Nepenthe

Brand New Common Library Adquisition: Alta velocidad You can read read some of it in online . [ WARNING , it's in Spanish :D] Hemos recorrido la geografía portuguesa a Alta velocidad, recogiendo muestras para componer un mosaico literario que dé cuenta de la variedad temática y la calidad formal de la última narrativa que se está realizando en el país vecino, para descubrir al lector la realidad de una literatura variada, de altísima calidad y, desgraciadamente, poco atendida hasta el momento en España. Los dieciséis autores seleccionados son novelistas y publican regularmente en Portugal. Sus nombres han sido seleccionados entre los surgieron en los años 90 con criterios de calidad y representatividad. " A pesar de que el "realismo urbano total" haya sido proclamado por todas partes -también entre nosotros- como designación de una nueva literatura, la idea de Portugal que más inspira a esta juventud literaria sigue siendo tan urbana como rural; en a...

More on eating and the Atkins diet: The Great Neurotic Art On the same topic: El Gobierno británico ordena una investigación de la dieta Atkins

Major German newspapers and a leading newsweekly said Friday they are abandoning a 6-year-old language reform program and returning to the old way of writing, reviving a fierce debate about new rules that were meant to make German easier (¿?) Read it here: Media Abandoning German Language Reforms , Spelling revolt grips German press , German publishers in revolt over spelling and here Germans bridle at language law .

After Babel [always good to contemplate this remarkable painting] IN THE 17th century, educated people across central Europe could still communicate with each other in Latin. By the mid-19th century, the handiest language for a traveller through Mitteleuropa was the German spoken by the Habsburg monarchs who reigned over Hungarians, Czechs and many others. A little more than 100 years later, the dominant tongue was Russian. Now the region's new language of choice for the 21st century is percolating upwards through the education system, and downwards from the business and political elite. It will be English, studied by three out of four secondary-school pupils from the Baltic to the Balkans. Most central European countries have just joined, or are waiting to join, the European Union, and their accession is already reinforcing the dominance of English as a language for the EU as a whole. In central Europe, as in much of the world, knowledge of English has become a ba...

On November 11 1944, Paul Fussell woke up surrounded by corpses. Drafted into the American infantry 18 months before, he had been in France just a few weeks and this was his first night in the line. "Until that moment," he writes in his memoir Doing Battle (1996), "the only dead people I'd seen had been Mother's parents." But now, in the forest where he had been ordered to rest after a botched attack, there were "dozens of German boys in greenish grey uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were replacing. If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces." The horrors inflicted by and on ground troops, Fussell believes, are almost never acknowledged. "American readers needed someone to tell them what war was really like," he says, "because by the 1970s the romanticising of the second world war had already begun. And so I tried to cut away parts of it...

The Risk of Reading ow American culture can get singularly weird when it's time to say a good word for reading. Think of the television public-service ad that depicts Shaquille O'Neal goofily chasing down the last page of a novel (Shaq reads? Sure.) or the one depicting a circle of kids being read to by Keith Van Horn, then with the New Jersey Nets, decked out in a ''Cat in the Hat'' stovepipe. Devising footage that makes reading look more ridiculous wouldn't be all that easy to do. Now, in the wake of a National Endowment for the Arts report that says -- to no one's surprise -- that interest in literature is falling drastically, reading is getting some more thoughtful defense. But the terms of the defense still leave me wondering. I feel a little as if I'm sitting around with a bunch of boxing aficionados praising Muhammad Ali: one goes on about his jump-roping ability; another, about how well he does his road work; a third g...

Privileged Tarts by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre ; Innocent Sweet Bread by Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye . (There's Turkish Delight by C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe too :) Stuff I'd like to taste - cos of the books, of course :-9 or that I find intriguing: ICHABOD’S SLAPJACKS by Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ; ORANGE–POPPY SEED TEA CAKES by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ; (STUFFED PIG STOMACH WITH) OYSTER FILLING by Lewis Carroll, "The Walrus and the Carpenter "; PERSIAN CUCUMBER AND YOGURT by Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog ; ANTICIPATION CHEESE AND SPINACH SOUFFLÉ by Agatha Christie, A Holiday for Murder ; CORN TORTILLAS by John Steinbeck, The Pearl ; MRS. LEIBOWITZ’S LENTIL-VEGETABLE SOUP by Frank McCourt, Angela ’s Ashes AND Isak Dinesen, Babette ’s Feast ; BAKED CHEESE SAVORIES by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe ; SUMMER ’S DAY CUCUMBER-TOMATO SANDWICHES by D.H.Lawre...

The Lost Art of Eating, still available from The New York Review of Books From bad: What's dinner like, then? They serve wine that a woolen rag wouldn't deign to lap up (as Juvenal puts it), which, if you're insane enough to drink it, will make you vinegary, watery, corrupted, dropsical, sour; either chilled, or tepid, with a bad color and taste.... And don't think you'll be drinking from vessels of silver or glass; there's the fear of theft with the former, and of breakage with the latter. You'll be drinking from a wooden cup, black, ancient, fetid, with dregs caked on its bottom, which the lords have used as a pissoir. And you won't get your own cup: so whether you want your wine mixed with water or pure, you'll get what everyone else wants, and wherever you bite down some louse-ridden beard or a slobbering lip or rotten teeth have gone just before. Meanwhile the king is receiving toasts in vintage wine so fragrant that it fills the whole pal...

Granta's latest on FILM: readable online, there's Thomas Keneally about the making of Schindler's List, Atom Egoyan on the movie he'd like to make and two other articles about Silence in the Movies and Lana Turner . Jeez...

What, Me Register? I have a confession. I'm not always who or what I appear to be. Depending on my mood, I'm a 92-year-old spinster from Topeka whose hobbies include snowboarding, macramé and cryptology; the CEO of a successful high-tech firm in Bumblebutt, New York, whose company has a market capitalization of four cents; or an Alaskan mango grower. What magazines do I read? Soldier of Fortune , Modern Bride , Granta and High Times . Date of birth? Dec. 7, 1941. July 4, 1976. Jan. 1, 1901. My name? Jed Clampett, Mustang Sally or Freddy Fudbuster. And who's responsible for my multiple personality disorder? I blame the Atlanta Journal-Constitution , Chicago Tribune , Los Angeles Times , Miami Herald , New York Times , Philadelphia Inquirer , Washington Post -- and any other news site that requires that I register before viewing content. [read on Wired ]

Another great photographer, Sebastião Salgado , in Terra Brasil

Lisboa, Henri Cartier-Bresson

[What's next... right, Spain is now Mordor...] [From The Independent , where else could we get this from?] " Historical fact is being diluted by Hollywood fiction, with some young people believing that Gandalf the wizard masterminded the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Almost half of 16- to 34-year-olds questioned in a BBC poll did not know that Francis Drake led the English fleet against Spain. One in five 16- to 24-year-olds thought it was Columbus, while one in 20 said it was Gandalf, the wizard from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The figures, which were released to mark the start of Battlefield Britain, a new BBC series fronted by the veteran election presenter Peter Snow and his son Dan, were declared "really surprising" by history specialists. Campaigners for a return to a more traditional syllabus branded the results a disgrace" for the state education system. Showing the impact of film-making on history, 15 per cent of 16- to 24-ye...

Ha muerto Henri Cartier-Bresson . The NYT has some slideshows here and here .

Nada o muy poco sé de mis mayores portugueses, los Borges: vaga gente que prosigue en mi carne, oscuramente, sus hábitos, rigores y temores. Tenues como si nunca hubieran sido y ajenos a los trámites del arte, indescifrablemente forman parte del tiempo, de la tierra y del olvido. Mejor así. Cumplida la faena, son Portugal, son la famosa gente que forzó las murallas del Oriente y se dio al mar y al otro mar de arena. Son el rey que en el místico desierto se perdió y el que jura que no ha muerto. Los Borges Jorge Luís Borges

I found this absolutely hilarious: Food for thought Question The brain is an energy-hungry organ, which presumably uses more fuel the harder it works. Could thinking hard help a person lose weight? Is reading James Joyce's Ulysses an alternative to dieting? Check the answers at The New Scientist

O estranho mundo dos diamantes (publicado no "Diário Económico") O que é que o diamante tem? É a substância mais dura que existe na natureza, o que faz com que tenha inúmeras aplicações industriais. O imaginário colectivo representa-o como uma reluzente jóia lapidada de preço astronómico. É também um cristal de carbono, um dos elementos mais abundantes do Universo e constituinte essencial de todos os seres vivos conhecidos. Mas o senso comum diz-nos que a abundância de um bem é inversamente proporcional ao seu preço, logo os diamantes deveriam ser muito raros, apesar de serem primos da vulgaríssima grafite, outra forma cristalina do carbono a partir da qual são feitas as minas dos lápis e muitas outras coisas. De facto, o preço dos diamantes não se justifica pela sua raridade, mas antes pela insólita forma como são comercializados – uma combinação de monopólio com uma estratégia de marketing sem paralelo na história da humanidade. Tudo começou na antiga colónia britân...

[This is from the Olympics in Beijing 2008. I was there and even though I stand in awe of the aesthetic beauty of the complex, I also pray for those poor people that live right there and that are going to be "relocated" by the we-are-never-wrong Chinese Government] From Arc-Space

Hoy tengo el dia portugués, no cabe duda... [From Ortografia da Língua Portuguesa ] " A ortografia do Espanhol medieval é uma descrição fidedigna da língua, tal como ela era falada nos círculos culturais de Toledo por volta de 1275. Essa representação gráfica começou a ser defeituosa pelos fins do século XV...[O gramático] Nebrija [séculos XV e XVI] reafirmou o princípio fonético de que a língua se deve escrever como se pronuncia. Por esta época, os humanistas tinham começado a insistir na etimologia... Nos séculos XVI e XVII, tendo-se produzido mudanças consideráveis de pronúncia, a ortografia espanhola apresentava diversas anomalias, o que levou a Academia da Lingua a começar a adoptar um controle oficial da língua no século XVIII". Sucessivas reformas, a última das quais em 1815, acabaram por conduzir à ortografia actual, que é praticamente fonética. Os países de língua espanhola usam, de um modo geral, a mesma ortografia, mas a união ortográfica está longe de se poder...