Nepenthe

it's the Year of the Dragon

2012-01-24T12:58:00.000Z

and we'll never see the end of it ;)

A Map of California in the 60's

2012-01-20T11:24:00.000Z

Thanx to La Historia con Mapas

I Have A Dream

2012-01-15T11:27:00.000Z

Alberto Montt, you are a genius :)

2012-01-08T02:07:00.000Z

Dear Addams Family :)

2012-01-07T01:36:00.000Z

The NYT Frugal Traveler in Coimbra

2012-01-06T16:17:00.001Z

Visiting a college town can sure bring back memories: dorm living, late night studying, partying to excess, roaming the campus dressed like vampires.

The vampire apparel may be less familiar if you didn’t attend the University of Coimbra, founded in 1290 — making it one of the world’s oldest continually operating universities — and still one of Portugal’s most prestigious schools. Through the centuries the university developed a set of customs and traditions collectively known as “praxe,” which among other things governs the use of the official university uniform that consists in part of a black cape, giving students a strikingly vampiric appearance.

At least that was my delighted take during my three-day visit to Coimbra (pronounced ko-EEM-bra) in December. Some sang drunkenly on their way home from Christmas gatherings; two approached me to ask for a 1 euro (about $1.30) donation to help pay for floats for the Queima das Fitas, the May festival that is the city’s main tourist draw. (I donated, in exchange for their posing for a picture with me.) None, happily, tried to drink my blood.

Coimbra, which is in central Portugal, is an easy place to get to and a cheap place to stay. I spent 12 euros for the hour-and-a-half bus ride from Porto in the north (the trip from Lisbon is only a bit longer and more expensive) and paid 30 euros a night for a room at the Flor de Coimbra Guesthouse, housed in a 200-year-old building that will please those who like rotary phones, creaky floors and friendly family ownership enough to tolerate dim lighting, lumpy mattresses and cranky bathroom fixtures.

Flor de Coimbra, like most of the city’s guesthouses and hotels, is in the Baixa, the downtown neighborhood down an exhausting but walkable hill from the Alta, where the campus sits. (For those not up for the walk, an elevator connects the lower part of town with the upper for the price of city bus ride — three trips for 2.20 euros) Both areas are graced with narrow, winding streets, though the Alta is mostly taken up by university buildings and graffiti-covered student housing, whereas the Baixa is loaded with shops, restaurants and other commercial activity. Ancient churches, picturesque plazas and the nearly total lack of international chain stores can make both areas feel like the 1950s — or the 1590s.

The centerpiece of the campus area is the Paço das Escolas, a former Portuguese royal palace, repurposed centuries ago as university space. (Coimbra was the capital of Portugal for much of the 12th and 13th centuries.) The U-shaped building includes the university’s main chapel, the law school, and traditional ceremonial rooms like the elegant Hall of Doctors, the former royal bedroom where doctoral degrees are now granted.

Much of it is open to the public, but even so I felt like a bit of a spy, peering into classrooms lined with ancient wooden desks, chatting with law students smoking on arcaded balconies, climbing up stairwells whose landings gave successively more impressive views of the city below. Centuries-old azulejos (Iberian blue-and-white-glazed tiles) decorated many walls, while just-posted fliers advertising poetry slams and dance lessons covered others.

Visiting some of the spaces requires a ticket (7 euros), at least in theory. But I found that out only after I had visited the Hall of Doctors — there was no guard or ticket taker — and was stopped trying to enter the chapel. Aghast at my earlier transgression, I immediately went back and paid for my ticket. Just kidding! I went the frugal, if ethically dicey, route of skipping the ticket. And since the chapel was holding a free Christmas concert that night, I knew I’d see it , if not the library, which is apparently stunning.

The a cappella Christmas hymns sung by students that night were lovely, but the true music of Coimbra is fado, the melancholy music whose local version differs significantly from the better-known Lisbon style. In Coimbra, the singers are traditionally male; they often perform in duos or in groups and use a slightly different guitar, among other distinctions.

I had been told that Queima das Fitas, the May festival, was the best time to take in local fado. But there are several spots that function as performance venues year-round. Of the ones I sampled, the best was also free: the no-cover Café Santa Cruz, in Baixa, housed since 1923 under the vaulted ceilings that used to be part of the adjacent 16th-century church and monastery. On the Thursday I went, the sparse audience was made up mostly of elderly couples sitting at rapt attention; the singers were two older gentlemen, former university students, with the caped outfits to prove it: Florentino Silva, a gentle 78-year-old, and Mário Gomes Pais, an impish-looking 56-year-old with a pointed chin, salt-and-pepper goatee and booming voice. Their voices echoed hauntingly off the cafe’s high ceilings. A Brazilian couple at the table next to me, who had lived in Coimbra when the husband was doing a master’s degree years before, sang along.

I was surprised at first to encounter a Brazilian who had studied in Coimbra. But I soon learned that Brazilians were everywhere, as were students and residents who hailed from other former Portuguese colonies, from Angola to Macao. When I spotted two seemingly African students, I faked needing directions to an art exhibit, hoping to find out where they were from. The fascinating answer: Guinea-Bissau, the tiny West African nation that won independence from Portugal in 1974. With Portugal’s economy crumbling, there was a poignancy in experiencing the vestiges of its once vast empire through these fellow visitors.

The student population may be international, but most of the restaurants in town are pure Portuguese. On my first day, I strolled along Rua das Azeiteiras, a pedestrian-only street in the Baixa that is loaded with restaurants. I activated my frugal sixth sense, analyzing the lunch menus posted outside and the crowds within, hoping to deduce which one had the finest meal for the least money.

I settled on A Cozinha, a cozy-looking place offering a 6 euro item called “secretos do porco preto com ananás,” which I translated as “secrets of black pork with pineapple.” Ah, what a story I could tell about such a cheap, wacky-sounding entree!

Unfortunately, my frugal sixth sense (if it exists at all) failed miserably, and my Portuguese (which is normally solid) followed suit. “Secretos” turned out to be a cut of meat, and “porco preto” referred to a breed — the Iberian black pig. Still promising … but they were out of the dish. I was stuck with a dull fish fillet.

Hoping to supplement my meal with some freebies, I dug into the chunks of hearty Portuguese bread and devoured a small wheel of cheese and some olives. What a great country, I thought: not only was the bread complimentary, but so were cheese and olives! Then the check came. I had been charged for everything: 1.25 euros for the bread, 3 for the cheese, even a euro for the two or three olives I had eaten. Final tally: a whopping 15.25 euros (about $19.75). A self-inflicted frugal failure: it turns out this is how things are done in Portugal.

I would later have some lovely meals, like the chanfana (goat stewed in red wine sauce; 7.50 euros) at Democrática, a sometimes rowdy student hangout. But it was at a bakery called Pastelaria Arco-Iris that I had my best drawn-out meal on a rainy day: fresh-squeezed orange juice, bread, a Portuguese chicken soup called canja, an espresso and flavorful pastries like filhoses de abóbora (squash fritters dusted with sugar). The final check was under 8 euros.

The real winner of the trip, though, was a cultural spot: the Museo Académico, a pay-what-you-will museum dedicated to the university itself, hidden on the second floor of an enormous academic building on Rua dos Estudos. When I walked in, a gray-haired man named António Dias leaped from his seat at the front desk.

“How much time do you have?” he asked. I said I had plenty.

“Good,” he said.

The bespectacled, multilingual Mr. Dias proceeded to give me a wonderful tour-for-one, recounting the history of the university and peppering me with questions to keep me on my toes. He pointed out pictures of how the vampire capes — er, traditional uniforms — had changed over the centuries, and showed me Coimbra fado guitars, semitorturous hazing tools used within the praxe system, and a ceramic wine vessel disguised as a book and labeled “Enciclopédia Vinícola.” I might never fully understand the capes, but music, hazing and hidden drinking – these were university themes that were all too familiar.

Goodbye 2011

2011-12-31T12:37:00.000Z

you were a good year because you gave me the other

most glorious being in all of creation,

my daughter!

Maple Syrup / Xarope de Ácer

2011-12-29T13:55:00.000Z

Feliz Natal / Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T17:18:00.001Z

All things Literary, by Grant Snider

2011-12-22T20:02:00.002Z

Earthquake!

2011-12-21T20:18:00.000Z

Our Mapa Cor de Rosa on Strange Maps

2011-12-20T20:23:00.000Z

Click to know all about it

The Periodic Table of Artists

2011-12-13T21:52:00.000Z

Robert Noyce in a (Russian) Doodle

2011-12-12T17:02:00.002Z

Diego Rivera in a doodle

2011-12-08T10:09:00.000Z

Get more out of Google, they say :)

2011-12-01T22:45:00.001Z

Created by: HackCollege

Mark Twain, November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910

2011-11-30T16:48:00.001Z

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Now this is Food Pron :-Þ or The Art of Andrea Bricco and Dianna Perrin

2011-11-23T12:27:00.001Z

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter
Andrea photography
Dianna Food styling

Stanislaw Lem's The Astronauts 60th anniversary

2011-11-23T12:05:00.001Z

From The Guardian:

A spiky-haired, bespectacled animation of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem marches across Google's doodle this morning, as the search engine marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of his first book, The Astronauts.

Lem remains best known for his cult novel Solaris, the story of an incomprehensible intelligence encountered on an alien planet. It has been adapted for cinema twice, by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney, 30 years later, and was first published in 1961, during the author's most fertile period, when he also produced his most famous works including Hospital of the Transfiguration, The Invincible and Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

But the doodle, which sees the Lem figure encounter a giant robot, is commemorating publication of his lesser-known first book Astronauci (The Astronauts), which was released in 1951, 60 years ago. The story of the Earth under attack from Venus, the author held it in low esteem in later life.

"Today I am of the opinion that my first science-fiction novels lack any value (despite the fact that I gained world acclaim through their numerous editions). I wrote them – this was the case with Astronauci published in 1951 – driven by motives that I still understand today, however the world presented in them radically differs from all experiences of my life," he said. "Everything is so smooth and balanced; among the heroes we have a positive Russian character and a sweet Chinese; naiveté is present on all pages of this book. The hope that in the year 2000 the world would be wonderful is indeed very childish … As a very young man to a certain extent I must have resembled a sponge that sucked in postulates proposed by socialism. I was concentrated on making the world more and more positive. In a certain sense I fooled myself, since my feelings and hopes were genuine. Today I am a bit disgusted by this book."

The doodle ends with the message that the art was inspired by the drawings of Daniel Mroz for Lem's short story collection The Cyberiad, published in 1965. The Google doodle is interactive, allowing users to participate in a series of games, from solving maths puzzles using the giant robot's body to aligning patterns (Lem shakes his head sadly if the answer is wrong).

The author, who died in 2006 aged 84, has sold more than 27m copies of his books, and is still celebrated today, with publisher Self Made Hero recently adapting two robot-themed tales from his Mortal Engines collection into a graphic novel, Robot..., and the publication earlier this year of the first ever direct translation into English of Solaris.

"Stanlislaw Lem's work looks at the relationship between technology and mankind, questioning the motives behind creating such technology. A theme that becomes increasingly relevant in our current age," said Emma Hayley, publishing director at SelfMadeHero.

Lem joins an eclectic selection of authors to have been honoured with a Google doodle, including HG Wells, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Agatha Christie and Jorge Luis Borges.

DAGUERRE, parbleu! :)

2011-11-18T11:07:00.001Z

Damn you, man! Nobody has such an amazing face!

2011-11-17T16:28:00.001Z

Gary Oldman is GQ's Icon of the year 2011 :)

Surf's Up in Nazaré :)

2011-11-09T11:10:00.003Z

Marie Curie and other historic female scientists you should know

2011-11-08T10:36:00.000Z

Emilie du Chatelet (1706 – 1749)

Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the daughter of the French court’s chief of protocol, married the marquis du Chatelet in 1725. She lived the life of a courtier and bore three children. But at age 27, she began studying mathematics seriously and then branched into physics. This interest intensified as she began an affair with the philosopher Voltaire, who also had a love of science. Their scientific collaborations—they outfitted a laboratory at du Chatelet’s home, Chateau de Cirey, and, in a bit of a competition, each entered an essay into a contest on the nature of fire (neither won)—outlasted their romance. Du Chatelet’s most lasting contribution to science was her French translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia, which is still in use today. At age 43, she fell in love with a young military officer and became pregnant; she died following complications during the birth of their child.

Caroline Herschel (1750 – 1848)

Herschel was little more than the household drudge for her parents in Hanover, Germany (she would later describe herself as the “Cinderella of the family”), when her older brother, William, brought her to England in 1772 to run his household in Bath. After she mastered the art of singing—to accompany William, who was the organist for the Octagon Chapel—her brother switched careers and went into astronomy. Caroline followed. In addition to assisting her brother in his observations and in the building of telescopes, Caroline became a brilliant astronomer in her own right, discovering new nebulae and star clusters. She was the first woman to discover a comet (she discovered eight in total) and the first to have her work published by the Royal Society. She was also the first British woman to get paid for her scientific work, when William, who had been named the king’s personal astronomer after his discovery of Uranus in 1781, persuaded his patron to reward his assistant with an annual salary. After William’s death in 1822, Caroline retired to Hanover. There she continued her astronomical work, compiling a catalogue of nebulae—the Herschels’ work had increased the number of known star clusters from 100 to 2,500. She died in 1848 at age 97 after receiving many honors in her field, including a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society.

Mary Anning (1799 – 1847)

In 1811, Mary Anning’s brother spotted what he thought was a crocodile skeleton in a seaside cliff near the family’s Lyme Regis, England, home. He charged his 11-year-old sister with its recovery, and she eventually dug out a skull and 60 vertebrae, selling them to a private collector for £23. This find was no croc, though, and was eventually named Ichthyosaurus, the “fish-lizard.” Thus began Anning’s long career as a fossil hunter. In addition to ichthyosaurs, she found long-necked plesiosaurs, a pterodactyl and hundreds, possibly thousands, of other fossils that helped scientists to draw a picture of the marine world 200 million to 140 million years ago during the Jurassic. She had little formal education and so taught herself anatomy, geology, paleontology and scientific illustration. Scientists of the time traveled from as far away as New York City to Lyme Regis to consult and hunt for fossils with Anning.

Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872)

Intrigued by the x’s and y’s in the answer to a math question in a ladies’ fashion magazine, 14-year-old Mary Fairfax of Scotland delved into the study of algebra and mathematics, defying her father’s injunction against such pursuits. Her studies were sidetracked by a marriage, in 1804, to a Russian Navy captain, but after his death she returned to Edinburgh and became involved in intellectual circles, associating with people such as the writer Sir Walter Scott and the scientist John Playfair, and resumed her studies in math and science. Her next husband, William Somerville, whom she wed in 1812, supported these efforts, and after they moved to London, Mary became host to her own intellectual circle, which included the astronomer John Herschel and the inventor Charles Babbage. She began experimenting on magnetism and produced a series of writings on astronomy, chemistry, physics and mathematics. She translated astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace’s The Mechanism of the Heavens into English, and although she was unsatisfied with the result, it was used as a textbook for much of the next century. Somerville was one of the first two women, along with Caroline Herschel, to be named honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Maria Mitchell (1818 – 1889)

Young Maria Mitchell learned to observe the stars from her father, who used stellar observations to check the accuracy of chronometers for Nantucket, Massachusetts, whalers and taught his children to use a sextant and reflecting telescope. When Mitchell was 12, she helped her father record the time of an eclipse. And at 17, she had already begun her own school for girls, teaching them science and math. But Mitchell rocketed to the forefront of American astronomy in 1847 when she spotted a blurry streak—a comet—through her telescope. She was honored around the world, earning a medal from the king of Denmark, and became the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1857 Mitchell traveled to Europe, where she visited observatories and met with intellectuals, including Mary Somerville. Mitchell would write: “I could not help but admire [her] as a woman. The ascent of the steep and rugged path of science has not unfitted her for the drawing room circle; the hours of devotion to close study have not been incompatible with the duties of wife and mother.” Mitchell became the first female astronomy professor in the United States, when she was hired by Vassar College in 1865. There she continued her observations, particularly those of the Sun, traveling up to 2,000 miles to witness an eclipse.

Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968)

When Lise Meitner finished school at age 14, she was barred from higher education, as were all girls in Austria. But, inspired by the discoveries of William Röntgen and Henri Becquerel, she was determined to study radioactivity. When she turned 21, women were finally allowed into Austrian universities. Two years of tutoring preceded her enrollment at the University of Vienna; there she excelled in math and physics and earned her doctorate in 1906. She wrote to Marie Curie, but there was no room for her in the Paris lab and so Meitner made her way to Berlin. There she collaborated with Otto Hahn on the study of radioactive elements, but as an Austrian Jewish woman (all three qualities were strikes against her), she was excluded from the main labs and lectures and allowed to work only in the basement. In 1912, the pair moved to a new university and Meitner had better lab facilities. Though their partnership was split up physically when she was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, they continued to collaborate. Meitner continued her work in Sweden and after Hahn discovered that uranium atoms were split when bombarded with neutrons, she calculated the energy released in the reaction and named the phenomenon “nuclear fission.” The discovery—which eventually led to the atomic bomb (“You must not blame scientists for the use to which war technicians have put our discoveries,” Meitner would say in 1945)—won Hahn the Nobel Prize in 1944. Meitner, overlooked by the Nobel committee, refused to return to Germany after the war and continued her atomic research in Stockholm into her 80s.

Irène Curie-Joliot (1897 – 1956)

The elder daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, Irène followed her parents’ footsteps into the lab. The thesis for her 1925 doctor of science was on the alpha rays of polonium, one of the two elements her mother discovered. The next year, she married Frédéric Joliot, one of her mother’s assistants at the Radium Institute in Paris. Irène and Frédéric continued their collaboration inside the laboratory, pursuing research on the structure of the atom. In 1934, they discovered artificial radioactivity by bombarding aluminum, boron and magnesium with alpha particles to produce isotopes of nitrogen, phosphorus, silicon and aluminum. They received the Nobel Prize in chemistry the next year, making Marie and Irène the first parent-child couple to have independently won Nobels. All those years working with radioactivity took a toll, however, and Irène died of leukemia in 1956.

Barbara McClintock (1902 – 1992)

While studying botany at Cornell University in the 1920s, Barbara McClintock got her first taste of genetics and was hooked. As she earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees and moved into postdoctoral work, she pioneered the study of genetics of maize (corn) cells. She pursued her research at universities in California, Missouri and Germany before finding a permanent home at Cold Spring Harbor in New York. It was there that, after observing the patterns of coloration of maize kernels over generations of plants, she determined that genes could move within and between chromosomes. The finding didn’t fit in with conventional thinking on genetics, however, and was largely ignored; McClintock began studying the origins of maize in South America. But after improved molecular techniques that became available in the 1970s and early 1980s confirmed her theory and these “jumping genes” were found in microorganisms, insects and even humans, McClintock was awarded a Lasker Prize in 1981 and Nobel Prize in 1983.

Dorothy Hodgkin (1910 – 1994)

Dorothy Crowfoot (Hodgkin, after her 1937 marriage) was born in Cairo, Egypt, to a pair of British archaeologists. She was sent home to England for school, where she was one of only two girls who were allowed to study chemistry with the boys. At 18, she enrolled in one of Oxford’s women’s colleges and studied chemistry and then moved to Cambridge to study X-ray crystallography, a type of imaging that uses X-rays to determine a molecule’s three-dimensional structure. She returned to Oxford in 1934, where she would spend most of her working life, teaching chemistry and using X-ray crystallography to study interesting biological molecules. She spent years perfecting the technique, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1964, and determined the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. In 2010, 16 years after her death, the British Royal Mail celebrated the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society by issuing stamps with the likenesses of 10 of the society’s most illustrious members, including Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin; Hodgkin was the only woman in the group.

Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958)

James Watson and Francis Crick get credit for determining the structure of DNA, but their discovery relied on the work of Rosalind Franklin. As a teenager in the 1930s, Franklin attended one of the few girls’ schools in London that taught physics and chemistry, but when she told her father that she wanted to be a scientist, he rejected the idea. He eventually relented and she enrolled at Cambridge University, receiving a doctorate in physical chemistry. She learned techniques for X-ray crystallography while in Paris, returning to England in 1951 to work in the laboratory of John Randall at King’s College, London. There she made X-ray images of DNA. She had nearly figured out the molecule’s structure when Maurice Wilkins, another researcher in Randall’s lab who was also studying DNA, showed one of Franklin’s X-ray images to James Watson. Watson quickly figured out the structure was a double helix and, with Francis Crick, published the finding in the journalNature. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for their discovery. Franklin, however, had died of ovarian cancer in 1958.

Smithsonian magazine

Happy Halloween :[

2011-10-31T10:30:00.000Z

Update on the Art of Yanko Tsvetkov - the Mapping Stereotypes Project

2011-10-27T11:49:00.000+01:00

A little more than a year ago I posted here about this master cartographer, or rather, social analyst: The Geography of Prejudice indeed! Here's an update from Yanko's website.

Click and go!
And I want a t-shirt :-Þ

Now, Yanko did not do this one, nor do I know who created it,

but here it goes, Europe according to the Portuguese:

Let's honor here those I find priceless :)

Madonnaland for Malawi?

The magic of Mary Blair, for Disney

2011-10-21T16:52:00.000+01:00

Why Read Moby Dick?

2011-10-20T15:41:00.001+01:00

ven though I hadn’t read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study, relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.

Sometimes he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school, when my English teacher made it clear that I had no choice in the matter, that I finally read Moby-Dick . I soon found myself in the worst position an adolescent male can ever know: having to admit that maybe, just maybe, his father had been right all along.

The voice of Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, caught me completely by surprise. I had expected to be bored to death, but Ishmael sounded like the best friend I had not yet managed to find. Thirty-seven years later, after reading Moby-Dick cover to cover at least a dozen times, I still count Ishmael as a beloved soulmate and spiritual adviser. Not only is he funny, wise, and bighearted, he is the consummate survivor, for it is he and he alone who lives to tell about Ahab’s encounter with the White Whale. For me, Moby-Dick is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual—the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Much of this has to do, I think, with the extraordinary historical moment at which Herman Melville wrote his masterpiece. In the fall of 1850, when he moved his family from New York City to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, the United States was in the midst of pushing its way west. Railroads had begun to knit the interior of the nation into an iron tracery of ceaseless, smoke-belching movement. Steamboats ventured up once inaccessible rivers. With the winning of the Mexican War, in 1848, America’s future as a bi-coastal nation was sealed. When word reached the East Coast later that year that gold had been discovered in California, thousands upon thousands of prospectors quickly made that future an accomplished fact.

But there was a problem with this juggernaut: a lie festered at the ideological core of the then 30 states of America. Despite the fact that her founders had promised liberty and freedom for all, the southern half of the country was economically dependent on the slavery of Africans. And with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required that any escaped slaves be handed over to the authorities, slavery was no longer just a southern problem. Antagonisms that had lain dormant for decades could no longer be contained, and an eruption of terrible violence appeared inevitable.

Melville’s intense imaginative engagement with these forces of turmoil and change meant that the novel he wrote and re-wrote over the course of a year beginning in September 1850 would be about much more than a whaling voyage to the Pacific. Indeed, contained in the pages ofMoby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that had contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 and were about to precipitate a civil war in 1861, and that have continued to drive this country’s ever contentious march across 160 years, up through the current “war on terror.” This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations of readers have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or, closer to our own day, as a profit-mad, deep-drilling oil company in 2010, or as one of several power-crazed Middle Eastern dictators in 2011.

he irony is that when Moby-Dick was first published, in the fall of 1851, virtually no one, except for the author to whom the novel was dedicated, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his wife, Sophia, seems to have taken much notice. By the time of Melville’s death, in 1891, Moby-Dick had sold a grand total of 3,715 copies—a third of the total that his first novel, Typee, had sold. It wasn’t until after World War I that what had begun as a few belated plaudits became a virtual tidal wave of praise. There were still some naysayers (Joseph Conrad ridiculed Moby-Dick for its romantic, overblown prose), but the vast majority of writers who first encountered the book were stunned and deeply influenced by how Melville conveyed the specifics of a past world even as he communicated an unmatched sense of what it is like, in any age, to be alive. What Moby-Dick had needed, it turned out, was space—the distance required for its themes and images to resonate, unfettered by the passions that had inspired them. Once free of its own time, the novel was on its way to becoming the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today.

Among the expatriates in Paris in the 1920s, Moby-Dick was what one writer described as “a sort of cunning test by which the genuineness of another man’s response to literature could be proved.” In 1927, William Faulkner, who would later hang a framed print of Rockwell Kent’s Captain Ahab in his living room in Oxford, Mississippi, claimed that Moby-Dick was the one novel by another author that he wished he had written. In 1949, Ernest Hemingway, upon entering his 50s, wrote his publisher that he considered Melville one of the handful of writers he was still trying to beat.

By 1951, when the centennial of the novel’s publication was celebrated, Melville’s masterpiece had succeeded in becoming more than a literary sensation; it had become an indispensable part of the popular culture. Even so, in our day, Moby-Dick is the most reluctantly read of the American classics. Not only is the book long; many of its 135 chapters appear to have nothing to do with the tale of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the White Whale. But the novel, like all great works of art, grows on you. Instead of being a page-turner, Moby-Dick is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

In fact, we have become those space aliens, the inhabitants of a planet so altered by our profligate presence that we are living on a different Earth from the one Melville knew. And yet the more our world changes, the more relevant the novel seems to be.

elville’s years on a whaleship in the 1840s gave him a firsthand appreciation for the backbreaking reality of physical labor. Politicians of his day might have spoken patriotically about the nation’s founding principles, but it was repetitious, soul-crushing work—a form of bodily punishment to which most white Americans refused to submit—that was responsible for the country’s prosperity. Once a whale was killed, it took an entire day to process it, only to be repeated when another whale was sighted. “Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing!,” Ishmael laments. “Yet this is life.”

The crew of a typical whaleship was made up of men from all over the world. This demographic diversity was not typical of the United States in that era, when to be an American citizen was to be white and, if not already rich (few, proportionally, were well-off), certainly on the way to wealth as the nation proudly took its place as a global power. A century and a half later, we have a very different perspective on the role of other peoples in America’s rise, and Melville was one of the few authors of his time to have personal experience with where the future lay for America in a demographic sense. What’s more, his portrayal of working people is never stereotypical or condescending.

Melville’s time aboard a whaler also left him with an appreciation for the liberating power of democracy, what Ishmael calls the “democratic dignity” that distinguished America at the time—with the notable exceptions of the settlers’ treatment of Native Americans and the institution of slavery. In the dangerous work environment of the whale fishery it didn’t matter what your race or background was; what mattered was whether you could do your job. At one point thePequod’ s third mate, Flask, climbs onto the back of his towering black harpooneer, Daggoo, to get a better view of a pod of whales. “The sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious,” Ishmael observes, “for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.” In this single image, Melville has managed to illustrate what he calls elsewhere “the divine equality” of humanity even as he provides a scathing critique of slavery. Flask may out-rank Daggoo, but it is the African harpooneer who literally carries the third mate. Indeed, one might go a step further and contend that what Ishmael repeatedly refers to as the whale’s appalling demonic whiteness signals the author’s stand against his nation’s racist practices. Democracy in principle, Ishmael maintains, “radiates without end from God; Himself!”

n every age, there will be a threat to the principle of “divine equality,” and his name is Ahab. In Melville’s view, it doesn’t take much to become a demagogue as long as you learn a few simple tricks. Dictators such as Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi are not geniuses; they are paranoid despots and expert manipulators of men. If you want to understand how these and other megalomaniacs pull it off, read the last third ofMoby-Dick and watch as Ahab tightens his stranglehold on the Pequod’ s crew in his increasingly horrifying quest for the White Whale.

But Melville also provides a description of the ideal leader. In the midst of a disorienting crisis, what is needed more than anything else, he suggests, is a calm, steadying dose of clarity, the kind of omniscient, all-seeing perspective symbolized by an eagle on the wing: “And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.” This is the anti-Ahab, who instead of anger and pain relies on equanimity and judgment, who does his best to remain above the fray and who even in the darkest of possible moments resists the “woe that is madness.”

In this portrait of a person who resists the fiery, disorienting passions of the moment, who has the soul of a high-flying Catskill eagle, Melville, in his preternatural way, has hit upon a description of the political figure America desperately needed in 1851 but who would not appear on the national stage until a decade later, when Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States.

n one of his typical chapter-length asides (the book is truly proto-modernist, given its fractured structure, voluminous lists, idiosyncratic asides, and interior monologues), Melville tackles a prescient question, considering today’s extinction-prone Earth: “Whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must … like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.” In the paragraphs that follow, Ishmael compares the whale to the buffalo in the American West and acknowledges that, taking into account what has happened to those “humped herds,” it might seem inevitable that “the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.”

But after examining the question from a variety of angles, he decides that this is not the case. Given the difficulty of pursuing whales across an ocean larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined, along with the whales’ ability to retreat to “their Polar citadels” in the icy North and South, where they can “bid defiance to all pursuit from man,” the whale is, Ishmael insists, “immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.”

For those who grew up in the aftermath of the industrialized slaughter of whales in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when it looked like several species of cetaceans would indeed go the way of the buffalo, Ishmael might seem woefully naïve, especially in light of what has happened in recent years to the world’s ice sheet. On the other hand, the sperm-whale population is now on the rebound, even as evidence continues to mount that our addiction to what supplanted whale oil—petroleum—has contributed to global warming and sea-level rise. In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity. Maybe Ishmael’s reference to “the last man” is more than a figure of speech. Instead of whales, maybe the endangered mega-fauna is us.

Melville ends this chapter with an image that has taken on a frightening immediacy due to the ravages of climate change and the aftermath of the tsunami that recently decimated Japan. “In Noah’s flood he [the whale] despised Noah’s Ark,” Ishmael reminds us, “and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmast crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.” There it is, Ishmael’s vision of the future: a drowned world devoid of land dwellers, a hell for people but a paradise for whales.

So how do we face a world in which yet another cataclysm, whether it be environmental, financial, or terrorist-devised, always seems to be just around the corner? I think it’s Ishmael who puts it best. Nearly halfway into the novel, after almost getting killed in pursuit of a whale, he says, “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.” Elsewhere Ishmael advises, “Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick.

the How to Write Fiction series from The Guardian

2011-10-20T15:38:00.000+01:00

The Cruel Working World, by Infograph

2011-10-12T12:16:00.001+01:00

Wishlist: Diamantes de Sangue

2011-10-12T12:09:00.000+01:00

Na província angolana da Lunda‑Norte, onde se concentram as principais áreas de exploração aluvial diamantífera, grande parte dos habitantes vive em regime de quase escravatura. São impedidos de manter actividades de auto‑subsistência, roubados, torturados, assassinados. As forças armadas e as empresas privadas de segurança protagonizam os crimes com total impunidade. As autoridades e o governo ignoram esses crimes.
Jornalista de investigação, Rafael Marques é um dos principais responsáveis por denunciar e divulgar os esquemas de corrupção que envolvem as mais altas esferas do poder em Angola, bem como as empresas e entidades estrangeiras que com ele negoceiam.
«Diamantes de Sangue» é uma investigação sobre personalidades, instituições e empresas envolvidas no negócio dos diamantes e inclui o testemunho de centenas de vítimas.

Rafael Marques é jornalista de profissão. Nos últimos anos tem-se dedicado à pesquisa sobre a economia política angolana, em especial sobre o sistema de corrupção no país, e continua a monitorizar a situação dos direitos humanos na região diamantífera das Lundas. É formado em Jornalismo e Antropologia, pela Universidade de Londres, e é mestre em Estudos Africanos, pela Universidade de Oxford.
Como resultado do seu trabalho em defesa dos direitos humanos, o Northcote Parkinson Fund atribuiu‑lhe, em 2006, o Civil Courage Prize.
É autor do site Maka Angola, no qual publica o resultado dos seus trabalhos de investigação e mantém actualizadas informações sobre a corrupção no seu país.

Edições Tinta-da-China

Iceberg, right ahead!

2011-10-11T11:03:00.001+01:00

Found in La Historia con Mapas, there's many more...

Putain de Famine

2011-10-10T13:02:00.003+01:00

Fuck Famine

2011-10-10T12:29:00.002+01:00

Food Comparison

2011-10-09T02:08:00.001+01:00

H.G. Wells on Metropolis, or Wishlist: (Lapham's Quarterly) Future

2011-10-09T02:05:00.001+01:00

I have recently seen the silliest film. I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier. It is called “Metropolis,” it comes from the great Ufa studios in Germany, and the public is given to understand that it has been produced at enormous cost. It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.

It is a German film and there have been some amazingly good German films before they began to cultivate bad work under cover of a protective quota. And this film has been adapted to the Anglo-Saxon taste, and quite possibly it has suffered in the process, but even when every allowance has been made for that, there remains enough to convince an intelligent observer that most of its silliness must be fundamental.

Capek's Robots have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster of Mary Shelley's, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds once more in this confusion. Originality there is none. Independent thought, none; where nobody has imagined for them the authors have simply fallen back on contemporary things. The airplanes that wander about above the great city show no advance on contemporary types, though all that stuff could have been livened up immensely with a few helicopters and vertical and unexpected movements. The motor cars are 1926 models or earlier. I do not think there is a single new idea, a single instance of artistic creation, or even intelligent anticipation, from first to last in the whole pretentious stew. I may have missed some point of novelty, but I doubt it, and this, though it must bore the intelligent man in the audience, makes the film all the more convenient as a gauge of the circles of ideas, the mentality, from which it has proceeded.

The word “Metropolis,” says the advertisement in English, “is in itself symbolic of greatness”—which only shows us how wise it is to consult a dictionary before making assertions about the meaning of words. Probably it was the adapter who made that shot. The German “Neubabelsburg” was better, and could have been rendered “New Babel.” It is a city, we are told, of about one hundred years hence. It is represented as being enormously high, and all the air and happiness are above and the workers live down, down, down below.

Now thirty years ago it may have been excusable to symbolize social relations in this way, but a lot of thinking and some experience intervene. That vertical city of the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable. Even in New York and Chicago, where the pressure on the central sites is exceptionally great, it is only the central office and entertainment region that soars and excavates. And the same centripetal pressure that leads to the utmost exploitation of site values at the centre leads also to the driving out of industrialism and labour from the population center to cheaper areas, and of residential life to more open and airy surroundings. That was all discussed and written about before 1900. Somewhere about 1930 the geniuses of Ufa studios will come up to a book of anticipations which was written as recently as a quarter of a century ago. The British census returns of 1901 proved clearly that city populations were becoming centrifugal, and that every increase in horizontal traffic facilities produced a further distribution. This vertical social stratification is stale old stuff. So far from being a hundred years hence, “Metropolis,” in its forms and shapes, is already, as a possibility, a third of a century out of date.

But in its form is the least part of its staleness. This great city is supposed to be evoked by a single dominating personality. The English version calls him John Masterman, so that there may be no mistake about his quality. Very unwisely he has called his son Eric instead of sticking to good hard John, and so relaxed the strain. He works with an inventor, one Rotwang, and they make machines. There are a certain number of other rich people, and the sons of the rich are seen disporting themselves, with underclad ladies in a sort of joy conservatory rather like the Winter garden of an enterprising 1890 hotel during an orgy. The rest of the population is in a state of abject slavery, working in “shifts” of ten hours in some mysteriously divided twenty-four hours and with no money to spend or property or freedom. The machines make wealth. How is not stated. We are shown rows of motor cars all exactly alike, but the workers cannot own these, and no “sons of the rich” would. Even the middle classes nowadays want a car with personality. Probably Masterman makes these cars in endless series to amuse himself. One is asked to believe that these machines are engaged quite furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used, and that Masterman grows richer and richer in the process.

This is the essential nonsense of it all. Unless the mass of the population has the spending power there is no possibility of wealth in a mechanical civilization. A vast, penniless, slave population may be necessary for wealth where there are no mass production machines, but it is preposterous with mass production machines. You find such a real proletariat in China still—it existed in the great cities of the ancient world—but you do not find it in America, which has gone furthest in the direction of mechanical industry, and there is no grain of reason for supposing it will exist in the future. Masterman's watchword is efficiency, and you are given to understand it is a very dreadful word, and the contrivers of this idiotic spectacle are so hopelessly ignorant of all the work that has been done upon industrial efficiency that they represent him as working his machine-minders to the point of exhaustion, so that they faint and machines explode and people are scalded to death. You get machine-minders in torment turning levers in response to signals. Work that could be done far more effectively by automata. Much stress is laid on the fact that the workers are spiritless, hopeless drudges, working reluctantly and mechanically. But mechanical civilization has no use for mere drudges. The more efficient its machinery the less need there is for the quasi-mechanical minder. It is the inefficient factory that needs slaves, the ill-organized mine that kills men. The hopeless drudge stage of human labor lies behind us. With a sort of malignant stupidity this film contradicts these facts.

Rotwang, the inventor, is making a Robot, apparently without any license from Capek, the original patentee. It is to look and work like a human being, but it is to have no “soul,” it is to be a substitute for drudge labor. Masterman very properly suggests that it should never have a soul, and for the life of me I cannot see why it should. The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and the drudge soul. But this is evidently regarded as very dreadful and impressive by the producers, who are all on the side of soul and love and such like. I am surprised they were not pinched for souls in the alarm clocks and runabouts. Masterman, still unwilling to leave bad alone, persuades Rotwang to make this Robot in the likeness of Mary, so that it may raise an insurrection among the workers to destroy the machines by which they live and so learn that it is necessary to work. Rather intricate that, but Masterman, you understand, is a rare devil of a man. Full of pride and efficiency and modernity and all those horrid things.

Then comes the crowning imbecility of the film—the conversion of the Robot into the likeness of Mary. Rotwang, you must understand, occupies a small old house embedded in the modern city richly adorned with pentagrams and other reminders of the antiquated German romances, out of which its owner has been taken. A faint smell of Mephistopheles is perceptible for a time. So even at Ufa, Germany can still be dear, old, magic-loving Germany. Perhaps the Germans will never get right away from the brocken. Walpurgis Night is the name day of the German poetic imagination, and the national fantasy capers securely forever with a broomstick between its legs. By some no doubt abominable means Rotwang has squeezed a vast and well-equipped modern laboratory into this little house. It is ever so much higher than the house, but no doubt he has fallen back on Einstein and other modern bewilderment. Mary has to be trapped, put into a machine like a translucent cocktail shaker and undergo all sorts of pyrotechnic treatment in order that her likeness may be transferred to the Robot. The possibility of Rotwang just simply making a Robot like her evidently never entered the gifted producer's head.

The Robot is enveloped in wavering haloes. The premises seem to be struck by lightning repeatedly, the contents of a number of flasks and carboys are violently agitated, there are minor explosions and discharges. Rotwang conducts the operations with a manifest lack of assurance, and finally, to his evident relief the likeness is taken and things calm down. The false Mary then winks darkly at the audience and sails off to raise the workers. And so forth and so on. There is some rather good swishing about in water after the best film traditions, some violent and unconvincing machine breaking and rioting and wreckage, and then rather confusedly one gathers that Masterman has learned his lesson and that the workers and employers are now to be reconciled by “love.”

Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; never for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature amid these mindless, imitative absurdities. The film's air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence. It has nothing to do with any social or moral issue before the world, or with any that can even conceivably arise. It is bunkum and poor and thin even as bunkum. I am astonished at the toleration shown it by “a number of film critics on both sides of the Atlantic,” and it cost, says the London Times, 6,000,000 marks. How they spent all that upon it I cannot imagine. Most of the effects could have been got with models at no great expense.

The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent, sentimentalizing, and make-believe film, wastes some very fine possibilities. My belief in German enterprise has had a shock. I am dismayed by the intellectual laziness it betrays. I thought Germany, even at its worst, could toil. I thought they had resolved to be industriously modern. It is profoundly interesting to speculate on the present trend of mechanical invention and of the real reactions of invention upon labor conditions. Instead of plagiarizing from a book thirty years old and resuscitating the banal moralizing of the early Victorian period, it would have been almost as easy, no more costly and far more interesting to have taken some pains to gather opinions of a few bright young research students and ambitious modernizing architects and engineers about the trend of modern invention and develop these artistically. Any technical school would have been delighted to supply sketches and suggestions for the aviation and transport of 2027 A.D. There are now masses of literature upon the organization of labor for efficiency that could have been boiled down at a very small cost. The question of the development of industrial control, the relation of industrial to political direction, the way all that is going, is of the liveliest current interest. Apparently the Ufa people did not know of these things and did not want to know about them; they were too dense to see how these things could have been brought into touch with the life of today and made interesting to the man in the street. After the worst traditions of the cinema world, monstrously self-satisfied and self-sufficient, convinced of the power of loud advertisement to put things over with the public, and with no fear of searching criticism in their minds, no consciousness of thought and knowledge beyond their ken, they set to work in their huge studio to produce furlong after furlong of this ignorant, old-fashioned balderdash and ruin the market for any better film along these lines.

Six million marks! The waste of it! The theatre when I visited it was crowded. All but the highest-priced seats were full, and the gaps in places filled up reluctantly but completely before the great film was begun. I suppose every one had come to see what the city of a hundred years hence would be like. I suppose there are multitudes of people to be “drawn” by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that “Metropolis” was really a possible forecast or not. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other.