Domingo no mundo (51)

Forty years ago, John Berger called the zoo “an epitaph to a relationship” between people and animals. Today those words could be applied to much of middle-class mass culture: it has become a kind of memorial to the nonhuman world, revived in a thousand representations even as it disappears all at once.

Human isolation from nonhuman nature, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Phoenix, goes beyond extermination and segregation. Even what we do encounter outside ourselves lacks the power Hannah Arendt called action: to begin something new, to set events in motion. The scripts of pets are closely edited for safety, hygiene, conformity to stereotype. Industrial agriculture has achieved totalitarian control over the beasts it turns to meals. No predator starts trouble with us.

Jedediah Purdy, Thinking Like a Mountain.

Pay attention

We’re taught early that attention is a currency—we “pay” attention—and much of the discipline of the classroom is aimed at marshaling the attention of children, with very mixed results. We all have a history here, of how we did or did not learn to pay attention and all the praise or blame that came with that. It used to be that such patterns of childhood experience faded into irrelevance. As we reached adulthood, how we paid attention, and to what, was a personal matter and akin to breathing—as if it were automatic.  

Today, though, as we grapple with a pervasive new digital culture, attention has become an issue of pressing social concern. Technology provides us with new tools to grab people’s attention. These innovations are dismantling traditional boundaries of private and public, home and office, work and leisure. Emails and tweets can reach us almost anywhere, anytime. There are no cracks left in which the mind can idle, rest, and recuperate. A taxi ad offers free wifi so that you can remain “productive” on a cab journey. 

Even those spare moments of time in our day—waiting for a bus, standing in a queue at the supermarket—can now be “harvested,” says the writer Tim Wu in his book The Attention Merchants. In this quest to pursue “those slivers of our unharvested awareness,” digital technology has provided consumer capitalism with its most powerful tools yet. And our attention fuels it. As Matthew Crawford notes in The World Beyond Your Head, “when some people treat the minds of other people as a resource, this is not ‘creating wealth,’ it is transferring it.”

Madeleine Bunting, Disarming the weapons of mass distraction. 

1989

Vida: modo de usar

In September 1921 T.S. Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown. The causes were numerous: anxiety over the mental health of his wife Vivien; delay in launching the Criterion, whose first issue did not appear until a year later; concern for the postwar state of the nation, with its two million unemployed; and concern for the state of the long poem he had planned, which should have been finished months before yet still refused to take shape. But the event that triggered his collapse was a visit that summer from his mother, whom he hadn’t seen for six years. 

Eliot’s austere New England parents had disapproved of his marriage in 1915 and of his decision to remain and work in England after completing his doctoral thesis. Charlotte’s visit to London, though eagerly anticipated by her son, promised to be difficult: ‘another anxiety and a joy’ as he put it in a letter to his friend and patron John Quinn. His mother’s health was frail, Vivien’s was unpredictable, and moreover he felt the need to justify his new life. 

Charlotte turned up with his sister Marian and older brother Henry. Her visit appears to have gone smoothly, though the fact of her presence may have been reproach enough. Shortly after her departure he collapsed. 

David Seabrook, All the Devils are Here, excerto do excerto da Granta.

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

Não há melhor homenagem do que esta.

Jovem

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Retrato de uma jovem, 1850 ou 1859*

* Pode ser um zero, pode ser um nove: se Jean-Baptiste estivesse aqui diria, surpreendido, «Então não se vê logo que é um zero?» ou «Então não se vê logo que é um nove?»

Faz atenção, Alan

‘Books Do Furnish a Room’, wrote Anthony Powell, but my mother never thought so and she’d always put them out of the way in the sideboard when you weren’t looking. Books untidy, books upset, more her view. Though once a keen reader herself, particularly when she was younger, she always thought of library books as grubby and with a potential for infection – not intellectual infection either. Lurking among the municipally owned pages might be the germs of TB or scarlet fever, so one must never be seen to peer at a library book too closely or lick your finger before turning over still less read such a book in bed.

Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On.

Domingo no mundo (50)

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Natureza-morta: conjunto de chá, 1781-3.

O jogo

[...] I can’t write with impunity. When I try to get in the reader’s head, I destabilize myself, too.

Julián Herbert numa entrevista à Paris Review.

As fotografias do menino Coetzee

In 2014, years after he moved from South Africa to Australia, the novelist J.M. Coetzee finally sold his own apartment in Cape Town. Soon after a researcher went through a cardboard box left behind in the vacated flat — and inside, to his astonishment, he discovered a welter of remarkable unpublished materials by the taciturn Nobel laureate. But they were not manuscripts. They were photographs: sheafs of yellowing prints that depicted “scenes from provincial life,” as his three volumes of autobiography are subtitled, as well as undeveloped negatives.

Tudo aqui.

Dia de pensar a mulher

(...) 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.”

Anna Heyward, The Opposite of a Muse.

Espertismo

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.

Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On.