Georgia O’Keeffe em passeio, White Place, New Mexico, 1957, fotografada por Todd Webb

© Estate of Todd Webb, Portland, Maine, USA

 

Como aviso de que somos livres

Acho que devemos fazer coisa proibida — senão sufocamos. Mas sem sentimento de culpa e sim como aviso de que somos livres. 

Clarice Lispector, Sopro de Vida.

Dickinson

Dickinson’s poems seem always to be in progress or in transit; she revised, reconsidered, and reconceived them, particularly when sending them to friends, as her very first editors would discover—and as editors keep discovering today. “Her true Flaubert was Penelope, to invert a famous allusion,” said the poet Richard Howard, “forever unraveling what she had figured on the loom the day before.” This is also what the critic Sharon Cameron suggested in her evocative (and well-titled) study Choosing Not Choosing (1993). 

To Dickinson, then, it seems that literature was partly improvisation, much like her inventions at the piano, which were affectionately recalled by all who heard them. She toyed with several possibilities for an individual word while playing with image patterns, line arrangement, and metrics; she did not necessarily prefer one variation over another; she did not indicate when or if a poem was “finished.” What’s more, she frequently composed on snippets of paper—newspaper clippings, cut-up paper sacks—or around the edges of thin sheets, her cursive often illegible. 

(...) By the 1950s, when scholars began to take serious notice, they christened Dickinson and Walt Whitman America’s greatest nineteenth-century poets, irrelevantly adding that she was “an unusually ineffective member of the weaker sex” (John Crowe Ransom) or a homebody spinster married to herself (R.P. Blackmur). The critic Richard Chase, also an enthusiast, was trying to be sympathetic, I guess, when he said that “one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood.”

Brenda Pineapple, Dickinson's improvisations. 

O viés do status quo

The status-quo bias is something I’ve encountered over and over again as gender violence, particularly as the refusal or inability to recognize that a high-status man or boy, be he film mogul or high-school football player, can also be a vicious criminal. Those who cannot believe the charges, no matter how credible, often dismiss and blame the victim instead (...). Society has a marked failure of imagination when it comes to grasping that such predators treat their low-status victims in secret differently than their high-status peers in public, and that failure of imagination denies the existence of such inequality even as it perpetrates it. It’s a failure born out of undue respect for the powerful. (...) Centrist bias is institutional bias, and all our institutions historically perpetrated inequality. To recognize this is to delegitimize them; to deny it is to have it both ways – think yourself on the side of goodness while insisting no sweeping change is overdue. A far-right person might celebrate and perpetrate racism or police brutality or rape culture; a moderate might just play down its impact, past or present.

Rebecca Solnit, aqui. 

Um viver em comum

A transmissão de conhecimento não é uma simples comunicação de conteúdos, é um exercício de pensamento. Daí a insubstituibilidade e responsabilidade do professor: insubstituibilidade, porque não há ensino sem uma relação de escuta e atenção em que os dizeres suspendem os objectivos imediatos da vida, a pressão da subsistência. Lembre-se que a palavra grega de que deriva "escola" (skholê) significava uma suspensão das actividades utilitárias (um lazer), bem como um modo específico de organização do viver em comum.

Silvina Rodrigues Lopes, "Do ensino como um ofício inquieto". 

O modo como vivemos

O modo como vivemos já é política, até se o modo como vivemos forem dois velhos num estúdio, sozinhos e despenteados, surdos, enquanto a selva da cidade, através dos vidros, os tenta aniquilar.

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida e Humberto Brito, Regras de isolamento.

A vida de Dorothy

A life made, or half-made, under conditions of academic precarity is often a paranoid, anxious, stupefying life - stupefying in part because, in some sense, you chose it. As any director of graduate studies will remind you, no one forced you to go to graduate school. You went because you thought, like Strong's narrator, that books were the answer to life's problems. Or maybe because, like Dorothy, you thought you might become the kind of "scholar who taught in at a top-tier research university and wrote books for the general reader that would be reviewed in the daily paper." For whatever reason, you chose a less remunerative (and possibly less evil) path than your peers who went into management consulting or tech. What you did not choose, at least not knowingly, was a life of permanent gig work and near-poverty wages.

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But she learned better

Milly is fat and ugly but she gives good head so she rarely sleeps alone, which is not to say she’s not lonely. Milly is not, in fact, ugly, but she might as well be. She has a pretty face, which is the same thing as ugly when a woman is fat. In the complex calculus between men and women, Milly understands that fat is always ugly and that ugly and skinny makes a woman eminently more desirable than fat and any combination such as beautiful, charming, intelligent, or kind. Milly is all those things. She knows it doesn’t matter. The truth of things makes Milly angry but she is quiet about it, her anger. She keeps it to herself, knows it sits at the bottom of her chest growing and growing, but there’s not much she can do about it. She knows how difficult it is to change the world. She used to try, to change the world, but she learned better.

Roxanne Gay, Difficult Women. 

Tempos de sombra

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu.

25 de Março de 1925

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

Domingo no mundo (118)

(...) penso na minha tarde. Penso que poderei sentar-me a escrever sem que nada me moleste ou incomode. Grande coisa é o domingo visto daqui com a sua tarde intocada e as suas horas generosas longe do mundo. Tão longe do mundo.

Ivone Mendes da Silva, O Fulgor Instável das Magnólias.

Domingo no mundo (118)

Os esquecidos, as anónimas

(...) De alguna forma misteriosa y espontánea, el amor por los libros forjó una cadena invisible de gente - hombres y mujeres - que, sin conocerse, ha salvado el tesoro de los mejores relatos, sueños y pensamientos a lo largo del tiempo.                                                            Esta es la historia de una novela coral aún por escribir. El relato de una fabulosa aventura colectiva, la pasión callada de tantos seres humanos unidos por esta misteriosa lealtad: narradoras orales, inventores, escribas, iluminadores, bibliotecarias, traductores, libreras, vendedores ambulantes, maestras, sabios, espías, rebeldes, viajeros, monjas, esclavos, aventureras, impresores. Lectores en sus clubs, en sus casas, en cumbres de montaña, junto al mar que ruge, en las capitales donde la energía se concentra y en los enclaves apartados donde el saber se refugia en tiempos de caos. Gente común cuyos nombres en muchos casos non registra la historia. Los olvidados, las anónimas. Personas que lucharon por nosotros, por los rostros nebulosos del futuro.

Iréne Vallejo, El infinito en un junco.

O tempo e o espaço

O que ganhamos e o que perdemos, o irreversível, por Maria Filomena Molder.

Domingo no mundo (117)

Sempé, J'ai mal partout, s/d.

 

Domingo no mundo (116)

9 am, Sempé para a New Yorker (# 2976 - Vol. 58 - N.° 2), Março de 1982.

Da arte em tempos sombrios

“The Beheading of St. John the Baptist” was difficult to absorb into my understanding of whatever it was I thought painting was. More than a year would pass before I found a key that helped me process what I saw in Malta. That was when I saw two brief video clips from Libya made in 2017. The first clip is of men being sold at a slave market, filmed by an unnamed source. The second was made by CNN journalists who went into the suburbs of Tripoli to confirm the story. The men being sold are migrants from Niger, a few of them standing at night against a bare wall, a desolate courtyard like that in Caravaggio’s painting. The light is poor. It’s hard to see. The business is brisk and rapid: Prices are called out, unseen buyers bid and it’s over. In those clips, what I saw was life turned inside out, life turned into death, just as I had seen in Caravaggio’s painting. Not simply what ought not to be, but what ought not to be seen.

Teju Cole, In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio's Paintings.

O uso das redes

Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture. The Bush era is inextricable from the failures of cable news; the executive overreaches of the Obama years were obscured by the internet’s magnification of personality and performance; Trump’s rise to power is inseparable from the existence of social networks that must continually aggravate their users in order to continue making money. But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking the same thing? 

I’ll admit that I’m not sure that this inquiry is even productive. The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have deliberately established themselves as near-impossible to regulate or control. 

The internet is also in large part inextricable from life’s pleasures: our friends, our families, our communities, our pursuits of happiness, and—sometimes, if we’re lucky—our work. In part out of a desire to preserve what’s worthwhile from the decay that surrounds it, I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.

 Jia Tolentino, Reflections on Self-Delusion.

Time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness

A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.

Carmen Maria Machado, In The Dream House. 

The Correctors

At times, correctors acted as expert intermediaries between an author and his publisher. The corrector seems to represent a new social type: a phenomenon brought into the world by printing and a native-born son of the new city of books that printing created. It seems obvious that the new art created new tasks. The printer confronted many rivals in the marketplace. He or she had to show that a particular product was superior to those of rivals. One way to do so—as printers rapidly decided—was to emphasize, in the colophon or, later, on the title page, that learned men had corrected the text. In Italy and Germany alike, books printed in the fifteenth century promised their readers not just texts but texts “diligently emended,” “vigilantly emended and revised,” or “most diligently and accurately revised” by particular scholars. Hiring someone to correct a text—or claiming to have done so, as many printers did even though they had not—represented a rational and effective way to claim a larger market share.

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