Nepenthe

I have no «voice» to speak of, but now that I sing for my child, I find it strangely pleasurable, and I'm no longer coy about it ;) Annie Lennox Not merely another form of language Warm-up Full of energy Breathing The Alexander Technique Bonnie Tyler Classify your voice, develop your diction Ladysmith Black Mambazo Tongue Twisters kd lang Simon & Garfunkel Pop songs Show tunes Rufus Wainwright on opera singing Jazz it up ! Gospel Róisín Murphy Stagefright ? Chrissie Hynde The whole guide to performing includes much more topics - The Guardian on Music

the paradox of capitalism What do we want to see emerge from the greatest crisis of capitalism for 70 years? If I had to answer in a single phrase, I would say: new models for a sustainable social market economy. This requires us to change as well as our states. Capitalism will not end in 2009 as communism ended in 1989 . It is too deep-rooted, too diverse and too adaptable to suffer such a sudden death. There are far more varieties of capitalism in the world today than there ever were of communism, and that diversity is one of its strengths. The rainbow reaches from wild west to wild east, and extends to major national variants of a market economy, such as China, that purists would say are not capitalism at all. So some versions of capitalism will weather the storm; others will be left in ruins or at least very substantially transformed. An extreme "neoliberal" version of the free-market economy, characterised not just by far-reaching deregulation and privatisation but also...

The most unexpected of Tolkien’s posthumous publications is his poetic response to the gap in the Nibelung legend TLS Many years ago William Morris declared that the legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, the Völsungs and the Nibelungs, deserved to become the Northern Homer, and he was right. It has everything: the dragon Fáfnir and the valkyrie Brynhild, werewolves and dwarves, mysterious interventions by a one-eyed deity, a sword broken and reforged, a fabulous treasure-hoard and, above all, a magic ring with a curse on it. It also has – and this may have prevented it from realizing its potential, at least in Morris’s long verse retelling of 1876 – many lurking embarrassments: incest, child-murder, human sacrifice, what looks very like ceremonial female suicide or suttee. Yet even more alluring and provoking than what is in the legend, is what might have been there once but is there no more. The relationship between the various forms of the Nibelung legen...

From the Globe at Bankside to the Wimpole Street home of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, London is, and always has been, crammed with literary life. Playwrights, novelists, diarists, poets and essayists throughout the centuries have roamed its streets, met in its cafes and retaurants and strolled in its parks and gardens. They have been inspired by its monuments, churches, law courts and theatres and have created fictional Londoners as diverse as Mr Pickwick, Sherlock Holmes, Bertie Wooster, Mrs Dalloway and Winston Smith, whose fortunes are played out against a London backdrop. This updated edition of The Penguin Literary Guide to London is a must for all book lovers and readers. E para quando a Lisboa Literária? Ou já existe? Onde, onde? ;)

*As melhores frases dos piores alunos* *O Convento dos Capuchos foi construído no céculo 16 mas só no céculo 17 foi levado definitivamente para o alto do monte.* (claro! Com o peso demorou 100 anos para subir o monte !!!) *A História divide-se em 4: Antiga, Média, Momentânea e Futura, a mais estudada hoje* (a Futura é particularmente estudada pela "Maya" certamente) *A Bigamia era uma espécie de carroça dos gladiadores, puchada por dois cavalos.* (será que este é Bígamo e sabe por experiência ?) *O metro é a décima milionésima parte de um quarto do meridiano terrestre e para o cálculo dar certo arredondaram a Terra! * (Ups! Até eu me vi atrapalhado para fazer o cálculo. Imaginação tem ele) *O cérebro humano tem dois lados, um para vigiar o outro.* ( o dele de certeza, só que estão ambos os lados com avaria) *O cérebro tem uma capacidade tão grande que hoje em dia, praticamente, toda a gente tem um. (ora aí está uma que é lógica: praticamen...

1925-2009 Livro biográfico e de memórias, conta com duas partes: uma de texto, com uma entrevista a cargo de João Paiva Boléo e com as memórias dos grandes nomes da Banda Desenhada que com ele privaram na Redacção do Tintin Português e/ou da Televisão, e outra de Banda Desenhada, com histórias curtas cujo argumento é assinado por Jorge Magalhães e para cujo desenho contribuem nomes como José Garcês, José Carlos Fernandes, Pedro Massano, Rui Lacas ... Um livro onde participaram no total 26 personalidades ligadas à BD nacional. Entrevista em Amor de Perdição

A Montanha Mágica , a obra-prima de Thomas Mann, vai estar novamente disponível nas livrarias portuguesas, a partir de 30 de Maio, com a chancela da Dom Quixote. Trata-se da primeira tradução feita directamente do alemão para português europeu. A responsável é Gilda Lopes Encarnação, que prepara uma nova tradução de Os Buddenbrooks . Esta é a primeira tradução para português feita directamente do alemão? Não, trata-se apenas da primeira tradução para português europeu, porque já havia uma no Brasil, também feita directamente do alemão por Herbert Caro. Foi uma tradução que depois teve uma adaptação estilística, ao ser publicada em Portugal, que na minha opinião não foi bem sucedida, como acontece muitas vezes nestes casos. Como explica que um romance desta importância tenha tão poucas traduções? Não é caso único. Basta pensar em Robert Musil, que só no ano passado teve uma segunda tradução do seu O Homem Sem Qualidades . Aliás, os casos de Thomas Mann e Musil são muito semelhantes. Amb...

Fotogaleria da nova Arquitectura, por Paulo Ricca

Vanessa Rato in Ipsílon Tudo começou com Crepúsculo", primeiro volume de uma saga entre uma humana e um vampiro. Quatro livros, escritos por Stephenie Meyer, um filme (e agora um DVD) estão a atrair os adolescentes de todo o mundo. Nesta história de vampiros não há sexo antes do casamento. É uma visão da América do pânico pós-sida tornado discurso repressivo. Quem era adolescente ou queria ser em finais dos anos 1980 viu: "The Lost Boys" , filme que, em Portugal, acabou conhecido como "Os Rapazes da Noite" mas que deveria ter-se chamado "Os Rapazes Perdidos", incluindo a vertigem da adolescência eterna numa Terra do Nunca ao som do "pós-punk" dos Echo and The Bunnymen. À distância de duas décadas, percebe-se: em finais dos anos 1980 vaguear pela noite ou estar perdido era a mesma coisa. Em finais dos anos 1980, princípio dos anos 1990, a vida para lá do pôr-do-sol era rugosa. Aliás, a vida, em geral, era mais rugosa. Pelo menos à su...

never too late to acknowledge

And this seen in Chocolate & Zucchini

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” to explain why he wrote “The Raven” backward. The poem tells the story of a man who, “once upon a midnight dreary,” while mourning his dead love, Lenore, answers a tapping at his chamber door, to find “darkness there and nothing more.” He peers into the darkness, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” and meets a silence broken only by his whispered word, “Lenore?” He closes the door. The tapping starts again. He flings open his shutter and, “with many a flirt and flutter,” in flies a raven, “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.” The bird speaks just one word: “Nevermore.” That word is the poem’s last, but it’s where Poe began. He started, he said, “at the end, where all works of art should begin,” and he “first put pen to paper” at what became the third-to-last stanza: “Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still if bird or devil! By that heaven that bends above u...

«The monstrous homogenization of our world has now almost destroyed the map, any map, by making every place on it exactly like every other place, and leaving no blanks….As in the Mandelbrot fractal set, the enormously large and the infinitesimally small are exactly the same, and the same leads always to the same again; there is no other; there is no escape, because there is nowhere else. In reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense - to regain the knowledge - that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life. The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope. » Ursula K...

The Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes discovered his literary vocation while delivering babies, performing amputations, and carving up corpses. Lobo Antunes trained as a doctor, and in the early nineteen-seventies, during military service, he was dispatched to Angola, near the end of a futile war in which the faltering Portuguese empire grappled to retain its African colony. In a makeshift infirmary, he lopped off limbs while a queasy quartermaster—disqualified from operating because the sight of blood made him sick—turned away and recited instructions from a textbook. Lobo Antunes also assisted a witch doctor who presided over births. As he recalls in a new volume of essays and short stories, “The Fat Man and Infinity” (translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Norton; $26.95), he spent hours struggling “to pull living babies from half-dead mothers” and sometimes emerged into the daylight “holding in my hands a small tremulous life,” while mango trees rustled overhead and mandrills lo...

Sat Apr 18, 2:32 pm ET ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini , a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20. Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute . She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her. The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recoun...