January 8, 2016
Bayes’ Theorem. Image © mattbuck
In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the most simple data.
Edgar Allen Poe — The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
…In other words, cavēte theorema Bayes, as explained by John Horgan.
December 25, 2015
Immer dichter fiel der Schnee vom Himmel und senkte sich auf die Felsen und auf die satten grünen Wiesen. Egger ging weiter. Er achtete genau auf seine Schritte, um nicht auszurutschen, und alle paar Meter wischte er sich mit dem Handrücken die Flocken von Wimpern und Augenbrauen. Dabei stieg eine Erinnerung in ihm hoch, ein kurzer Gedanke an etwas, das sehr lange zurücklag, kaum mehr als ein verwischtes Bild. “Es ist noch nicht so weit”, sagte er leise, und der Winter legte sich übers Tal.
Robert Seethaler — Ein ganzes Leben
December 22, 2015
Não te habituaste já a olhar para o espelho de manhã e ver uma mancha disforme que ainda não se deitou?
Hoje só é diferente porque sonhaste e te lembraste do teu sonho e no teu sonho levantavas vôo e quando acordaste estavas ainda a cinco centímetros acima da cama e então pensaste que ias acordar mas já estavas acordado e deixaste a manhã afagar-te e a manhã disse-te assim:
“Eu sou só outro sonho e tu tens asas em todos os sonhos”
Só estás assim porque sentiste uma alegria a ferver dentro de ti, uma vontade de cantar e correr e abraçar toda a gente e escrever quilómetros.
Não é de ti que se trata. Não tens razão de ser egoísta assim; se te desses conta que só sentes o que sobra de teres existido no sonho de outra pessoa, não te zangavas assim contigo.
December 21, 2015
Percebo-te lindamente.
No entanto, e sem querer retirar um nanograma que seja àquilo que é objectivamente a pouco óbvia façanha de reconhecer um marco, há que admitir que isso não ilumina em nada o mistério que é tudo o que vais querer a seguir.
Teres chegado aqui é um alívio sim, mas tens a noção de que não é aqui que acaba, não tens?
December 21, 2015
Egon Schiele — Die Umarmung (1917)
Ils sont nus maintenant, et leurs peaux que l’obscurité fusionne prennent même température et mêmes nuances carbone, ils se tendent une main jusqu’à se toucher par dessus le lit, jusqu’à se rapprocher l’un contre l’autre, alors c’est le grand tâtonnement, l’opéra tactile, et les corps à fragmentation multiple qui se débrouillent parfaitement bien dans la pénombre.
Maylis de Kerangal — Naissance d’un pont
December 7, 2015
(originally published on my now defunct Medium page, sometime in 2014)
I was enamoured of London long before I had even visited it and for two very specific reasons, random as they may sound: Walt Disney and Foyle’s bookstore.
I first saw “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” at around age ten, and loved it from beginning to end, as a ten-year-old would. One scene (or rather, a song) however, was to stay indelibly etched in my mind: Portobello Road.
It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that my image of Portobello Market during the war was, of course, a complete illusion: the scene isn’t filmed in London at all but rather in a studio set in Burbank, California. It didn’t matter: by then the damage was already done.
To this day I can’t exactly determine what fascinated me so much. It wasn’t the song per se; after all, it’s not as if I was expecting to one day visit London and see people spontaneously spring into song and dance in the middle of the street (these days, with the advent of flash-mobs, I’m less certain.)
Perhaps it was the sound of the (fake, I know) cockney accent of stall-owners and spivs offering everything from vegetables and fruit, to jewellery, to books, and even secret instructions (for a fee) on how to find the Star of Astaroth. Or maybe was it seeing the music and choreography being adapted on the spot by Jamaicans, Sikhs, Australians, Irish, and many others, making Notting Hill their own and yet shared.
Come to think of it, it may very well be due to the simple fact that these were children like myself, in a shady market, late at night, during the war, when despite all the horror which only later I came to comprehend, all rules seem to have been suspended. To me it felt like an adventure; slightly dangerous, slightly forbidden and slightly mischievous, much as good adventures ought to be.
Least of all, let’s not forget that they had a magical flying bed. It is a known fact that childhood memories of magical flying beds are character-forming. I mean, think about it: it’s a bed and it flies, I can’t stress it enough.
The origin of my fixation with Foyle’s, on the other hand, has proven impossible to trace despite many attempts to do so. Its spot on my “top ten list of memorable… stuff” was never endangered even though it sometimes changed positions. It has proudly occupied the rarified atmosphere of the top three positions for a long time, but is now in danger of leaving it; it appears that the Charing Cross Road location is being sold, and the store is moving somewhere else. (update: it has, right next door)
At the beginning all I knew of the place from pictures and from reading about it was precisely its current location and peculiarities, later confirmed by subsequent visits: inconceivably large for those times, a labyrinth of shelves and corridors that connected the five floors of three different buildings, hastily merged into a single space while keeping the layout and floor-plan of each. Like a family whose members aren’t necessarily keen on each other but have no choice but to live together; not exactly ideal but still better than having to move in with strangers.
And books. Pile upon pile of dusty books. Fifty kilometers of shelves, it is said, in two and three rows, on tables, on the floor even, mixing used books with new ones, from floor to ceiling, either organized by a sadist or else simply left abandoned; the purpose seemed to be to make it as difficult as possible to find the volume you were looking for. My own extended speleological surveys of the space later revealed that this chaos served me very well: after all this wasn’t a bookstore where you went to buy the books you wanted but much rather a bookstore you went to want books you didn’t yet know.
After having discovered your volumes, or as some would argue, they had found you, exhausted from the travels to the darkest ends of the mysteriously winding corridors — some leading apparently nowhere, changing subject-matter mid-way for no logical reason — and in anticipation of the wonders buried in those pages, you still had to overcome the greatest hurdle of them all: you had to pay for them.
You wouldn’t normally suppose it to be a problem, had not the sadist in charge of organizing the books also designed the check-out procedure: there were two, sometimes three, queues. You had to surrender your book in one in exchange for a note, obtain an invoice for that note in another queue and finally pay the invoice in yet another queue. All were written by hand by less than inspired clerks, some of which didn’t even speak English at all. Only then could you have your book.
The whole experience felt as if Foyle’s was appalled that you (dishonestly, surely) had found something you wanted to buy and gave itself a moment of reflection on the merits of your disposition before allowing you to walk out with what sometimes felt like a brick of the house itself; it wasn’t just a purchase, it was a test of character.
At any rate, my childhood obsession with both Foyle’s and Portobello Road gave me a purpose: I studied Tube maps, photographs, movies, books (the ones I could understand), and descriptions from anyone I knew who could tell me something about London.
My first visit at thirteen wasn’t the grand event I had anticipated: it was incomparably better, a familiar surprise. I knew exactly where I was and where I wanted to go first: Central Line to Notting Hill Gate, walk down and back up ever so slowly Portobello Road. Still walking, cross Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, catch the Piccadilly Line at Knightsbridge, hop off at Leicester Square. From there it’s a short walk up Charing Cross Road to Foyle’s. In the event of having survived it whole reward myself with a visit to Convent Garden by way of Trafalgar Square.
I have since been to London more often than I can remember, and my perception of it has become a palimpsest of memories of events, people, scents, colour, all-important conversations, life-changing emotions and a whole collection of many other sights, from the preppy times of drinking Bellinis at the Claridge’s, to the punk years of the bug-ridden bed-and-breakfast near Victoria Station. The city and I are inextricably, and I now realise, inexplicably linked to each other.
—
Every now and then I convince myself that it forgot about me which makes me a little sad and a little anxious as if I was discovering once again for the first time a promise that’s impossible to keep.
Most of the time, however (and misquoting Whitman) I just know that we were together, the rest I forget.
December 5, 2015
New album by Hélène Grimaud, produced by Nitin Sawhney, but only on February 5th, 2016. I was foolishly hoping that the story would be ready to be told by now… 🙁
The album features works by nine composers: it opens with Berio’s Wasserklavier and includes Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II, Fauré’s Barcarolle No.5, Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, “Almería” from Albéniz’s Iberia, Liszt’s Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este and the first movement of Janáček’s In the Mists, before closing with Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie. These myriad reflections on the qualities of water were recorded live at the Armory during the installation and then connected and woven into the album narrative by seven “Transitions” that were newly composed, recorded and produced by Sawhney. Grimaud was delighted to work with the award-winning composer, DJ and multi-instrumentalist, praising his ability to highlight “the universal human dependence on our planet’s most precious resource” and weave “contrasting poetic and philosophical perspectives into a single, cogent musical ecosystem.”
December 2, 2015
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.
T.E. Lawrence — Seven Pillars of Wisdom
December 1, 2015
(originally published on my now defunct Medium page, sometime in 2015)
You will never know how much music has transformed you, not until it has, but by then you won’t remember what it was like back when it hadn’t. You’ll swear that it was always like this, that it didn’t so much transform you as it unlocked something in you.
And yet it did transform you: there were neurological changes, dormant nerve paths awoke, new ones were discovered, tiny and impatient little specks of light now travel through you, an imminent and familiar menace, one to which you cannot wait to capitulate.
It is your mother-tongue now.
—
You never saw it coming, did you?
November 29, 2015
(originally published on my now defunct Medium page, sometime in 2015)
This puzzles me:
I hear the expression “words were said that cannot be taken back”, and yet I don’t know where or how we draw the conceptual line that separates words that can be taken back from those that cannot. I mean we can all easily differentiate between monstrous statements and innocuous ones, yet I suspect that there exists a grey area where we cannot do that at all, one which contains many more words than both extremes.
It all depends on who hears those words I suppose. If that is the case, maybe it should read: “there will never be a correct apology for the words you’ve said”, or in other words: “the separation line is clear to me, regardless of where you think the line is”.
—
It all sounds very final.
As if it were supremely important that Spring must die or else never be.
November 26, 2015
I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. Perhaps there should be an unspoken agreement that in the event of loss of virginity, the more experienced of the partners should, afterward, make the other an omelet—passing along the skill at an important and presumably memorable moment.
November 22, 2015
(originally published on my now defunct Medium page, sometime in 2015)
Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.
Aldous Huxley — Eyeless in Gaza
Love is easy, here’s what you do:
If you didn’t, if you can’t, if you’re not sure about all this, if you are stupid enough to think that you “need to think about it” or even if, hey, you reach the conclusion that maybe you’re not in love with her, then get the fuck out of her way.
Stop wasting her life and go be an imbecile on your own time.
November 22, 2015
(originally published on my now defunct Medium page, sometime in 2013)
Yes, it hurts, just a little, and there is no way to avoid it.
The damned conjugation of life’s little ploys always ends up pushing you to the edge of a cliff where you are exposed, defenseless, where anything, no matter how trivial, can make you loose balance and plunge you into the pit.
Even your surprise at finding yourself here is predictable.
You’ll try to argue, to reason: No, not me, why me, I had no demands, not this time. I didn’t screw up, not that much, I was good, I was courteous, I was delicate. I was prepared to be hurt, for fuck’s sake. I shouldn’t even be here. Look, that moment, that stupid awkward moment, that hesitation? It meant nothing that can’t be undone, right? Right?
See, so long as you don’t accept that you are the only part in this, that no one is punishing you, no amount of protest will ever save you; so you know, if you crave redemption, you first need to know from what.
Rest now. Everything will be alright. Messy and chaotic.
Flawless.
November 8, 2015
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
Jonathan Franzen — How to Be Alone
November 6, 2015
I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. This is a car assembled in a work area that’s completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant—allow a little moisture where they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement back-referenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There’s nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments of coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead.
It’s a culmination in a way, machines made and shaped outside the little splat of human speech. And this made my rented car a natural match for the landscape I was crossing. Heat shimmer rising on the empty flats. A bled-white sky with ticky breezes raking dust across the windshield. And the species factually absent from the scene—except for me, of course, and I was barely there.
Don DeLillo — Underworld
November 6, 2015
Não sei se existem olhares que contêm mais significado do que outros. Se calhar só se pode saber pelo reflexo, mas se assim for então isso quer dizer que não contêm nenhum.
October 30, 2015
Olha,
Quando escrevo em português sinto-me desprotegido e acho que é por isso que o faço pouco. Não é por causa da língua me ser estranha, antes pelo contrário: é por ser tão próxima do meu núcleo, seja lá o que isso for.
Sabes?
October 10, 2015
She sits and reads with the inevitable resolve of a child who has no notion of boundaries and pays no attention to the physical form of what she absorbs. Not just books alone but anything and everything she can get her hands on: every minuscule speck of life itself around her is fair game; it all speaks directly at her and she needs to reply. At first sketching a mental image of the authors, imagining their voices, their demeanour and their lives. Placing herself there as a real semi-fictional character in a fictional semi-real life seems to be the only way to do so, but they’re not listening.
Suddenly without filter and with the same resolve words of reciprocation rush out of her. She starts to write directly from her open heart (or mind, but she can’t tell the difference nor does she care to) straight to the paper in a rush to carve it somewhere before it fades, not stopping for a second to review or reread: the real visible words on the paper are sufficient gratification. There is more to read.
—
She sits and reads a little slower now. The lives and the sound of the voices of the authors are inexorably fading into the distance as the text itself stubbornly pushes to the surface demanding to be heard, constantly reminding her that once it’s been written it belongs to the author no more, that the words are now the reader’s. She spots structures, plot, progression, rhythm and melody in the words. She spots herself.
Hesitant, suspecting that she’s trespassing upon forbidden territory, she begins to write with the same purpose of letting the words go as either a donation to others or else a balm to herself. She even writes a book as if she was building a house, recruiting help and opinion on every single brick, wall, window sill and floorboard and every poppy in the garden that surrounds the house is named and accounted for. She watches this house grow and change as people move in and out and the garden blooms and withers with the tragedies of other lives, now insignificant for not being hers anymore.
—
She sits and reads very slowly and meticulously. Unlike before, her eyes go back and forth in the text thoroughly absorbing every single word and every word becoming a part of herself. She discovers the infinitely recursive depths of perception, one infinitesimal laceration after the other and feels humbled and inadequate and in need of an answer from herself alone.
And so she writes slowly and deliberately. She suspects it but hasn’t yet fully grasped that while it seems she’s still writing from her heart (or mind, but she can’t tell the difference nor does she care to) even when building larger structures, the very slowness of the act has become a strict and sometimes cantankerous editor who makes the words linger in her mind arguing with each other, some cuddling in shining sentences others placing entire paragraphs of safe distance between them.
—
She sits almost immobile now, maybe not reading at all.
Every word has become a whole book, every paragraph a whole encyclopedia and every book a whole life, revisited, molded and reimagined over and over again. Her writing has now become both excruciatingly slow and surprisingly fluid. It has become a mental life of its own where the writing down of words is but a distillation of a whole universe into the very essence of her where no alternatives exist, just the exact words. As if there is no choice but to wait for them, until infinity if need be, as if slowing down to near immobility and abandoning time has finally given her the space to read everything and write everything or maybe just the one thing.
—
But it’s not clear if she’s reading or writing at all anymore.
On her face there is just the vaguest hint of the peaceful smile of someone who’s finally discovered that there was never anything else she could do.
October 10, 2015
I’m pretty sure I want to watch this.
