Troubled Water

[...] Estava perplexo ao fundo do povo quando apareceu o professor Mário, sempre muito bem posto para a profissão e a localidade. Depois que se inteirou do que havia, meteu o braço no de Dedê e conduziu-o para sua casa. Para ele, era o ideal. Continuava a esvoaçar no seu horizonte o lenço vermelho. A casa era fraca, mas sempre tinha um quarto disponível. A mãe do professor, uma mulherzinha seca, mirrada, minuciosa, sabendo quanto ele era mãos rotas, tratou logo de lhe preparar a cama: – Vossa Senhoria, senhor Comendador, terá de perdoar. A casa é de pobres, mas limpa. Olhe que o não mordem pulgas nem percevejos!  À noite vieram sucessivamente saudá-lo a família do Nagalho, depois a família do Aleixo, inclusive o moço de Canabrás, que andava a ajudar-lhes às ceifas, e o próprio Aleixo, reconciliado mercê dos bons serviços do novo escravo e dos dez contos, de que afinal se arvorara tesoureiro. Diamantino teve artes de dizer a Águeda: Você amanhã não vá às ceifas.  E não foi. Do ...

For the first time in my life, I had paper and ink. I was beside myself. I found a straight stick and shaved it to a point and scratched a groove on one side. I put the paper on my lap, dipped my stick into the ink and wrote the alphabet. I printed letters as I had seen them in books, slowly, clumsily. Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge’s library. I wrote: I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name . p.57 I really wanted to read. Though Huck was asleep, I could not chance his waking and discovering me with my face in an open book. Then I thought, How could he know that I was actually reading? I could simply claim to be staring dumbly at the letters and words, wondering what in the world they meant. How could he know? At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was ...

Miriam Schapiro - Keyhole, 1971   in   American Artists and Reproductive Justice by  Salomé Gómez-Upegui I. Daily we push tiny pills through their thin foil backing. We swallow the calendar, counting out days, counting blessings with each bleeding. In our dreams we crave ligation of the uterine tubes: scalpels dancing with clamps, festooned with beaded knots of chromic gut. We fantasize rituals of ablation and wake to the smell of cauterized flesh. We fear falling and falling like Alice through the Fallopian passage into a dark vascular basement, and never resurfacing. The ovaries simmer with a world too large and possible to accept, thousands of lives we want for ourselves. We suck in our eggs like breath, as if walking through exhaust. II. We do not yet hate ourselves fully. What we can't bear is the chance of bearing a daughter and passing on the disease of woman. Call it an autoimmune disorder. Call it anorexia nervosa. Call it endometriosis. The body turns against ...

The town that climbs the mountain and looks upon the sea, And sleeping time or waking, sure its there I long to be, To walk again those kindly streets, where first my life began, With the boys of Barr na Sráide, who hunted for the wren . With cudgels stout we roved about to hunt the dreólín, We looked for birds in every furze from Litir to Dooneen, We jumped for joy beneath the sky, life held no print or plan, And we boys in Barr na Sráide, hunting for the wren. And when the hills were bleeding and the rifles were aflame, To the rebel homes of Kerry the Saxon stranger came. But the men who dared the Auxies and fought the Black-and-Tan, Were once boys in Barr na Sráide, hunting for the wren. But now they toil on foreign soil, where they have made their way. Deep in the heart of London town and over in Broadway. And I am left to sing their deeds and praise them while I can, Those boys of Barr na Sráide, who hunted for the wren. So here's a hand to them tonight, those men who laughed ...

They should not clench their fists, it is my longing that is drawing near to them; they should not stand there full of rage, my longing is timidly drawing near to them; they should not be ready to pounce like vicious dogs, as if they wanted to tear my longing to shreds; they should not threaten with broad sleeves, that pains my longing. Why have they suddenly changed? As great and deep is my longing. No matter how difficult, no matter how menacing: I must reach them and I am already there. THE TREES (I - A Ballad) There laugh, there rise in the coming and going of the world many deep worlds, all wandering again and fleeing through the others, regarded as ever more beautiful. They surrender in their orbits, become large in their escape, their vanishing is their existence. I am no longer troubled, for I can unpulverized strive through the world as a world. WORLD (I) Grey days, on which the sun carried itself like a pale nun, are gone. A blue day is blue above, a world has freely risen, i...

First they come for a cup of sugar for a cup of vinegar for nothing And you being well brought up allow your kitchen to fill with people and your days to shorten as if winter has suddenly begun Later all evening through the wall you hear the muffled blows of bodies the dog’s bark the ringing of the phone which nobody answers Your cigarettes pack up this night you walk for miles in the room and then in your dreams (having finally fallen asleep) In the morning you see them refreshed they water their flowers wave to you go out in the open casting a fourfold shadow like a footballer’s in the middle of the park. Neighbors And when they reached the final door the judges asked them (simply to amuse themselves) what is it that rises with a roar and suffering flies with delight and quietly falls all in flames Boeing, answered the fireman My song, answered the silent one The bird which flew from end to end of my head and loved me, answered the third (happy!) the youngest brother all in flames. B...

«AI applications that generate human-like language raise fundamental questions that concern education but spread far beyond: How will this technology change notions of who we are as humans? How will it reframe our understandings of human intelligence? How will it impact our relationships with each other? We are also forced to consider the new technologies that study our languages and generate them, without explicit human direction and therefore unpredictably. Is it possible for technology that is proficient in language and learning to, at some point, develop sentience, knowledge of its own existence and desire greater autonomy? Is it wise to hand over millennia of knowledge to machines that appear to be capable of learning and performing beyond boundaries set by humans?And what about our interactions with these machines: How should we ‘treat’ them? Is it appropriate for a non-human machine to speak to an adult as if it is another person? Is this appropriate for a child? What should we ...

Unsettling epistemic power held by disciplines, universities, and policymakers can be progressed through building solidarities, locally and transnationally, and repowering community narratives that are rooted in collective self‐determination, truth‐telling, healing, the recovery of historical memory, and the cocreation of settings from and with, to stand up for, as and with. Truth‐telling locates historical memory and decolonial praxes within solidarities, but also engenders trust as the way in which solidarities can enact change. Arts and aesthetics can play a central role in provoking the otherwise, to act against numbing forms of structural and symbolic violence. In this issue, we sought to drive the conversation from “peripheries” back to the “center,” with examples of critical inquiry and emancipatory practices and orientations toward solidarities in and across contexts. We build on the efforts of others who have gone before and whose work are not in canons but who have carved pat...

Is writing worth it? Does it make any sense at all to pursue literary glory? Are the writers we praise really the best anyway? In 1824, the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi decided to take on the subject in a thirty-page essay, of kinds. In fact, he puts his reflections somewhat playfully in the mouth of Giuseppe Parini , perhaps the finest Italian poet of the eighteenth century, a man from a poor family who spent all his life seeking financial and political protection in the homes of the aristocracy. Leopardi imagines Parini — “one of the very few Italians of our times who combined literary excellence with depth of thought” —responding to an exceptionally talented and ambitious young writer seeking advice. What follows here is nothing more than a brief summary of what he says; I take no responsibility for the ideas expressed. Readers can decide for themselves how much of this rings true today. Young man, literary glory, or the fame that comes from learning and then writi...

Conceptual art has been with us for more than fifty years, and it still defines the work of a great many contemporary artists. But what is it? The term “concept art” was first used in 1963 by the philosopher Henry Flynt ; it quickly morphed into “conceptual art” and was applied to art work in which the idea behind it is as or more important than the work itself. An early example was Joseph Kosuth ’s “One and Three Chairs,” which consisted of a straight-backed chair, a photograph of that chair, and a mounted dictionary definition of the word “chair.” The idea was clear enough, and conceptual artists have been struggling ever since to make works that are not as boring as this one. Those who succeed have usually been influenced by Marcel Duchamp, the intellectual father of Conceptualism. Duchamp wanted, as he said, to “put art back in the service of the mind.” Leonardo da Vinci described art as a cosa mentale , and that’s what it had been, according to Duchamp, until the nineteenth centur...

[...] Apart from several mixed systems, most IALs were of the a posteriori type. Okrent (2010) lists close to 150 such languages from Ruski Jezik (1666) to Guosa (1981). At least fifteen of them are reforms of Esperanto and a number of Ido, itself being a reform of Esperanto. Several projects are based on Latin as the first Auxiliary Language still in use among scientists (most notably Latino sine Flexione by G. Peano, 1903). Some derive their vocabulary and/or grammatical systems from a specific language group, e.g. from Germanic – Tutonish (E. Molee, 1902), Alteutonik (E. Molee, 1915) and Slavic – Slavski Jezik (B. Holý, 1920), Mezhduslavjanski Jezik (L. Podmele, 1958). There was a surge of projects claiming to be universal, with names suggesting that the language could be used by the whole world, e.g. Universalglot (J. Pirro, 1868), Mundolingue (J. Lott, 1890), Mondi Lingua (A. Lavagnini, 1955), Mondial (H. Heimer, 1943), Lingua Komun (F. Kürschner, 1900) or Komun (F. Musil, 194...