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.

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.