TEMPO NORTE-AMERICANO II

Tudo o que escrevemos
será usado contra nós
ou contra aqueles que amamos.
São estas as condições,
é pegar ou largar.
A poesia nunca teve hipótese
de se pôr fora da história.
Um verso dactilografado há vinte anos
pode ser escarrapachado a tinta na parede
para glorificar a arte como distanciamento
ou tortura daqueles que
não amámos mas também
não quisemos matar

Nós seguimos mas as nossas palavras ficam
tornam-se responsáveis
por mais do que tínhamos na intenção
e isto é privilégio verbal

Adrienne Rich, Uma paciência selvagem.
(trad. Maria Irene Ramalho e Maria Teresa Varese)

A rede

O esgoto da minha casa percorre o mundo inteiro [...]

Álvaro Siza, 01 Textos.

Na primavera quando as tardes se arredondam/ e já nas praias nascem as primeiras ondas

Monica Vitti em L'Avventura, de Michelangelo Antonioni.

I'll paint what I see

A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower—the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower—lean forward to smell it—maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking—or give it to someone to please them. Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small— we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.. ..’So I said to myself—I’ll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers: ‘Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don’t.

Georgia O'Keefe, Georgia O'Keefe, Penguin Books.

Domingo no mundo (2)

Maria Van Oosterwijck, Natureza-morta com flores, 1669.

Desarrezoado amor, dentro em meu peito

[...] que posso fazer destes tectos pesadamente ornamentados, de cores soturnas, destas paredes com pinturas arruinadas, destes espaços a roçar o kitch? Deste casarão cinzento, do jardim desfeito, de entorno mal cuidado?

Álvaro Siza, 01 Textos.

Teoria da Literatura

I have decided not to take my O levels. I am bound to fail them anyway so why waste all that neurosis in worrying? I’ll need all the neurosis I can get when I start writing for a living.

Adrian Mole, entrada de diário de 19 de Março de 1983.

A Grande Depressão e a cozinha de Eudora Welty

[...] But the WPA gave me the chance to travel, to see widely and at close hand and really for the first time the nature of the place I'd been born into. And it gave me the blessing of showing me the real State of Mississippi, not the abstract state of the Depression. The Depression, in fact, was not a noticeable phenomenon in the poorest state in the Union. In New York there had been the faceless breadlines; on Farish Street in my home town of Jackson, the proprietor of the My Blue Heaven Café had written on the glass of the front door with his own finger dipped in window polish: 

Eudora Welty, Jackson, Mississippi, anos 30.

[...] The local Standard Photo Company of Jackson developed my rolls of film, and I made myself a contact-print frame and printed at night in the kitchen when I was home. With good fortune, I secured an enlarger at second-hand from the State Highway Department, wich went on the kitchen table. It had a single shutter-opening, and I timed exposures by a trial-and-error system of countdown.

Eudora Welty no prefácio do seu One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression : a Snapshot Album.

Apontamento

E não aponto um caminho claro. Os caminhos não são claros.

Álvaro Siza, 01 Textos.

Anonymous was woman.

These motets were published decades before any other printed music that is proven to be for convents, but I felt certain they were written for nuns by a fellow nun: a nun princess called Suor Leonora d’Este. [...]

Leonora (1515-75) was the only surviving daughter of Lucrezia Borgia and her third husband, Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara. Lucrezia died when Leonora was only four, of complications after the birth of what was possibly her 10th child. Leonora was raised at the convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, where her mother was buried, because there was no woman of her rank to raise her at court. Aged eight, she decided to enter the convent permanently, and became abbess when she was 18. This may seem young for a woman to be in charge, but her mother was appointed Governor of Spoleto at only 19 – perhaps she had inherited her mother’s administrative ability. She may have chosen to become a nun rather than be a marriageable bargaining chip for her father, and so she could do the things she most wanted to do – play and study music – without the distraction of childbearing or politics. She would have learned from her mother’s experience what a mixed blessing it was to be the daughter of a powerful family.

A descobrir na íntegra aqui.

Um cavalheiro no nevoeiro

But he’s not a historical novelist in any ordinary sense; he doesn’t seek to reconstruct the past. Rather, he’s interested in what remains after we’ve forgotten, in the little slips of memory and connection, the vague reminiscences, all of which hang on a detail, a proper name, an address, the glimpse of a face.
[...]
His aim is never to explain away a charged moment in history, but rather to stay true to the opacity of the past. All of his literature participates in the same process of historical detail and blur, lamplight and shadow.

Alice Kaplan, Lamplight and Shadow.

Domingo no Mundo

Linda McCartney, Paul, Stella and James, Scotland, 1982.