Revolution Road

I think it’s perfectly possible for human beings to spend a large part of their life convincing themselves that they’re happy,” Ms. Winslet said recently, speculating on why it is that Revolutionary Road will resonate with people so deeply. She was perched on a sofa in the Waldorf Astoria, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and ashing elegantly into a bottle of water. “Ultimately, when reality kicks in and you dare to allow yourself to think that you might actually be living a life that you haven’t planned, or living a life that you don’t want to be living and feel trapped in, then that’s when your problems begin. I think for human beings to feel trapped and isolated and lonely in a life that they thought they were happy in … Well, it’s just a terrible, terrible place to be. I think everyone has been in that place—even if they tell you they haven’t, I think they have. I think there are more people who have been in that place than people who have been blissfully happy forever I’m a big believer that life is diamond-shaped,” said Mr. Mendes. “Horizons expand and they contract. I think we’ve all at one time or another realized without really knowing it that they’re contracting … and how did that happen? You can’t choose who you marry because you’re married. You can’t choose whether to have kids or not because you have kids. You can’t choose where you live, because you’ve already chosen where you live, and these choices have been made, you know? You wake up and you wonder how I did I get here? It’s a 20th-century malaise expressed with incredible clarity with this book. I think people can relate to it on the level of that moment when, whoever you are, you look at your partner and think, who are you? Who is this stranger who is living in my house? I think that absolute shock of sharing your life with someone who is on some level a complete mystery to you whoever you are … I think it’s universal I think the country and society makes a promise to its people at a very early age that anything is possible,” said Mr. Mendes. “A country that promises can kill people with possibility and potential. Can kill people with the constantly dangled carrot of, life should be better. Life could be better. You deserve more. You are entitled to more.” Mr. Mendes pointed to a moment in the film when April realizes she’s no different than her neighbors. “If you’re good-looking, the world promises you something, and then you lose your looks,” Mr. Mendes continued. “If you’re talented enough to get into a top university but then don’t manage to get the job you want, the world has led you to believe that you are an X when in fact you are Y. At one point, we feel so superior to the people around us, but we’re exactly the same. Everyone is sitting in their own house feeling superior. It’s a very modern idea, that somehow you are the lead character in your own film of your life. But in everyone else’s, you are way in the back and your face is obscured by shadow.”There are huge numbers of people who say to themselves, if it wasn’t for this, this and this, I’d be leading this whole other kind of life,” said Mr. Haythe. “And the drumbeat for women to have children is still really strong. There’s this sense of musical chairs; if you don’t get one when the music stops, there’s this anxiety so you grab a chair before the music stops and then you have to live with that person for the rest of your life. For all it’s 1950s-ness, Revolutionary Road is as resonant in 2008 as ever.”

E.M. Forster, Chuck Palahniuk, Milan Kundera y su convergencia en Revolution Road

En 1984 Milán Kundera publicó "La Insoportable Levedad del Ser"y ahí en un párrafo memorable lamentó que la vida no pueda ensayarse. E. M. Fortester 76 años antes escribió lo mismo: "La vida es un recital público de violín en el cual uno va aprendiendo a tocar el instrumento mientras va interpretando"

Antología de Nassim Nicholas Taleb

122- The Ancients Knew it
After years reading prose in social science with strange theories, with seemingly empirical "evidence" but computed in a nerdy way, I surmise that everything that works in social science has to have an antecedent in the Latin (& late Helenistic) moral literature (moral sciences meant something else than they do today): Cicero, Seneca, M. Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace or the later French moralists (La Rochefoucault, Vaugenargues, La Bruyere, Chamfort, Bossuet, Montaigne even ....) -- we are witnessing a slow but certain degradation of wisdom.
Utility Theory /Prospect Theory: Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt in Livy's Annals (XXX, 21) (Men feel the good less intensely than the bad).
Negative advice: Nimium boni est, cui hinil est mali Ennius , via Cicero-
Madness of Crowds: Nietzche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule (this counts as ancient wisdom since Nietzsche was a classicist; I've seen many such references in Plato) -
Hormesis: Cicero (Disp Tusc,II, 22) When our souls are mollified, a bee can sting -
The Paradox of Progress/Choice (Lucretius): there is a familiar story of a NY banker vacationing in Greece, talking to a fisherman &, scrutinizing the fisherman's business, comes up for a scheme to help the fisherman make it a big business. The fisherman asked him what the benefits were; the banker answered that he could make a pile of money in NY and come back vacation in Greece; something that seemed ludicrous to the fisherman who was already there doing the kind of things bankers do when they go on vacation in Greece. The story was very well known in antiquity, under a more elegant form, as retold by Montaigne I, 42: (my transl.) when King Pyrrhus tried to cross into Italy, Cynéas, his wise adviser, tried to make him feel the vanity of such action. "To what end are you going into such enterprise?", he asked. Pyrrhus answered:" to make myself the master of Italy". Cynéas: " and so?". Pyrrhus: "to get to Gaul, then Spain". Cynéas: "Then?" Pyrrhus: " To conquer Africa, then ... come rest at ease". Cynéas:" but you are already there; why take more risks"? Montaigne then cites the well known Lucretius (V, 1431) on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.

Canto II

Mujer el mundo está amueblado por tus ojos
Se hace más alto el cielo en tu presencia

Altazor / Vicente Huidobro

Mala educación

En Inglaterra se acaba de rodar un film para perros. Los 150 perros invitados se abalanzaron contra la pantalla y la hicieron pedazos. NY Times
De Opio de Jean Cocteau

Mercadotecnia

Satie quería hacer un teatro para perros. El telón se levanta. El decorado representa un hueso.
Opio. Jean Cocteau

El significado de SOS

Save our Souls. Yo siempre pensé que significaba ¡San Onemesio sálvame!

Retazos

Una muestra de esta red bastará: se trata del célebre soneto donde Quevedo sueña que goza a Floralba; allí exclama: “que nunca duerma yo si estoy despierto, / y que si duermo, que jamás despierte”. Estas palabras las plagió Quevedo de un soneto del jesuita Pedro de Tablares; y fueron después imitadas o parodiadas por Lope de Vega (“Nunca me amanezca el día /si tales noches son”), Calderón (“no me despiertes si duermo; y si es verdad, no me aduermas”). Lo sintomático es que el padre Tablares tampoco es el autor original de los versos, sino que los plagió de los poemas de Janus Secundus, el conocido humanista flamenco, autor de los famosos Basia (Besos), quien escribió en otra obra, sus Elegías: “¿Duermo? ¿Estoy despierto? ¿Esto es verdad o es un sueño? / Ya sea sueño o verdad, ¡sea, gocemos! / Si es sueño, que dure mucho, y que no venga la luz del día, por favor, a despertarme”, (Elegiae ad amorem I.x.27-30) Estas líneas fueron copiadas y traducidas por numerosos poetas del siglo XVI.

Del Blog de Roger Bartra

Untitled

The track listing for "Garden State" is as follows:
1. "Don't Panic" - Coldplay
2. "Caring is Creepy" - The Shins
3. "In the Waiting Line" - Zero 7
4. "New Slang" - The Shins
5. "I Just Don't Think I'll Get Over You" - Colin Hay
6. "Blue Eyes" - Cary Brothers
7. "Fair" - Remy Zero
8. "One of These Things First" - Nick Drake
9. "Lebanese Blonde" - Thievery Corporation
10. "The Only Living Boy In New York" - Simon & Garfunkel11. "Such Great Heights" - Iron and Wine

El significado de la vida

- Who are you?- I'm your new friend Sam.
- Tissue?
Come here.
Fuck, this hurts so much.
Yeah, I know.
But that is life.
If nothing else,that's life, you know.
It's real.Sometimes it fuckin' hurts.
To be honest,it's sort of all we have.
How are you feelin'?
Safe.
When I'm with you,I feel so safe.
Like I'm home.

Garden State movie

This necklace reminds me of this reallyrandom memory of my mother.
I was a little kid, and I was cryin'for one reason or another.
And, uh...
She was just like, you know, cradling meand rocking me back and forth.
I can remember seeing the little ballsin this thing just floating back and forth.
And, uh...
And there was just, like,snot dripping down my nose, right?
And, uh...
She gave me her sleeve...
and she told meto blow my nose into it.
And I remember thinking,even as a little kid, like...
"Wow!
This is love."
"This is love."

Un viaje

Want a ride, sweetheart?
You're in itright now, aren't you?
- What do you mean?- My mom always says that when she can see...
I'm, like, working something out in my head,she's like, "You're in it right now."
And I'm lookin' at you,and you're...
telling me that story, and...
you're definitelyin it right now.
I think you're right.I am in it.

De Garden State (me recuerda a la frase: "La enfermedad es el viaje de los pobres'

Flarf por Heriberto Yepez

El vocablo Flarf parece no tener sentido. Pero estoy convencido que en él está codificado el significado de este movimiento. Me explicaré. “Flarf” es una reunión inconsciente de fart (pedo) y bluff (engaño). Pedo presuntuoso, además, que se mezcla con flat (plano) y que suena como ladrido en inglés: arf! Arf! Flarf es una burla del arte (art) y una farsa (farce). Busca evidenciar que la poesía es un chiste y una onomatopeya cultural.
Hay algo también de fluff (ligero) mezclado con war (guerra). Fluff-war, guerra inverosímil. Todo esto es la fórmula secreta de Flarf.
¿Recuerdan aquel extraterrestre ochentero de peluche? Bueno, si E.T. era un símbolo de la otredad extraplanetaria, Alf era su parodia, la otredad venida a menos. Lo retro-inmediato. Flarf es Alf. Y Flarf es al experimentalismo lo que Alf es a E.T.
Y si Kenneth Goldsmith es Max Headroom, Flarf en Bart.