Nepenthe

This question was posed last weekend in the Guardian Review by James Buchan, reviewing a new Paul Celan selection , Snowpart/Schneepart, with English translations by Ian Fairley. He adds that, after all, "a poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice". That's true enough. Modern lyric poetry, with its symbols and metaphors, its arcane allusions and teasing line breaks, is fairly bad at giving us the facts. We no longer live in an age in which the skills of beekeeping, say, are explained by the greatest verse-maker in the language, as Virgil does in The Georgics . Even those jolly mnemonics about the weather or the Greek alphabet are fading from consciousness. It's a pity, as I often think I might get the gist of assembling a new piece of flatpack furniture quicker if the instructions were wittily rhymed. So why translate? My first answer is that poetry in translation simply adds to the sum total of human pleasure obtainable...

Juliette Binoche on her new life as a dancer, painter and a model

I’m sure that I will always be A lonely number like root three The three is all that’s good and right, Why must my three keep out of sight Beneath the vicious square root sign, I wish instead I were a nine For nine could thwart this evil trick, with just some quick arithmetic I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321 Such is my reality, a sad irrationality When hark! What is this I see, Another square root of a three As quietly co-waltzing by, Together now we multiply To form a number we prefer, Rejoicing as an integer We break free from our mortal bonds With the wave of magic wands Our square root signs become unglued Your love for me has been renewed “The Square Root of Three” by David Feinberg

Já se sabia que Guy Oseary, manager de Madonna, ia lançar Confessions , um livro de fotografias sobre os bastidores da 'Confessions Tour'. Previsto para Junho , o lançamento foi avançado para Outubro, com chancela da Power House Books . Anuncia-se como uma antologia de mais de 250 imagens inéditas — as primeiras a ser divulgadas são magníficas —, registadas por alguém que, por definição, pôde circular por zonas da produção dos espectáculos de Madonna a que mais nenhum fotógrafo teve acesso. Todas as receitas provenientes dos direitos de autor de Confessions serão entregues à fundação Raising Malawi . Sound & Vision

Every April, New York's proud Scottish-Americans celebrate their heritage with the Tartan Day Parade, processing up Sixth Avenue in a sea of kilts, to the noble blare of the bagpipes. If you are thinking of attending the festivities next year, however, you might want to keep quiet about having read "The Invention of Scotland" (Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30), a punchy new book by the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. For as Trevor-Roper points out with ill-concealed glee, tartan and kilt, those universal badges of Scottishness, are about as authentic as Disneyland. Until the 18th century, no one north of the Tweed had ever seen a kilt; nor did the clans, as legend has it, distinguish themselves by the pattern of their tartans, until they were taught to do so by an enterprising clothing manufacturer. The Scottish costume is, Trevor-Roper shows, simply the latest example of an ancient national habit: the forging of tradition. The word forging, however, can be taken ...

Illustration by Claudio Munoz “I AM the most offensively possessive man on earth. I do something to things. Let me pick up an ashtray from a dime-store counter, pay for it and put it in my pocket—and it becomes a special kind of ashtray, unlike any on earth, because it’s mine.” What was true of Wynand, one of the main characters in Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead”, may be true of everyone. From basketball tickets to waterfowl-hunting rights to classic albums, once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it—an observation first called “the endowment effect” about 28 years ago by Richard Thaler, who these days works at the University of Chicago. The endowment effect was controversial for years. The idea that a squishy, irrational bit of human behaviour could affect the cold, clean and rational world of markets was a challenge to neoclassical economists. Their assumption had always been that individuals act to maximise their welfare (the...

Brains + drugs = fried eggs, right? Not always. Some pills can boost your cognitive output. But we at Wired aren't doctors. Anyone who takes a bushel of drugs based on our say-so must be high. Check the table at WIRED

For more than 2,500 years, classical epic has been the province of men: written by, for, and about them, and passed down through the centuries by male translators. One could certainly describe Virgil's Aeneid as a manly poem. From its arms-and-the-man opening to its climactic blood bath on the battlefield, the Latin epic tells a tale of exile, combat, and slaughter, with a body count rivaling that of Homer's Iliad. Women figure mostly as collateral damage. In what appears to be a first, however, a woman has finally tried her hand at bringing Virgil's dactylic hexameters to a modern, English-speaking public. This month Yale University Press publishes a blank-verse translation by the poet and classicist Sarah Ruden. And she has plenty of company. The Aeneid has never been a forgotten work, but since the most recent millennial turn, it has enjoyed a burst of renewed popularity with translators. Four major English-language versions have appeared in the past three years alone. T...

Thwart . Yes, thwart is a good word. Thwarted . Athwart . A kind of satisfaction lives in such words--a unity, a completion. Teach them to a child, and you'll see what I mean: skirt , scalp , drab , buckle , sneaker, twist , jumble . Squeamish , for that matter. They taste good in the mouth, and they seem to resound with their own verbal truthfulness. More like proper nouns than mere words, they match the objects they describe. Pickle , gloomy , portly , curmudgeon --sounds that loop back on themselves to close the circle of meaning. They're perfect, in their way. They're what all language wants to be when it grows up. Admittedly, some of this comes from onomatopoeia: words that echo the sound of what they name. Hiccup , for instance, and zip . The animal cries of quack and oink and howl . The mechanical noises of click and clack and clank . Chickadees , cuckoos , and whip-poor-wills all get their names this way. Whooping cranes , as well, and when I was little, ...

In the digital era, we transform our memories into photos, videos, and blog posts that can be stored, catalogued and summoned at the click of a mouse. James Poulos explores the effect on the individual and on society when the power of remembrance is replaced by the capacity to retrieve. The Technology of Memory, by The New Atlantis

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He insists he doesn't want to kill me . He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened. Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.'' It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me...

To honor Ian Fleming’s centenary, one of Britain’s top novelists has accepted espionage fiction’s ultimate challenge: reviving James Bond. In an exclusive excerpt from Devil May Care, Agent 007 takes on perhaps his most dangerous opponent yet, pharmaceutical tycoon Dr. Julius Gorner. As Bond and Gorner hit the tennis court, the distractingly leggy Scarlett Papava referees. The New Yorker

Só porque sim, só porque é uma frase belíssima :)

Before Sunrise and Before Sunset on Cinematical ;D Check more of their Friday Night Double Feature

In the words of Cinematical : Fantasy may have the most rabid and obsessive fans, but it also has the staunchest detractors of any mainstream genre. We all know people who simply refuse to watch fantasy films or read fantasy books of their own volition. They may have sat through The Fellowship of the Ring grudgingly, but didn't bother with the rest of the series. They probably associate the genre with asocial nerds, fan conventions, and Dungeons & Dragons . They can only shrug at the exuberance of the devotees. Fantasy is "not their thing." Why are fantasy movies (and the genre in general) so polarizing? I've long thought it has something to do with viewers' relative affinity for cinematic worlds. Some people go to the movies to see something that directly relates to their own lives, something that takes place in the universe they live in and know. Others – myself among them, if you haven't figured it out – flip for new, self-contained worlds that could e...

Last Tuesday Paula Félix-Didier travelled on a secret mission to Berlin in order to meet with three film experts and editors from ZEITmagazin. The museum director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy of a long version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, including scenes believed lost for almost 80 years. After examining the film the three experts are certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered. Fritz Lang presented the original version of Metropolis in Berlin in January 1927. The film is set in the futuristic city of Metropolis, ruled by Joh Fredersen, whose workers live underground. His son falls in love with a young woman from the worker’s underworld – the conflict takes its course. At the time it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was intended to be a major offensive against Hollywood. However t...

With a glint of a dagger and a blaze of celestial light, Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper burst into new life on Monday night after Peter Greenaway finally secured permission to reinvent the crumbling, 510-year-old masterpiece as a sound and light show. In a remarkable coup for the British film director, the Italian authorities allowed Greenaway to wheel a battery of projectors, computers and speakers into the usually hushed and air-sealed refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where the image of Christ telling the apostles one of them will betray him decorates an end wall. Inside, Greenaway unveiled a provocative vision of one of Christianity's most sacred and fragile paintings, reimagined "for the laptop generation". To the strains of modern opera, he used cutting-edge technical trickery to make Leonardo's Christ appear like a three-dimensional hologram while a radiant sun rose and fell over his head. He turned the original colourful image red, grey and black...