Bicho ruim

(...) In his view, this is perfectly natural, since “creativity” was an economic, not aesthetic, notion to begin with. “The concept of creativity,” he concludes, “never actually existed outside of capitalism.”

So , from November, 2012, to October, 2013, I kept a record of most of my visits to the Auchan superstore in Cergy, where I usually go, for reasons of convenience and pleasure essentially linked to its location inside the Trois Fontaines shopping center, the largest in Val-d’Oise.

(...) he always hoped he could paint the mouth as Monet had painted sunsets.

(...) I find myself marvelling less over the sweeping insights of the novel and more over the intricate delights of its language and form. I keep thinking about the shocking velocity of Woolf’s sentences, how they rocket off into the sky, trailing sparks of emotion behind them. I keep thinking about how beautifully, how gracefully, how ecstatically, even, she makes use of dashes and commas and parentheses to capture the halting stutter-step of feeling being transmuted into thought. (...) Jenny Offill on Mrs. Dalloway

From my window, I can see a white mulberry, a tree I’m fascinated by—one of the reasons I decided to live where I live. The mulberry is a generous plant—all spring and all summer it offers dozens of avian families its sweet and healthful fruits. Right now, the mulberry hasn’t got back its leaves, and so I see a stretch of quiet street, rarely traversed by people on their way to the park. The weather in Wrocław is almost summery: a blinding sun, blue sky, clean air. Today, as I was walking my dog, I saw two magpies chasing an owl from their nest. At a remove of just a couple of feet, the owl and I gazed into each other’s eyes. Animals, too, seem to be waiting expectantly, wondering what’s going to happen next. (...) By Olga Tokarczuk, The New Yorker, April 8, 2020

— So far, so good. We’re up near Corralitos, California, in a shelter-in-place zone, and are doing that. Just staying home. Feels strangely nineteenth century up here. Everything has slowed down and the trees are looking prettier and the sky seems like an old friend whose beauty you never fully appreciated, and so on. Feels like this thing, for all its horrors, might be a chance for the world to take a breath and go, “Wait, why have we been living this way?” (...) * In this, you are, and I am, I hope, like cave people, sheltering a small, remaining trace of fire through a dark period.

Em  Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia,  o escritor jesuíta Baltasar Gracián aperfeiçoou o que chamou de agudeza : um tipo de dito de espírito em que o máximo de significado é compactado no mínimo de forma ou estilo.  Brian Dillon, Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction   The Art of Wordly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle chegou a vender mais de cento e cinquenta mil exemplares ao ser apresentado como um manual de auto-ajuda para executivos. Em 1992, permaneceu dezoito semanas (duas nas primeiras posições) na lista dos mais vendidos, segundo o jornal  The Washington Post .  Wikipédia

I don’t quite agree with Marina Harss . Actually it’s the other way around: if you’ve never heard of the Swiss turn-of-the-twentieth-century novelist and short-story writer Robert Walser, you’re utterly  alone.

Às vezes a crítica literária marimba-se para análises e julgamentos; atira-se à matéria com tal vontade que dá origem a objectos excêntricos. A tradução do conto Bliss , de Katherine Mansfield, por Ana Cristina Cesar ou, descobri agora, os sete volumes de À Procura do tempo Perdido transformados em argumento por Harold Pinter  (com a vantagem de nunca ter sido filmado). Dr. Percepied: Well, I must be going. I have to look in to see Monsieur Vinteuil. Not in the best of health, poor man. Father: Mmmnn. Dr. Percepied: His daughter’s friend is staying with them again, apparently. Father ( grimly ): Is she? Bom, talvez já não se possa chamar a estes exercícios, crítica — mas então chama-se crítica a quê?

A sentence from Wittgenstein contains a “fantastically vague semicolon”: “ Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit .” (“The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.”) This has been translated by G. E. M. Anscombe thus: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.” But, in removing what Erich Heller, an expert in German philosophy, calls a “profound” semicolon, one that “marks a frontier between a thought and a triviality,” the translator has reduced a deep thought to a bland one. Watson writes, sounding like the “punctuation therapist” she sometimes plays, “Ambiguity can be useful and productive, and it can make some room for new ideas.”