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.