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Arte e Instinto: Beleza, Prazer e Evolução Humana,  de Denis Dutton Tradução de João Quina Edições Revisão de Pedro Ernesto Ferreira Lisboa: Temas & Debates, 2010, 446 pp. Os dinca (povo do sul do Sudão) apreciam como especialistas os padrões e cores das manchas do seu gado. A cerimónia japonesa do chá é vista como uma arte performativa. Algumas culturas produzem escultura, mas não desenho; outras, especializam-se na poesia. Contudo, apesar da rica diversidade de expressão artística que se encontra em diferentes culturas, todos partilhamos um sentido profundo de prazer estético. A necessidade de criar uma forma qualquer de arte encontra-se em todas as sociedades humanas. Neste livro (cujo título original é  O Instinto da Arte ), Dutton explora a ideia de que esta necessidade tem uma base evolutiva: os sentimentos que todos partilhamos quando vemos uma paisagem magnífica ou um pôr-do-Sol belo evoluíram como adaptações úteis nos nossos antecessores caçadores-recolectore...

Places I've been ;) National Geographic

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From the Telegraph Sign Language galleries

It's the defining anti-censorship book of our time. The image of government crews gathering up and burning books is as iconic in the free world as Big Brother. In  Fahrenheit 451 , America in the future is a clusterfucked society and a nation of dimwits. Books are outlawed for promoting intellectualism and free thinking, which inevitably leads to objective discourse and debate, which are now considered politically incorrect because dissenting opinions make people sad. Instead of preventing homes from going up in flames, firemen have been reassigned to rifle through homes and seize any contraband books that remain. Just about every critic and literary scholar on the planet viewed the novel as metaphor for the dangers of state-sponsored censorship. Can't see this as much of a stretch, considering it was about  book burning  (although, the title may have suggested that it was really about book  warming , since,  according to Bradbury's sources , the temperature at...

START HERE Julian Barnes   Homage to Switzerland, by Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) I chose Ernest Hemingway because he is deeply out of fashion, still over-admired by the literary boys-with-toys brigade, still shunned by women readers put off by the macho myth. His style is wrongly thought to be both simple and imitable; it is neither. His novels are better known than his stories, but it is in the latter that his genius shows fullest, and where his style works best. I deliberately didn't choose one of the famous stories, or anything to do with bullfighters, guns or Africa. "Homage to Switzerland" is a quiet, sly, funny story (Hemingway's wit is also undervalued) which also – rarely – is formally inventive. It has a three-part, overlapping structure, in which three Americans wait at different Swiss station cafés for the same train to take them back to Paris. Each man plays games of the sort a moneyed and therefore powerful expatriate is tempted to play with the nomina...

Via: OnlineSchools.org

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Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence , in Portuguese A Angústia da Influência Jonathan Lethem's take as published in Harper's Magazine The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism By  Jonathan Lethem All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . . —John Donne LOVE AND THEFT Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an  amour fou , one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story:  Lolita . The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, f...