Love Compared

Poema de Nizar Qabbani (Damasco, 1923 – Londres, 1998)

 

I do not resemble your other lovers, my lady
should another give you a cloud
I give you rain
Should he give you a lantern, I
will give you the moon
Should he give you a branch
I will give you the trees
And if another gives you a ship
I shall give you the journey.

Note: Translation by Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton.

Good Things

Hacia el final de 2010 elaboré una lista con los discos que habían capturado mi predilección durante ese año. Obviamente, mi subjetivísima selección partió de los discos con los que pude toparme el año pasado. El gusto, esa arcilla tan maleable, me haría hoy reordenar los elementos de esa lista. De todos modos, no es el propósito de esta entrada discutir los cambios en mi apreciación. Es sólo que este año escuché un disco excelente, publicado en Septiembre de 2010. Si lo hubiese encontrado antes, con seguridad habría estado en la lista de Favoritos de 2010. Se trata de Good Things, segundo álbum de estudio del cantante Aloe Blacc.

He escuchado comparaciones de este disco con la música de Sam Cooke, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye… Personalmente, encuentro de poco provecho las comparaciones de este tipo. Me limito a recomendar mucho este disco, especialmente si le gusta el soul. Mis temas favoritos: Femme Fatale (gran cover), I need a dollar y Loving you is killing me. Pero todos los temas son muy buenos.

Parece que se ha ido, pero no es cierto

Casi se puede fechar el nacimiento del cantinflismo. En 1937, Luis N. Morones, dirigente de la Confederación Revolucionaria Obrero Mexicana, califica a Vicente Lombardo Toledano, líder de la central obrera del gobierno, la Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM), de “traidor, cobarde, tembloroso, enclenque y Niño Fidencio de Teziutlán”. (El Niño Fidencio es un curandero famosísimo y en Teziutlán nació el líder de la CTM). Lombardo comenta desdeñoso: “Si Morones se propone demostrar su capacidad dialéctica, que discuta con Cantinflas”. Éste, enviado al limbo de lo que no merece réplica, admite por primera vez que su humor tiene un sentido y que ese sentido es la parodia del discurso político:

Lo primero que hice fue pensar en ir a ver a Lombardo para preguntarle con qué objeto… pero luego pensé… ¡pues no! Porque pensándolo bien, verdad, a nadie pudo haber escogido el licenciado mejor que a mí para solucionar la solución del problema… porque, como digo, naturalmente, ya que si él no puede arreglar nada y dice mucho, a mí me pasa lo mismo y nunca llego a un acuerdo… ¡Ah!, pero que conste que yo tengo momentos de lucidez y hablo muy claro. Y ahora voy a hablar claro… ¡Camaradas! Hay momentos en la vida, que son verdaderamente momentáneos… Y no es que uno diga, sino que ¡hay que ver! ¿Qué vemos? Es lo que hay que ver… porque, qué casualidad, camaradas, que poniéndose en el caso –no digamos que pueda ser- pero sí hay que reflexionar y comprender la fisiología de la vida para analogar la síntesis de la humanidad. ¿Verdad? Pues, ¡ahí está el detalle!

Fragmento del ensayo de Carlos Monsiváis sobre Cantinflas, en Ídolos a nado.

The Library and Its Unimaginable Mathematics

The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel

Si le gustó el post Dimensiones del Universo o La Biblioteca, seguramente disfrutará este hermoso libro: The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel. Éste es un libro bello. La elegancia define su composición y tipografía, y el contenido es riquísimo. William Goldbloom Bloch parte del famoso cuento de Borges, La Biblioteca de Babel, y realiza unas exposiciones matemáticas muy claras, de tal forma que no se requiere un alto nivel de matemáticas para comprender la diversidad de tópicos considerados (combinatoria, análisis real, topología, teoría de la información, entre otros). Este libro es una delicia y un regalo magnífico para cualquier admirador de la obra de Jorge Luis Borges. Totalmente recomendado.

Buena

[wpaudio url=”http://www.chocolatesparalucia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/mb.mp3″ dl=”0″ text=”Morphine – Buena”]

I hear a voice from the back of the room
I hear a voice cry out you want something good
Well come on a little closer let me see your face
Yeah come on a little closer by the front of the stage
I said come on a little closer I got something to say
Yeah come on a little closer wanna see your face
You see I met a devil named Buena Buena
And since I met the devil I ain’t been the same oh no
And I feel all right now I have to tell ya
I think it’s time for me to finally introduce you to the
Buena buena buena buena good good good
It’s coming to me yeah it’s coming to me
Now I, I think I know what it is you need
I know some people want to make you change
Well I, I know how to make’m go away
You see I met a devil named Buena Buena
And since I met the devil I ain’t been the same oh no
And I feel all right I have to tell ya
I think it’s time for me to finally introduce you to the
Buena buena buena buena good good good

Note: From Cure for Pain, fantastic album by Morphine. Regarding this song… I think of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day… because of the incredible music… because of the evident references and metaphors.

On The Religion of (Fake) Cheerfulness

“What?” cried Merton in an incredulous tone. “And the Religion of Cheerfulness—”

“It is a cruel religion,” said the priest, looking out of the window. “Why couldn’t they let him weep a little, like his fathers before him? His plans stiffened, his views grew cold; behind that merry mask was the empty mind of the atheist. At last, to keep up his hilarious public level, he fell back on that dram-drinking he had abandoned long ago. But there is this horror about alcoholism in a sincere teetotaler: that he pictures and expects that psychological inferno from which he has warned others. It leapt upon poor Armstrong prematurely, and by this morning he was in such a case that he sat here and cried he was in hell, in so crazy a voice that his daughter did not know it. He was mad for death, and with the monkey tricks of the mad he had scattered round him death in many shapes—a running noose and his friend’s revolver and a knife. Royce entered accidentally and acted in a flash. He flung the knife on the mat behind him, snatched up the revolver, and having no time to unload it, emptied it shot after shot all over the floor. The suicide saw a fourth shape of death, and made a dash for the window. The rescuer did the only thing he could—ran after him with the rope and tried to tie him hand and foot. Then it was that the unlucky girl ran in, and misunderstanding the struggle, strove to slash her father free. At first she only slashed poor Royce’s knuckles, from which has come all the little blood in this affair. But, of course, you noticed that he left blood, but no wound, on that servant’s face? Only before the poor woman swooned, she did hack her father loose, so that he went crashing through that window into eternity.”

G. K. Chesterton (from “The Three Tools of Death”, in The Innocence of Father Brown).

What is ‘standard English’?

After King Alfred’s victory over the Vikings in 878, the government of Southern England came to be established in London, which later became the capital of the whole of Britain. Because of this, the English spoken in London and the East Midlands was gradually adopted as the ‘official’ variety of English. And as time went by, this dialect (and its later developments, profoundly influenced by Norman French), became the ‘standard’ language- the form of English generally accepted for use in government, the law, business, education and literature. Standard English, like all standard languages, is therefore largely the result of historical accident. If the Vikings, who held the north of England, had defeated Harold’s army, the capital of modern Britain might well be York, and this book would be written in (and about) a very different kind of English.

Michael Swan. Practical English Usage (3rd Edition).

Resizing multiple image files

For the Ponyo post I had a bunch of PNG 853×480 screenshots. At first, the post used 300×168 images, resized by the blog’s engine, such as the below one:

However, the ideal width for images in this blog is about 600 pixels:

For resizing multiple files I recurred to ImageMagick command line tools (here are some Windows Binary Releases). On Windows command prompt, it’s enough to type:

forfiles /M *.png /C “cmd /c convert -resize 70% @file resized_@file”

That way all of the images will have resized versions, at 70% their original size, yielding a 597-pixels width.