(...) the key to understanding Mège’s work is “the act itself... an act that makes her into an artist of some sort.” He was interested in the fact that, while Mège appears to have the will of an artist, she distributes the means of creation to others; she is an artist whose medium is other artists. He invented new words to describe her work: “It’s a selfothermade,” he wrote, “not an auto-portrait... but it’s not a simple alloportrait either.”
11 September [2015]. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he calls ‘the smart state’. This seems to be a state that gets away with doing as little as possible for its citizens and shuffling as many responsibilities as it can onto anyone who thinks they can make a profit out of them. I am glad there wasn’t a smart state when I was being brought up in Leeds, a state that was unsmart enough to see me and others like me educated free of charge and sent on at the city’s expense to university, provided with splendid libraries, cheap transport and a terrific art gallery, not, of course to mention the city’s hospitals.
Smart to Mr Cameron seems to mean doing as little as one can get away with and calling it enterprise. Smart as in smart alec, smart of the smart answer, which I’m sure Mr Cameron has to hand. Dead smart.
He quotes the novelist Mary McCarthy, who was still writing venomous book reviews well into her dotage and who, when asked why she continued to be so ferociously unappeased, said, “there is so much to hate”.
Quando escreve, você contempla a emoção, já não está mais emocionado. Você ainda se emociona, mas não está dentro daquela emoção que teria, vamos supor, no ato amoroso ou no fervor da ideia. Você está afastado com grande emoção, mas acima da emoção, como se estivesse só observando o seu próprio estar emocionado. É mais ou menos isso.
No uso da casa precisamos tanto de zonas com luz muito forte como de penumbra, de descanso, sossego, tranquilidade, etc. Esse doseamento da luz é importantíssimo.
Souto Moura em conversa com Siza Vieira no Ípsilon de ontem.
O problema não é substituir os livros por um ecrã de um telefone inteligente ou de um tablet — o problema é o mito perigoso de que a “leitura”, mesmo numa forma diferente, está a emigrar de um meio para outro, porque não está. O que se está é a ler diferente, pior e menos, como se está a “saber” demasiado lixo — meia dúzia de performances rudimentares com as novas tecnologias — e pouco saber. A morte das livrarias é um aspecto desse soçobrar no lixo, mas infelizmente estão demasiado acompanhadas pela morte de muitas outras coisas, do valor do conhecimento, do silêncio, do tempo lento, da leitura, da verdade factual, e da usura da democracia.
Even having a swath of land, I quarrel with the neighbor. He’s suing me. It’s just like having a guy in the apartment next door. He’s got his 120 acres, and I’ve got mine, it doesn’t matter. In New York it would be 120 square feet, but it’s the same damn story. You just can’t avoid it. People are everywhere.
[...]
If it’s not people — I had a place in the Yukon, 50 miles from the nearest human — and a freaking grizzly bear started marauding. And whenever I wasn’t there he’d tear the place up.
[...]
Basically, when life decides it’s going to visit you, it will visit you. You can’t hide.
An editorial in The Irish Times in 2014 exhorting Ireland to introduce philosophy to secondary schools argues against ‘attempts to remove time for reflection’, perfectly summed up by ‘the slogans of our techno-consumerist age’ – Just do it, Move fast and break things, YOLO (You only live once) – which encourage us to ‘act now, think later’. Against a ‘consumer society [that] constantly attempts to remove time for reflection’, philosophy is recommended as ‘a counterbalance to this culture of fast action’.
The problem with ‘fast action’ is that it presumes a sure way of doing things and a uniformity that, in a pinch, we can accelerate. Just as fast food works for some meals and not for others, we must remain open to things that take time, both for preserving what is of value from the past and taking the time to forge new approaches in the present. The key here is multiplicity, plurality and diversity, which take time.
