Great Expectations

[...] the answers would probably never be as interesting, or as meaningful, as the fictions we create in their absence.

Jonathan Clark, The Eternal Mystery of the Reclusive Writer.

Domingo no mundo (32)

Vincent Van Gogh, The flowering orchad, 1888.

Açúcar elegante

Um piano para o introvertido

At the time, Waldron was playing alto saxophone, not piano: He had picked up the horn after hearing Charlie Parker, whom, like other young bop musicians, he worshipped. By his mid-20s, however, he’d returned to the piano. The saxophone, he realized, was “a very exhibitionist instrument, and you had to be extroverted, and I was very introverted.” In A Portrait of Mal Waldron, a 1997 documentary by the Belgian filmmaker Tom Van Overberghe, Waldron describes how the piano allowed him to hide, to “play very quietly and work out your changes. It’s a very beautiful instrument for a person like me.”

Adam Shatz, Free at Last.

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Frank Dillon, Baía do Funchal, 1850.

...............

Harold Feinstein, Polka Dot Twins, NYC, 1952.

Um dia, em Outubro

o senhor Pirzada perguntou logo que chegou: "Que são estes vegetais alaranjados colocados à porta da rua das pessoas? Um tipo de fruto para beber?"

"São abóboras", respondeu a minha mãe. "Lília, lembra-me de comprar uma no supermercado."

"E qual é a finalidade? Qual o significado que têm?"

"Faz-se uma carantonha e ilumina-se por dentro", disse eu, fazendo uma expressão feroz.  "Assim. É para meter medo às pessoas." 

"Ah, já percebo", respondeu o senhor Pirzada, fazendo também uma careta. "Não há dúvida de que é útil."

Jhumpa Lahiri, intéprete de enfermidades

Acontecia-me com a camioneta da carreira que fazia Leiria-Marrazes-Marinheiros*

[...] tinha a desgraça de ser tão tímido, que, posto à espera dum eléctrico, não se atrevia a fazer o gesto de o mandar parar. Se parava, subia – se não parava, ficava à espera de outro.

Raul Brandão, Memórias.

* A diferença é que eu acabava por ir a pé.

O giro

Kazimir Malevich, Boulevard, 1930.

Now and then: cues between what is said

Communication requires presence, self-presentation, cues beyond what is said, and learning to communicate well is a matter of mastering those cues — body language, breath, eye placement — that affect our meaning with or without our intention. The screen, of course, imposes a controlled distance between individuals, but privileging face-to-face conversations over those mediated by screen ignores the many ways we establish presence beyond physical proximity, through the use, or misuse, of text. The “human touch” — a phrase that is suggestive of something closer than what online interaction begets — gestures to the ways that human-ness is expressed through the screen. Hi is warmer and more familiar than hello, but hey borders on casual and unprofessional. This language sets the tone for the rest of the conversation, and characterizes a friendly voice. Hii, hiiii, and heyy communicate both different levels of enthusiasm, and different kinds of enthusiasm; the rules of grammar and syntax mean less than the language developed and understood within the window. 

We rely on autocorrect as we once did spell check, but there is a difference between the two. Spell check brings the mistake to our attention: It scans, compares, signals, and verifies the error. Autocorrect makes the correction without our permission — without understanding the error. When “fucking” becomes “ducking,” the word sheds its intended meaning and function for something new and senseless. The modifier becomes modified, and what is meant to heighten a phrase to a certain degree of intensity (“fucking”) makes it a blunder instead. Each letter is a unit of communication, a symbolic material measuring carefully what we mean, what we do not mean, what tone we intend.  

Typos caught in hindsight act as a kind of descriptive metadata, telling us something more than what’s stated, about how and in what conditions the statement was made. Sometimes the mistake is a slip of the fingers; sometimes it’s a product of the way the brain runs faster than the hand. Sometimes it’s the opposite, as if our hand runs faster than our minds, or answers to a different command. The words that are dropped, the phrases uncompleted, are telling. The phrase i ducking love u expresses a deeper infatuation than the words spelled correctly.

Philip Pamela Dungao, Error messages. 

Domingo no mundo (30)

Vincent Van Gogh, Autumn Landscape, October 1885.

Bubbles

Later that same year (1982), Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University wrote a paper on single-bubble inflation referencing all of our papers. He noted that a rapidly inflating bubble would produce random quantum fluctuations that would then be tremendously stretched into large-scale structures. Then in 1986 I showed (with my colleagues Adrian Melott and Mark Dickinson) that such structures would naturally lead to a sponge-like pattern of galaxy clusters connected by filaments of galaxies. That pattern has since been verified by numerous large-scale cosmic surveys; it is known as the cosmic web.

The theory of inflation in the early Universe explains how the Universe began expanding some 13.8 billion years ago, in the first moments of the Big Bang, and describes, in beautiful detail, the small fluctuations we see in the microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. These spectacular successes of inflation lead us to believe that our Universe emerged from a very high-density vacuum state accompanied by a negative pressure of equal magnitude. It seems pretty clear that once you get inflation started, it is hard to stop it. Inflation should go on forever, creating a multiverse that will continue to spawn bubble universes eternally.

J. Richard Gott,  Universe in a Bubble.

Constância, continuidade

There were 2000 in the theatre and about 10,000 outside who couldn’t get in; all girls. And all they did was scream all the way through the entire 35 minute set. I never heard anything The Beatles said or sang. When you’ve got 2000 girls screaming, and one takes a breath, there are always others screaming. So there is no stop. It is a complete, continuous jet engine.

Jim Berkenstadt, The Beatle Who Vanished.

Os Beatles vieram à varanda ver como estava o tempo

Out on the balcony, the sound of 300,000 people was deafening, like a jet engine on steroids.

Jim Berkenstadt, The Beatle Who Vanished.

Domingo no mundo (29)

Henri Matisse, Harmonie en jaune, 1928.

Que farei quando tudo reverbera?

Some of the venues on tour were not built for Rock and Roll music. Many had long flat hard walls in the back. When Nicol and other drummers hit their bass drums, the sound would echo back to the stage on a delay of one or two seconds at the same volume. This aggravation, along with preconcert drinking and marijuana smoking, generally made things difficult to keep time.

Jim Berkenstadt, The Beatle Who Vanished.

A arte perdida de molhar o pão (os tontos chamam-lhe javardice)

Janet Delaney, NYC, 1985.

Done

"You androids," Rick said, don't exactly cover for each other in times of stress."

Garland snapped, "I think you're right; it would seem we lack a specific talent you humans possess. I believe it's called empathy."

Philip K. Dick, Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Até Quinta

The rubbish-littered, lifeless roof of his apartment building as always depressed him. Passing from his car to the elevator door he damped down his peripheral vision; he concentrated on the valuable bag and bottle which he carried, making certain that he tripped over no trash and took no ignominious pratfall to economic doom. When the elevator creakily arrived he rode it - not to his own floor - but to the lower level on which the new tenant, Pris Stratton, now lived. Presently he stood in front of her door, rapping with the edge of the wine bottle, his heart going to pieces inside his chest.  

Philip K. Dick, Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Bruce Chatwin

He was known for being particular about his outfits: his emerald jacket, his khaki safari shirt and shorts, his soft, toffee-coloured boots, and for the haversack in dark brown calfskin custom made by a saddler in Cirencester with each pocket carefully devised to house a particular item. He was famous for his sudden disappearances, his unexpected arrivals and for the whirling discourses that magnetised his audiences but which no one could quite summarise.

Susannah Clapp, 'Dazzling and worrying’: my memories of Bruce Chatwin and In Patagonia.

Luz pela barba

John White Alexander: Walt Whitman, 1889.

Até Quinta

After a hurried breakfast – he had lost time due to the discussion with his wife – he ascended clad for venturing out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece, to the covered roof pasture whereon his electric sheep "grazed". Whereon it, sophisticated piece of hardware that it was, chomped away in stimulated contentment, bamboozling the other tenants of the building.

Philip K. Dick, Do androids dream of electric sheep?

More fragile and vulnerable than we generally assume

Although it is not always possible to delineate statistical changes in levels of violence, it is, as changing reactions to wife-beating suggest, possible to trace shifting attitudes. Indeed, the development of deeper sensibilities about violence can lead to increases in quantitative evidence of violence – modern statistics on domestic violence, and the long-term rise of prosecutions for sexual assault over the 20th century are probably evidence of this. Nevertheless, many forms of violence that were commonplace in the past are no longer tolerated.

Corporal punishment in state schools in the United Kingdom was abolished in 1986, and in private schools in England and Wales in 1998. Bullying, once regarded as a normal hazard of growing up, or even as a character-forming experience, is now widely condemned, both in school and at the workplace. And although the precise relationship remains elusive, the decline in interpersonal violence between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries coincided with the retreat from inflicting public executions, public whippings and public shaming punishments on convicted criminals. Changes in official attitudes are further demonstrated by how the police and the law courts, albeit imperfectly in some instances, are now much more alert to the reality of domestic violence and to the need for the sympathetic and sensitive treatment of rape victims. The everyday recourse to violence that was apparently so widespread even two centuries ago is now seen, rightly or wrongly, as the prerogative of discrete, and normally lower-class, groups: boys in disadvantaged council estates, teenage gangs, football hooligans, professional criminals, working-class ‘hard men’.

This should not give us cause for complacency: as events in Germany in the 1930s, parts of Africa and the Middle East more recently, and the plots of countless post-apocalypse movies remind us, the essentially secure and violence-free civil society that most of us in the West take for granted is more fragile and vulnerable than we generally assume. And as statistics on domestic violence demonstrate, we still have a way to go. But an awareness of the ‘violence we have lost’ is an important element in that process, central to the general public’s view of history, of ‘understanding ourselves in time’. So many of the issues that we confront when considering violence in modern society – media distortion and amplification, problems of definition, problems of the cultural acceptance of violence, the connection between violence and masculinity – have a historical dimension, and getting to grips with that dimension helps to deepen our understanding of our current situation. Even terrorism, so often identified as a new problem, has been with us in something like its modern form since the Fenian bombings of the early 1880s.

Mais aqui.

Domingo no mundo (28)

John William Waterhouse, St. Cecilia, 1895.