Nepenthe

Last month, I asked Slate readers to send me their hand-drawn maps . The request was part of my series on signs , the tools that professionals use to orient us and direct us from point A to point B. But official signs aren't the only things that help us get around. Since early man first drew on his cave wall—including marks that some scholars argue were maps of local rivers and settlements—we've been sketching out routes to guide one another to the market and to the mountain top. These humble maps can be beautiful. They can also be messy, indecipherable, inaccurate, and unattractive. Slate readers sent in nearly 200 maps, and they ranged from hasty scribbles on scrap paper to elaborate, multicolored renderings. No matter what it looks like, a handmade map offers several advantages over a road atlas or the directions you get from Google. Read on to see some of your most interesting hand-drawn maps—and to discover why homemade maps are often superior to the ones d...

Who wrote the Milan Kundera you love? Answer: Michael Henry Heim. And what about the Orhan Pamuk you think is so smart? Maureen Freely. Or the imaginatively erudite Roberto Calasso? Well, that was me. The translator should do his job and then disappear. The great, charismatic, creative writer wants to be all over the globe. And the last thing he wants to accept is that the majority of his readers are not really reading him. His readers feel the same. They want intimate contact with true greatness. They don't want to know that this prose was written on survival wages in a maisonette in Bremen, or a high-rise flat in the suburbs of Osaka. Which kid wants to hear that her JK Rowling is actually a chain-smoking pensioner? When I meet readers of my own novels, they are disappointed I translate as well, as if this were demeaning to an author they hoped was "important". There is complicity between globalisation and individualism; we can all watch any film, read any...

Aquele que na hora da vitória respeitou o vencido Aquele que deu tudo e não pediu a paga Aquele que na hora da ganância Perdeu o apetite Aquele que amou os outros e por isso Não colaborou com a sua ignorância ou vício Aquele que foi «Fiel à palavra dada à ideia tida» como antes dele mas também por ele Pessoa disse. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen Não me digam mais nada senão morro aqui neste lugar dentro de mim a terra de onde venho é onde moro o país de que sou é estar aqui. Não me digam mais nada senão falo e eu não posso falar eu estou de pé. De pé como um poeta ou um cavalo de pé como quem deve estar quem é. Aqui ninguém me diz quando me vendo a não ser os que eu amo os que eu entendo os que podem ser tanto como eu. Aqui ninguém me põe a pata em cima porque é de baixo que me vem acima a força do lugar que for o meu. José Carlos Ary dos Santos

My translation for Saída de Emergência

Vampires figure the anxieties of their cultural moment. They come out at night—and during periods of social and political turmoil, and their habits and looks mutate to personify the fears of the age in which they appear. Bram Stoker ’s Dracula dramatized Victorian fears of sex as morally corrupting and fears of English culture as threatened by invading foreigners.  The vampires of Anne Rice ’s Vampire Chronicles , published primarily in the 1980’s, shared a certain kinship with the ruthless, amoral financier characters of the age, Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone ’s Wall Street and Patrick Batemen of Bret Easton Ellis ‘ American Psycho , but their most striking feature was their homosexuality. Rice’s vampirism as blood-borne pathogen also came to seem a metaphor for AIDS—a taunting metaphor, since her beautiful men could not die. So what about our vampires—the vampires of Charlaine Harris ‘ Sookie Stackhouse novels or those of Stephenie Meyer ’s ubiquitous Twiligh...

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1   God commanded, “Let there be light,” but it didn’t happen for nearly half a million years . That’s how long after the Big Bang the universe took to expand enough to allow photons (light particles) to travel freely. 2   Those photons are still running loose, detectable as the cosmic microwave background, a microwave glow from all parts of the sky. 3  Light moves along at full “light speed”—186,282.4 miles per second—only in a vacuum. In the dense matrix of a diamond, it slows to just 77,500 miles per second. 4   Diamonds are the Afghan­istan of gemstones: Any entering photon quickly gets bogged down. It takes a lot of pinging back and forth in a thicket of carbon atoms to find an exit. This action is what gives diamonds their dazzling sparkle. 5   Eyeglasses can correct vision because light changes speed when it passes from air to a glass or plastic lens; this causes the rays to bend. 6   Plato fancied that we see by shooting light ray...

Because of Carsten Jensen 's new novel 1. The Odyssey by Homer Written in an era when the world believed in magic, and that the unmapped seas contained both marvels and monsters, The Odyssey is the greatest seafaring epic of all. Homer's storytelling skills are so deft that readers tend to overlook the shortcomings of his hero on the seamanship front: not only does it take Odysseus 20 years to cover the relatively short distance between Troy and his beloved island of Ithaca, but during that time, he also manages to lose his entire fleet of 12 ships. When he finally arrives home, not a single one of his crew remains alive. Hardly a great role-model for would-be captains. 2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville Melville's masterpiece tells the tale of Captain Ahab and his obsessive quest for a whale whose terrifying whiteness comes to embody evil itself. I doubt that any contemporary publisher would take on such a vast, eccentric, anarchic work if it crossed their desk today....

In September 2008, at the age of eighty-five, José Saramago was feeling restless. “Here’s a job for you”, said his wife. “Write a blog”. And so the 1998 Nobel laureate began to record his reflections on an almost daily basis, jubilantly freed from the constraints of fiction and awed by the “infinite page” of the internet: “that place where I can most express myself according to my desires”. So close has this blog since become to Saramago’s heart that a review of it in a Portuguese newspaper caused him to break a vow, “which hitherto I have fulfilled to the letter – never to respond to, or even comment on, any criticism of my work”. The reviewer had remarked on Saramago’s “excesses of indignation”. The blogger was outraged: “How can one talk of excesses of indignation in a country where it is specifically lacking?” Saramago may at times be Lear-like in his umbrage, but he opens his Notebook with a “love letter” to Lisbon: “My Lisbon was always that of the poor neighbourhoods . . . the ...

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It is one of the most notorious scenes ever filmed – yet Hitchcock and Janet Leigh didn't tell the truth about it. In the run-up to the release of Psycho in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock did everything he could to build up the suspense. "No one will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance," declared the poster, bearing a sulky-looking Hitchcock wagging a finger. The director bought up all copies of the original novel, which he had optioned for a paltry $9,000, so that hardly anyone would know how the story ended. He also filmed on a closed set and forced cast and crew to sign an agreement promising not to mention the ending to anyone. There were no advance screenings. When the reviews for Psycho , which is rereleased this week, rolled in, they focused on one shocking moment: the shower sequence, in which Janet Leigh is slashed to death. Comprising over 70 shots, each lasting two or three seconds, it has become one of the most infamous momen...