Tatame também abriga aula para vida

... Later on, however, he became absorbed in the text. The recurring statistics certainly bored him, but he was too conscientious to skip them and succeeded in learning a good deal by heart. He was deeply interested in the American police system and the law courts, which, the book averred, were organized in the service of democratic freedom, so that any man able to read a book intelligently could gather that in America no cripples were thrown into jail at the bidding of wicked shipping firms; it would be as well therefore for Martin to go with him. (...) A police force that worked in the cause of freedom and accepted no money from shipping firms wouldn't need to be scored off. ...

Addenda: the photo was taken with a new cellphone - when I took it, I hadn't noticed the lens was protected with a dark protective film  - the opaque color is the result of taking the picture with the plastic protection still on!

España <-- Hispania <-- Hispani <-- I Shpanim (fenicio - isla de los conejos). En hebreo moderno la expresión אי השפנים (I haShfanim) puede ser leída como "isla de los conejos" también.

(La etimología no es segura - es solo una entre varias posibilidades - suena sin embargo simpática - le quita antipatía y grandilocuencia a la palabra "España" y hace pensar en las deliciosas preparaciones de conejo que aún hay allá.)

-

Otra etimología - esta más segura: Cartago (de donde Cartagena) - del fenicio Kart Jadasht - similar de nuevo al hebreo moderno Kirya Hadasha - ciudad nueva.

-

Wadi al Yihara - río de piedras

Wadi al Qabir - río grande

Nablus - ciudad nueva

... He contemplated the portrait of Herr Hentjen over the mantelpiece to see whether it had any resemblance to Lohberg, and when he had looked long enough at the features of the late restaurant-keeper they did actually melt into those of the Mannheim tobacconist. Yes, wherever one looked it seemed that one figure melted into another and that one could not even distinguish the living from the dead. Nobody was what he thought he was; a man imagined he was a chap with his feet planted firmly on the earth, pocketing his seven marks a night and going wherever he pleased; and in reality he was just sometimes in one place, and sometimes in another, and even when he made a sacrifice it was not himself who made it. An irresistible desire overcame him to produce some proof that was not so and that it could not be so, and even if it was impossible to prove it to anybody else he was resolved to show that woman in there that he wasn't to be confused either with Herr Lohberg or with Herr Hentjen.

(...)

He brought a glass of beer for her too, and she drank it at his bidding. In the dark compartment of the train he made a pillow for her head on his shoulder. He did not know whether she was asleep or awake, and she herself scarcely knew it.

(...)

He read a portion of it everyday. At first he had contented himself with the illustrations, and now when he thought of America it seemed to him that the trees there were not green, the meadows not brightly colored, the sky no longer blue, but that all American life was deployed against a polished and elegant chiaroscuro as in the brownish grey photographs, or against the sharp contours of the delicately limned pen-drawings. Later on, however, he became absorbed in the text.

Ayer fuimos con María Clara a escuchar a Javier, Alejandro y Ricardo en la Feria del Libro de Bogotá. No me pareció novedoso ni particularmente interesante lo que se dijo. No es culpa de los panelistas - tal vez es culpa del formato de "panel de discusión"... y del tema.

¿Cómo hablar de blogs sin caer en banalidades y cosas obvias?

¿Cómo detectar la cantidad de pre-blogs que hubo en la historia (Jabès, Borges, el Talmud de Babilonia, los cuentos homéricos) y entender que simplemente se potenciaron? ¿Cómo capturar el esplendor de lo fugaz, de lo diario? ¿Cómo evitar la discusión (jartísima) de los derechos de autor?

Lo divertido: el gato Plinio apareciendo (pixelado) en la pantalla, la cara de aburrición absoluta de Javier (también pixelado) - aburrición que hacía eco del ambiente del evento en Bogotá, y el twitter de Javier en la pantalla, que tenía a la gente medio confundida (¿por qué salen avillavecesn? ¿Wallace? ¿Javier estaba tecleando eso todo el tiempo? - me divertí cantidades con las múltiples interpretaciones que dieron al twitter quienes no conocen el twitter).

Alexandre Franc and Arnaud Bureau's Mai 68 - histoire d'un printemps is a fantastic read for these days. We keep hearing all sorts of things about May 68 - from accounts of heroism to description of the beginning of a decline. I suckled on May 68 during my infant years: parts of the dream were alive in my household (I was born in June 68!) - my recollections of my very early years are all marked by local aftershock waves of May 68 (we lived a block away from National University, where my father worked and my mother was a student - the local émeutes [pedreas] often ended with students taking refuge in our apartment, and with long long discussions I could not really understand, young bearded men with thick eyeglasses dressed in long jerseys, young women in miniskirts and funnily made up hair - the whole lot of them smoking endlessly and discussing la cuestión).

Then, trying to understand what really happened 40 years ago. Sarkozy, with many others, claims the beginning of a decline (in society, in education, in respect) started then - part of his election platform had to do with "throwing away the horrendous legacy of May 68". Many responses to that  - one of them, intriguing to me, by Alain Geismar, says “As a divorced man, Sarkozy couldn’t have been invited to dinner at the Élysée Palace, let alone be elected president of France,” Mr. Geismar said. Both the vivid personal life and political success of Mr. Sarkozy, with foreign and Jewish roots, “are unimaginable without 1968,” he said. “The neo-conservatives are unimaginable without ’68.”

Many many other things beyond Sarkozy's lifestyle as a French president, or even beyond France itself, were galvanized by that upheaval - in many parts of the world. Even the weariness with the 68 legacy.

Click on the images to go the bande dessinée - it is really worth a little of your time, if the subject interests you.

Shanghai - China - early 21st century

A quarry in Vermont

In any case, go check the site if you want to see more. There are urban mines, more quarries, more of China, oil fields, ...

Right. A delight to listen to. I hope I will have the chance to listen to them in concert some time soon! Why is salsa music entitled to break my inner self in such an incredible way? I am never the same after listening to it.

Back in March 2004, I posted about le parkour, an intriguing activity I only glimpsed briefly at Les Halles in Paris back then. During the last months, especially since coming back from Finland, I have come across more and more people doing parkour, not far from home (mostly, near the Torres del Parque, in the beautiful Parque de la Independencia).

Here is an interesting video of parkour in Bogota - at Salmona's building in National University and other locations in the city.


 

eco de Mustaa (María Clara Cortés, foto tomada el 16.4.2008)

Our experience with Lonely Planet guides goes back to a trip to Greece in 2000. Back then, Lonely Planet seemed to be slightly better than Les Guides du Routard and much better than Harvard's students' Let's Go guidebooks. Somehow the Greece Lonely Planet seemed to have the right combination of information and usefulness for people who (as in our case) wanted to visit a few places, improvise a bit, but have some basic selection of suggestions of places to stay and eat. The old Colombia Lonely Planet (brought and left here by some visitor back in 1998) was OK - not excellent, not bad. The Japan one was OK.

Then in Finland back in 2007 the Lonely Planet was simply horrible. Extremely uninformative, full of false claims on opening times, bus or train routes, lots of imprecisions and a general lack of knowledge on the country that was more and more disturbing as we got to learn a little bit on Finland ourselves. At some point, ovidio had the Routard and I could appreciate the enormous difference in quality between Lonely Planet and Routard.

I believed that was a sort of exception - I also try to get info from various different sources. But this string of news seems to confirm the downward trend of Lonely Planet: El Tiempo, on the fake around the Colombia edition, an article in the Daily Telegraph, among other things.

Too bad. I hope they will get their act together at some point. For now, I will be very careful when buying guidebooks.

Paris - avril 2008 - marche pour la libération d'Ingrid Betancourt - photo El País

I am struck by the same observation very often. People living essentially in colonial times, contemporary with people living in a (well advanced) 21st century - and some few essentially starting already the 22nd century - all around us.

(my muxtape: hopefully, I will keep updating it with new songs [or other music] I care for)

Just a few moments ago, Apolo - our dalmatian dog - seemed to be dreaming. He was actually barking in his sleep - his bark sounded funny - a bit like convulsions initially (that prompted MC and I to check what was happening) - but then we noticed his legs were moving slightly like if he was running, and he was barking... he woke up a bit confused of seeing us and being back in the room after having been running who knows where.

A dream that caught my attention (it woke me up - and I remember it perhaps because of that): I was with a lot of people in a room that looked like the Marta Traba hall at Universidad de los Andes. The occasion was a concert - a piano recital. The pianist (who had not yet arrived) happened in the dream to be Alf Onshuus. The chancellor of the University was there, together with all the main academic authorities. At some point, I realized in the dream that Alf was about to arrive from the Chocó, directly to play for us. It was normal within the dream that Alf was also a great concert pianist. I remember being a bit surprised that people were calmly waiting, as if Alf's direct arrival from the Chocó had been a normal thing to happen.

When Alf arrived, of course he was not dressed as a pianist - obviously: nobody arrives from Alf's situation dressed as a concert pianist... Therefore, he had to go to the back of the room to change and put on the tuxedo. I took advantage of the moment to go greet him, and the dream became extremely emotional at that point: we embraced, and Alf seemed to be glowing with happiness about being back here - and I was incredibly glad. Somehow we began to talk and talk (and somehow the public was kept waiting) ... and I woke up with those images in my mind.

At 4 pm, Colombian time, we (Alf's friends, and Ana who is now with us) will keep a minute of silence for Alf, wherever we are at that time of the day. We keep waiting for him.

Me envió (una familiar mía de quien no sabía que leyera estas cosas, pero así es) la Meditación XVII del poeta metafísico inglés John Donne. Donne me ha fascinado desde que lo descubrí en alguna librería de segunda en Madison, hacia 1993. La sonoridad en inglés es absurdamente bella.

Meditación XVII ( En "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions")

Uno se despierta estos días en Colombia y ya no sabe qué hacer, cómo empezar el día. Mejor no mirar el periódico: cada día, cada mañana y tarde, cada hora casi trae algo que lo distrae a uno de manera ridícula. Un día es un exabrupto del ministro de agricultura, al día siguiente una locura de Chávez, luego otra respuesta absurda de José Obdulio Gaviria, luego una liberación de secuestrados, seguido (como pasó en enero) de un espantoso secuestro de un amigo muy cercano.

Y ahora es aún peor - no lo puedo creer. El país aparentemente al borde de una guerra - una guerra que creo que nadie quiere (ni venezolanos normales que buscan trabajar y sobrevivir, ni ecuatorianos - tan parecidos a nosotros en todo (uno ve fotos de Quito y puede casi decir en qué barrio de Bogotá serían) - ni colombianos). Pero aparecen por todos lados mapas de supuestas invasiones (Venezuela y Ecuador simultáneamente invadiendo Colombia, con ayuda de las FARC, con plan de desestabilización previo y todo - en Semana - un engendro del demonio con el estrambótico nombre de "Plan de Guerra Guaicaipuro"). Cada noticia parece peor que la anterior. ¿Computadores con cartas entre la cúpula de las FARC y Chávez o los asesores de Correa? ¿300 millones de dólares? ¿Supuestamente iban a liberar a Íngrid el 12 de marzo? ¿Por qué ese día - es acaso el cumpleaños de Chávez o del asesor de Correa? ¿Qué podemos esperar mañana? ¿Con qué ánimos voy a abrir de nuevo eltiempo.com, la gacetilla, elpais.com? ¿No puede aparecer por un día, por un solo día, una noticia decente, algo que no parezca aún peor que la víspera?

Antenoche domingo no pude dormir de verdad. Hablar con Alex me dejó más alterado que siempre. Entre vigilia y sueño (no era vigilia real pero no era sueño real) pensaba todo el tiempo que los aviones de Chávez (digo de Chávez - no de los venezolanos - me resisto a creer que ese personaje represente a los venezolanos maravillosos que he podido conocer en mi vida) - pensaba todo el tiempo que los aviones de Chávez iban a llegar esa misma noche a bombardear a Bogotá. Como vivimos no muy lejos del centro, pensé que no había caso, que seríamos borrados esa misma noche del mapa. Al otro día parecía ligeramente absurdo el sueño-vigilia (y espero que lo sea), pero seguía representando muy clara, muy nítidamente mi estado de ánimo actual. Puede pasar cualquier cosa. No sabemos qué pasa con Alf y Ana. No sabemos qué hacer por ellos. La información misma, nuestra voz, parece secuestrada. Nadie va a oír nada. Hacemos fuerza, constantemente, porque estén bien, porque los respeten, por hacerles llegar de alguna manera esa llama que está permanentemente prendida por ellos. Pero no sabemos nada, y cada noticia parece alejarnos más y más del día de volverlos a ver. Es terrible pensar eso, pero no veo absolutamente ninguna salida a este atolladero.

Pensar en matemática - en la medida de lo posible - ha sido la salvación para mí. Pensar en su proyecto de recorridos y arte ha sido (creo) la salvación para María Clara. Ir a las maravillosas charlas de Fernando sobre historia de la matemática en el siglo XX (qué lejos se ve ya ese siglo también horrendo, con sus abstracciones y sus auto-referencias). Hablar y hablar de variedades riemannianas con Guillermo - enterarme de mil y mil cosas. Escuchar a Gian-Carlos dar su charla a los lógicos. Leer y releer a Udi, que realmente tiene visión de las cosas. Re-re-re-re-redescubrir la Finite Equivalence Relation Property de Shelah por ahí oculta. Saber que tengo que leer más física si quiero continuar lo mejor del trabajo reciente... y tener realmente poco tiempo (y paz mental) para hacerlo. Escribir notas para los estudiantes de lógica (motivados, entusiasmados, ojalá les dure eso) y enseñarles el teorema de Tarski y el de Gödel.

Y sí, soy afortunado. Una caja de Amazon llegó, portadora de maravillas. La Enciclopedia Romántica, de Novalis (sugerencia, ya varias veces, de Fernando). Leer cosas como true thinking appears like a creating - and is indeed such a thing. Untrue thinking appears as something other than it is. The former is at once thinking and nonthinking. (Indirect and direct.) me deja completamente intrigado. ¿Quién diablos puede escribir eso, antes de los 29 años? O por ejemplo Consciousness is nothing more than a sensation of the (algebraic) sense of comparison. - sense of relation. Arbitrary affections of this sense. Original relations-algebraic relations. Theory of living relations. Natural relations. Artificial relations. Synthetic relations. - Mystical theory of proportions. Consciousness is the substance of the senses-consequently its sensations are also substances, etc. Where there is a sense, there is also no consciousness. ¿Quién pudo ser realmente quien escribió esto - y mucho más, a sus 27 años, al final del siglo 18?

Las otras maravillas de la caja de Amazon fueron esta vez Los Sonámbulos, de Broch. Love, Sex, Tragedy - How the Ancient World shapes our lives, de Simon Goldhill, la edición de The Novices of Sais de Novalis con dibujos de Paul Klee, y el How Proust can change your life de Alain de Botton.

En noviembre andaba yo buscando la Enciclopedia de Novalis - decidí preguntar en la Central del Raval. La dependienta me miró malacarosa: ¿Novalis? ¿Quién es? Yo le expliqué que era un poeta romántico y me miró aún peor. Arqueó las cejas. Poeta romántico... estás en el lugar equivocado. La Central es un lugar serio. Aquí no vendemos ni Corín Tellado ni poetas románticos (dijeron sus cejas). Miró en el ordenador con cara de duda y desde luego se quedó aterrada al ver que sí tenían libros de Novalis en su base de datos. El Allgemeine Brouillon desafortunadamente estaba agotado. Cuando vio que mi pobre poeta romántico tenía títulos tan variados y en francés y en alemán le cambió el tono de las cejas. Me dijo que podían pedirlo a algún lugar, a alguna editorial. Yo le dije que salía de España al día siguiente. La pedantería de algunos vendedores de libros (sobre todo los que no saben de verdad) puede ser abismal.

Retorno a mis cosas. Creo que desde mañana no volveré a mirar noticias por la mañana. Mejor ir a la Universidad y jugar juegos de Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé sobre cuantificadores generalizados monótonos con los jóvenes, o ir a desentrañar sentencias de Gödel con los más jóvenes, o leer a Novalis, o seguir cuadrando el espectro de estabilidad continuo con Alex. Y seguir pensando en Alf y en Ana María - buscándolos de maneras virtuales mientras se puede hacer algo de verdad.

Erotic poetry in Hebrew is just incredible. The history of incredibly erotic sound of Hebrew harks back at least to the Song of Songs. Just consider pronouncing (even if you do not understand the language) "kshetavoi lishkav iti, tilveshi simla shkhora, meuyeret betutim; umgaba`t shkhora, mkushetet betutim; vehakhziki salsilat tutim; vetimkri li tutim; tagidi bekol dak umatok, tutim tutim; mi rotse tutim; `al tilbeshi klum mitakhat lasimla, akhar kakh, khutim ia`alu otakh lema`ala, bilti nir´im o nir´im, veyoridu otakh, yashar `al hazain sheli."

This post should best have been in Nuemus. María Clara found out about Yona Wallach in an Italian program on literature called "Uomini e Profeti" - a program she follows carefully every week. There was a series on Hebrew poetesses for some time - and at some point they spoke about Yona Wallach. This was one of the occasions when we both want to write posts about somethings - this time María Clara told me to just write the post here...

Here are translations of her poems Masturbation, Strawberries and Hebrew, and also the originals in Hebrew. Enjoy the counterpoint of images, the rhythm, the sound in Hebrew if you can, the words in English.

Yona died quite young, in 1985. She conjures up images of my beloved Tel Aviv - a city where we spent little time, but which played an extremely important role in our lifes in the summer of 1997. Few cities I know are more sexualized than some parts of Tel Aviv. My yearning for the few times (we were poor, we took the bus in the morning in Jerusalem and returned in the evening, we had no money to stay there - I just brought 648 (or 300, or the series on ST_2, or whatever else) to the beach and spent with María Clara incredible days of proving or disproving lemmas or corollaries, all mixed with sand, and swimming and watching the crowd).

There are songs based on Yona's poems - perhaps the nicest one is this one María Clara found on youtube:

(excerpts from Charpentier's opera La descente d'Orphée aux enfers - the librettist is anonymous but is thought to be based on Ovid's The Metamorphoses)