Poverty

The horrible stories of their lives were way beyond anything I had anticipated, so much so that I repeatedly checked the stories with their treating doctors, asking whether they could really be accurate. So too were their Cinderella-like stories of recovery, as lovely as the one with the pumpkin coach and the glass slipper. Over and over again, as I met poor people who were being treated for depression, I heard tones of astonishment and wonder: How, after so many things had gone wrong, had they been swept up by this help that had changed their entire life? “I asked the Lord to send me an angel”, said one woman, “and he answered my prayers”.

Andrew Solomon

Earth Abides

During thousands of years man had impressed himself upon the world. Now man was gone, certainly for a while, perhaps forever. Even if some survivors were left, they would be a long time in again obtaining supremacy. What would happen to the world and its creatures without man? That he was left to see!

George R. Stewart

1895 - 1980

After London

For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and trees and shrubs sprang up, and, last, the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown.

The earth on which he walked, the black earth, leaving phosphoric footmarks behind him, was composed of the mouldered bodies of millions of men who had passed away in the centuries during which the city existed.

Richard Jefferies

1848 - 1887

Multitude

The crisis of representation and the corruption of the forms of democracy is a planetary confition, inmediately evident in all the nation-states, unsuperable in the regional communities of contiguous sates, and violently expressed at the global, imperial level. The global crisis of democracy affects every form of government in the world. The interminable state of global war is a condition that contributes to the contemporary tendency toward the formation of a single, monarchical system of domination over the world. We cannot help but recognize the planet as a sick body and the global crisis of democracy as a symptom of corruption and disorder.

A country of illiterates

A federal diploma is no longer valid in Brazil. How sad is live in this underdeveloped country. No job, no culture, just bullshit, only criminals prosper. No future.

Women and fiction

It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of her children, whether she had money of her own, if seh had a room to herself, whether seh had help in bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the house works was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woamn that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.

Virginia Woolf

1882 - 1941

Writer at work

Writer consists of to order the facts one observes and to give meaning to life, and along with, that goes the love of words for their own sake and a desire do manipulate.

I met men had deliberately limited himself to the point where he would talk about almost nothing but drink, drugs and sex. Just crap. That's why I chose to read and writer.

A country of illiterates

For the generations of the Third World the beloved object never was be a book at all, but a videogame, iPhone, soccer ball or a beer can.

Book doesn't more a magical object of mysterious powers. In school or at home kids don't were taught to be curious and intellectuals.

The magical letters represent nothing. 

The Waves

Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.

Virginia Woolf

1882 - 1941

An interview

Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they’re fifty? It’s a problem in biochemistry and adult education.

Aldous Huxley

1894 - 1963

The Suicide

Not a star will remain in the night.

The night itself will not remain. 

I will die and with me the sum 

Of the intolerable universe. 

I’ll erase the pyramids, the coins, 

The continents and all the faces. 

I’ll erase the accumulated past. 

I’ll make dust of history, dust of dust. 

Now I gaze at the last sunset. 

I am listening to the last bird. 

I bequeath nothingness to no-one.

Jorge Luis Borges

1899 - 1986

Translate by A. S. Kline

Spectator Sports

In our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way - so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folk. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports - so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self - confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.

And spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they're a great way to build up chauvinism-you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don't know anybody on the team. They don't know me. I wouldn't know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? And it's true, you do: you're taught from childhood that you've got to worry about the Philadelphia Phillies, where I was. In fact, there's apparently a psychological phenomenon of lack of selfconfidence or something which affected boys of approximately my age who grew up in Philadelphia, because every sports team was always in last place, and it's kind of a blow to your ego when that happens, people are always lording it over you.

But the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power, and for chauvinism. And of course, you're looking at gladiators, you're looking at guys who can do things you couldn't possibly do - like, you couldn't pole - vault seventeen feet, or do all these crazy things these people do. But it's a model that you're supposed to try to emulate. And they're gladiators fighting for your cause, so you've got to cheer them on, and you've got to be happy when the opposing quarterback gets carted off the field a total wreck and so on. All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they're there; there's no doubt that they're there. But they're emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things. So if you look at the whole phenomenon, it seems to me that it plays quite a substantial social role. I don't think it's the only thing that has this kind of effect. Soap operas, for example, do it in another domain-they teach people other kinds of passivity and absurdity. As a matter of fact, if you really want to do a serious media critique right across the board, these are the types of things which occupy most of the media.

Noam Chomsky

Autobiografía

Oh, the sickening greed

En la oficina de empleo de Stretford, una mujer culigorda se sienta ante mí y quiere saber por qué he dejado mi espléndido puesto en las madrigueras subterráneas de la Inland Revenue. Es un neumático arenque ahumado de tan morsiles proporciones que hasta me cuesta responderle.

- Mírese, ¿acaso no podría arreglarse un poco? - me dice, y suelta en un suspiro todo el aire contenido en su puerquedad mientras agita unos brazos mantecosos y forcejea con sus piernas de gelatina... como friso yo por llegar al lugar de esta cita. Como ha dejado usted un trabajo perfectamente ventajoso, no podemos otorgarle ningún beneficio de desempleo. Tenga: quiero que acepte éste.

El hipopótamo me tiende una tarjeta con detalles de un trabajo y yo la leo con recelo.

- ¿Me está pidiendo que limpie las orillas de los canales?

- Sí.

- ¿Limpiar las orillas de los canales?

- Sí.

- ¿Como ocupación?

- Sí.

Susurro una última plegaria en busca de misericordia y recuerdo las palabras de Nancy en Oliver Twist, «dejadlo en paz o le haré alguna barbaridad a uno de vosotros que me llevará a la horca antes de tiempo...», y la morgue bosteza mi nombre. Me interrogan en la oficina de selección de Stretford porque tienen vacantes de cartero y es donde me veo con más posibilidades, pero no es así porque me rechazan - se me considera física y psicológicamente incapaz de entregar cartas. Ya no hay otra escapatoria que la muerte.

Steven Patrick Morrissey

Dictionary

In itself, a dictionary is like a Möbius strip a self defining object of one surface only, collecting and explaining without claiming a narrative third dimension.

A dictionary is then a collection of touchstones, marking points in an inconmensurable web whose individual nature remains unknow tous but whose constellations allow us a glimpse, however brief, however slight, of the machinery of the universe where everything we lose is gathered and everything we forget is remembered.

Dictionaries are catalogues of definitions. An anthology, a hierarchical catalogue, a philological theasures, a parallel memory, a writing and reading tool.

If books are our records of experience and libraries our depositories of memory, a dictionary is our talisman against oblivion.

The Candy Factory

A creative community held together by collaboration and the efforts of a Ann Ballentine (1941 - 2023) who is part landlady, part fairy godmother.

Caught in the web of words

Dictionary makers are astonishing creatures who rejoice, above everything else, in words. Dictionary makers are notoriously passionate and don’t believe in social niceties insofar as their great task is concerned. Think of James Murray, mastermind behind the great Oxford English Dictionary, who for many years received thousands of earliest instances of English words from an American surgeon living in England whom he never met, until he discovered, with splendid indifference, that his contributor, in addition to being a talented researcher, was also a clinically insane murderer whose home was the lunatic asylum of Broadmoor.

Digression

The writer's so-called craft: that is consists of a morbid compulsion o make up stories in order to acknowledge our human condition.

The Metamorphosis

It is not the dream but real life that proves to be Gregor's nightmare when he wakes up from disturbing dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect.

Maestri della microstoria

Carlo Ginzburg is dead 

and everything is worse now.

Selling my library

Learned the alphabet is the complicated art of distinguishing between factual untruths. Words are our guide to what is treason and what is true.

Picture of reality

slums

ignorance
idiocy

stupidity

foolish behavior

plutocracy

noise

pollution

small talk

bullshit

poverty

misery

deseducation

vulgarity

illiteracy

underdevelopment

chaos

disease

alienation

inequality

violence

corruption

greed

drugs

alcoholism

pornography

anti-intellectualism

superstition

fascism

Heart Place

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. 

Iris Murdock

1919 - 1999

A country of illiterates

Such a radical transformation of the society to allow singularities to intelligent express themselves is a far-off utopian dream in a periphery of capitalism.

A country of illiterates

It will not be the brazilian people which discovery the project of "another world is possible", a world beyond sovereignty and beyond every tyranny. There's not chance. Brazil is not composed of enlightened and radical singularities.

Pathology

The planet as a sick body and the global crisis of democracy as a symptom of corruption and disorder.

Junk news

If you were just to read the news every day, you'd say nothing but doom.

The Gnomes

The Gnomes are older than their name, which is Greek but which was unknown to the ancients, since it dates from the sixteenth century, Etymologists attribute it to the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in whose writings it appears for the first time. 

They are sprites of the earth and hills. Popular imagination pictures them as bearded dwarfs of rough and grotesque features; they wear tight-fitting brown clothes with monastic hoods. Like the griffons of Greece and of the East and the dragons of Germanic lore, the Gnomes watch over hidden treasure. 

Gnosis, in Greek, means knowledge; and Paracelsus may have called them Gnomes because they know the exact places where precious metals are to be found. 

Jorge Luis Borges 

and Margarita Guerrero

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.