"Zapatero" (Chaucer)

Westminster
Castillo
Pacha Mama
Walker
Prov. 25:26
"A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring."

Have Fun Storming the Castle!

Chess: "Westminster" "Castle" "Castillo" "Walker" "Bianca Jagger" "Castillo Viejo"

And the more fish they ate, the lower their risk, the report found. The findings appeared in the August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutr

U
Fish
Zona
Prov. 1:21
"She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying,"

Wings 02
Seeing the Sites Parasailing Through the Countryside

fresh fish for dinner

Chess: "Fish" "Zona" "U"

How about Bill Gates and professor Henry Gates? ;-)

Obama Shifts Tone on Gates After Mulling Debate

Mr. Obama placed calls to both the professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the man who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, two days after saying the police had “acted stupidly” last week in hauling Professor Gates from his home in handcuffs. Mr. Obama said he still considered the arrest “an overreaction,” but added that “Professor Gates probably overreacted as well.”

Large Study Points to the Brain Benefits of Eating Fish

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Published: July 21, 2009
Many studies have suggested that a diet rich in fish is good for th e heart. Now there is new evidence that such a diet may ward off dementia as well. One of the largest efforts to document a connection — and the first such study undertaken in the developing world — has found that older adults in Asia and Latin America were less likely to develop dementia if they regularly consumed fish.

And the more fish they ate, the lower their risk, the report found. The findings appeared in the August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The study, which included 15,000 people ages 65 and older in China, India, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru and the Dominican Republic, found that those who ate fish nearly every day were almost 20 percent less likely to develop dementia than those who ate fish just a few days a week. Adults who ate fish a few days a week were almost 20 percent less likely to develop dementia than those who ate no fish at all.

“There is a gradient effect, so the more fish you eat, the less likely yo

u are to get dementia,” said Dr. Emiliano Albanese, a clinical epidemiologist at King’s College London and the senior author of the study. “Exactly the opposite is true for meat,” he added. “The more meat you eat, the more likely you are to have dementia.” Other studies have shown that red meat in particular may be bad for the brain.

Fish, especially oily fish, may be protective against dementia because it is rich in omega-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, which studies suggest m

ay have numerous health benefits, among them anti-inflammatory properties. Omega-3 fatty acids have been shown in animal studies to reduce the build-up of atherosclerotic plaques and may also prevent the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, Dr. Albanese said.

But though numerous observational studies in the West also h

ave indicated fish may reduce dementia risk, there is little evidence as yet from randomized controlled clinical trials, which provide the best scientific evidence but are expensive and difficult to carry out.

Although the new study was an observational study, Dr. Albanese suggested that since the findings are consistent both in the West and in developing countrie

s, where the environment and lifestyle are so different, the new data lend support to the hypothesis that fish is protective against dementia.

Most of the elderly surveyed in the study lived with extended families, and those seniors who had electricity and indoor plumbing, or several assets like a car, a ph

one, a TV or a refrigerator were considered relatively well off.

Researchers assessed the dietary habits of 14,960 study partici pants by going door-to-door to do face-to-face interviews, and they diagnosed dementia by using culturally validated criteria. The data were adjusted to accoun t for differences in such variables as sex, age, education, income, smoking and physical health.

An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: July 24, 2009

A woman and a child of the Kamayurá tribe in the Amazon bathed in a lake on the evening of June 6. Members of the tribe usually bathe three times each day.

XINGU NATIONAL PARK, Brazil — As the naked, painted young men of the Kamayurá tribe prepare for the ritualized war games of a festival, they end their haunting fireside chant with a blowing sound — “whoosh, whoosh” — a symbolic attempt to eliminate the scent of fish so they will not be detected by enemies. For centuries, fish from jungle lakes and rivers have been a staple of the Kamayurá diet, the tribe’s primary source of protein.
But fish smells are not a problem for the warriors anymore. Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.

“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.

Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.

Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.

“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups — the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

“In some places, people will have to move to preserve their culture,” said Gonzalo Oviedo, a senior adviser on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Gland, Switzerland. “But some of those that are small and marginal will assimilate and disappear.”

To make do without fish, Kamayurá children are eating ants on their traditional spongy flatbread, made from tropical cassava flour. “There aren’t as many around because the kids have eaten them,” Chief Kotok said of the ants. Sometimes members of the tribe kill monkeys for their meat, but, the chief said, “You have to eat 30 monkeys to fill your stomach.”

Living deep in the forest with no transportation and little money, he noted, “We don’t have a way to go to the grocery store for rice and beans to supplement what is missing.”

Tacuma, the tribe’s wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.

Cultures threatened by climate change span the globe. They include rainforest residents like the Kamayurá who face dwindling food supplies; remote Arctic communities where the only roads were frozen rivers that are now flowing most of the year; and residents of low-lying islands whose land is threatened by rising seas.

Many indigenous people depend intimately on the cycles of nature and have had to adapt to climate variations — a season of drought, for example, or a hurricane that kills animals.

But worldwide, the change is large, rapid and inexorable, heading in only one direction: warmer. Eskimo settlements like Kivalina and Shishmaref in Alaska are “literally being washed away,” said Thomas Thornton, an anthropologist who studies the region, because the sea ice that long protected their shores is melting and the seas around are rising. Without that hard ice, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hunt for seals, a mainstay of the traditional diet.

Some Eskimo groups are suing polluters and developed nations, demanding compensation and help with adapting.

“As they see it, they didn’t cause the problem, and their lifestyle is being threatened by pollution from industrial nations,” said Dr. Thornton, who is a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. “The message is that this is about people, not just about polar bears and wildlife.”

At climate negotiations in December in Poznan, Poland, the United Nations created an “adaptation fund” through which rich nations could in theory help poor nations adjust to climate change. But some of the money was expected to come from voluntary contributions, and there have been none so far, said Yvo De Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It would help if rich countries could make financial commitments,” he said.

Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.

The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.

About 5,000 square miles of Amazon forest are being cut down annually in recent years, according to the Brazilian government. And with far less foliage, there is less moisture in the regional water cycle, lending unpredictability to seasonal rains and leaving the climate drier and hotter.

That has upended the cycles of nature that long regulated Kamayurá life. They wake with the sun and have no set meals, eating whenever they are hungry.

Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and “have just collapsed” since 2006, said Chief Kotok, who is considering the possibility of fish farming, in which fish would be fed in a penned area of a lake. With hotter temperatures as well as less rain and humidity in the region, water levels in rivers are extremely low. Fish cannot get to their spawning grounds.

Last year, for the first time, the beach on the lake that abuts the village was not covered by water in the rainy season, rendering useless the tribe’s method of catching turtles by putting food in holes that would fill up, luring the animals.

The tribe’s agriculture has suffered, too. For centuries, the Kamayurá planted their summer crops when a certain star appeared on the horizon. “When it appeared, everyone celebrated because it was the sign to start planting cassava since the rain and wind would come,” Chief Kotok recalled. But starting seven or eight seasons ago, the star’s appearance was no longer followed by rain, an ominous divergence, forcing the tribe to adjust its schedule.

It has been an ever-shifting game of trial and error since. Last year, families had to plant their cassava four times — it died in September, October and November because there was not enough moisture in the ground. It was not until December that the planting took. The corn also failed, said Mapulu, the chief’s sister. “It sprouted and withered away,” she said.

A specialist in medicinal plants, Ms. Mapulu said that a root she used to treat diarrhea and other ailments had become nearly impossible to find because the forest flora had changed. The grass they use to bound together the essential beams of their huts has also become difficult to find.

But perhaps the Kamayurá’s greatest fear are the new summer forest fires. Once too moist to ignite, the forest here is now flammable because of the drier weather. In 2007, Xingu National Park burned for the first time, and thousands of acres were destroyed.

“The whole Xingu was burning — it stung our lungs and our eyes,” Chief Kotok said. “We had nowhere to escape. We suffered along with the animals.”

Deer Slayer

The Deer Hunter
James Fenimore Cooper
Psalm 14:4
"Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the LORD."

Antelope Slot Canyon

Chess: "The Deer Hunter", "James Fenimore Cooper" "Metro Juliet" "Hartman "

United States 2, Honduras 0

U.S. Depth Is Evident in Gold Cup Victory Over Honduras

Logan Pause of the United States, left, and Walter Martinez Ramos of Honduras couldn’t keep their feet while pursuing the ball.

By JERÉ LONGMAN

Published: July 23, 200
CHICAGO — With the United States’ soccer stars absent from the Gold Cup, understudies have rushed from behind the curtain to eagerly take their turns on center stage.

Six players have scored their first international goals in this regional tournament. The latest was the central defender Clarence Goodson, who headed home a corner kick late in the first half in the semifinals Thursday, providing the decisive moment in a 2-0 win over Honduras.

Jimmy Conrad, who sustained a concussion in Saturday’s quarterfinal victory over Panama, was held out of the semifinals and was replaced by Goodson, who plays professionally in Norway and rose to the occasion before a crowd of 55,173 at Soldier Field.

So again did the emerging midfielder Stuart Holden of the Houston Dynamo, who has scored twice in the Gold Cup and who assisted on both American goals against Honduras with his accustomed flair and pluck.

Holden delivered the corner kick that produced Goodson’s goal. In the 90th minute, Holden’s cross in the penalty area was one-timed into the net by the substitute forward Kenny Cooper, who had delivered the decisive penalty kick in the quarterfinals.

Nearly a month after reaching the final of the Confederations Cup in South Africa, the United States has reached the championship of another tournament, this time with essentially a different team, which attests to growing professional depth provided by Major League Soccer.

Sunday, the Americans will face Mexico in the Gold Cup final at Giants Stadium as the United States attempts to defend its title as champion of the North American, Central American and Caribbean region. Mexico tied Costa Rica, 1-1, on Thursday night and advanced on penalty kicks.

“I consider the United States to be a very collective team,” said Reinaldo Rueda, the Honduran coach. “It is known for teamwork, which does not allow any one player to stand out. What is notable is their intelligence, the way they conceptualize play and their maturity.”

Thursday, the United States controlled play through the first half by pressuring Honduras, which often seemed unnerved by the compact and organized American defense. Goalkeeper Troy Perkins remained sharp throughout as Honduras awakened in the second half.

Although the United States had a 10-1 edge in shots by halftime, it appeared that Honduras might get to the break with a scoreless tie. But in extra time, Goodson ran onto Stuart’s outswinging corner kick and headed the ball high into the net from six yards for a 1-0 American lead.

“It was a momentum change for sure,” Goodson said. “It gave us a psychological lift, a huge boost. For them to come away with nothing, I think they went into the locker room pretty depressed.”

Several early chances to score in the second half went unrequited for the United States. On other nights against more skilled opponents, “you pay for it,” Coach Bob Bradley said. Perhaps, but not against a Honduran team that had to play this tournament with one eye toward the unstable political situation back home.

Perkins smothered all of Honduras’s threats in the second half, rushing off his line several times. Finally, in the 90th minute, Holden found Cooper in the penalty area and the American lead became insurmountable. Once again, the understudies seemed perfectly comfortable in their hopeful auditions for a spot on the 2010 World Cup team, should the United States qualify as expected.

“It’s a big opportunity for us,” Goodson said, referring to both the replacement starters and the team’s Confederations Cup success. “We’re all trying to make the most of it.”

James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper [pseudonym Jane Morgan] (1789-1851), American author and critic wrote The Last of the Mohicans (1826);
"Where are the blossoms of those summers!--fallen, one by one; so all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of spirits. I am on the hilltop and must go down into the valley; and when Uncas follows in my footsteps there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores, for my boy is the last of the Mohicans." Chingachgook to Hawkeye, Ch. 3
Cooper's depiction of American Indians was sometimes criticised as unrealistic and implausible. Over fifty years after The Deerslayer (1841) was published Mark Twain served up a heaping plate of sardonic but scathing criticism of it and Cooper in his essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895). But as Cooper writes in his Introduction to The Last of the Mohicans;
The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent. They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads, of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frosts, is represented as having already befallen them. There is sufficient historical truth in the picture to justify the use that has been made of it.

Written during the 18th century days of the American Frontier, Cooper popularised the plight of Native peoples in his writings with a sympathetic although romanticised vision. 'White man' Natty 'Hawkeye' Bumppo, nicknamed 'The Long Rifle' embodies the heroic frontiersman who bridges the gap with camaraderie and friendship to the 'Red man', Chingachgook and Uncas, to name a few. Bumppo is the hero of Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" series, here listed with their publication dates:

The Pioneers: The Sources of the Susquehanna, A Descriptive Tale (1823),
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826),
The Prairie: A Tale (1827),
The Pathfinder: The Inland Sea (1840), and
The Deerslayer: The First War Path (1841)

However, they are best appreciated if read by their fictitious chronological dates that follow Bumppo's life;
The Deerslayer (set in the year 1744),
The Last of the Mohicans (1757),
The Pathfinder (1750s),
The Pioneers (1793),
The Prairie (1804).

Author of sea-tales like The Pilot (1823) and revolutionary war romances like The Spy (1821), Cooper also wrote many short stories and non-fiction works critiquing American values and morals such as in The American Democrat (1838), Homeward Bound (1838), and its sequel Home as Found (1838). Cooper was a friend of Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is said to have influenced Herman Melville and earned the praise of Wilkie Collins. Many of Cooper's novels are still in print today and have been the source for popular feature film adaptations.

James Cooper was born on 15 September 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey, U.S.A, the eleventh child born to Elizabeth née Fenimore (1752-1817) and Congressman, Judge, and founder of Cooperstown, William Cooper (1754-1809). A year after James was born the family moved to the banks of Otsego Lake in Otsego County, where William built the first home and founded Cooperstown.

Cooper entered Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut in 1803 but was expelled a few years later. He then worked as a sailor on a merchant ship, travelling to such far away places as the Strait of Gibraltar. In 1808 he joined the United States Navy as midshipman and it was on the seas that he started to seriously think of himself as a writer. After the death of his father, he resigned from the Navy and went back to the land to try his hand at farming.

On 1 January 1811, in Mamaroneck, New York, Cooper married Susan Augusta DeLancey (1792-1852) with whom he would have seven children: daughters Elizabeth (1811-1813), Susan (1813-1894), Caroline (1815-1892), Anne (1817-1885), and Maria (1819-1898); and sons Fenimore (1821-1823) and Paul (1824-1895). After living for a time in New Rochelle, New York State, the Coopers moved to Scarsdale, New York where James built a home. Soon after Cooper was spending much time in New York City, where he founded the 'Bread and Cheese Club' in 1822.

In 1826, the same year he legally added Fenimore to his name, James, Susan and the children moved to Europe. Cooper served as United States Consul in Lyons, France, while also travelling to many other countries including Italy, Switzerland, England, and The Netherlands. In 1833 the Coopers returned to the United States, settling in Cooperstown, although Cooper made many trips to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He continued his prodigious output of fiction and non including History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), The Lives of Distinguished Naval Officers (1846), and The Towns of Manhattan (1851).

James Fenimore Cooper died on 14 September 1851 in Cooperstown, New York, U.S.A. He lies buried in the family plot in the Christ Episcopal Churchyard in Cooperstown. His wife Susan survived him by just a few months, and now rests with him.

Biography written by C. D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Whole-wheat

Pan de Azúcar
Integer Number
Kaka
Prov.28:21 "To have respect of persons is not good: for for a piece of bread that man will transgress."

Morraine Park
Big Thompson River Flows Through Morraine Park

Chess : "Sugar Loaf" "Brasil" "Kaka" "integer" "whole-wheat bread" "bollo"

"Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest;"W.W. Leaves of Grass 33-l.727

“Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” - Lao Tzu

Sebastian Faulks, Philip Pullman

From The Times

April 29, 2008

Sebastian Faulks reveals the 40 books he can't live without

An exclusive look at the bestselling novelist's hand-picked table of books for Waterstone's

From The Times

August 30, 2008

Exclusive: Philip Pullman's essential reading list

40 favourite books selected for the Waterstone's Writer's Table

For many of us, the enduring image of Mann is to be found at the end of Visconti’s film of Death in Venice; Dirk Bogarde as he lies dying in a deck-ch

Big Ben
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
Prov. 21:28
"A false witness shall perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly."

Venecia

Chess: "Big Ben" "Thomas Mann" " The Magic Mountain"
Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the anti-fascist Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952.

From The Sunday Times

January 5, 2003

Review: Biography: Thomas Mann by Hermannn Kurzke translated by Leslie Willson

IAN THOMSON
THOMAS MANN: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography
by Hermann Kurzke trans Leslie Willson
Allen Lane £30 pp581

When Thomas Mann died in 1955 at the age of 80, he was dismissed by younger readers as a starchy man of letters. His fiction, with its lofty themes of nihilism, decadence and decay, seemed too old-fashioned and patrician for post-war Germany. The image of Mann as a sort of Teutonic Galsworthy, however, was destroyed in the mid-1970s when the embargo on his diaries expired. The journals revealed that Mann was prone to bouts of nausea, his nerves frayed by homoerotic fantasies. Few should be surprised. Mann’s most celebrated novel, Death in Venice, is not just a high-flown hymn to unrequited love; it is about gay desire.

Yet at the height of his success in prewar Germany, Mann represented the perfect paterfamilias: he had fathered six children, and radiated a stolid, mercantile air. The guilty truth lay hidden in his diary entries; towards the end of his life, these celebrated snake-hipped boys, elevator attendants (“Flirt mit dem lift boy”), sailors and actors. Mann was rather too aloof and self-obsessed to be a good father. In Switzerland, where he spent his last years divorced from his children, he became besotted with a Bavarian waiter named Franz. Poor Franz could not have guessed at his fate. When the 10th and final volume of the Mann diaries came out in 1995, German reporters tracked down the startled former waiter to New York and turned him into a minor celebrity. Mann would have been appalled (even though Franz was immortalised in his unfinished comic novel Felix Krull).

This new biography of Mann has been a bestseller in Germany, and not surprisingly it draws heavily on those salacious diaries. The author, Hermann Kurzke, is literature professor at Mainz University and has a flair for windy abstractions. Thus Mann betrays “the pure reality of the dream world”; he also rejects “the laxness of the homily of sympathy” (whatever that may be). Nevertheless, the professor has a thesis to demonstrate and he does so tirelessly: Mann sublimated his guilty sexual urges in his fiction.

One may be sceptical of this sort of cod psychology. But whatever Mann’s true sexual nature, few have written so alluringly about the enigma of human desire. Hans Castorp’s ill-fated passion for Clavdia Chauchat in The Magic Mountain is charged with a sultry eroticism, where sex glitters dangerously in the death- enchanted sanatorium. Clavdia has a conceivably masculine figure, with her willowy frame and boyish hips. Yet, contrary to what Kurzke and other biographers may believe, there is no evidence that Mann ever moved from homoeroticism to homosexuality. After reading Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, he demanded in his diary: “How can one sleep with a man?” Ronald Hayman, in his reliable 1996 biography of Mann, mentions this entry, but Kurzke pointedly omits it.

All his life, Mann was afraid of being outed. Exiled during the war to Los Angeles as an anti-Nazi, he had rashly left his diaries behind in Hitler’s Germany. If Goebbels had got hold of them, suggests Kurzke, Mann’s reputation as a virtuous patrician liberal would have been ruined. For the Nazis, Mann was too cosmopolitan, un-German, decadent and snobbish. And the fact that his wife, Katia Pringsheim, was the daughter of converted Jews endeared Mann even less to the regime. In January 1937, Goebbels banned all mention of the novelist from German papers. Mann had left Germany shortly before Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and did not return until the war’s end.

Kurzke defends Mann from charges of anti-semitism, rightly so. From his part-Brazilian mother, Mann liked to think that he had inherited Indian blood, and he opposed Nazi notions of racial purity. His anti-Hitler propaganda, relayed from America to Germany via the BBC, alerted listeners to the destruction of European Jewry. Moreover, as the genocide unfolded in occupied territories, Mann published his biblical saga, Joseph and his Brothers. To portray Jews as the founding fathers of our modern morality — at such a time — showed a rare German humanity. (Unfortunately, the Joseph opus is Mann’s most soporific effort: how many have got to the end of it?) Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art is a thick, teeming book that combines first-class scholarship with flashes of awkward humour and somewhat smarty-pants observation. Mann, I think, would have hated it, but then he was an over-sensitive individual who flinched from cremation (“It may hurt”) as much as from biographers.

For many of us, the enduring image of Mann is to be found at the end of Visconti’s film of Death in Venice; Dirk Bogarde as he lies dying in a deck-chair, while gazing at the beautiful boy on the beach.

Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi is published by Hutchinson. Thomas Mann is available at the Sunday Times

A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianan or Georgian..."

George Louis
"Lipids"
Psalm 40:10
"I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart; I have declared thy faithfulness and thy salvation: I have not concealed thy lovingkindness and thy truth from the great congregation."

Lunar eclipse above Fort San Lucjan, Marsaxlokk
Lunar Eclipse

Chess: "Jorge Luis Borges" "Elkhorn Creek" "lipids"

The Elkhorn Creek is mentioned in the poem "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman:

"A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth, A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianan or Georgian..."

Leaves of Grass XIV , Song of Myself, 16

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same,
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth,
A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,
A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;
At home on Kanadian snow-shoes or up in the bush, or with fishermen off Newfoundland,
At home in the fleet of ice-boats, sailing with the rest and tacking,
At home on the hills of Vermont or in the woods of Maine, or the Texan ranch,
Comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners, (loving their big proportions,)
Comrade of raftsmen and coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,
A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,
A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,
Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,
A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.
I resist any thing better than my own diversity,
Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.
(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,
The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)

Virginia Woolf began her publishing career the year her father, Leslie Stephen, died. She could never have been a writer, she said later, had he lived

Siboney: De gallos y llamas

Machu Picchu, Llama View

From The Times Literary Supplement

June 17, 2009

Virginia Woolf's neat brown paper parcels

A great essayist – the last great English essayist, perhaps – and her library of fleeting moments

me especialicé en literatura francesa y la aprendí estudiando latín.

Entrevista inédita

Jorge Luis Borges: "Yo he leído muy pocas novelas"

19.07.2009 El autor muestra su preferencia por el cuento ante los demás géneros ·· Califica los ‘best sellers’ como un hecho momentáneo y dice que leer sólo a contemporáneos es un error ·· Dice que la literatura se enseña mal porque no se entiende como emoción ante un texto estético, como forma de felicidad”

Imagen de archivo de Jorge Luis Borges tomada en el año 1986

Muchas cosas han pasado desde aquel abril de 1975, cuando un joven estudiante porteño, Daniel Rilo, se acercó con descaro al gran Jorge Luis Borges. Más de tres décadas después muchos de los conceptos expuestos por el gran maestro siguen plenamente vigentes: un hombre cercano, encaminado a las letras desde niño, expuso su amor por la enseñanza del goce literario en si mismo, su preferencia por el cuento ante la novela, el rechazo por las clasificaciones artificiosas y el encasillamiento generacional.

-Cursó su Bachillerato en Suiza ¿Cómo se enseñaba la literatura en aquel entonces?

-En Ginebra, en el college yo descubrí que si uno se especializaba en dos materias, uno podía olvidar las otras. De modo que yo por ejemplo, que nunca supe nada (porque no quise saberlo) de física, de mineralogía, de botánica, de zoología si me intereso algo, pero poco. Pero me especialicé en literatura francesa y la aprendí estudiando latín.

-Usted respiró desde niño un ambiente literario en su familia. ¿Tuvo algún maestro que le orientó en su vocación?

-Tuve a mi padre, que me incito siempre a la lectura. Me acuerdo que una de las primeras cosas que me dijo es que leyera mucho, que escribiera mucho, que rompiera mucho y que no me apresurara en publicar. Por eso yo publique mi primer libro en el año 23, cuando tenía 24 años, y ya había escrito y había roto varios libros, porque me di cuenta que eran flojos y quizás hubiera debido esperar más tiempo, en fin alguna vez había que empezar. Publiqué Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) fueron trescientos ejemplares y no pensé en ponerlos en venta, en mandarlos a las librerías, en mandarlos a nadie: fui repartiéndolos entre los amigos.

-¿La vocación literaria es tal que el escritor se puede realizar a si mismo y dentro de la comunidad? ¿Puede dedicar toda su vida a la vocación literaria?

-Bueno, eso puede tener dos sentidos. Económicamente no puede hacerlo (...) Yo porque he sido profesor aunque he publicado muchos libros pero no como modus vivendi.

-Sobre los ‘best sellers’. ¿usted piensa que son libros que tienen una fama momentánea o quedan como verdaderos monumentos?

-No. Tienen una fama momentánea. Como dijo Schopenhauer, mi filósofo preferido junto con Hume y Berkeley. Decían que no había que leer ningún libro que no hubiera cumplido cincuenta años. Porque el decía la vida es corta y uno no puede exponerse a leer trivialidades. Si yo leo un libro que ya ha cumplido cincuenta, o mejor aun cien años, es decir si yo leo clásicos, leo libros que han pasado por esa prueba. Es decir que si Platón ha llegado a nosotros es porque llegó, indudablemente porque durante generaciones han sentido que tenía valor. En cambio, si leemos a un filósofo contemporáneo posiblemente sea simplemente un best seller, no. Y eso lo dijo
Schopenhauer, hará mas de cien años y ha sobrevivido, bueno.

-¿Es verdad que su género preferido es el cuento fantástico con un contenido metafísico?

-Si es verdad. Yo por ejemplo he leído muy pocas novelas en mi vida, es decir naturalmente he leído a Cervantes, he leído a Conrad, a Kipling, he leído algo a Dostoievsky, he leído mucho a Flaubert, pero en general me atrae mucho mas el cuento. El cuento tiene algo redondo, cabal, que no tiene la novela. Porque en la novela hay siempre ripios, el autor imagina una trama larga y luego tiene que inventar episodios para unir un capítulo con otro, no. (...)Yo creo que La Divina Comedia, es quizás una de las obras capitales de la literatura si exceptuamos los Evangelios, naturalmente, aunque no soy creyente. Yo no creo que nadie haya leído una novela de Tolstoi, de principio hasta el fin: Guerra y Paz. Por eso decía Edgar A. Poe que era muy importante, él creía que la emoción estética tenía que ser dada de una vez, sin interrupción.

-Y en cuanto a la lectura ¿Cree que hay mas tendencia acá en Argentina a leer a los clásicos?

-Actualmente se está leyendo mucho aquí. Lo malo es que se leen solo autores contemporáneos, y es gran error. La gente lee un poco los libros como si fueran diarios. Y cada año, por ejemplo, se publican cierto número de libros y se cree que es obligatorio leerlos. Al mismo tiempo esas personas que siguen con tanta asiduidad la producción contemporánea argentina ignoran la producción contemporánea desde luego y pasada mundial, y eso es un error.

-Hablemos de docencia ¿Tal y como se enseña la literatura, se hace bien o se falsean algunas partes?

-Se enseña mal, porque se enseña fijándose menos en el goce literario que en la biografía de los autores, en las fechas de nacimiento y de muerte, en las fechas de publicación de los libros, y todo eso no tiene nada que ver con la literatura. Habría que enseñar, y yo he tratado de enseñar la literatura como una forma de felicidad, es decir que una persona, sienta emoción ante un texto estético. Entiendo que ahora se tiende a enseñar la literatura en función de la historia y que aunque quizás, siempre es necesario conocer un poco la circunstancia en que se escribió algo. Pero la literatura, me parece que ante todo, tiene que ser algo que emocione.

-Usted que mensaje podría dar a los profesores de literatura.

-Que se fijen más en la literatura, y menos en la historia de la literatura, y en las biografías de los autores. Por ejemplo, yo he sido profesor en conjunto durante más de 20 años y siempre les he dicho a mis alumnos que descuiden la biografía o que la dejen para el final si les interesa un autor, que lo importante es que lean las obras. Porque yo sé que hay profesores, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, que hacen que los alumnos lean mucho sobre un autor pero no llegan al autor, eso me parece absurdo.

ffranjo@elcorreogallego.es

El autor. Daniel Rilo Bonserio, apasionado de la literatura (Buenos Aires, 1958) realizó la entrevista al escritor argentino el 19 de abril de 1975, cuando cursaba secundaria en la escuela San Francisco de Sales. La conversación, que ha sido emitida en su integridad por Radio Obradoiro, había permanecido inédita durante más de treinta años.
rilobonserio@gmail.com

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