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.

Deste artigo, uma leitura que recomendo.

Aonde chegou o canceling

O racismo em Flannery O' Connor não é uma questão de agora - é de sempre. Mas desde 2018 tem vindo a ganhar paladinos e agora, por todas as razões, está na ordem do dia. Não importa quantas vezes se explique que a n-word que hoje é ofensiva era a linguagem corrente do tempo; não importa quantas vezes se demonstre as críticas que tece, na ficção, ao racismo, que entende como uma das componentes do orgulho inerente ao branco; não importa quantas vezes se assinale que nas cartas, sobretudo as que correspondem ao final da vida, se desdobra em múltiplas personalidades (chegando até a assinar com outros nomes) numa espécie de diatribe, o escape possível no momento. Não importa. A atracção pelo abismo da redução de tudo a preto/branco, bom/mau - a cultura do pensamento binário - é mais forte. Boicotar figuras públicas por comportamentos considerados ofensivos é uma postura que nasceu nas redes sociais, chama-se canceling. Há quem aposte que a próxima vítima deste tipo de artigo deliberadamente-enquadrado-para-cancelar será Mark Twain.

Domingo no mundo (115)

Gordon Parks, St. Louis, 1950.

Da incognoscibilidade da pandemia

Entenda-se que

beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and epistemological (...)

 Ler aqui.

Domingo no mundo (114)

Vincenzo Foppa, O jovem Cícero a ler, c.1464

What consolation can there be for the awareness that everything we love is dying?

Beauty itself is not always a consolation. For it is inseparable from transitoriness. Be it the beauty of a girl, or a boy, or a flower, or a song. It must end and soon, if it is to be perceived by earthlings as beautiful. A flower that doesn't fade is hideous. A song that runs through our mind for an hour, let alone a day or a week, bores and irritates us and finally disgusts us. Beauty gives us pleasure. The keenest pleasure, if prolonged, must turn into pain. A toothache can last for a week, or a month, and seem only to grow sharper for its long duration. But there is no point in studying to prolong orgasm. For a orgasm prolonged for as much as an hour would have long ceased to be a pleasure. Human beings are geared for pain. Pain is what we are good at. If a thing of beauty is to be a joy forever, it's because we have the power to recall it when it is gone, drawing it into our imagination where it shines all the brighter with the surrounding shadow of bereavement. Death and annihilation are necessary conditions for the existence of beauty. Every poet who ever wrote has known that joy's hand is forever "at his lips. / Bidding adieu", as Keats said. No poet was more achingly aware of beauty than Keats, who was ill and dying all his short life. What consolation can there be for the awareness that everything we love is dying?

Transcrição minha da introdução a este episódio, um dos meus predilectos até ao momento, desta série. 

O futuro próximo

This, then, is what passes for optimism in these grim times: the hope that while the days are still warm, and after tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost that could have been saved with quicker action, some of us will be able to start crawling out into the sunlight. We’ll emerge into a world in which people give each other wide berths and suspicious looks, where those public venues still in business allow only the thinnest crowds to congregate, and where a system of legal segregation determines who can enter them. Millions will still be out of work and struggling to get by, and people will watch nervously for signs of a new flare-up near them. 

Qualquer semelhança com Orwell, Le Guin e Atwood é mera coincidência. Ide ler.

Domingo no mundo (113)

Édouard Vuillard, Intérieur ensoleillé, 1920.

Na América.

Em pleno Verão, os habitantes de uma aldeia do interior sorteiam quem vai morrer, a bem da paz, da prosperidade e do equilíbrio da região. Nos anos 50, era ficção.

Pensar a permanência

The high humanities are to be preserved, then, not just because they intensify practical reasoning and imagination; because they enable us fully to appreciate and enjoy the cultural heritage and connect us to the past; because they offer a space for free contemplation and reflection; because they help us spiritually “endure modernization” (as the German theorists Joachim Ritter and Odo Marquard have argued); or because they encourage particular political subjectivities and movements. They are to be preserved because they are compelled to push back on the capitalist apparatuses that are dismantling them. In that pushback, what remains of them is aligned with green and radically left anti-capitalist movements. That is so even for those in the humanities (and there are many such) who do not personally sign on to political programs that formally contest current capitalist state regimes.  

The idea that we are now enduring a second secularization — this time not of religion but of culture and the humanities — helps reconcile us to our losses by helping us to see their larger logic. It is important to remember that religious secularization does not mean the end of religion. The same will be true of cultural secularization. And just as religious secularization involved political resistance, adjustment to cultural secularization will involve critique and resistance.

Simon During, Losing Faith in the Humanities.

Domingo no mundo (112)

Boris Lipnitzki: Marguerite Duras em sua casa, 1955.