One generation’s
luxury will be the next’s necessity: buttons, window glass, socks, rugs, door handles, lace, cranberries...

Eco on Paper vs Electronic Memory

The Elegant Universe series is available online for everyone to enjoy ...........

ROTK premiere survival guide:
For those of you planning on seeing the third LOTR movie at the theater her are some survival tips.

1. Stand up halfway through the movie and yell loudly, "Wait... where the hell is Harry Potter?"
2. Block the entrance to the theater while screaming: "YOU SHALL NOT PASS!" - After the movie, say "Lucas could have done it better."
3. At some point during the movie, stand up and shout: "I must go! Middle Earth needs me!" and run and try to jump into the screen. After bouncing off, return quietly to your seat.
4. Play a drinking game where you have to take a sip every time someone says: "The Ring."
5. Point and laugh whenever someone dies.
6. Ask the nearest ring-nut if he thinks Gandalf went to Hogwarts
7. Finish off every one of Elrond's lines with "Mr. Anderson."
8. When Aragorn is crowned king, stand up and at the top of your lungs sing, "And I did it.... MY way...!"
9. At the end, complain that Gollum was offensive to Ethiopians
10. Talk like Gollum all through the movie. At the end, bite off someone's finger and fall down the stairs.
11. When Shelob appears, pinch the guy in front of you on the back of the neck.
12. Dress up as old ladies and reenact "The Battle of Helms Deep" Monty Python style.
13. When Denethor lights the fire, shout "Barbecue!"
14. Ask people around you who they think is the next "Terminator" sent from the Middle Earth of the future to assassinate Frodo Baggins
15. In TTT when the Ents decide to march to war, stand up and shout "RUN FOREST, RUN!"
16. Every time someone kills an Orc, yell: "That's what I'm Tolkien about!" See how long it takes before you get kicked out of the theatre.
17. During a wide shot of a battle, inquire, "Where's Waldo?"
18. Talk loudly about how you heard that there is a single frame of a nude Elf hidden somewhere in the movie.
19. Start an Orc sing-a-long.
20. Come to the premiere dressed as Frankenfurter and wander around looking terribly confused.

It's here... The First ROTK Review...

also,

Gaffes: Fellowship of the Nitpickers
A Web site traces Peter Jackson’s every step... and misstep

Sigur Rós

On Translation

If you have a good time with a book, praise the author; if you have a good time with a paragraph, praise the translator (as well).
This is a rule of thumb devised by Michael Hoffmann to perceive translation work, about Umberto Eco's new book, Mouse or Rat - Translation as Negotiation (yes, yet again :-)

Didn't know D.H. Lawrence dabbed at painting too :P

In June 1929 a squad of embarrassed policemen raided the Warren gallery in London, and seized 13 paintings by DH Lawrence. They were spared from being burned on condition that they were never exhibited in Britain again.

The paintings were exported - "to corrupt some other poor buggers" as Lawrence remarked - but a set of replicas was on view yesterday at the Pan bookshop in London.

And I thought Germany had some reaaaally bad town names. It seems that Austria is indeed home to a town called 'Fucking' (48' 03"N 13' 51"E). Here are a few photos of the reportedly hard-to-keep sign:




(The "Bitte — nicht so schnell!" is German for "Please — not so fast!" is the icing on the cake)

El hombre de la Quinta del sordo

Robert Hughes's account of Goya's life and art on the NYTimes

The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick

The inside-out story of how
a hyper-paranoid, pulp-fiction hack conquered the movie world 20 years after his death.

Late-breaking news:
incidentally - no, really - the Lord of the Gold Ring seems to be foundering in a sea of commercialism, so the Boston Globe says. Tss tss.

Inspired by, for sure, and there are more writers in this sort of series, Eça de Queirós, Júlio Dinis, Shakespeare, Balzac, etc.

Ehehey, Martin Amis on porn:

From the man the New York Times calls the best American writer England has ever produced comes a brilliant and unsettling novel of sex, royalty, and violence.

The Strange World Of Thomas Harris: Inside The Mind Of The Creator Of Hannibal Lecter, by David Sexton - surprising lineage, including Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire, the whole vicious lot!

The Search For Roots: A Personal Anthology by Primo Levi.
The literature that shaped this Auschwitz survivor and chemistry professor, published for the first time in English.

The below mentioned essay on Deleuze mentions both Jaschinski and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritú. Boy, they're good :-))))

This is exactly who my cat thinks she is when prowling around in my garden, lurking behind the bushes :-) Photograph by Britta Jaschinski.

What is more, here's a short essay on what Georges Deleuze wrote, Art is continually haunted by the animal.

Portugal and Spain in 360º

Some pointers here one of those doomsday times...

In the ghetto

New studies by Gunnar S Paulsson and Michal Grynberg show the fate of the Jews
in Warsaw during the second world war is ripe for reappraisal

Posiblemente la mejor fotografia del dia:

Cómo quisiera poder vivir sin aire
cómo quisiera poder vivir sin agua
Me encantaría quererte un poco menos
cómo quisiera poder vivir sin ti

Pero no puedo
siento que muero
me estoy ahogando
sin tu amor

Cómo quisiera poder vivir sin aire
cómo quisiera calmar mi aflicción
Cómo quisiera poder vivir sin agua
me encantaría robar tu corazón

Cómo pudiera un pez nadar sin agua
cómo pudiera una ave volar sin alas
Cómo pudiera la flor crecer sin tierra
cómo quisiera poder vivir sin ti

Pero no puedo
siento que muero
me estoy ahogando
sin tu amor

Cómo quisiera lanzarte al olvido
cómo quisiera guardarte en un cajón
Cómo quisiera borrarte de un soplido
me encantaría matar esta canción

Barcelona



My beloved Valencia

My eyessssssssssss, My eyessssssssssss

Why, oh Why, in the name of the Lord. I fear just to link
it: Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates star in a Matrix spoof
(caveats=they do star, no CG here my eyessss, my eyesssssssssss)

Sooooooooooooo sad. This guy performs a pseudo-poll on the IRC to check young people knowledge on music. While some
are way too Spanish, some of the answers are awesome:

///////////////////////
>hola
>conoces "We are the champions?"
fffffff> me suena mucho
fffffff> es una cancion?
>Es la canción q ponen cuando un equipo de futbol gana un trofeo
fffffff> joder claro q la conozco
fffffff> eso lo conocen hasta las piedras
> ¿Sabes de quien es?
fffffff> De la UEFA


Nota: :’(
/////////////////////

////////////////////
topillo>hola
>Buenas
topillo>edad?
>¿Sabes kien era bob marley?
topillo>si
>sabias q era primo del che guevara?
topillo>no
>hicieron un disco q se llamaba 'led zeppelin IV'
>deberias escucharlo
topillo>gracias por el consejo
topillo>pero ahora no kiero hablar d musica
>d q kieres hablar?
topillo>q llevas puesto??

Nota: La desesperación por el sexo debe quemar las neuronas
//////////////////////

Power to Wrinkles: we can find intensely beautiful wrinkles everywhere, from faces to fruit to the fabric in Renaissance paintings :-)

Where are you? it's the usual question when communicating over a cellphone. Here's Metropolis magazine on the subject.

Winner of the Anima Mundi Web award in the Internet Animation Contest: O Boot it's from Brazil, loaded with slang but still very funny :-)

Old Wives Tales?

Ummm, let's see (masturbation and blindness are not there, damn it)

And, of course, Turner, this time his Venetian Vision in a book reviewed by same ol' TLS

Reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement

Last post about life with the wizard at McKellen.com

"La mujer del médico se levantó, se acercó a la ventana. Miró hacia abajo, a la calle cubierta de basura, a las personas
que gritaban y cantaban. Luego alzó la cabeza al cielo y lo vió todo blanco, Ahora me toca a mí, pensó. El miedo súbito
le hizo bajar los ojos. La ciudad aún estaba allí."

José Saramago
Ensayo sobre la ceguera

Breaking News: Umberto Eco on Translation as Negotiation, a must read (well, since we read him in college, for Narratology and Methodology purposes, what the heck :-)

This is the movie everybody talks about and I've already seen it in an airplane! :-P
Movie site: Finding Nemo

Can't resist to publish the following story. It's a tradition I've just discovered by investigating the origin of a Buddist statue in Japan: Jizzo. It's as beautiful as it is bittersweet:

According to tradition, children who die prematurely are sent to the underworld as punishment for causing great sorrow to their parents (their death caused grief to their folks). They are sent to Sai no Kawara, the dry bed of the river of souls in purgatory, where they pray for Buddha's compassion by building small stone towers, piling stone upon stone. But an underworld demon soon arrives and scatters their stones and beats them with an iron club.

But, no need to worry, for Jizo comes to the rescue to help the children. Because of this traditional story, children who die prematurely in Japan are called "mizuko children," or water children, and the saddened parents pray to "Mizuko Jizo."

Even today, you will invariably find little heaps of stones around Jizo statues, as many believe that a stone offered in faith will shorten the time their child suffers in the underworld.

Jizo statues are often wearing tiny garments. Since Jizo is the guardian of dead children, sorrowing mothers bring the little garments of their lost ones and dress the Jizo statue in hopes the kindly god will specially protect their child.

i've always loved this line from the Bible, and I think it applies:

"And the light shines in the darkness,
but the darkness has not overcome it"
John 1:5

It's not all Greek to me they say, and methinks we can both say that in our languages.
Essay on ancient Greek thought compared with contemporary Chinese ideas.

Following the appearance of the movie The Human Stain, adapted from a novel by Philip Roth, here's an article on The Best Novelists, the Worst Movie Adaptations from the NY Times, registration required.

The NY Times publishes a retrospective that includes reviews, interviews and excerpts from the books of Martin Amis, whose new novel is "Yellow Dog."

Just guess who's meeting the parents... in May....



(guess what trailer is already waiting in some ftp server!)

Una crítica literaria del Quijote en el New York Times....

Which Trainspotting Character Are You?

A Gallimard publica esta Antologia da Poesia Portuguesa Contemporânea:

O que se diz:
Le Portugal est sans doute un des pays où la vitalité de la poésie contemporaine est la plus manifeste. Les poètes vivants connaissent des tirages que bien des romanciers pourraient leur envier ; les journaux leur consacrent de pleines pages à l'égal des prosateurs, les prestigieux prix littéraires ne les épargnent pas et le nombre de recueils traduits en diverses langues est impressionnant. En France, parmi les quelque trois cents titres de littérature portugaise traduits depuis 1980, près d'un tiers sont des livres de poésie.
Mais aujourd'hui, quoi de neuf au Portugal ? Pessoa, serait-on tenté de dire, tant sa présence éditoriale est encore vive. Ce serait pourtant ignorer l'extraordinaire diversité de la poésie portugaise depuis 1935. Cette anthologie témoigne, par sa diversité et l'originalité des voies explorées, de la manière singulière et fervente qui incite les poètes portugais à «habiter poétiquement le monde».

Vi este filme ontem em ante-estreia e gostei muito. A Guerra Colonial em exorcismo, como já há muito era preciso. Aqui está o sítio de uma das produtoras, cujos nome e símbolo me agradam :-) Samsa, embora desactualizado.

Wine is constant proof that God likes to see us happy
-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

How Putin became Rasputin?
With such a title, glaringly obvious but newfound to me (caraças!) ensues an article about the growing totalitarianism of the Russian helmer.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize for Literature recipient (1993), in a lecture titled How can Values be taught in the University?. Response by Denis Dutton, the scholar behind Arts & Letters Daily, to be found here and titled Dare to Think for Yourself.
I know, reams of links :-)

The Moral Sense Test is a Web-based study into the nature of moral intuitions. How do humans, throughout the world, decide what is right and wrong?
This is a quality project who (needs and) deserves advertising. In the words of Marc D. Hauser of the Harvard's Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory:
I would very much appreciate it if you would not only take the test, but also spread the word to your friends and colleagues, of all ages. We are particularly interested in getting cross-cultural data as well as developmental information, so even young children who can read would be terrifically helpful. The more the word spreads, the better for us. Thanks a lot for your help.

This is a mere review, but worthy of perusal: The Key to The Name of the Rose has been republished.

COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

It's a damn old version but 24, the TV show uses KDE, that is, Linux!!!!!
Check the toolbar underneath the pic...

Where does the @ symbol come from. El mundo has
a list of its different translations. The origin, though, is here.
Surprise, surprise, it might be Spanish.

Questioning Darwinism: fashionable but even more timely?

Why did Germany, one of the most cultured societies on earth, bow to gangsters? Was WWII inevitable? [This is the exact same indignant response Tolkien had :-]
Upcoming book reviewed here, The Coming of the Third Reich

Down with Rorschach, mythmaking test :-P

At home with the Führer

A copy of Homes and Gardens from 1938 featured an article about Hitler's house
...