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.

Domingo no mundo (31)

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.