Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Joyce...
A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for aims towards the very reverend John Conmee S.J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his purse held, he knew, one silver crown.
Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey's words: If I had served my God as I have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my old days. He walked by the treeshade of sunnywinking leaves: and towards him came the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.
-- Very well, indeed, father. And you, father?
Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O, yes: a very great success. A wonderful man really.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Eu vi Deus....
You smiled at me
Like Jesus to a child....
I'm blessed.... I know....
Heaven sent.....
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Api Files - Fictional Truth
Clive James on Borges' political blindness during the dire 70's in Argentina:
In 1979, when Borges wrote his homage to Victoria Ocampo (the founder of the cosmopolitan magazine Sur) in which this revealing passage appeared, the Argentine junta was doing its obscene worst. Surrounded by horror, Borges either hadn't noticed or—a hard imputation, yet harder still to avoid—he knew something about it and thought it could be excused. But even if he was confident that the political Brahmanism he favored could be pardoned for imposing itself by extreme means, he might well have detected an incipient challenge to his conscience. He had good reason—i.e., a bad reason but an urgent one—to suggest, if only to himself, that what was happening to his country was of secondary importance, because his first loyalty was to the world. But the world, not one's country, is the abstraction: an ideal that means nothing if one's first loyalties to truth, justice, and mercy have been given up. The old man was pulling a fast one. At this point there is a key quotation from Ernesto Sábato, one of Borges' most talented peers, that we should consider:
From Borges's fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence.
In Buenos Aires after World War II, there were two literary voices of incontestable international stature. The main difference between them was that only one was known to possess it. The whole world heard about Borges. But to get the point about Sábato, you had to go to Argentina. Both inhabitants of a beautiful but haunted city, both great writers, and both blind in their later lives, Borges and Sábato were linked by destiny but separated in spirit: a separation summed up in this single perception of Sábato's, which was penetratingly true. Borges did fear the bitterness of reality, and he did take refuge in an invented world. Sábato's fantastic novels were dedicated to including all the horrors of the real world and raising them to the status of dreams, so that they could become apprehensible to the imagination. Most of the dreams we recognize all too clearly. He didn't need to search very far in order to find the stimulus for them. All he needed was the recent history of Argentina. In Borges, by contrast, the near past scarcely exists: In that respect his historical sense, like his Buenos Aires, is without contemporaneity. His political landscape is a depopulated marble ghost town remembered from childhood, spookily hieratic like the cemetery in Recoleta. Before he went blind he would walk the streets only at night, to minimize the chance of actually meeting anyone. In his stories, the moments of passion, fear, pity, and terror belong to the long-vanished world of the knife fighters. Death squads and torture are not in the inventory. The time scale ends not long after he was born. Why did he hide?
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Clarisse Tarran - Brasilha
Anagramas de Ordem e Progresso
Preso Segredo Mor . Gorem os Podreres.
Na cidade lisa, onde o olho pouco se fere,
sem quinas, sem perpendiculares quebras.
Olho doido, desliza redondo, inócuo,
boiando num sem tempo (como estas absurdas não construções)
Tudo flutua em ar quente, em seca e rubra atmosfera
Tudo se esconde; a vida, a carne e tudo que se espera
Homens surgem do nada. Inesperadas vezes, mergulham para o nada
Espaços ocos, em ocas moradas. Projeto clean invasor, ocas muradas
Cidade que os ocupantes, simultaneamente, devora e cospe
Em mágico movimento de existência-alinhavo
Não há lugar no mundo melhor para ilicitar
Depois da reunião, depois, depois da proposta, depois
Imunidade parlamentar, decoro, retórica palestra
Festa, infidelidade, propina, fresta
Atendimento ao público, ao meio expediente, encerrado
Orgão público, ao público, privado Brasília, cidade ilha
Poder você com vermelha poeira de flor do cerrado
Cidade deslumbrante, onde em 68 nasci,
não por acaso, morrendo, sufocada.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
American Dream
back at me.
up.
Don't know when things went wrong,