed great, meandering films about disaffected types who don't do a whole lot of anything besides kicking back and philosophizing ( Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life ), but he's also made tightly plotted movies about equally disaffected types who band together to combat a repressive social order ( The Newton Boys , Fast Food Nation , even The School of Rock , and Bad News Bears ). It's as though the left and right hemispheres of Linklater's brain have been competing! Which is, of course, precisely the problem faced by narcotics agent Bob Arctor, the protagonist of Philip K. Dick's brilliant 1977 science-fiction novel A Scanner Darkly . So, will Linklater's new, rotoscoped adaptation of A Scanner Darkly , starring Keanu Reeves as Arctor, reveal once and for all which side of Linklater's brain is the dominant one? That is, will Keanu and his drug buddies, played by Robert Do...

Arriving in Marin County, (New York poet Elsa) Gidlow holed up in a derelict house in rural Fairfax. She was forty years old. Facing winter solstice alone and unsettled, she decided to perform what she later described as a "transforming ritual." As a storm raged outside the leaky house, she built up a roaring blaze of madrone logs. Slowly, Gidlow sensed the room fill with the spirits of all the mothers and grandmothers who have ever tended fire, all the way back to the Paleolithic. "I knew myself linked by chains of fire," she wrote, "to every woman who has kept a hearth." In the morning, Gidlow honored this rather neo-pagan vision by wrapping some of the cold coals in foil and red ribbon, and keeping them for next year's solstice fire. In 1954, Gidlow brought one of these solstice charcoals to her new home, a junky five-acre patch of rural hillside on the edge of Muir Woods, lying at the end of a precarious road more clay than dirt. Shadowed by a loo...

Nenhuma estreia digna de nota A equipa do Cinecartaz não considerou nenhum dos filmes que estreiam esta semana como merecedor de um destaque. Se quiser ir ao cinema esta semana sugerimos um dos filmes já em exibição. Mas também pode ir ao teatro , a uma exposição ou a um concerto .

In the 1920s and 1930s Stefan Zweig was an immensely popular writer, a man who had to barricade himself in his house in Salzburg in order to avoid the fans lurking around his property in the hope of waylaying him. According to his publisher, he was the most widely translated author in the world. Today, while he is still read in Germany and also in France, his name is barely known to the average Anglophone reader. In the last few decades, however, there has been an effort on the part of several publishers to get Zweig back into print in English. In my opinion, no book of his deserves reissue more than his one novel, Beware of Pity ( Ungeduld des Herzens , 1938) Zweig was a friend and admirer of Sigmund Freud, his fellow Viennese, and it was no doubt Freud's writings, together with the experience of two world wars, that persuaded him of the fundamental irrationalism of the human mind. Absolutely central to his fiction is the subject of obsession. And so it is with Beware of Pity . T...

The list of urgent challenges facing humanity is depressingly long. AIDS, hunger, armed conflict and global warming compete for attention alongside government failure, malaria and the latest natural disaster. While our compassion is great, our resources are limited. So who should be helped first? To some, making such priorities seems obscene. But the UN and national governments spend billions of dollars each year trying to help those in need without explicitly considering whether they are achieving the most that they can. The Western media focuses on a tsunami in the Indian ocean; donations flow freely. An earthquake that devastates Pakistan garners fewer headlines, so the developed world gives a lot less. There is a better way. We could prioritize our spending to achieve the greatest benefit for our money. This month, I will ask UN ambassadors how they would spend US$50 billion to reduce suffering. They will repeat the same exercise that some of the world's best economists tac...

I am the product...of endless books. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. C.S. Lewis

The most serendipitous literary experience I have had was when I found myself, very many years ago, reading Henry James' "The Portrait of a Lady" for the first time while on holiday in Florence where some of the most significant action of the book takes place -- I use the word "action," of course, in the special, Jamesian sense. It is often said that one may only come truly to know a foreign city by falling in love there -- ah, San Francisco , mon amour -- but as Logan Pearsall Smith said of life, I prefer reading. The first thing the visitor must understand about Ireland is that there are two Irelands : There is Dublin , and then there is all that is not Dublin . I make the distinction not out of the city dweller's usual prejudice against the provinces, or not entirely so, but sometimes it does seem that every Irish person aspires to the condition of Dubliner -- the country has a population of some 4 and a half million, of whom a million and a quarter l...

La combinación de distintas terapias, incluido el injerto de células madre obtenidas de embriones de roedores, permite restaurar parcialmente el sistema nervioso de ratas paralíticas. Así lo asegura un nuevo estudio recibido por los especialistas con satisfacción pero con prudencia. El trabajo, publicado en 'Annals of Neurology' y dirigido por Douglas Kerr, de la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad Johns Hopkins (EEUU), es el primero que muestra que el trasplante de neuronas, obtenidas de células embrionarias, puede formar conexiones funcionales con el sistema nervioso de un mamífero adulto, según los investigadores. En el estudio, ratas paralíticas tratadas con una combinación de varias terapias pudieron recuperar parcialmente el movimiento de sus patas traseras. [ leer más ]

At the moment, we are asked to believe, the British are all the rage in America. The Metropolitan Museum in New York is hosting AngloMania, an exhibition launched with a glamorous and much-discussed party. Alan Bennett's very English play The History Boys had terrific reviews on Broadway, and might conceivably become a hit. The Tony awards this year were dominated by English actors, some of whom might still win. Some allowance has to be made for national pride in these matters, which naturally tends to inflate, when on home ground, any indication of foreign interest in our cultural products. Any French small-press production about Englishness with the word Rosbif in the title is guaranteed to be described here as "a bestseller" and its most insulting aperçus widely reported. More than one American magazine, when running a "London groovy again" feature, has produced separate editions for the European and American markets, their indigenous productions retaining ...

YOU KNOW, IT'S HARD out there for a linguist. ``People tend to say, `How many languages do you speak?' or `I'll have to be careful what I say around you,"' e-mails Geoff Pullum from Cambridge, where he's enjoying the waning weeks of a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute. The prescriptively minded may go further, he says, accusing linguists of an anything-goes indifference to the fate of our poor abused language. Not true, any of it--but how to spread the word that linguists are not polyglots, language cops, or anarchists, but fact-seeking, fun-loving, rule-embracing folks? Three years ago, Pullum, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and fellow linguist Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, decided to use the Web as their pulpit; they started a ``little online magazine" called Language Log, languagelog.com, where they, and a dozen or so coconspirators, could chat about their field in (more or less) everyday language, le...

Over the sea and far away She's waiting like an iceberg Waiting to change, But she's cold inside She wants to be like the water, All the muscles tighten in her face Buries her soul in one embrace They're one and the same Just like water Then the fire fades away But most of everyday Is full of tired excuses But it's too hard to say I wish it were simple But we give up easily You're close enough to see that You're.... the other side of the world to me On comes the panic light Holding on with fingers and feelings alike But the time has come To move along Then the fire fades away But most of everyday Is full of tired excuses But it's too hard to say I wish it were simple But we give up easily You're close enough to see that You're.... the other side of the world Can you help me? Can you let me go And can you still love me When you can't see me anymore Then the fire fades away most of everyday Is full of tired excuses But it's too hard to say I wi...

Watched this a while ago and it's by far one of the best movies of the year. Yeah, I'm biased because its candid cover of Pink Floyd's Hey You and because I am partial to Laura Linney, what the heck... Hands down... (the exhibition is still there, btw, at the Natural History Museum in NY) Official page here Movie trailer here PS: the title is way nicer in PT, has a liquid quality... No, wait, playijng linguistic algebra then "Lula da Silva" means "Squid of the jungle"? No friggin' way...

Last year, Maxence and I went on a little week-end getaway to Lisbon . A blissful, dazzling few days of walks along the narrow little streets, funicular rides up and down the hills, stunning views of the city, and sunny drives along the beautiful coast. But all of this wouldn't have been quite as magical without the stupendous Portuguese cuisine : seafood galore -- grilled marinated fried salted or otherwise smoked -- tasty little nibbles, scandalously underrated cheese, head-spinning port, the freshest fruit and, last but by no means least, out-of-this-world pastries. In Lisbon, you cannot walk one block without hearing thousands of sweet little voices calling your name from pastelaria windows, teasing you with promises of puff pastry, custard fillings, orange flower water, almonds and nuts, fruits and chocolate, crispy crusts and spongy dough. The interesting thing was that they didn't look all that appealing to me at first : they have a much more homely, unsophistica...

My wife Nicola is saving the planet. The only problem is that most of it is in our house. Ethically, I can't argue with her - she works for an environmental campaign group and is co-author of the bestselling book Save Cash And Save The Planet. But our home has become a kind of new millennium rag-and-bone yard. Clearly, if people put perfectly useful things in bins and skips, then it is our duty to save them from going into landfill. Minimalists we are not. In the library, we have new shelves made from plywood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, only these are obscured by an abandoned 6ft poster featuring a Matisse figure of a naked woman. Nicola saw it on a nearby street while cycling to work and ordered me to carry it home: "The girls could draw dots on it." The library also serves as a bike repository, holding Nicola's bike, her luminous sash, spider clips, helmet, gloves and various sustainable hessian carrier bags full of work papers. These are placed...

I was really happy to get parsnips : they belong to what is sometimes referred to as "les légumes oubliés" (forgotten vegetables), those vegetables we used to eat a lot in the past, but which have been more or less abandonned : panais, rutabagas, salsifis, pâtissons, crosnes... I have read that most of these were what people had to live on during the second world war, so they were promptly pushed aside after the war, because of the bad memories they brought back. Nowadays these vegetables aren't very widely cultivated and can seldom be found at produce stands. Of course, I find the idea of forgetting a vegetable heart-breaking and cruel and terrible and saddening, it makes me want to save the vegetable and bring it back home and give it love and affection and decorate a little room for it with a little bed it can sleep in. *lick your lips :-9 either way

Epicurious: Your book is called What to Eat, but it doesn't really tell us. Why the title? Marion Nestle: Because as soon as people find out what I do, they ask me: What should I eat? Is canned tuna okay? Is organic food worth the money? I decided to write a book that would walk readers up and down the aisles of the supermarkets and tell them not what to eat, but how to make informed decisions about what they eat. Epi: You're a Ph.D. and nutritionist. It must have been easy for you. MN: Far from it. I was surprised to discover how much you need to know to make an informed choice. I always took a computer with me to figure out prices and labels. The average supermarket has something like 40,000 different items, and one I went to stocked more than 400 kinds of yogurt on its shelves. If you tried to figure out which one was cheapest and healthiest, you'd be there forever. Epi: Then let's start with the question everyone asks you. What should we eat? MN: You can describ...

For centuries elephants in Thailand have been revered as a nationalsymbol, worshiped as living gods and employed as beasts of burden in the nation's thriving timber industry. But when logging was banned in Thailand in 1990, these noble animals fell on hard times. Reduced to performing tricks for tourists by day and illegal heavy labor by night, Thailand's elephants were exhausted, malnourished, and dying in alarming numbers. Hearing of their plight, a pair of unlikely heroes came to the rescue, Wildly eccentric Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid devised a brilliant scheme: to create the world's first quadruped occupational retraining program-a network of art schools for unemployed elephants. Taking a cue from elephant trainers in a number of American zoos, Komar and Melamid taught the animals to hold brushes in their trunks and apply paint to canvas. And the results were astonishing: Not only did the elephants' paintings closely resemble the expan...

Physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter are to write a science book for children which will be "a bit like Harry Potter", but without the magic. They aim to explain theoretical physics in an accessible way to youngsters. Professor Hawking became famous for his bestseller A Brief History of Time, which attempted to simplify cosmology, the Big Bang and black holes. His daughter Lucy said their forthcoming project would be aimed at people like her own eight-year-old son. "It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," she said. She did not provide any further details, nor a likely publication date. Professor Hawking - a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge - has...

Today is June 16. It is a rather innocuous day for most people. But not for Leopold Bloom. Mr. Bloom is a literary character and as such, you'd imagine any day written about him would be a rather momentous one to warrant pen to paper. And June 16 certainly was. This was the day James Joyce carefully chronicled in what many consider the greatest novel of the 20th century: Ulysses . The novel takes place over the course of a single day and was the original 24 long before Keifer Southerland was ever born*. It follows the course of Mr. Bloom as he wanders and weaves his way through Dublin, paralleling Ulysses' journey home as chronicled by Homer in The Odyssey . And you can do the same. Every year, Dublin celebrates Bloomsday in honor of this lost soul. There are readings of the book, a road race, and other festivities celebrating Joyce's masterpiece. Fans of the novel, often adorned in period dress, start the day as Bloom did, with a kidney breakfast and the...

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Descobrir uma/outra escritora portuguesa através de um site francês ... Campo de Sangue é Coeurs arrachés , Os meus sentimentos é Les anges, Violeta :) Dulce Maria Cardoso

Subject: NEW YORK CITY - TEACHER ARRESTED NEW YORK CITY - TEACHER ARRESTED: At New York's Kennedy Airport today, an individual later discovered to be a NYC public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, protractor, set square, slide rule and calculator. At a morning press conference, a White House spokesman said authorities believe the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. The man is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of maths instruction. "Al-Gebra is a fearsome cult," the spokesman said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute value. They use secret code names like `x' and `y' and refer to themselves as `unknowns', but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of mediaeval, with co-ordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, "thereare three sides to every...

Richard Ryder was one of the pioneers of the philosophy of animal liberation. In 1970, he had an Archimedes moment in the bath and coined the term "speciesism", a prejudice against other species on the grounds of their species difference; akin to racism and sexism. The word is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. Three decades later, defending any essential difference between humans and animals has become deeply unfashionable, but Kenan Malik has been unusually forthright in doing just that. In his book Man, Beast and Zombie he follows the great philosopher Immanuel Kant in arguing that animals are mere things that can be treated as means to an end. When we brought Malik and Ryder together to debate the ethics of animal experimentation, we began by asking Ryder what he thought the strongest argument against vivisection was. Richard Ryder: The strongest reason that I'm opposed to at least unnecessary testing on animals is that I don't really see that the species diffe...

Que coisa mais fofa! :)

This blog had a post about the Ilustrate Life of PI Competition last February, and here now go the news on the outcome: EYES READ WORDS AND THE words become little paint brushes — the arms and legs of the “ks” and “ms” and “rs” like stray bristles — and these brushes are dipped in the paint pots of the eyes and then paint, on the blank canvas of the mind, bright and colourful pictures. Other times it goes the other way: we see an arresting picture, and in the mind there is a rush of questions and interjections — What’s this? Look at that! — at any rate, the reaction in the mind is something verbal. Words, processed, become images; images, processed, become words. A neat, essential balance, whose fulcrum is the versatile eye. Such a good idea, then, to combine words and illustrations in a book. Comic strips and children’s books have been doing so for generations. Manga’s immense popularity in Japan has spread to the West. Bande dessinée , that Belgian speciality, is an institution in E...

The Blue Rigi was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder after a 10-minute bidding battle at Christie's in London. The work, which Christie's described as "the most important watercolour to appear at auction for over 50 years", had been expected to fetch about £2m. It features Lake Lucerne and the Rigi Mountain, in Switzerland, at sunrise, and was painted in 1842. The previous record for a Turner watercolour on paper was £2.04m, fetched by Heidelberg with a Rainbow in 2001. The Blue Rigi was bought in 1842 by its first owner for 80 guineas. It was one of four watercolours Turner produced on his return from a trip to Switzerland the same year. The 19th Century art critic John Ruskin said of the work: "Turner had never made any drawings like this before and never made any like them again." It was last sold in 1942 for 1,500 guineas to the family of the owner who sold it on Monday.