1984

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

George Orwell

1903 - 1950

Dragons

Astrid Sheckels

In the eleventh book of the Iliad we read that there was a blue three-headed Dragon on Agamemnon’s shield; centuries later Norse pirates painted Dragons on their shields and carved Dragon heads on the prows of their long ships. Among the Romans, the Dragon was the insignia of the cohort, as the eagle was of the legion; this is the origin of present-day dragoons.

Trump nation

First trillionaire

Just as business is business, the never-ending accumulation of money, so war is killing, the never-ending accumulation of dead bodies.

The Art of Seeing

David Hockney

1937 - 2026

Noise pollution

The noise, there's no peace, there's no quiet. You can never relax in Porto Alegre. You can't switch off, read a book, and prepare yourself for another day, to look for a job, for example. An worse, there's no job for graduate in literature in the city. So, after two months, you're mentally exhausted. It's very sad to live in POA.

A country of illiterates

To be a scholar in Brazil mean to be poor, even a beggar. The university today doesn't have endemic unrest. The "nation" don't see the studies as a key factor in development.

The Words

Standing on a chair, I would contemplate with ecstasy those black, blood-streaked lines. Charles Schweitzer let me know that he had a deadly enemy, his Publisher. My grandfather had never known how to count. Thoughtlessly lavish and ostentatiously generous, he ended, much later, by falling a victim to that disease of octogenarians, avarice, which is a consequence of helplessness and the fear of death. At the period I am discussing, it was foreshadowed by a strange distrust: when he received his royalties by money order, he would raise his arms to heaven and cry that they were cutting his throat, or he would go to my grandmother's room and declare grimly: "My publisher's robbing me right and left." I discovered, to my stupefaction, the exploitation of man by man. Without that abomination, which fortunately was limited, the world would have been well made: employers gave, according to their ability to pay, to workers according to their merit. Why did publishers, those vampires, have to spoil things by drinking my poor grandfather's blood? My respect increased for that holy man whose devotion was unrewarded. I was prepared at an early age to regard teaching as a priesthood and literature as a passion.

Jean-Paul Sartre

1905 - 1980

The book of imaginary beings

 

The Celestial Horse is like a white dog with a black head. It has fleshy wings and can fly.

The mountain Hui looks like a dog with a human head. It is a fine jumper and moves with the swiftness of an arrow; this is why its appearance is held to foretell the coming of typhoons. On beholding a man, the Hui laughs mockingly.

In the region of the Queer Arm, people have a single arm and three eyes. They are exceptionally skilful and build flying chariots in which they travel on the winds.

A country of illiterates

In Brazil, people are ignorant and perverse. 

They hate studying.

A country of illiterates

The municipality and the state will not to provide high quality education to most children. Racists, promoters of religious schools, and others whose interests are socially divisive they profit from this model.

A country of illiterates

The children will never be communists. The teachers are not Marxists. Children will not be readers. Stop being delusional.

Tropic of Capricorn

If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.

Henry Miller

1891 - 1980

Justice

Greed is a vice, a bad way of being, especialy when it makes people oblivious to the suffering of others. More than a personal vice, it is at odds with civic virtue. In times of trouble, a good society puls together. Rather than press for maximum advantage, people look out for one another. A society in which people exploit their neighbors for financial gain in times of crisis is not a good society. Excessive greed is therefore a vice that a good society should discourage if it can. Price-gouging laws cannot banish greed, but they can at least restrain its most brazen expression, and signal society’s disapproval of it. By punishing greedy behavior rather than rewarding it, society affirms the civic virtue of shared sacrifice for the common good.

The country of illiterates

Educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the public education. Porto Alegre is making the invention of a new class of poor.

A country of illiterates

It is now accepted that the physical environment of schools will soon be destroyed by noise pollution unless we reverse current trends in the cultural production.

A country of illiterates

This total failure to improve the education of the poor it becomes evident in the learning of disadvantaged children, especially in its bibliographic references and their language experience.

That's clear: educational disadvantage cannot be cured by relying on education within the school.

Even unusual incompetence cannot beat that of the school system. Middle-class have nothing to lose if the school program is cut.

The country of illiterates

In Brazil the poor are those who lack of critical thinking. Poverty doesn't refers to those who have fallen behind an advertised ideal of consumption.

The city of exclusion

Porto Alegre is making the invention of a new class of poor and it will take one a new definition of poverty.

A country of illiterates

Reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect. Learning on one's own as unreliable among the underdeveloped uncultured.

Why we must disestablish school

School enslaves more profoundly and more systematically. The imagination of students is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. The institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence

Ivan Illich

1926 - 2002

A country of illiterates

School enslaves more profoundly and more systematically. Your principal function of forming critical judgment is dead.

The city of exclusion

The historical process of socio-spatial segregation, gentrification and inequality in Porto Alegre it's scary.

Planet of slum

We don't are witnessing decline of the divisions that separates agricultural from industrial workers, the working classes from the poor. Increasingly common conditions of labor in all sectores they are not assigning new importance on knowledge, information, affective relations, cooperation and communication. Sadly, there is none a new common expression being produced.

Planet of slum

Biopolitical production of the multitude doesn't creates a new social being, a new human nature. It is perpetuating misery.

Planet of slum

In Brazil, human nature itself seems to have taken on ominous overtones. The encounter with madness is one of the basic experiences of the pheriphery of capitalism which life forces upon us. The irracionalism  is a structure.

Would you care to take a look a book?

The historian Bruce Dickinson could encourage the reading of Karl Marx for young people. It would be important. But the singer not a unbeliever.

The Spider

“When the medical student Richard Bracquemont decided to move into room seven of the little Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens 6, three persons had hanged themselves on the crossbars in that very room on three successive Fridays”.

Hanns Heinz Ewers

1871 - 1943

The Authors of Tales of Terror

Kafka’s world is nearly always an enclosed space, a man made world devoid of landscapes, oceans, mountains, rocks, and blades of grass. It begins with the animal level, that is, at a level at which independent movement exists and which now is directed at man.

Kafka’s characters are not specific individuals; they often lack a proper name. And “powers” would be much too meaningful and strong a term for that which asserts itself in the movement. There are no coherent sequences which directly and unambiguously point to ward physical destruction, or which could be presented in that manner. Destruction may well be the result; but the action never leads up to it as a goal that is superimposed from the outside. What Kafka shows is the gradual displacement of the individual, a continuous process without climax, no single phase of which the narrator is able to explain; for he, too, like the reader is affected by the incomprehensibility of the phenomenal world which is strange and dreamlike.

Wolfgang Kayser

1906 - 1960

A city of illiterates

Low cognitive ability and very low quality of life.

Dracula

In the library I found, to my great delight, a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines and newspapers, though none of them were of very recent date. The books were of the most varied kind, history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law, all relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There were even such books of reference as the London Directory, the “Red” and “Blue” books, Whitaker’s Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists, and it somehow gladdened my heart to see it, the Law List.

Whilst I was looking at the books, the door opened, and the Count entered. He saluted me in a hearty way, and hoped that I had had a good night’s rest. Then he went on.

“I am glad you found your way in here, for I am sure there is much that will interest you. These companions”, and he laid his hand on some of the books, “have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England, and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! As yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak”.

Bram Stoker

1847 - 1912

A city of illiterates

People don't study in POA. 

There is no college life.

A country of illiterates

There's no way out – slaves for eternity! The people reduce diversity to a inequality. In the people doesn't exist differences, less different ways of living. The people are stupid and anti-intellectual. 

A country of illiterates

In Brazil, bullshit became a pathology, it is everywhere and it was amplified.

A country of illiterates

The orientation of “Russian socialism” by massively spreading education and culture, had shown that it did not want “slaves,” but “thinking people”.

Brazil continue path ignorance.

Planet of slum

People don't study in POA. It's a city of illiterates. There is no college life.

A country of illiterates

The brazilian people suffer under it own nature to the point of revulsion. There is something most deeply irrational about the "brazilian soul" which, to the mind and judgement of other, more developed peoples appears disturbing, agitating, alien, indeed repellent and offensive.

In short: people don't study.

Deutsche Hörer!

To place Russian communism and Nazi-fascism on the same moral plane, in that both would be totalitarian, is superficial at best, fascism at worst. Whoever insists on this equation may well consider himself a democrat, in truth and in the bottom of his heart he is in fact already a fascist, and certainly only in a hypocritical and insincere way will he fight fascism, while reserving all his hatred for communism.

Thomas Mann

1875 - 1955

A country of illiterates

Brazilian intellectuals don't know the meaning of fascism.

A country of illiterates

What is so threatening about reason?

Few students (or basically none) are has been introduced to prose of science fiction by elementary school teachers. The language of their is a preposterous caricature of misunderstood television, social media and commercial music, laced with religious prejudices: anti-rational view of the world. True education was replaced by bullshit.

Brazil continue be a country that afford to mess about. The brazilian bullshitter continue ignoring science.

The perversity in power

At the most advanced stage of capitalism, the brazilian society is a system of subdued, in which the institutions solidifying the power of the whole over the individual. There will never be a welfare state.

Herschel at the Cape

He steals the Dutch stars.
He will write with a pen.
He will write with light.

* *

1833: two months at sea.

Ashore, he notes
the mackerel drift of cloud.
His telescope stands in an orchard.

* *

Double star and double star.
He fixes the next nebula.

He rummages and sweeps.

Double star and double star.
He polishes the mirror.

* *

He cooks an egg in the sun
then moves on to mutton.

He studies tides, yet thinks time flies.
He loses the morning looking for a key.
He measures Alpha Centauri.

* *

Now he robs the wilds of lovely flowers.
He draws an outline and his wife paints in.

He shoots a few brown birds –
yellow beneath their tails –

then watches his children gather cones,
sketching until the Cape light fails.

Often he completes the background
but leaves the foreground empty...

Double star and double star –
a blank space, then a cluster.

* *

He studies sun-spots.
The milk-boy steals the Beef.

He imitates the calls of birds.
He mistakes a cluster for a comet.

He makes another sweep.

* *

And snakes attack, and dogs,
and purgatorial rats, and fleas.
There are coughs and colds
and a face-ache called the Sinkings.

And glorious nights, pure and clear
double star and double star
and sometimes such ill-adapted air
that the stars swell out and waver.

* *

Also he studies weather.
His study is unroofed by wind.
Double star and double star.
He dismisses a carpenter.
He repairs a barometer.

* *

He will propose the contact lens
and study colour blindness.

He will talk of snap-shot and of negative.
He will translate the Iliad.

He will be Master of the Mint.
He will invent the blueprint.

But at present he arranges stars.

* *

He also evaporates the juice of figs.
He is quick in motion and in speech.
He draws a sudden gale.
He writes with the Anglo-Saxon thorn.
He digs in the earth. He does reductions.
He loves his wife and children.
He makes a zone and sweeps the sky.
And people with wings are walking on the moon!
(A hoax.) He is pestered in several languages.
He is modest, he is shy.
Halley can sometimes make him sigh...
it steals his sweeps, and makes him slow...
He uses the camera lucida.
He translates Michelangelo.

* *

Four years at the Cape...
we hear his happiness from afar.

Of Saturn’s sixth, uncertain moon,
he writes to his aunt with an italic shout:

‘So this is at last a thing made out.’

* *

Double star and double star.
Winter and summer.

* *

Double star and double star.
He polishes the mirror.

Bill Manhire

A country of illiterates

Moonlight is all reflected sunlight (a fact which the brazilian christians to have continue refuse to believe: it offensive his illusions).

Full Moon

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –

And you listening. 

A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch. 

A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror 

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges 

with their warm wreaths of breath – 

A dark river of blood, many boulders, 

Balancing unspilled milk.

"Moon!" you cry suddenly, "Moon! Moon!"

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.

Ted Hughes

1930 - 1980

Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night –
I walked abroad, 

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge 

Like a red-faced farmer. 

I did not stop to speak, but nodded, 

And round about were the wistful stars 

With white faces like town children.

Thomas Ernest Hulme

1883 - 1917

Troilus and Cressida

Ulysses:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the influence of evil planets,
And posts like the commandment of a king,
Sans check to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogeniture and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows.

Shakespeare

Beautiful mind

Pulsars spin so fast that, where our planet takes 24 hours to rotate, a pulsar may take a fraction of a second.

Modern Painters

For most men, an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one; it is better to conceive the sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist I much question whether anyone who knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure or reverence which an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow. We cannot fathom the mystery of a single flower, nor is it intended that we should; but that the pursuit of science should constantly be stayed by the love of beauty, and accuracy of knowledge by tenderness of emotion.

John Ruskin

1819 - 1900

Remembering Richard Feynman

1918 - 1988

The distinguished theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was charged by a friend that a scientist misses the beauty of a flower by studying it. Feynman responded:

The beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others. I can see the complicated interactions of the flower. The color of the flower is red. Does the fact that the plant has color mean that it evolved to attract insects? This adds a further question. Can insects see color? Do they have an aesthetic sense? And so on I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds.

 

Hymn of hate against the intellectuals

In the last decade, the antipathy against science resulted from the common tendency in the political arena. That hostility is sounds to more personally anguished, threatened, beleaguered, fearful of humiliation because science - by the secondarily illiterate - is seen as too difficult to master. Even more so in feudal geographies, a country of illiterates.

On Giants' Shoulders

There are still those who are affected enough to say they know nothing about the sciences as if this somehow makes them superior. What it makes them is rather silly.

A country of illiterates

Prejudice against reason weigh down the wings of education. A discipline which, if fed back to students in scientific guise, might inspire still greater study.

A country of illiterates

There is a great difference between an exclusive snobbery and an embracing, flattering elitism that strives to help people to raise their game and join the cultural elite. A calculated dumbing down is the worst: condescending and patronizing.

Don't worry be happy

If children are lured into science, or any other worthwhile occupation, by the promise of easy fun, what are they going to do when they finally have to confront the reality?

The new creationism

Purveyors of cultural relativism and the "higher superstition" are apt to pour scorn on the search for truth.

"Dumbing down" is a very different kind of threat to scientific sensibility. Larky voices proclaim that science is fun, fun, fun. The very word science is best avoided, we were told, because ordinary people see it as threatening.

A country of illiterates

There in Brazil an pernicious alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalist religious right and the institutional left. Not even the theory of evolution escapes this bizarre manifestation. A underdeveloped country that will never be modern.

On the Origin of Species

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with manyplants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin

1809 - 1882

To spring direct towards the galaxy

Poet and the city

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them, because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are, therefore, speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

W. H. Auden

1907 - 1973

Strange other world

A cell is not just a bag of juice. It is packed with solid structures, mazes of intricately folded membranes. There are about 100 million million cells in a human body, and the total area of membranous structure inside one of us works out at more than 200 acres. That's a respectable farm.

What are all these membranes doing? They seem to stuff the cell as wadding, but that isn't all they do. Much of the folded acreage is given over to chemical production lines, with moving conveyor belts, hundreds of stages in cascade, each leading to the next in precisely crafted sequences, the whole driven by fast-turning chemical cogwheels. The Krebs cycle, the 9-toothed cogwheel that is largely responsible for making energy available to us, turns over at up to 100 revolutions per second, duplicated thousands of times in every cell. Chemical cogwheels of this particular marque are housed inside mitochondria, tiny bodies that reproduce independently inside our cells like bacteria. As we shall see, it is now widely accepted that the mitochondria, along with other vitally necessary structures within cells, not only resemble bacteria but are directly descended from ancestral bacteria who, a billion years ago, gave up their freedom. Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

Passion

Full of desire I lay, the sky wounding me, 

Each cloud a ship without me sailing, each tree 

Possessing what my soul lacked, tranquillity.

Waiting for the longed-for voice to speak 

Through the mute telephone, my body grew weak 

With the well-known and mortal death, heartbreak.

The language I knew best, my human speech 

Forsook my fingers, and out of reach 

Were Homer’s ghosts, the savage conches of the beach.

Then the sky spoke to me in language clear, 

familiar as the heart, than love more near. 

The sky said to my soul, "You have what you desire!

"Know now that you are born along with these 

clouds, winds, and stars, and ever-moving seas 

and forest dwellers. This your nature is.

"Lift up your heart again without fear, 

sleep in the tomb, or breathe the living air, 

this world you with the flower and with the tiger share".

Kathleen Raine

1908 - 2003