Sem futuro

As utopias evaporaram e quase ninguém faz questão de imaginá-las, os jovens não se interessam pela história nem por ter história. Muitos poucos são socialmente responsáveis e politizados. Todos querem se dar bem individualmente, jovens, adultos e idosos.

Idiocracia

Os conteúdos gerados pelas redes sociais estão coibindo a evolução do subdesenvolvido. A tecnologia poderia ser usada para evoluir o nível psíquico, em vez disso os desclassificados do mundo moderno e iluminista estão disseminando a mediocridade sob a bandeira tecnológica.

Tubo de ensaio

A infância dos subdesenvolvidos está vinculada à pobreza material e, sobretudo, intelectual, mais o enfraquecimento extremo do laço social, o abandono do lar costuma ser explicado por patologias familiares e trajetórias psicológicas deficitárias.

A perversidade no poder

A exclusão e a segmentação desigual são as duas principais consequências da reestruturação global. A proposta neoliberal: a submissão da população às elites empresariais. Amplos setores perderão seus empregos e sua segurança social básica.

Porque não me ufano

Os riscos de exclusão no mercado de trabalho e de marginalização nas franjas massivas do consumo aumentarão nos países periféricos. Ser trabalhador no terceiro mundo tornou-se sinônimo de vulnerável. Os próximos anos serão um desastre, muito em breve a escravidão irá voltar a ser a prática social e jurídica dos desclassificados do mundo moderno.

Perspectivas

A história não pode ser reduzida a uma interação cega entre a plebe e o culto às personalidades, personalidades essas que se beneficiam com a miséria e a ignorância. É preciso uma teoria dos sujeitos que permite identificar os focos de resistência que estão contribuindo para a construção de uma boa sociedade.

Perspectivas

Alcançar a consciência requer destruir a fetichização mercantil. O fetichismo é ao mesmo tempo imaginário e material. No capitalismo, os homens se relacionam efetivamente por meio de mercadorias (nesse contexto, o corpo feminino é um item, um artigo, um produto). Não há atores, sujeitos da história, indivíduos inteligentes mas relações sociais entre coisas. A consciência se produz na construção de uma nova vida social, o que não irá acontecer na periferia do capitalismo.

A consciência somente irá existir como processo de construção. Para a psicanálise, atingir a consciência inclui a passagem do princípio do prazer ao princípio da realidade. Para sair da infância e converter-se em adulto é preciso de uma rigorosa e robusta formação letrada, de teoria (não existe vida sem teoria).

The correspondence of Charles Darwin

Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.

History of science

In 1858, Charles Darwin was forty-nine years old, a gentleman scientist living quietly at Down House in the Kent countryside. He was not yet a focus of debate; his "big book on species" still lay on his desk as a manuscript. It is at this point that the second and concluding volume of Janet Browne's magisterial biography opens. Beginning with the extraordinary events that finally forced the Origin of Species into print, we come to the years of fame and controversy. Here, Browne does dramatic justice to all aspects of the Darwinian revolution, from  fascinating examination of the Victorin publishing scene to a survey of the debates between scientists and churchmen over evolutionary theory. At the same time, she presents a wonderfully sympathetic picture of Darwin himself.

Endgame

What can be done with the ruins?

Nothing to be done!

Las Vegas

Xenophobia, bullshit, shouting, noise, vulgar music, prostitution. Everything is ugly, idiot and fool. No one educates anyone. Brazil is finished.

The trial

Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

Amrum

Nanning is a member of the Hitler youth (Hitlerjugend). The unfortunate product of toxic brainwashing.

Perversity in everywhere

Xenophobia, bullshit, 

shouting, noise, 

vulgar music, 

prostitution. 

Brazil is finished.

Franz

Did you notice Odradek?

The true function of art is social criticism

A specifically Marxist view of the role of art in society that remains widely held and his powerfully operative in the world of today. It is that the true function of art is social criticism. According to this view, art should get people to understand in a deeper way than they do what is wrong with the society they live in; and it should make them want to change society. Thus Marxists view art as a revolutionary instrument. Bad art is art which upholds the values of existing society, and tries to full or deceive people into accepting those values. This view of the role fo art, which was not at all widely held before Marx, comes close to being the prevailing orthodoxy in today's world.

A barbaric country

In Brazil, public action aimed at reducing inequality and poverty they are very ineffective and inefficient. Missing practical policy making.

Brazil have not developed the cultural and moral resources or the democratic forms of social organization that make possible the humane and rational use of material wealth and power.

The intellectual deprivation of girls is more deeper.

Porque não me ufano

Como os brasileiros irão elevar o nível do discurso político, se envolver em grandes questões como justiça e boa vida, lidar com a corrupção e reduzir a desigualdade se tudo o que fazem se limita a gritar, ouvir musica ruim e falar merda o dia inteiro de segunda a segunda? 

Periphery of capitalism

In an unequal society, courts payin exorbitant salaries:
Brasil, a country without an ideal.

Periphery of capitalism

The Southerner hates literature. There no jobs for Literature graduates in Porto Alegre. The Southerner created an imaginary enemy: the literature professor. Sad and poor city where prostitution is growing.

Periphery of capitalism

In the last year, Norway has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, with only 19 homicides. On the other hand, Brazil recorded 34.086 homicides. Nordic countries lead in global quality of life rankings. No more.

The fascisization of Brazil has the support of both the poor and the rich. It is a deliberate project. Look to the south.

Apresentando dois Homo troglodytes

Um macaco é um macaco, não importa o que vista. O nosso brasileiro, por exemplo, não é um homem, nem tampouco macaco, mas uma espécie de animal entre os dois com uma mentalidade de uma criança de dez anos. Nada mais que um primata e um simples bruto imaturo. Os macacos e os brasileiros não diferem apenas na anatomia mas particularmente na fala e no funcionamento mental. O brasileiro é uma forma intermediária de símio. Se ele pertence ao gênero simiesco ou humano, depende da qualidade de vida de suas cidades.

The perversity in the cities

In Brazil, a writer cannot write about beauty. Can't.

Look around and feel the cold truth with your face. 

Everything is ugly.

No future

Unfortunately, there no jobs for Literature graduates in Porto Alegre. Sad and poor city.

New American Ghetto Archive

Camilo Vergara, like a good ecologist, deliberately focused on “disturbance” sites, including drug houses, homeless encampments, and areas of noxious landuse dumping as well as assorted margins and interstices "often lacking political representation or even a name". As the crack cocaine epidemic made street-level photography more risky, he began to use rooftops to generate panoramic bird’s-eye views, which, in turn, revealed unsuspected landscape facets.

A good example of Vergara’s tenacious methodology is his case study of a once magnificent apartment complex at the corner of 178th Street and Vise Avenue, near the Bronx Zoo. When he first started visiting the “Castle” in the winter of 1980, the heating had failed and tenants were beginning to leave. Seemingly no resources were available to rehabilitate the building’s faded glory. The next fall was fire season. Although one might assume that buildings burn and become derelict from the ground up, Vergara discovered that the opposite was true. The first of twelve apartment fires began in occupied units on the top floor. Subsequently scavengers looted pipes and radiators from the fire-damaged apartments, leading to flooding and water damage on floors below. Tenant flight accelerated.By January 1983 the complex was completely abandoned and efforts had been made to seal all the windows and entrances with cinder blocks. Scavengers, nonetheless, continued to find their way inside to “mine” the building of saleable materials. As the building continued to deteriorate over the next two years, it blighted the rest of the neighborhood: attracting crime, depressing property values, and encouraging more abandonment. Finally in 1985 it was bulldozed into oblivion.

Purposeful deindustrialization

In The Assassination of New York, Robert Fitch has shown in compelling detail how private accumulation strategies (above all, the vast real estate calculations of the Rockefellers) manipulated public policy to help drive small manufacturing out of Manhattan.

Dead cities

“Ghetto geomorphology” (the economic and political erosion of inner-city neighborhoods) is tantamount to the macro-economic determinants of inner-city decline operating on decadal frequencies: deindustrialization, white flight, housing and job discrimination, anti-urban (but pro-suburban) federal policies, capture of city revenues for corporate, and so on.

Age of rubble

The carbon metabolism of urban areas is transforming world climate, destroying in process the recent niche of moderate weather that has made super-urbanization possible.

Environmental crisis is synonymous with expanding metropolitan scale.

What expert has ever examined the corpse of a great city? Who has ever put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis?

A country of illiterates

In Brazil, schools are completely disorganized and noisy. Bullshit is rampant, it is educational content.

A country of illiterates

Age of rubble and bullshit in Brazil. No future.

Just another system slave

Karl Marx insists that one of the great progressive elements of capital historically is to organize armies o workers. Today, without cooperative productive relationships.

Dead zone

What expert has ever examined the corpse of a great city? Who has ever put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis?

Basic Banalities

The main activities of the Lettriste International were "drifting" and "psychogeography". The former consisted of wandering around a city following the solicitations of the architecture. It was an attempt to find types of architecture one desired unconsciously. Psychogeography wasthe study and correlation of the material obtained from drifting. It was used to draw up new emotional maps of existing areas and plans for Utopian cities.

Stewart Home

Isomorphisms

Michel Foucault describes in his studies of the spatial distributions and architectures of the various modern disciplinary institutions. It is no coincidence that the prison resembles the factory, which resembles the school, which resembles the barracks, which resembles the hospital. They all share a common form that Foucault links to the disciplinary paradigm.

Prostitution and ways of fighting it

Prostitution continues to exist and threatens the feeling of solidarity and comradeship between working men and women, the members of the workers’ republic. It is time that we faced up to this problem. It is time that we gave thought and attention to the reasons behind prostitution. It is time that we found ways and means of ridding ourselves once and for all of this evil.

Prostitution is a phenomenon which is closely linked with unearned income, and it thrives in the epoch dominated by capital and private property. Prostitutes, from our point of view, are those women who sell their bodies for material benefit – for decent food, for clothes and other advantages; prostitutes are all those who avoid the necessity of working by giving themselves to a man, either on a temporary basis or for life.

Our Soviet workers’ republic has inherited prostitution from the bourgeois capitalist past, when only a small number of women were involved in work within the national economy and the majority relied on the “male breadwinner”, on the father or the husband. Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs. The institution of marriage made it possible to prevent the wealth that had been accumulated from being scattered amongst a vast number of “heirs”. But there is a great difference between the prostitution of Greece and Rome and the prostitution we know today. In ancient times the number of prostitutes was small, and there was not that hypocrisy which colours the morality of the bourgeois world and compels bourgeois society to raise its hat respectfully to the ‘lawful wife” of an industrial magnate who has obviously sold herself to a husband she does not love, and, to turn away in disgust from a girl forced into the streets by poverty, homelessness, unemployment and other social circumstances which derive from the existence of capitalism and private property. The ancient world regarded prostitution as the legal complement to exclusive family relationships. Aspasia [the mistress of Pericles] was respected by her contemporaries far more than the colourless wives of the breeding apparatus.

The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.

All forms of prostitution flourish like a poisonous flower in the swamps of the bourgeois way of life.

The world of the bourgeoisie does not even spare children, forcing young girls of nine and ten into the sordid embraces of wealthy and depraved old men. In the capitalist countries there are brothels which specialise exclusively in very young girls. In this present post-war period every woman faces the possibility of unemployment. Unemployment hits women in particular, and causes an enormous increase in the army of “street women”. Hungry crowds of women seeking out the buyers of “white slaves” flood the evening streets of Berlin. Paris and the other civilised centres of the capitalist states. The trade in women’s flesh is conducted quite openly, which is not surprising when you consider that the whole bourgeois way of life is based on buying and selling. There is an undeniable element of material and economic, considerations even the most legal of marriages. Prostitution is the way out for the woman who fails to find herself a permanent breadwinner. Prostitution, under capitalism provides men with the opportunity of having sexual relationships without having to take upon themselves the responsibility of caring materially for the women until the grave.

Bourgeois science and its academics love to prove to the world, that prostitution is a pathological phenomenon, i.e. that it is the result of the abnormalities of certain women, just as some people are criminal by nature, some women, it is argued, are prostitutes by nature. Regardless of where or how such women might have lived, they would have turned to a life of sin. Marxists and the more conscientious scholars, doctors and statisticians have shown clearly that the idea of “inborn disposition” is false. Prostitution is above all a social phenomenon; it is closely connected to the needy position of woman and her economic dependence on man in marriage and the family. The roots of prostitution are m economics. Woman is on the one hand placed in an economically vulnerable position, and on the other hand has been conditioned by centuries of education to expect material favours from a man in return for sexual favours – whether these are given within or outside the marriage tie. This is the root of the problem. Here is the reason for prostitution.

If the bourgeois academics of the Lombroso-Tarnovsky school were correct in maintaining that prostitutes are born with the marks of corruption and sexual abnormality, how would one explain the well-known fact that in a time of crisis and unemployment the number of prostitutes immediately increases? How would one explain the fact that the purveyors of “living merchandise” who travelled to tsarist Russia from the other countries of western Europe always found a rich harvest in areas where crops had failed and the population was suffering from famine, whereas they came away with few recruits from areas of plenty? Why do so many of the women who are allegedly doomed by nature to ruin only take to prostitution in years of hunger and unemployment?

It is also significant that in the capitalist countries prostitution recruits its servants from the propertyless sections of the population. Low-paid work, homelessness, acute poverty and the need to support younger brothers and sisters: these are the factors that produce the largest percentage of prostitutes. If the bourgeois theories about the corrupt and criminal disposition were true, then all classes of the population ought to contribute equally to prostitution. There ought to he the same proportion of corrupt women among the rich as among the poor. But professional prostitutes, women who live by their bodies, are with rare exceptions recruited from the poorer classes. Poverty, hunger, deprivation and the glaring social inequalities that are the basis of the bourgeois system drive these women to prostitution.

Or again one might point to the fact that prostitutes in the capitalist countries are drawn, according to the statistics, from the thirteen to twenty-three age-group. Children and young women, in other words. And the majority of these girls are alone and without a home. Girls from wealthy backgrounds who have the excellent bourgeois family to protect them turn to prostitution only very occasionally. The exceptions are usually victims of tragic circumstances. More often than not they are victims of the hypocritical “double morality”. The bourgeois family abandons the girl who has “sinned” and she – alone, without support and branded by the scorn of society – sees prostitution as the only way out.

We can therefore list as factors responsible for prostitution: low wages, social inequalities, the economic dependence of women upon men, and the unhealthy custom by which women expect to he supported in return for sexual favours instead of in return for their labour.

Relations between the sexes are being transformed. But we are still bound by the old ideas. Furthermore, the economic structure is far from being completely re-arranged in the new way, and communism is still a long way off. In this transitional period prostitution naturally enough keeps a strong hold. After all, even though the main sources of prostitution – private property and the policy of strengthening the family – have been eliminated, other factors are still in force. Homelessness, neglect, had housing conditions, loneliness and low wages for women are still with us. Our productive apparatus is still in a state of collapse, and the dislocation of the national economy continues. These and other economic and social conditions lead women to prostitute their bodies.

The correct slogan was formulated at the first All-Russian Congress of Peasant and Working Woman: “A woman of the Soviet labour republic is a free citizen with equal rights, and cannot and must not be the object of buying and selling.” We know that we can only overcome chaos and improve industry if we harness the efforts and energies of the workers and if we organise the available labour power of both men and women in the most rational way.

And what, after all, is the professional prostitute? She is a person whose energy is not used for the collective; a person who lives off others, by taking from the rations of others. Can this sort of thing be allowed in a workers’ republic? No, it cannot. It cannot be allowed, because it reduces the reserves of energy and the number of working hands that are creating the national wealth and the general welfare, from the point of view of the national economy the professional prostitute is a labour deserter. For this reason we must ruthlessly oppose prostitution. In the interests of the economy we must start an immediate fight to reduce the number of prostitutes and eliminate prostitution in all its forms.

It is time we understood that the existence of prostitution contradicts the basic principles of a workers’ republic which fights all forms of unearned wages.

We can only build a new communist economy if all adult citizens are involved in productive labour. The person who does not work and who lives off someone else or on an unearned wage harms the collective and the republic. We, therefore, hunt down the speculators, the traders and the hoarders who all live off unearned income. We must fight prostitution as another form of labour desertion.

The correct organisation of sexual education for young people is especially important. We must arm young people with accurate information allowing them to enter life with their eyes open. We must not remain silent any longer over questions connected with sexual life; we must break with false and bigoted bourgeois morality.

Prostitution is not compatible with the Soviet workers’ republic for a third reason: it does not contribute to the development and strengthening of the basic class character and of the proletariat and its new morality.

What is the fundamental quality of the working class? What is its strongest moral weapon in the struggle? Solidarity and comradeship is the basis of communism. Unless this sense is strongly developed amongst working people, the building of a truly communist society is inconceivable. Politically conscious communists should therefore logically be encouraging the development of solidarity in every way and fighting against all that hinders its development – Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. A man who buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. He sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers’ state. The contempt he has for the prostitute, whose favours he has bought, affects his attitude to all women. The further development of prostitution, instead of allowing for the growth of comradely feeling and solidarity, strengthens the inequality of the relationships between the sexes.

Prostitution is alien and harmful to the new communist morality which is in the process of forming. The task of the party as a whole and of the women’s departments in particular must he to launch a broad and resolute campaign against this legacy from the past. In bourgeois capitalist society all attempts at fighting prostitution were a useless waste of energy, since the two circumstances which gave rise to the phenomenon – private property and the direct material dependence of the majority of women upon men – were firmly established. In a workers’ republic the situation has changed.

the new morality is created by a new economy, but we will not build a new communist economy without the support of a new morality. Clarity and precise thinking are essential in this matter

Behaviour that is harmful to the collective must he rejected and condemned by communists.

It cannot be doubted that the poor and inadequate wages that women receive continue to serve as one of the real factors pushing women into prostitution.

The political backwardness of women and their lack of social awareness is a second reason for prostitution. The best way to fight prostitution is to raise the political consciousness of the broad masses of women and to draw them into the revolutionary struggle to build communism.

Alexandra Kollontai

1872 - 1952

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.