Há meio século a bater em retirada

Bom. A questão do ensino secundário toca-nos muito de perto. [...] Há quem exija diplomados capazes de se entregar imediatamente a carreiras técnicas de formação rápida: o país está necessitado de químicos, de físicos, de mecânicos... Há quem o deseje para que os seus filhos se promovam socialmente, quer dizer... para que atinjam uma situação superior à atingida pelos seus pais ou para que se mantenham na destes. Há, por último, uma minoria que aspira a um ensino secundário formativo em sentido amplamente humano, a um conjunto de estudos que confira aos estudantes uma visão do mundo completa e suficiente.

Os primeiros defendem um ensino secundário especializado quase desde o princípio; consideram-no como uma propedêutica para estudos superiores. Os segundos, um ensino secundário simples, que facilite a ascensão sem grandes esforços mentais. Os últimos, hoje batidos em retirada, são partidários de estudos difíceis e aparentemente inúteis.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista; crónica de 1965.

Outros tempos

Making students cry is definitely out of bounds now (accusations of bullying would instantly follow). But as a survivor of this regime (as I believe, in different ways, we all were), I would make two observations. First, I think for me it was an appropriate way of recognising how difficult the things I was now being asked to do were, and just how much it made your head hurt to try. They were tears of frustration at one’s own inability to run before one could walk.  

But second, it wasn’t bullying in any real sense because we all knew that she was on our side, and was pushing us as hard as we could to think better and harder. One of the ways that came over was in just how much time she made for us. Our essay supervisions were scheduled for an hour but often lasted for twice that long (how irritating that was for the person timetabled next I cant imagine!). We went on it seemed until we had argued through everything there was to argue… as if her time was yours, as if her real aim was to get you to get your head around the problem, unsettling and tear-jerking as that might be.

Mary Beard, aqui. 

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Império Mughal, Senhora sob uma árvore, 1760.

Vida: modo de usar (6)

The Stoics thought that there are two aspects of human nature that should be taken as defining what it means to live a good life: we are highly social, and we are capable of reason. Therefore, to ‘live according to nature’, as they advised us to do, means to apply reason to the improvement of the human polis. In turn, the way to accomplish the latter is to improve one’s judgment (the faculty of prohairesis, which distinguishes us from any other animal species), and to exercise the four cardinal virtues of practical wisdom, courage, justice and temperance.

 Skye C. Cleary & Massimo Pigliucci, Human nature matters.

A type of written confession

The most common reason for keeping a diary in the seventeenth century was to keep an account of providence or God's ordering of the world and of individual lives. Ralph Josselin called the diary he kept between 1641 and 1683 'a thankfull observation of divine providence and goodness towards me and a summary view of my life'. As Isaac Ambrose put it in 1650, a diarist 'observes something of God to his soul, and of his soul to God'. Diaries also allowed their authors to meditate regularly on personal failings - a type of written confession in a protestant world that had rejected the need for a catholic priest to mediate sins. Or the diarist could count his blessings, and give thanks for births or marriages or seek consolation for illness and death. In an age when life in this world and salvation in the next were both uncertain, diaries were a way of making sense of and ordering existence. In short, they reflected the intensely introspective and anxious, self-examining religiosity of the seventeenth century, particularly (though by no means exclusively) among the 'hotter sort' of protestants, such as the presbyterians, independents, baptists and quakers.

Sobre os diários do século XVII, aqui. 

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Asmus Jacob Carsten, Baco e Cupido, 1796.

Frock consciousness

Virginia Woolf na Vogue.

My thoughts about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write about them, led me to Virginia Woolf and the term she coined: ‘frock consciousness’. On 6 January 1925, at the beginning of her diary for that year, she wrote: ‘I want to begin to describe my own sex.’ That thought recurs in the diary as the months go on and it is cast, increasingly, in terms of clothes. ‘My love of clothes interests me profoundly,’ she wrote. ‘Only it is not love; and what it is I must discover.’ This was the year Woolf published Mrs Dalloway, which brought her to literary prominence; the previous year she had sat for her photograph in Vogue. For that she chose to wear a dress of her mother’s, which was too big for her and long out of fashion. To plant it in the most famous fashion magazine in Europe was to make a statement, however ambiguous. And the experience of the sitting prompted a further thought: ‘My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness etc. These states are very difficult … I’m always coming back to it … Still I cannot get at what I mean.’

Rosemary Hill, What does she think she looks like?

Vera de Bosset Stravinsky

Martine Franck, Nova Iorque, 1979.

Inge Morath, Nova Iorque, 1978.

Os olhos também crêem

Casual spontaneity is often as elaborately constructed as Instagram’s more polished images. Earlier this year, Leandra Medine Cohen, the founder of the lifestyle blog Man Repeller (1.9 million Instagram followers), posted “How to Take a Good Instagram Photo: A Theory,” in which she admits as much. “The paradox, of course,” she writes, “is that we know (inherently at this point) how much effort might go into a selfie, but we’re willing to accept the pretend sheen of ease.” But enjoying that pretense of apparent spontaneity doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve collectively lost all grasp of the truth. For their intended audiences, these images don’t seem like contrived attempts to pass off stylized setups as everyday life but instead imply dedication to the aesthetic, a pure commitment to trying to influence. In its way, this is as “authentic” as any document that purports to capture unvarnished reality. 

For influencers, authenticity tends to be bound up with aspiration: an image is “true” if it captures and triggers desire, even if the image is carefully and even deceptively constructed. The feeling it inspires in the midst of scrolling is what matters. They draw on the ambiguity between what is real and what is possible. And after all, what could be more inauthentic than an image from an influencer that fails at seeming influential? Being liked, capturing attention, connecting with an audience: on Instagram, these incentives are not a corruption of reality but the basis of it. So a post whose strategies for garnering attention are legible conveys something essential about the “facts” of the moment that begat it. Traits like spontaneity, vulnerability, and beauty are as “real,” by Instagram’s standards, as the attention they get in being effectively signified. Instagram teaches users to decode and navigate these sorts of “deceptions” on their own terms, which is a large part of what makes it compelling to use. 

A kind of vertigo ensues if we try to assess lifestyle-oriented images in terms of their level of truth. Instagram is consumed not as bona fide reality but a hyperreality, in which representations refer to other representations, not some supposed truth outside the app. There is no natural beauty, just “natural” beauty. No candid shots, just shots that read as “candid” by the code of conventions that effective influencers have mastered — demonstrating that mastery over the conventions is how one establishes one’s influence. There is no “reality” against which to measure the particular beauty or mood or lifestyle an image is designed to evoke except itself. Using something faked, edited, misleading, or out of context to attract attention isn’t the platform’s problem but its point. There is no “fake news” on Instagram. 

But there are fake audiences. There’s no telling how many of Instagram’s 800 million users are bots; the only estimates of the number of fake accounts (8 percent as of 2015) come from the platform itself, though independent analysts have suggested bots could make up closer to 30 percent of total accounts. While the company does shadow-ban insubordinate users and delete some bots, it has not launched a large-scale effort to purge them since the “Instagram rapture” of 2014, in which millions of bots were deleted for the sake of preserving “genuine interactions.” After the rapture, Instagram received thousands of pleas from despondent users begging to have their cherished ghosts back.

 Adrienne Matei, Seeing is Believing.

The Science of Transgender Identity

So, where do we stand on transgender issues? Science tells us that gender is certainly not binary; it may not even be a linear spectrum. Like many other facets of identity, it can operate on a broad range of levels and operate outside of many definitions. And it also appears that gender may not be as static as we assume. At the forefront of this, transgender identity is complex – it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to attribute it to one neat, contained set of causes, and there is still much to be learned. But we know now that several of those causes are biological. These individuals are not suffering a mental illness, or capriciously “choosing” a different identity. The transgender identity is multi-dimensional – but it deserves no less recognition or respect than any other facet of humankind.

 Katherine J. Wu, Between the (Gender) lines: 
The Science of Transgender Identity

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Jonathan Brand, 57th Street, New York City, 1967.

Eudora Welty

And yet by sixteen she was ready to get out. She convinced her parents that she was old enough to go away to college—first to Columbus, Mississippi, and then to Madison, Wisconsin, which was far enough from home, but in the wrong direction. After graduation, she moved to New York, to attend Columbia Business School; this was 1930, and the theatre and Harlem jazz clubs and Martha Graham occupied her far more than her classes did. She returned to Jackson only when her father was dying, in 1931. Two years later she was back in New York, but financial worries and pressure from her mother brought her home again. It was then that she started to take photographs, principally in Jackson’s black neighborhoods, where she went to buy jazz records.  

Her real awakening, though, came with a job as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, in 1935, for which she travelled by car or bus through the depths of Mississippi and saw poverty—black and white—that she had never imagined before. Taking pictures now became her passion, and Welty published photographs before she published her first story. When the W.P.A. job was over, in 1936, she returned to New York several times, searching for a job in publishing and pounding the pavement with her photographs. All she ever got was a small exhibition in an optician’s store on Madison Avenue. Her subject was black Mississippians, in the fields or on the streets or simply looking outward, meeting impossible odds with a frank and powerful dignity.  

It is telling that through the late thirties Welty tried to publish her stories and her photographs in a single volume. The impetus for what she knew to be her first genuine writing had come from the same shock of discovery—from her W.P.A. travels, when, as she put it, “my feelings were engaged by the outside world, I think for the first time.” The evidence of this experience is sometimes stark, as in “The Whistle,” a story about impoverished tomato farmers who strip off their only warm clothing to cover the delicate crops during a frost, and in “A Worn Path,” about an ancient black woman who undertakes a long journey on foot to get medicine for her grandson (and who serenely ignores the petty insults of the white people she meets along the way; she, too, receives a nickel). Despite the subjects, there is nothing didactic in these stories; Welty’s tone remains as light and precise here as in her freak-show comedies. And, like the comedies, these stories do not need to name the big subjects they touch on—race, deprivation, ignorance, morality—because the author’s quick chiselling of character includes them all.

Claudia Roth Pierpoint, A Perfect Lady, 

artigo muito antigo para a The New Yorker, 

 recuperado ontem, dia do aniversário da escritora.

A 96-year-old violinist in bright pink lipstick and golden slippers

Completed in 1899, the building was created as a sanctuary for musicians who found themselves poverty-stricken in old age, “Old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young, did not possess the virtue of saving,” as Verdi wrote in a letter at the time.

Sally McGrane, Inside Milan’s Opulent Retirement Home for Musicians.

Albert Bartholomé, Périe, a mulher do artista lendo, 1883.

Vida: modo de usar (5)

Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making – wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds. 

But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.

C Thi Nguyen, Escape the echo chamber. 

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Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night
And I love the rain.

Langston Hughes, April Rain Song.

Yourna Byrd

William Claxton, Yourna Byrd, esposa de Donald Byrd, NY, 1960.

The tone and timbre of women's speech

It is startling how much the ancient model of misogyny chimes with modern times. Not a day goes by without a male – and sometimes female – troll accusing me of “whingeing and whining” when I express views on current affairs. The mockery of female voices – Beard points out – is evident throughout Roman legend: there’s Philomela, whose tongue was ripped out to prevent her speaking of the rape she endured; Io, the mortal lover of Jupiter who mooed instead of speaking after being turned into a cow; as well as scientific treatises aligning low-pitched voices with courage, and high-pitched voices with cowardice. “Classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, or the whole state”, writes Beard. Sounds familiar.

 Afua Hirsch, The problem with a name.

On the brink of a mental crisis

Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school. 

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends. 

If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.  

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

 Jean M. Twenge, Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

Acting my age

Lately I have found myself trying to unravel the somewhat counterintuitive idea of aging as something which grants a kind of freedom, particularly for those of an age that places them in a kind of middle ground: old enough to have real responsibilities like bills, full-time job(s), or even a mortgage, but not old enough to be seen as middle aged, when a type of settling down is seen as tradition. If there is a freedom here, it’s in the ability to cling to ideas of youth while also teasing out the comforts of what we imagine being old looks like. One friend says I’m such a grandma while putting on sweatpants at 7 p.m. and pulling several blankets over herself. I’m such an old man I joke, while digging my hand into a massive bowl of popcorn and letting stray bits of it spill all over my lap. People hear this and laugh, nodding from the shell of their own comforts.

Hanif Abdurraquib no último número da Real Life. 

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