Arthur Rimbaud: cargado con el rumor de agua y de vientos

una perenne lucha interior entre el ángel y el demonio

Un día el adolescente Rimbaud le escribió una carta a Paul Verlaine y le adjuntó varios poemas. Verlaine quedó asombrado y le contestó a vuelta de correo: "Ven, querida gran alma. Te esperamos, te queremos". Junto con la carta Verlaine le mandó un billete de tren a París. Rimbaud llegó en septiembre de 1871. El choque emotivo fue terrible. Verlaine abandonó a su esposa y a su hijo recién nacido y comenzó a vivir una aventura homosexual con Rimbaud cuando este todavía con cara de niño tenía ya un alma negra. En plena y mutua tempestad viajaron a Inglaterra, a Holanda, a Alemania. Se amaban en oscuros jergones, se peleaban en las tabernas, iban por las calles como dos vagabundos rehogados en ajenjo, alucinados por el hachís y escribían poemas visionarios. En julio de 1873, después de una violenta pelea de celos en la mansión de la Rue de Brasseurs de Bruselas, Verlaine le disparó en la muñeca. Temiendo por su vida, Rimbaud llamó a la policía. Verlaine fue condenado a dos años de prisión. Al salir se volvieron a encontrar en Alemania y en otra disputa Rimbaud le rajó la cara con una navaja. Fruto de esta experiencia fueron Iluminaciones y Una temporada en el infierno, las dos obras de Rimbaud que inauguraron la estética moderna. Tenía 19 años. Ya había llegado el momento de sentar la cabeza. Rimbaud quería ser rico, quería ser en un caballero. Se convirtió al catolicismo y dejó de hacer poesía, que consideraba una forma de locura.

Wole Soyinka. El sentido de la vida

La globalización es inevitable. Uno tiene que aceptar que la globalización ha formado parte del mundo desde que se empezó a viajar. La expansión de las religiones es una forma de globalización y el comercio ha transferido la cultura, las costumbres y las convenciones de un sitio a otro. Esto tiene a veces como resultado una colisión, y otras veces, una simbiosis. El cristianismo intentó globalizar el mundo. El islam, también. Y, en la actualidad, algunos aspectos del islam siguen queriendo globalizar el mundo. La cultura en sí, en términos generales, se está globalizando. El problema empieza cuando la globalización se vuelve peligrosa, cuando la salud económica de una zona se consigue a expensas de un lugar más débil en el que los bienes se exportan de tal forma que hace que otros países se conviertan en marionetas. Y así nos encontramos con esas empresas manufactureras en Filipinas que fabrican allí una sudadera que luego se envía a Europa, donde se vende muy cara, mientras que los trabajadores están cobrando el sueldo mínimo. Ese es el aspecto de la globalización que me parece negativo y degradante. Pero en cuanto a la circulación de bienes, si funciona no necesariamente con una igualdad absoluta, sino simplemente con respeto a los seres humanos que los fabrican y a su cultura, si ayuda a fomentar esa cultura, la globalización debe considerarse positivamente. Así que no es la globalización per se, sino la recolonización de otras partes del mundo a través de medios económicos, lo que es negativo. Es negativa la banalización de los valores, la creación del consumismo como menor denominador común. Mucha gente reacciona ante expresiones como “globalización” como si el diablo estuviera a punto de entrar en la conversación, pero yo veo la globalización como la consecuencia inevitable de que se hayan acortado las distancias. ¿Cómo puede no haber globalización si puedes estar sentado en un rinconcito de un minarete en Irán y comunicarte con el resto del mundo? Este hecho, a pesar de las tristes restricciones que aíslan a sociedades, ya ha englobado el mundo y, en cierto sentido, los países retrógrados y regímenes malvados como el de Irán reciben los efectos liberadores de la globalización.

Slain Latino Journalist Rubén Salazar, Killed 40 Years Ago in Police Attack, Remembered as Champion of Chicano Rights

Hallado un filme de Leonard Cohen perdido desde 1972

Invisible Hands: David and Charles Koch & Rupert Murdoch. Corporate players who have financed the far right

David and Charles Koch are rich, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans.

the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

“Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages”

if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

Does the U.S. Have a Muslim Problem?

Stieg Larsson

La chica del dragón tatuado, La chica que jugaba con fuego y La chica que pateó un avispero

The World's Happiest Countries

MS and arthritis may be linked to lack of sun

Covert Operations: David and Charles Koch

The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.

The Kochs believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Documental sobre Roberto Bolaño

Stephen Harper's True Religion: American Money and Power.

Stephen Harper's True Religion: American Money and Power.

The Pilgrimage of Stephen Harper, Canada prime minister

Stephen Harper, Canada prime minister is an evangelical Christian
The Alliance Church, to which Harper has belonged for decades, believes Jesus Christ will return to Earth in an apocalypse, won't ordain women, strongly opposes abortion and divorce, condemns homosexuality as the most base of sins and believes those who aren't born-again are "lost."

Iraq: 800.000 millones de dólares

Estados Unidos ha puesto fin a una guerra que no debió comenzar nunca. Y lo ha hecho en unas condiciones en las que no puede ni proclamar la victoria ni tampoco reconocer la derrota, porque las causas alegadas para invadir Irak fueron falsas, la estrategia sobre el terreno, equivocada, y los objetivos perseguidos, imprecisos y cambiantes. Puesto que las armas de destrucción masiva que sirvieron de excusa a esta guerra resultaron ser una deliberada manipulación, sus promotores pasaron a justificarla como un intento de llevar la democracia a Irak. Es decir, trataron de ocultar detrás de una causa noble unos medios que desde el comienzo fueron abyectos.

El balance de muertos y heridos que deja esta guerra será siempre un acta de acusación contra quienes la desencadenaron, despreciando la legalidad y las instituciones internacionales en nombre de valores que traicionaban en el mismo momento de invocarlos. Más de 100.000 civiles iraquíes han perdido la vida en el conflicto, además de 4.700 soldados de la coalición, la mayoría de ellos estadounidenses. Estados Unidos, por otra parte, ha gastado cerca de 800.000 millones de dólares en la aventura, e Irak es hoy un país arruinado y con pocas esperanzas de estabilidad.

Fault Lines - General Wesley Clark

The new boundary between mental disorder and normality

Many people who experience completely normal grief could be mislabeled as having a psychiatric problem.

The Arab World’s Cultural Challenge. The cultural seen as pagan. Advancing schizophrenia. Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaou

Part of the grandeur of Islam was its ability to absorb a myriad of cultural influences. The Muslim world protected, studied and developed the great traditions of classical literature and philosophy. It was not a place for burning books, but for building libraries to preserve them. It was, for some time, the guardian of the founding documents of what became known as “western civilization.” It understood that these were a part of the intellectual legacy of all mankind.

With the rise of Islamist movements, however, a new public norm took root, often characterised as Salafist, since it is based on a narrow version of a “return” to religious orthodoxy. This new social norm is, for the most part, implicit -- an unofficial ethos or ideology, only rarely enforced by legal or administrative sanction. But it is even more powerful as a result. The authority and centrality of the new Salafist norm derives not from the power of a regime, but from the fact that an unapologetic Islam has installed itself at the heart of Arab identity; it has become the central signifier of resistance to westernisation and neo-colonialism.

In earlier decades, Arab nationalism fought off any such overbearing religiosity; today, “moderate” secular voices refrain from challenging it. They are caught in an identity trap, constantly limiting their discourse, in fear of being accused by religious conservatives or regimes of undermining Arab authenticity and independence -- even Arab nationalism itself.

There was a striking example of this last summer, when a group of young Moroccans decided to break the Ramadan fast with a picnic in a public park. Along with the predictable reactions from religious quarters, the USFP, Morocco’s main social-democrat party, also demanded punishment for the fast-breakers. This leftwing “religiosity” was couched in nationalist terms: It was an insult to national culture, and a disruption of the consensus on Moroccan identity. The government charged the youths under a secular statute for an offence against “public order,” in a way that had never been done before. This simple challenge to the Salafist norm turned out to be too radical for all the politicians.

The cultural seen as pagan

The public space is increasingly dominated by a cultural norm based on elaborating a set of strict rules, a series of dos and don’ts, read off from a strict construction of religious texts. As religion is becoming a more dominant element of public ideology, it is contracting around Salafism, creating a context in which the cultural is now more easily perceived by believers as not just profane, but pagan. A capacious understanding of Islam as a partner with culture has been shrunk into a narrow version of sharia that excludes the cultural. The passages between the sacred spaces of religion and the secular discourses of profane culture are being barricaded.

This dynamic of Salafisation occurs even as people continue to consume a proliferation of profane and secular cultural products via television, videos, the internet and popular literature. It is easy to identify the “western” and global forces driving secular culture, and denounce it as “foreign”; but this would be to ignore the creativity with which Arabs have appropriated and transformed the contemporary means of cultural production.

At the level of elite culture, there is a burgeoning patronage system for artistic modernisation, financed by western foundations and transnational NGOs -- but also by foundations of the Gulf. At the popular level, there is the dissemination of western media conglomerates. But there is also the growing presence of indigenous media outlets -- from news sources like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, through popular soap operas and the popular literature of self-help and romantic advice, to the explosion of musical and artistic creativity, which the internet has made possible and Arab youth have seized upon enthusiastically. In the Arab world as everywhere else, it is a prodigious cultural mash-up, whose commercialised version is the “festivalisation” of modern Arabic culture -- a phenomenon in which Arab businesses, promoters and middlemen are entirely complicit (see “Arab showtime”).

Most of these cultural practices are without religious intent, saturated with global influences and, to all intents and purposes, completely secular. Despite the growth of political Islam, attempts to Islamicise art and culture in the Arab world have been relatively weak and ineffective. Still, caught between the pressure for modernisation from secularised global culture, and the pressure for solidarity and authenticity from the Salafised indigenous public norm, artists and cultural producers in the Arab world have taken to calling themselves “Muslim” (but not “Islamic”) – even though their artistic practice has nothing to do with religion, and may be implicitly contributing to the secularisation of Arab societies. By calling themselves Muslim, they are affirming an identity, not a religious practice.

Advancing schizophrenia

What is occurring in the Arab and Muslim world is a kind of schizophrenia: In private, one regularly consumes the cultural profane (via television, videos, the internet, and popular literature, or in carefully segmented semi-public spaces); in public, one proclaims one’s Muslim identity, avoids going to a movie theatre, and perhaps makes a show of religiosity by attending the mosque, sporting a beard or a veil. The two forms of cultural experience unfold in parallel, but it is the religious norm that maintains hegemony in the public space. In the Arab and Muslim world today, cultural practices produce a process of secularisation, but no one may acknowledge or accept it.

This is not simply because of the social division between elites and masses. Well into the 20th century, there was a simple working compromise: westernised elites could traffic with profane culture while ordinary people stayed in the traditional cultural sphere dominated by Islam. But over the last few decades, education, literacy and the exponential growth in communication have brought profound changes. Contact with other languages and cultures has spread beyond the elite.

Today, we have increasing diversity in the Arab world: the young read novels, watch movies and videos, listen to music, read blogs – and create all of these things – in many different languages. They are not just consuming, but mastering, modern cultures that are intertwined with linguistic and cultural influences from the East, North, South -- and, yes, the West.

It would be naive to presume that this diversification of mass culture will inevitably feed into movements for secularisation or democratisation. The same person reads novels or astrology books one day, and the next reads mass-produced religious tracts, bought in the same bookstore; or watches Ikraa (the Islamic TV chain) at lunchtime and Rotana (Saudi) after dinner.

The Salafists have adapted well to the new means of mass cultural diffusion: Paperback devotional and inspirational tracts and internet blogs replace theological texts. What is important for the Salafists, as for the region’s regimes, is that mass profane cultural consumption is seen as a distraction -- not entirely respectable and with no implications for social or political change. One must show respect for the Salafist norm even if one does not practise it. Transgression is individual; the public norm is Salafist. This is a form of ideological “soft” power that is far more effective than any bureaucratically enforced censorship.

There is schizophrenia in the attitude to language, too. The ulema always deemed a scholar’s written work to hold the highest intellectual and social importance. The consequence, today, is a constriction in writing: An Arab intellectual does not write in the language he or she speaks. On this point, pan-Arab nationalism and Islamism agree: both insist that classical Arabic (fosha) is the only legitimate language for cultural expression. For pan-Arabists, fosha is the glue of the Arab nation; for Islamists, of the umma (community of believers). This ignores the profound divergences between actual usage (and even modern standard Arabic, the language of journalism, television, academic discourse and fiction) and fosha, which is rarely used outside of religious schools. It makes the novel a particularly suspicious genre, since it explores “existential” questions of life and its meaning; the novel is not just independent of religion, it reinvents the Arabic language far beyond the limits of fosha.

The same ambivalence governs law. Each Arab state has its own legal code, but almost all refer to sharia as the ultimate source of law. Each state defines its own version of legality and “Islamicity,” and does so for the most part by incorporating some secular principles of rights and justice; but none can refuse to acknowledge the primacy of sharia. The primacy of the Islamic norm governs the Arab polity at the moment. This norm maintains itself as the public standard of judgment, yet it does not always define or determine the real practices of courts and the law.

U.S.'s Propensity for Paranoia

Entre paréntesis de Roberto Bolaño

En 1996 Roberto Bolaño publicó un engendro literario titulado "La literatura nazi en América", e irrumpió como una bestia en esa pequeña casa de adobe en que vivía amontonada la literatura chilena. El portazo se escuchó en todas partes. En los siguientes siete años, se despachó varias novelas y algunos libros de poesía, ganó el premio Herralde y el Rómulo Gallegos con "Los detectives salvajes", conquistó lectores a diestra y siniestra y se convirtió en un polemista incómodo pero adorable. Hasta que el año pasado, la muerte -que siempre hace la misma gracia porque en verdad nunca ha sido muy fanática de los grandes escritores, o quizás es al revés y por eso se lo llevó- le dijo ya es suficiente. El escritor que había salido de Chile cuando era muy joven para ir hasta México y quedarse enredado en la rebeldía de una generación de poetas veinteañeros y que luego se arrinconó para siempre en un pueblo de la costa catalana llamado Blanes, murió en una clínica de Barcelona cuando tenía 50 años, una novela inconclusa y un hígado malo.

Tony Judt

Born in London in 1948, Judt grew up in war-shattered Britain in a Jewish household steeped in Marxism, an experience he would later say inured him to sectarian politics. He was a man of the left who belonged to no party or ideological faction: a collection of his essays from the last twenty years, Reappraisals, includes a withering assessment of the historian and unrepentant Communist Eric Hobsbawm, and a pungent attack on American liberals who supported the Iraq War. Judt opposed that war but supported NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, not because he lacked clear principles but because, as he told the British magazineProspect recently, “I don’t believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.”

How the Politics of Criminal Justice Reform May Be Shifting

The Lonely States Of America

"Who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?"

From 1985 to 2004, "the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled." Now, 24.6 percent report they have no confidants, family or non-family — that's one in four Americans. Another 19.6 percent say they have just one confidant. That means 43 percent of Americans have either no confidants or just one, a slice that has doubled since 1985.

More than half, 53.4 percent, do not have any confidants who aren't family. In 1985, 80 percent had at least one confidant who was not family; now only 57.2 percent do.

The average size of Americans' social networks decreased by a third between 1985 and 2004, from 2.94 to 2.08; basically this means the loss of one confidant.

Tony Judt

Tony Judt, widely regarded as one of the most important historians of contemporary Europe