Pour fêter l’entrée de “S.” dans le cercle très fermé de la “S.”, du “F.”
un post labellisé VPF et deux sites à visiter www.villageducochon.com/ et www.leporc.com

Las grandes potencias europeas conmemoraron ayer el fin de la primera guerra mundial, hoy hace 90 años. Obama, a su vez, celebró un acto en el cementerio de Arlington. En él están enterrados los soldados americanos muertos en todas las guerras, incluidos los de ámbos bandos de la guerra civil americana.

Todas las grandes democracias, en sintonía, trazando un imaginario para una Europa en grave crisis de valores, una simbología que nos sea común y cercana, a la vez que venerable. La gran Europa, proponiendo el camino a nuestra propia mitología. Una mitología basada en una mirada al pasado, pero una mirada profundamente respetuosa, conciliadora y común.

Se estaba trazando la identidad de Europa, la de occidente, incluso.

Y Zapatero le ha dado ampulosamente la espalda a todo eso. A Zarkozy y Merkel, lo mismo que a Obama. Ni está ni se le espera.

Se comporta igual en Europa que en España. Da la espalda a sus orígenes. Por toda tradición, por toda religión, por toda mitología, y por toda identidad, nos quiere imponer las doctrinas socialistas.

————————————————————————————————

Por cierto, César Vidal ha colgado ya, adherida a su interesantísima entrada Coronel no tiene quien le escuche, la tercera y última parte de su análisis sobre Ágora. No se pierdan la serie completa.

LaCiudadenLlamas ya habló lo que tenía que decir de Ágora. Sin embargo, no podemos dejar pasar la ocasión de recomendar la crítica pormenorizada de la película que encontramos en el blog de César Vidal, y en el que desmonta la tesis de Amenábar hasta dejarla reducida a la más absoluta de las naderías.

Ágora (I): un panfleto fallido

Ágora (II): Un dislate histórico.

Ágora (y III) El cristianismo victorioso.

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket or Are Ya Glad to See Me?

Gore Vidal is a true “celebrity,” that is, ’someone who is well known for being well known.’ If he shows at a 5th Avenue soiree, he counts double among the guest-list luminaries because, in addition to being a celebrity, he also is an intellectual.

Merriam-Webster defines an intellectual as one who is “devoted to matters of the mind, especially arts and letters.”

Note however, that being an intellectual does not necessarily qualify one as being intelligent. The same dictionary (no doubt consulted on occasion by Mr. Vidal, since he has written a few forgettable books) defines intelligence as “…having the power of reflection or reason;…not stupid or foolish.”

Juxtaposing these definitions, it is clear that Mr. Vidal is an intellectual but that he is not at all intelligent. Why? Because when asked by an interviewer from The Atlantic about the Roman Polanski festouche Mr. Vidal said, “I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?”

Our intellectual continues, trying to explain why poor Roman is in all this trouble in the first place. “The media can’t get anything straight. Plus, there’s usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press – lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then.”

Christ, Gore, you’re giving intellectuals everywhere a bad name. Polanski is not in trouble because he is a Jew, he’s not in trouble because he’s a fag, and he’s not in trouble because the girl was some Sunset Boulevard tramp who just happened to be on her way to communion.

POLANSKI IS IN JAIL BECAUSE THE GIRL WAS 13!!. Can you spell “Jail Bait?”

To an intellectual, sex with a 13-year-old is perfectly OK. To someone who is intelligent (i.e., “…not stupid or foolish…”) it is rape.

I don’t care if this girl had been turning tricks for Hollywood pederasts since she was six, Polanski should have known better than to go anywhere near her, no matter how uncontrollable his libido. She was 13!

She Told Me She Was 15!

Then, the cops find out and next you know, the oh-so-talented Mr. Polanski is looking at doing hard time in a California prison for rape. So what does he do? He leaves the United States before he can be sentenced and hides behind the skirts of the French and other complicit “intellectuals” for 32 years.

I really hope he rots in prison. Switzerland is OK but Lompoc with a roommate named “Big J” would be even better.

Barack Obama is failing as President and the US is in danger of sliding into a military dictatorship, says Gore Vidal, the American essayist and intellectual. In an exclusive interview with The Times, Vidal, 83, reveals that he regrets switching his allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Mr Obama during last year’s campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.
“I was hopeful,” he said of Mr Obama. “He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”
America should leave Afghanistan, Vidal said. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” Vidal, a friend of President John F. Kennedy, became an Obama backer because he “grew up in a black city” (Washington) and was impressed by Obama’s intelligence.

Un mapa de las Misiones de la Compañía de Jesús que tiene más de 258 años de antiguedad y cuyo original –una de las obras más importantes del acervo cultural del Departamento y el país– se conserva en el Colegio del Rosario de Paysandú.

Se trata del “Mapa de las Misiones de la Compañía de Jesús en los ríos Paraná y Uruguay conforme a las más modernas observaciones de latitud y longuitud hechas en los pueblos de dichas Misiones de ambos ríos, realizado por el padre Joseph Quiroga, de la misma Compañía de Jesús de la Provincia del Paraguay en el año 1749″. Se trata ni más ni menos que de una de las obras de mayor relevancia de nuestro acervo cultural y cuyo carácter original fue determinado recientemente ya que hasta no hace mucho se consideraba en nuestro medio que el referido mapa que preserva en Paysandúera una copia cuando en realidad es el auténtico.

LA HISTORIA DEL MAPA
En 1917 el padre Baldomero Vidal propuso que en Paysandú se erigiera un monumento a quien se consideraba su fundador, el padre Policarpo Sandú, del cual vendría el propio nombre de la ciudad: “Pay”, de “padre” y “Sandú” por el apellido.

Al relatar sus investigaciones sobre los orígenes de Paysandú, Vidal escribe: “Empecé mis trabajos por donde me parecía que se debía empezar, es decir, por conocer la personalidad y los hechos del héroe, a quien se había de inmortalizar en mármol o bronce…El trabajo se me presentó más arduo y difícil de lo que me había imaginado: no me fue posible dar en ningún lado con documentos fehacientes; siempre me salía al encuentro la tradición, pero una tradición vaga, sin mayores fundamentos y tan llena de lagunas y contradicciones como para desorientar al más pintado.

Ante ese resultado negativo sobre la personalidad del padre Sandú, resolví dar otras orientación a mis investigaciones, y haciendo caso omiso de la persona rastrear la fecha en que empieza a sonar el nombre. Y hete aquí que, sin sospecharlo, me puse sobre una verdadera pista que me llevó a resultados, si por un lado desconcertantes e inesperados, por otro seguros y precisos a mi modo de ver.

Una de las fuentes más seguras para rastrear la antiguedad del nombre de Paysandú son, sin duda, los mapas geográficos. Si llegamos a demostrar que con anterioridad al nombre cuya parternidad se debe atribuir al enigmático Padre Sandú, creo que habremos andado gran trecho”.

Es así que Baldomero Vidal estudia distintos mapas con referencias hasta dar con el que hasta el momento se guarda en el Colegio del Rosario.

En sus notas continúa Vidal: “Todo aquello era fuerte motivo para que fuese cada vez más firme mi convicción de la antiguedad del nombre de Paysandú cuando he aquí que el año pasado (1930), recibí la más espléndida confirmación de mis conjeturas, con la publicaicón hecha por el padre Guillermo Fúrlong Cárdiff, S.J, de un antiguo mapa en el que se lee el consabido nombre con todas sus letras. Es el dicho mapa, obra del P. José Quiroga y Méndez, S.J, que lo dibujó en 1749 y fue publicado en Roma en 1753 por Franceschelli”.

This year, Silver Week fell between September 19-23, and it’s basically when there are three consecutive national holidays all in a row (Respect for the Aged Day, a Citizen’s Holiday, and Autumnal Equinox Day).  Hooray 5-day weekends!!  Most everyone at JCMU went to Tokyo, but there were some of us who decided to travel to other places.  So I got up kind of early on Saturday morning so that I could meet with the people I would be going to Kyoto with.  Kouri showed up as well, so we all got breakfast at Vidal and got on the train for some awesome times.

The train ride was pretty cool.  We just sat and talked and listened to music.  When we got off the train, it was kind of intense.  The station in Kyoto is a lot bigger, and has a lot more people.  We sort of waited around awkwardly for a bit because we were meeting Lynsey outside of the station.  We headed into the underground mall attached to the station to take the subway to go to a (different) covered mall.  However, Kouri had a concert to go to that night, so he wanted to stick around the station, so I stayed with him.

We sort of wandered around randomly outside the station for a bit before we headed north in order to (hopefully) come across a temple or something interesting to see.  We really didn’t need to worry about that because we found one really quickly.

On a side note, Kyoto is a very interesting city.  You’ll see a lot of people in western clothing, but every now and then you’ll see someone wearing a kimono or something like that, especially when it’s a holiday.

Anyway, we stumbled across this temple called Higashi Hongan-ji, which apparently contains the largest wooden building in the entire world.  Part of the grounds are under construction, so it was a little noisy inside.  However, the entrance we went inside wasn’t the main entrance, but there were a whole lot of pigeons.

A lot of pigeons.

Of course, outside the gate there’s an old man selling bags of seeds for people to spend money on to feed the birds.

Obviously we needed to feed the birds.    So Kouri bought some seeds and then a ridiculous bird photo session ensued.  I also got in on the fun, and eventually more people joined in as well after seeing the madness.  A Japanese photographer even took pictures of Kouri (at least we think so…).  However, it was a little freaky, just because there were so many birds.  It reminded me a lot of the Far Side comic where a woman is feeding birds, and they swarm her and when they leave, the only thing left is her outfit…

This is the way it was the whole day…

Either way, there were a lot of birds, and luckily Kouri was the only one who got pooped on and that was only a little bit. 

There was one bird in particular that just wouldn’t leave Kouri alone.  It even flew from my shoulder to his.

It was kind of freaky when I’d be standing there, just taking a picture, and suddenly I’d feel something grab onto the back of my shirt and try to climb up my back…I definitely had scratches on my arms after these shenanigans.

I know, right?  Nothing beats having rats with wings sitting on your head…  But like I said earlier, I got lucky.  Although I was scared for the state of my hair after this…

Either way, I feel like there’s going to be a slew of pictures of Kouri feeding various animals in Japan after this whole thing is done.  Monkey Mountain anyone?

Either way, this is basically all we did that afternoon.  We looked around the temple a bit, and it was very impressive.  There’s also this beautiful lotus fountain outside of the main gate that we saw as we left in search of dinner (and a place to thoroughly wash our hands).

We decided to just get something to eat at the station, and as we were heading back, we saw a couple of monks with suitcases head down into the subway.    That was kind of cool.

But we ate at a Japanese restaurant in the station (they had really good tea…) and then headed back to Hikone.  On the train, we met a couple other foreigners (omg) and we talked with them for a bit.  Mainly we talked to this guy from Holland who is an artist and he was meeting a designer or something in Osaka…I don’t really remember.  But he was also with a couple people from Korea, Thailand (?), and France.  So I thought, ‘Ooo, French, maybe I could say something in French…’

Fail.

In my head, I had forgotten all of my French grammar and vocabulary and would find myself slipping into Japanese in the middle of a sentence.  I couldn’t even think in french anymore.  Not to mention that whenever the guy from Holland would ask me something I would automatically say yes in Japanese.  I couldn’t say anything more complicated than that really, but the reflex was to try and say it in Japanese instead of English.  It was cool and frustrating at the same time…  They got off a couple stops before us though, so after that it was just us on the train again.

It was surprisingly windy, so biking back from the station was rather difficult.  We made a quick stop to the ¥100 store, and then he went back to his homestay and I returned to JCMU.  It was kind of painful due to the wind, especially along the lake where I had a ton of trouble staying on the left side of the road…

Back at JCMU, there were a bunch of us who were bored out of our minds.  Most everyone was gone, and we were all really hungry.  But one guy, Joe, had been invited to go to a bug concert at Hikone Castle by the woman who taught his group how to cook, so he invited some of us to go with him.  Jerome, Ken and I all went to the castle.  It was still really windy, so biking was kind of difficult.

We parked at the international lounge again, and went to meet the others.  I noticed that there were some break dancers there dancing to Eminem…I was amused.  It was really neat to walk at night by the shrine near the castle because the lanterns were lit and it was really beautiful.

There were three others from Japan who went with us to the concert.  It was actually in the garden, so there were lots of lanterns lit everywhere and all of the light fixtures were on.    We were also given small handheld lanterns with the Hikonyan on them to carry around.

It was really nice in the garden.  We walked around and talked, although the wind made it hard to hear…  But there were some women playing the koto in the garden and I really liked listening to that.  It was just really beautiful and nice in the garden, although a little chilly.

After that, we all went to the Joyfull restaurant.  It was really interesting getting there because there are these stairways heading down at the corner of this one intersection that sort of look like the entrances to the subway station.  But they have these thing sections of the stairs that are actually ramps.  I’ve always been curious as to what they were, and now I actually know.  You walk your bike down the ramp thing (mine tried to pull me with it…) and you cross the street underground.

What an awesome idea.

I often wish there was something like that in America…

Anyway, we park our bikes outside the restaurant and head inside.  It’s an inexpensive family restaurant, but everyone from JCMU had trouble deciding what to get (that happens a lot here).  The woman who invited us ended up ordering for most of us so we all got the same thing. 

There’s also the awesome concept of a drink bar.  It’s like a salad bar, except for beverages.  Pop, tea, coffee, whatever.  It allowed me to discover the wonder of the green tea latte.  I love them, they’re sooooo good.

Conversation was sort of stunted due to our limited language abilities, but I think we managed pretty well.

After dinner, we went outside to discover that the wind had knocked a bunch of the bikes over (and apparently it cracked my helmet as well… ).  By this point, it was realllllly cold outside from the wind.  (I checked it later, and I think the wind was blowing at least 20 mph.)  Either way, we all said our goodbyes and headed to our respective homes.

The bike back was intense.  It was after 10:00 at night, so it was dark, and I was freezing and we were riding directly into the wind.  But it was still pretty fun.  Then Jerome and I made the oh so smart decision to bike back along the lake….

…

I don’t think my legs have ever burned so much in my life.  It was actually really fun.  It was a real battle to stay on the left side of the road, especially when cars were coming from the opposite direction.  But I was almost giddy for some reason.  I couldn’t stop laughing for the life of me.  At one point, the wind went rushing past my face, and it was almost like it stole the air from right in front of me – I couldn’t breathe for a second.  I still don’t know whether Jerome was saying, “This is awesome!” or “This is awful!”

Whatever the case was, I’ve never been so glad to see JCMU in my life.  I felt like this strange mixture of Jell-O and lead when I got off my bike, and I was exhausted.  Getting in bed was just about the best thing that had ever happened to me at that point.

But the adventures were just beginning…

I love Wednesdays.    Classes are a lot shorter because we have a listening activity 3rd session, so that’s always cool.  After class, I really wanted some sushi for lunch, so I went out and got some.  I was a little anxious though, because I had my first weekly meeting with Aizawa-sensei at 2:30.  But it was actually pretty cool.  All we really did was talk about my family and school (in Japanese, of course).  And after that we had a fire drill.

So, here’s the thing.  Someone had mentioned that the fire drill was supposed to be really sweet, like we would be putting out a fire or something.  What we actually got was a bit of a letdown.  Yes, there were extinguishers involved, but we mainly sat in a room and listened to some safety procedures and then practiced using the fire extinguishers in a camp relay-race-type-thing.

This picture is a lot more epic than the fire drill was…

There was also a mingling sort of thing with some students from Waseda that afternoon, and later a group of us all went out to dinner at a close-by noodle place.  We sat in the tatami area, and took lots of pictures of ourselves…

The food was pretty good though.

Then it was back to the dorms to study.  We had a listening comprehension test the next day, so homework needed to get done.

The test wasn’t too bad, and once class was done, me, Kouri, Peter, and some others went to this nearby bread shop called Vidal.  Best.  Bread.  Ever.  There are so many different kinds there.  Pizza roll things, red bean buns, raisin bread, even something called melon bread.  The shop is right next to the beach too, so you can sit and eat bread down by the water.

However, I had to leave really soon after that because my class was going to Hikone Castle that afternoon.  We met at this place called the International Lounge and met up with our tour guides.  This was my second trip to the castle, so I didn’t take as many pictures of the castle itself, but we did go into the museum as well as the garden so it was pretty interesting.  The tour guide in the front spent so much time talking about historical facts that it felt a little bit slow.  However, in the back, the guide there would talk about the functions of certain parts of the castle or the significance of what we saw, and that was actually very interesting.

The museum is actually the lord’s former house, and that includes his private garden as well.

The inside of the museum was really cool too. 

The tour of the castle was second, and it was nice because the weather was definitely better than the first time I went so it was nowhere near as hot in the tower.  I also learned that there were giant fish statues on the castle to ward away fire.

After the castle, we went down to the large garden.  It was beautiful.  There were lots of bridges, plants and a really calm lake.

The garden was probably the best part of the field trip.  But after that, it was time to go back to the dorm and (shocking!) study for our test the next day.

The test went pretty well, I think.  Although, probably not as well as the first one, but still good.

After class, it was time for another Friday project.  This time it was a koto lesson.  We got to go into the traditional Japanese room for the lesson which was really cool.  Of course, we had to wear socks inside so that we didn’t damage the tatami.  But there were lots of really inconspicuous doors all over the room.  It kinda freaked me out when the one behind me started to move…. 

She explained a bit about the instrument (in Japanese…) and then she played for us.    Then we got to try and play some simple songs.  It was more difficult than it looked, for sure.  But I definitely enjoyed it.

After that, a few of us met with this guy who might become the new director of the school.  We just talked for a while and he had some pretty interesting information about Japan’s history.

After that I went to the bakery again to get lunch. 

The rest of the day was pretty quiet because a lot of people left for Tokyo that afternoon.  So those who were still at JCMU sort of just chilled out (I played video games with Jerome) that night.  Which was a good thing, because Silver Week was coming up real soon… 

“We hate this system that we’re trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how. We don’t even know what our cage looks like because we have never seen it from the outside.”

– Gore Vidal (2004)

I

UNOs appear in Wu Ming I’s identification of the New Italian Epic. A UNO is part of the ‘aberrant development’ of the latter, which:

‘…at times abandons the orbit of the novel and enters the atmosphere from unpredictable directions. ‘What’s that? Is it a bird? No, it’s a plane. No, wait a moment. It’s Superman!’ Absolutely not. It’s an Unidentified Narrative Object.

‘Fiction and non fiction, prose and poetry, diary and investigation, literature and science, mythology and comedy. In the last 15 years many Italian authors have written books which cannot be labelled or pigeon holed in any way because they contain almost everything […] It’s not just a matter of ‘intra-literary’ hybridisation, within the genres of which literature is made up but rather the utilization of whatever will serve its purpose.’
(Wu Ming I: New Italian Epic 2.0, 2008)

The inside flap of the 1965 edition of Calvino’s Racconti: hints at something similar. On the one hand, La nuvola di smog is ‘a short story tempted continually to turn into something different: either a sociological essay or else a private diary’. On the other, these temptations are regularly subverted by Calvino; this allows the text ‘to remain suspended within the environment that suits him best, between symbolic transfiguration, topicality drawn from what is true, bursts of humour and prose poetry.’

So this then is a precursor.

*

Another way to look not only at La nuvola but also at La formica argentina (its predecessor and not quite identical twin) is through the lens of anthropocentrism and at what the alternative to that might be.

‘Our society lives after the end of nature,’ according to Anthony Giddens. Along with Fukuyama he seems excited by the ending of some war. Between Man and Nature in this case. Apparently Man has won.

The ending of Kaputt involves a struggle against flies:

‘Oh here in Naples too we’ve struggled against the flies. Actually we’ve conducted an absolute war against the flies. For three years we have had a war against the flies.

‘In which case how come there are quite so many flies here in Naples?

‘Well that’s the thing. The flies won.’

(Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt)

Like Malaparte’s flies, Calvino’s ants and his smog ought to be in the background, mere phenomena, offering a quasi natural setting of some kind. But their activities, albeit compromised or potentiated by man, are what motivates the texts.

Wu Ming I comments as follows:

‘[A]nthropocentrism is alive and well, and it fights against us. Scientific discoveries, objective proofs, the crisis of the subject, the collapse of old ideologies… Nothing seems to have removed from humankind the absurd idea that we are at the centre of the universe.

[…]

‘Which is why the issue of looking at things obliquely is so vital and why (as Calvino had sensed) the literary ‘surrendering’ of viewpoints that are exterior to the human, that are non human, which can’t be identified with, will become even more so.’
(Wu Ming I: New Italian Epic 2.0, 2008)

*

Of course it’s true that Calvino’s protagonists are by no means always human. In, for example, Marcovaldo (II giardino dei gatti ostinati) or Cosmicomiche (notably Qfwfq). But this isn’t really the point. More relevant is his obliqueness. Hence this observation on the voice of the narrator in II visconte dimezzato:

‘[It’s] not the voice of a protagonist per se but rather that of a lateral or secondary character who has the role of narrator.’
(Gregory L. Lucente: An Interview with Italo Calvino; his translation, my italics)

Rather than a battle, some elemental struggle for supremacy or in the service of one viewpoint that’s supposedly more powerful than the others, there’s a rendering up to openness, a ‘surrender’.

And if that ‘surrender’ is important, which I think it is, then one clear example of it (albeit not from Calvino) would be the beginning of Genna’s Grande madre rossa, where the viewpoint (or perhaps the ‘gaze’) has become detached from whoever (or whatever) does the viewing.

*

One might, for example, creatively (mis)interpret the following:

‘Point of view and movement exclude one another.’
(Giuseppe Genna: Grande madre rossa, 2004)

The totalising stasis of historical achievement, of ‘truth’, of ideological hegemony (which all points of view have in common, even if only in embryo), of ending, is here set at odds with the endless dialectical process of which history is made up, as in Agamben’s view of time. (Benjamin hints at something similar in The Arcades Project when he draws an analogy between allegorical procedures and the relationship between commodity and price: ‘The allegorist rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to some other piece and tests if they fit together … The result can never be known beforehand, for there is no natural mediation between the two. This is just how matters stand with commodity and price. How the price of goods in each case is arrived at can never quite be foreseen.’)

In fact, this is the second of two quotations which preface Genna’s book, from Ulrike Meinhof’s final letter to her Hamburg comrades dated 13 April 1976. The German uses ‘Standpunkt’, ‘point of view’. However, up until this moment Meinhof had actually been using the more explicitly political compound, ‘Klassenstandpunkt’, ‘class position’.

Meinhof insists that ‘this class position, with which you puff yourselves up [is] unbearable.’ (By 9 May she was dead.) The ‘class situation’ she perceives is within the ‘imperialist system, with its invasion of all relationships by the market and, as a given, the process of State control of society by the ideological and repressive State,’ outside of which ‘there is only illegality and liberated territory.’ (my italics)

The novel itself starts as follows:

‘The gaze is from 10,200 metres over Milan, inside the sky. It’s freezing blue and rarefied up here.

‘The gaze is towards on high, it sees the hemisphere of ozone and cobalt, going outwards from the planet. The luminous barrier of the atmosphere prevents the stars from passing through. The heavenly body absolute, ie the sun, is on the right, extremely white. The gaze swings free and circular in the pure blue void.’
(Giuseppe Genna: Grande madre rossa, 2004)

And one could go a lot further back. To this arresting paragraph from Deledda, for example:

‘A nightingale sang on the solitary tree, which was still suffused with mist. All the coolness of the evening, all the harmony of far away serenities, and the smile of the stars towards the flowers and of the flowers towards the stars, and the proud joy of the fine young shepherds and the closed in passion of the women with their red bodices, and all the melancholy of the poor who live waiting for what’s left over from the tables of the rich, and the sorrows far away and the hopes that are there, and the past, the lost fatherland, the love, the crime, the remorse, the prayer, the canticle of the pilgrim who goes further and still further and doesn’t know where he’ll spend the night but feels himself guided by God, and the green solitude of the smallholding down below, the voice of the river and of the alders down there, the smell of the euphorbias, the laughter and the weeping of Grixenda, the laughter and the weeping of Noemi, the laughter and the weeping of Efix, the laughter and the weeping of the entire world, trembled and vibrated in the notes of the nightingale above the solitary tree that seemed higher than the mountains, with its top scraping the heavens and the tip of its topmost leaf thrust inside a star.’
(Grazia Deledda: Canne al vento, 1913)

What happens here, albeit fleetingly, is exactly that sort of transfer of utterance to some ‘secondary’ voice to which Calvino later referred. The nightingale’s ‘sang’ is a sort of aorist. Not the imperfect of background information (‘cantava’) but the passato remoto (‘cantò’) of a discrete, protagonistic act. The nightingale isn’t subalternised into a soundscape for individualised human behaviours. Nor yet is she an echo. This isn’t pathetic fallacy. Rather the fact of her nightingalehood is extended and exceeded into something else. She becomes the owner of a positive act of her own, which (even though it has no purpose beyond itself) subsumes all human activity, present, past and future; all three are represented. And yet she too is exceeded. Whereas she sits on top of the tree (‘sull’albero’) her song rises above it (‘sopra l’albero’) like the tip of the topmost leaf as it pierces the heart of some star: her viewpoint has been surrendered to something-not-of-this-world.

So clearly there are precursors and successors.

*

Of course, the smog of Calvino’s La nuvola di smog (1958) is also a physical smog, a matter of grey particulates. The Argentine ants of La formica argentina (Linepithema Humile) do exist, and in Ligurian gardens. However, Calvino employs what he elsewhere called ‘the essayistic dimension’ to address irrationality with rationalistic precision. And it is this UNO disjuncture, this anomalousness, which enables Ovid and Lucretius (or maybe Cerveteri and Bensi, respectively the ‘poet’ and the ‘philosopher’ of La speculazione edilizia) to join together in his work.

Here, for example, is Gore Vidal on La formica:

‘[It is] as minatory and strange as anything by Kafka. It is also hideously funny. In some forty pages Calvino gives us […] the human condition today. Or the dilemma of modern man. Or the disrupted environment. Or nature’s revenge. Or allegory of grace. Whatever…’
(Gore Vidal: Calvino’s Novels, NYRB 1974)

Now clearly there’s a link between, on the one hand, what Vidal calls ‘nature’s revenge’ and, on the other, what Wu Ming I says about displacing anthropocentrism. Yet equally clearly something else is going on: the anomalousness that Vidal conjures up with ‘whatever’ emerges from two directions. On the one hand the ants provide an unexpected challenge to the psyche from outside: perhaps they are going to win. On the other they are an extrusion of the psyche (some sort of over-reaction coming from within; some interior disposition) into that outer world:

‘We didn’t know then about the ants when we came to settle here. […] Thinking it over, perhaps Uncle Augusto had mentioned them once – You should see the ants down there, not like the ants we have here – but it was a sidetrack from talking about something else…’
(Calvino: La formica argentina)

*

Calvino’s ants are hardly Deledda’s nightingale and cannot be read as such. But they are perhaps the McGuffin. They allow him to ‘surrender’ control over the narrative just as the narrator in turn ‘surrenders’ to their effects. As a result the text becomes an early ‘game of combinations, following through the possibilities implicit in the material from which it has been made.’ (Una pietra sopra) Which means in turn that whether or not these ants are (for example) either the anxiety from which one hoped to get away or the challenge which one really hoped one didn’t have to face in the first place it scarcely matters any more. They could have been avoided, excluded or suppressed either way. Were it not for the exterminator, Signor Baudino (who has come to resemble an ant, and who acts a sort of untore, the paranoid interpretation, spreading the pestilence in order to benefit from it, or maybe as a sort of stand-in for Calvino, the postmodernist interpretation) it is possible that there might not even have been such a problem in the first place.

But the ants are there nonetheless. Not quite foregrounded but endlessly, self-replicatingly there: an existential emblem of subversion:

The great oak, the emperor’s pride and joy
is collapsing!
Who’d have thought it!
It wasn’t the river, nor yet did some hurricane rip
that magnificent trunk from its roots,
rather it was the ants, thousands of ants
organized, working together day by day
year after year!
(Dario Fo: La grande quercia)

Except that Calvino rejects all such programmatic engagement of that sort.

*

‘The artist manages to communicate only through the sort of isolation which a political or propagandistic type of engagement cannot affect.’
(This is Montale countering Gramsci in La solitudine dell’artista)

In his 1964 preface to Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, though clearly speaking with hindsight Calvino writes as follows. His point is a little different:

‘Today when one speaks of the ‘literature of commitment’ one generally gets it wrong, as though speaking of a literature that serves to illustrate a theme that’s already been defined, that’s independent of poetical expression. On the contrary, that which one called ‘engagement’, commitment, can be found at every level…’ (my italics)

There’s an example of one sort of level in La speculazione edilizia. The protagonist sits listening to a dispute between his two friends, Bensi and Cerveteri. He ‘really doesn’t know which side he ought to take’:

‘Bensi was seized by one of his nervous laughs … as though to express his own pained amusement at witnessing his interlocutor getting lost in a labyrinth from which he alone knew the way out.

‘We have to proceed from the ideology to the dream, not from the dream to the ideology …  Ideology runs through all your dreams rather as butterflies are pierced through by pins.

‘Cerveteri looked at him, dumbfounded.

‘Butterflies? Why did you say butterflies?’

(Calvino: La speculazione edilizia, 1957)

Finally here is Calvino, this time in propria persona, speaking about a moment in Palomar:

‘In that brief story of mine I don’t take sides but instead I limit myself to representing both positions.’
(Gregory L. Lucente: An Interview with Italo Calvino)

II

La formica and La nuvola instantiate ways of speaking. They turn on the sort of social constructivism in which meaning lies (in both senses) in the telling rather than in what the telling is about. The differences, though, are profound.

The narrator of La formica, has moved out from the town into the country. The narrator of La nuvola has travelled the other way. He arrives in the town (‘for someone who has just got off the train, the city is one big station’) as though entering into a holding formation. He takes ‘some sort of a room’:

‘I took my overcoat, my scarf and my great illusion
I left home
to go to where to where to where to where to where…
the cold ends,
to the start of another ghetto.’
(Antonello Venditti: Dove)

Here’s how the piece begins:

‘It was a time when nothing much mattered to me, when I came to settle in this town. Settle’s not quite the right word. I didn’t have any desire to settle down, what I wanted was that everything should stay fluid and provisional around me and only in that way did it seem I’d be settled inside, even though I wouldn’t have been able to explain what that meant.’
(Calvino: La nuvola di smog)

*

The narrative of La formica tells of a broken idyll: the idealised state is not to suffer from ants. The world was clean to begin with but is now revealed as infested, so the watchword must be ‘response’. Only one question remains: How should one react? With ill suppressed hysteria, like the wife of the narrator? By soldiering on, like Mr and Mrs Reginaudo, keeping cheerful along the lines of the peasant in Ho visto un re? With endless, ineffectual ingenuity, like Captain Brauni, a sort of Italian Heath Robinson? By grandly ignoring the problem, as does Madam Mauro (just as the Pintor sisters ignore their own decline in Canne al vento)? And so on.

This is, of course, the ‘allegory’, to pick up a term from Vidal: how to make a moral choice? Responses vary. Attitudes may be brought in a priori or may arise through experience. Whether the ants are something natural or have been humanly induced remains uncertain. However, the principle of ‘commitment’ to one’s own reactions or to some chosen point of view is never in any doubt.

Until, that is, the narrative of La nuvola turns all this around. The pivot is political. Calvino had published La formica back in 1952. La nuvola was written in the summer of ’58. In July ’57 Calvino had published La gran bonaccia delle antille, satirising the Stalinist stagnation of the Italian Communist Party under Togliatti and provoking a response (Stalin as Captain Ahab and so forth) from Maurizio Ferrara, Giuliano Ferrara’s father. He had resigned from the Party one month later.

*

A figurative smog is what its narrator wants, at least at first. It’s something not quite settled:

‘…it had to be entirely provisional and I wanted this to be clear to myself as well.’

The ants embody a constant, undefeatable energy, the restlessness of invasion. The smog is undefined. It’s a depression, lethargy. It subsists as a transience which perpetuates itself through always leaving traces, an elective but threatened pessimism to be set against both the failing optimism of La formica and, for example, the energetic intrusions of the narrator’s girlfriend, Claudia:

‘How could she ever have understood this unhappiness of mine? There are those who condemn themselves to the greyness of a life of increased mediocrity because they have had a grief, a misfortune; but there are also those who do it because they’ve experienced more good fortune than what they felt they could cope with.’

Unlike the world of La formica, whose supposedly ‘natural’ state is shown to have been corrupt through the original sin of having ants, La nuvola’s world is an already dirty, human infested place, one where ‘commitment’ (as it turns out) is also under threat, the commitment of performing a narrative that’s expected, which in this case is a narrative against pollution for a journal called Purification that’s owned by the same person (Cordà the engineer) who produces the pollution in the first place:

‘…it was he who wafted it without cessation over the town and APAUIC, the Agency for the Purification of the Atmosphere in Urban Industrial Centres, was a creation of the smog, born from a need to give to those who worked for the smog the hope of a life that would not be wholly smog but at the same time to celebrate its power.’

So obviously one could normalise this as an ‘allegory’ about following party lines, or indeed about the imprisonment of any ideology or orthodoxy whatsoever, about anything in which experience is greyed and reduced by being included in some sort of formulation.

But isn’t it in the nature of allegory that it resists such consistent readings?

Here is Benjamin, making precisely this point:

‘Where man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention, and to triumph over it […] If it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways. The symbol, on the other hand, … remains persistently the same’
(Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama)

*

In the symbolism of one-to-one correspondence, according to De Michele in Carmilla, ‘the symbol is already inscribed in an interpretative dimension made rigid through the pretence of objectivity.’ (my italics) Likewise metaphor ‘risks operating as a translation of sense within some pre-determined cognitive environment.’ (again the italics are mine, as is the touch of Sperber.) Whereas ‘the allegorical is autonomous with respect to the overall context of antinomy, an autonomy which the symbolic is denied.’

And since de Michele pillages Benjamin who in turn pillages Creuzer, here is Creuzer himself, explaining what he calls the ‘difference between symbolic and allegorical representation’:

‘The latter signifies merely a general concept, or an idea which differs from itself, whereas the former is the very incarnation and embodiment of the idea. In the former a process of substitution happens … In the latter the concept itself has descended into our physical world and we see it directly in the image.’
(G F Creuzer: Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen)

Which accounts for, say, allegorical objects such as the ice which tinkles in the glasses of the first class passengers travelling on de Gregori’s Titanic. Or for the complex relationship either between de Gregori’s mythical Titanic both with the (earlier) wreck of the Sirio and the fate of postwar Italy. Or the similarly complex relationship between the ‘wounded steinbock’, the historical Milanese fraudster Felice Riva and the issue of (failed) political violence in early ’70s Italy which Antonello Venditti explores in Lo stambecco ferito.

*

Allegory, ideology and memory are aspects of one another. Ideology is a sort of allegory reconfigured as memory. Thus the UK’s New Labour, freed from ideology, lost both its memory and its ability to envisage the future in the course of its coming to power: not just Agamben’s ‘means without ends’ but government by Alzheimer’s, reaching for absurd metaphorical fragments from elsewhere (Big Tent, New Deal etc) with which to remedy the lack.

For Calvino ideology presents a different problem. Here’s how he introduces it in La speculazione edilizia. First he describes the gloriously heterogeneous anomaly of a section of land owned by the protagonist’s mother. On it there’s a former chicken coop now doing service as a potting shed. It is said to have (Calvino’s parents were botanists and Calvino himself studied agriculture, albeit briefly) ‘a disharmonious aspect, between the agricultural, the scientific and the highly valued.’ It is, in short, a heterocosm. Some pages further on the protagonist’s two friends, Bensi and Cerveteri, decide to start a journal, although its title is still in doubt. According to Bensi:

‘…we have to let it be understood right from the very title that what we’re aiming for is a generalised phenomenology that brings back each separate form of knowledge into a single discourse.

‘It was on this point that the argument between Bensi and Cervetero started up … Since everything was to become part of a single discourse was the journal to bring in only what had already been incorporated into that general discourse or rather that which still lay outside?’

*

The key to La formica is the discovery of Inside. What happens when you find yourself on the inside of something else (or within an ideology) is that you lose a degree of autonomy: you live within a situation that persists beyond your control. The narrator visits the noble Madam Mauro in her house on the upper slopes. Is she troubled by ants? Is she external or internal to the situation, in other words? ‘We chase them away with a broom,’ is her response. But unfortunately:

‘at that very moment her expression of studied impassivity was traversed by something like a physical distress, and we saw that whilst remaining seated she shifted her weight quite firmly to one side, bending herself at the waist. If it hadn’t been inconsistent with the assurances that were issuing from her mouth I would have sworn that an Argentine ant, having got under her clothes, had nipped at her…’

The narrator and his wife go to the sea, which ought to be a figure of Outside, but find instead a sort of reprise of the ants. Whilst it appears as another idyll beneath the idyllic ‘calm’ of the surface there is an endless, minute activity:

‘The waters were calm, with just a continuous swapping about of colours, blue and black, getting denser as they got further away. I thought of the water stretching out in the distance like that, of the infinite, tiny grains of sand down at the bottom, where the current deposits the white husks of shells that have been polished by the waves.’

*

The key to La nuvola is the converse: the discovery of Outside. The narrator’s view of his landlady is a negative one. But though her kitchen is in chaos she maintains her public rooms like a ‘private work of art’, created through, as it were, subtraction or withdrawal of some ‘liberated territory’, producing an outside within. The cheery decisiveness of the narrator’s girlfriend, Claudia, is an intrusion into melancholia from outside. And so on.

The narrator brings Claudia to a lookout point in order to show her the view. But his own viewpoint is broken and ‘surrendered’ through what happens then. He shows her the whitish peaks of the Alps which emerge ‘from the sky’ but loses control of the narrative in a sort of Calvino sublime. He has the names but cannot name them because he doesn’t know which is which. ‘A sense of vastness had seized me. I don’t know if it was Claudia’s hat and her dress that did this or whether it was the view’:

‘We were there, looking out over the low wall. I was squeezing her waist. I was looking at countryside in all its multiple aspects, struck immediately by a need for analysis, already dissatisfied with myself because I didn’t have at my disposal an adequate nomenclature for places and for natural phenomena. She, on the other hand, was ready to transform these sensations into unexpected humorous impulses, effusions, into things she said that had nothing to do with it. And it was then that I saw that thing.’

*

‘That thing’ is actually the smog, at least as seen from outside. Whereas the ants’ greatest reality comes with the discomfort, actual or imagined, of Madam Mauro (La formica bids for totality, either the totality of solution or the unstoppable taking over of the ants) La nuvola works by limitation. Such as, in this instance, through conceiving the smog as a cloud. The narrator describes it as such, and this is the point of its greatest un-reality. But what Claudia either sees or chooses to see instead is a flock of birds.

‘And I remained there, looking out and watching for the first time from the outside the cloud that surrounded me all the time, that cloud I lived in, that lived in me and I knew that of all the variousness of the world with which I was surrounded this was the only thing that mattered to me.’

In the restaurant just below where he lives the narrator shares a table with a worker. They read separate papers. The narrator, in David Riesman’s terms, is other directed: ‘mine was the one that everybody read, the most important paper in town; I certainly had no reason to get myself noticed as someone set apart from other people by reading a different paper.’ Whereas his paper is stylish but conformist, the worker’s paper is ‘grey, incredibly dense, monotonous’ but at the same time also critical:

‘[His] was so to speak the converse of mine, not just because the ideas it put forward were the opposite but because it concerned itself with things that for my one didn’t even exist: employees given the sack, machine workers who ended up with a hand trapped in the gears…’
(my italics; Dolce’s Inchiesta a Palermo was published in 1956)

The narrator’s conception of the worker is a negative one. He projects his own lack of openness onto his interlocutor:

‘I tried to give [my impression of his paper] to my tablemate … endeavouring at the same time (since he seemed to me to be the sort who didn’t care for criticism …) to play down my judgement’s more negative aspects.’

However, he is wrong in his assessment of the other’s supposed loyalty. Indeed he perceives his being wrong as the other’s resistance to his own judgemental hegemony, whereas:

‘[i]nstead [the worker] seemed to follow his own train of thought, in which my appraisal of his paper must have seemed superfluous, out of place.

‘You know, he said, there hasn’t yet been a paper that’s been put together as it should have been put together. Not as I would like to see it done.’

The worker has formed a study group ‘amongst the young people in our business’. (Montaldi founded the Gruppo di Unità Proletaria in 1957):

‘I didn’t follow what he was saying any more. I thought that someone like [him] wasn’t at all trying to escape from the smoky greyness around us but to transform it into a moral value, into an internal norm.

‘The smog, I said.

‘The smog? Yes, I know that Cordà wants to play the modern industrialist … To purify the atmosphere … Let him go and tell his workers that. Certainly it won’t be him that does the purifying. It’s a matter of social structure … If we do manage to change it, we’ll also solve the smog problem. Us, that is. Not them.

*

The sea at the end of La formica is another attempt at the natural, freed of pollution or entailments.

Towards the end La nuvola the narrator spots a side road. There’s a mule loaded up with laundry. He comes to see the process of laundry exchange (soiled for clean) as something festive, as a different and restorative human event:

‘Between the meadows, the hedges and the poplars my gaze continued to trace the water troughs, the words Steam Laundry written on certain low buildings … the fields where the women passed by with baskets as though they were harvesting grapes to take down the dry clothes from the line … It wasn’t much. But for me, who sought no more than images to keep in view, perhaps it was enough.’

Which is how the story ends.

Magnífica entrevista a Marc Vidal donde habló sin pelos en la lengua de la actual crisis económica y financiera del país.  No se lo pierdan.

Fuente: Blog de Marc Vidal

Here is a brand new joint by Chris Brown. Love him or hate him, you must admit that this guy has some serious talent, and even better vocals. Brown’s latest, ABC, produced by Dre and Vidal, is a classic sounding joint from the young superstar. Thoughts?

Chris Brown – “ABC”

Also, check out Chris Brown’s public apology post the Rihanna stint after the break.

“I wish I had the chance to live those few moments again, but unfortunately I can’t. I’m not gonna sit here and make any excuses. I take great pride in being able to exercise self-control and what I did was inexcusable. I’m very sad and very ashamed about what I’ve done. My mother and my spiritual teachers have taught me way better than that. I have told Rihanna countless times and I’m telling you today that I’m truly truly sorry that I wasnt able to handle the situation better. I’ve spent a lot time soul searching, and I’m trying to understand what happened and why. No one is more disappointed in me than I am. As many of you know, I grew up in a home where there was domestic violence, and I saw first-hand what uncontrolled rage can do. I’ve sought help to insure what occurred in February, can never happen again, I promise that. What I did is unacceptable, 100%. I can only ask and pray that you forgive me, please. I hope that others learn from my mistake. I intend to live my life so I am truly worthy of the term role model. Thank you.”

Respect level was just raised.

Great comeback track. I am feeling the beat and the lyrics. Hopefully this is enough for all the dumb dumbs to get over past events. I see you Breezy!

Chris Brown-ABC<<<<<<LISTEN
DOWNLOAD<<<<<<

Conheça o excelente website da The Real News Network

“A Guerra Fria”

“O Imperador”

“A liberdade”

“Mídia e sociedade”

“Democratas e religião”

“O futuro”

“Sobrea mídia”

“História do Estado de Segurança Nacional”

Her passion for books and libraries propelled the Library Center’s recently hired reference department manager to a cosmopolitan career of working in libraries all over the world – from a long career in Washington, D.C., and Maryland, to interesting and productive years in Mogadishu, Somalia, and Paris, France.

Her last overseas gig was as director of the American Library in Paris, founded in 1920 by the American Library Association to provide the services of an American public library and a research center for students of American history and culture. From 1994 until 2001, she lived in Paris and always felt at home there. Rader grew up in Conway, an hour or so from here near Rader, a community of “three houses and one church” named after her family, who immigrated from Alsace-Lorraine.

In Paris, she met many “writers, eccentric expatriates and interesting people” such as Pamela Harriman, William Styron, Gregory Peck and Gore Vidal. “Many were guests of honor at fundraising events,” she said. The Americans who were instrumental in founding the library included Charles Seeger in memory of his son, Alan, who was killed at the Somme. “I spent a day with his grandson, Pete Seeger, at his home on the Hudson in New York,” she said.

“He talked about his grandfather’s involvement with the library and about his Uncle Alan, the World War I poet who wrote ‘I have a rendezvous with death,’ and gave the library a beautiful bust of Alan Seeger. Many of the books in the core collection in Paris have bookplates dedicated to Alan Seeger.” During her stint in Africa from 1982-1986, she managed a United Nations- and U.S.-funded project to establish a library in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce in Mogadishu, Somalia and worked with Somali librarians to establish the Somali Association of Libraries.

A graduate of the University of Maryland with a bachelor of arts degree in English literature and a master’s degree in library science, Rader was named in 1998 International Alumnus of the Year by the University of Maryland and Alumnus of the Year by the college’s library and information science school. For the past seven years, she worked at the St. Louis County Library, and was ready to come home to be closer to family: “The transition from Paris to St. Louis to Springfield was a good one.

” “We are so happy to have Kay with us,” said Library Center Manager Lorraine Sandstrom. “Her breadth of experience in combination with her unique background and extensive reference experience benefits both the Library Center and the entire Springfield-Greene County Library District.” “I really love public library service,” said Rader.

Her other interests are classical music, jazz and the blues, film history and, as you would expect, travel.

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With all due respect to site: read here

“So ask me,” said the veteran music hall comedian, “what is the secret of my success.” The adoring fan began: “Tell me, what is …” “Timing!” interrupted the veteran comedian, before his interlocutor could go any further. It’s an old story, but very relevant to the present economic debate. There can be no doubt, as the opposition and the governor of the have no hesitation in reminding us, and Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, forcibly told the Society of Business Economists’ annual meeting last week, that the country faces a huge medium-term fiscal crisis.

The prime minister is said to be at best unaware of the scale of the crisis, and at worst the perpetrator of what Churchill famously described as “terminological inexactitudes” on the subject. But it is to the credit of , the governor, and more seasoned , such as my old friend , that they are not calling for dramatic cuts in public expenditure, or frightening tax increases, to take effect immediately. It is all a question of … timing. King and his colleagues on the monetary policy committee are doing their best to dampen exaggerated expectations about “” and economic recovery.

The general situation is still pretty grim. It is not a “recovery” when the rate of deterioration slows down. Nor will it be a recovery by traditional standards if the 4.3% decline in the UK’s gross domestic product now forecast by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for this year is followed by a modest upturn.

One has to remember not only the sensational scale of this , but also the lost output, or unrealised potential for an increase in living standards, arising from the fact that the economy is not growing at the trend rate of (perhaps: there is much debate) some 2.5% a year. The loss would be a lot greater if it had not been for the fiscal (tax cuts; higher public spending) and monetary (reduced interest rates; desperate efforts to boost liquidity in the economy) measures taken by the Treasury and Bank of England.

My suspicion is that, when the time comes to make a start on reducing the deficit, the real debate will not be between “Tory Cuts” and ” investment” (it seems to be commonly accepted that there will have to be cuts), but between “deep spending cuts accompanied by tax cuts - or no tax increases” (a Cameron government) and “unavoidable, but fewer, spending cuts accompanied by tax increases” (a Lazarus-style resurrected Labour government). Recovery was impeded several times after the Great Depression of 1929-32 by premature fiscal tightening. And, for all the concern about the “structural” budget deficit - ie, that element not accounted for by the cyclical impact of this Great Recession – I cannot help feeling that, after a period of robust recovery, that deficit might look less “structural” than it appears to be at present.

This minority view is born of long experience of the vagaries of. And it begs the question, because for a variety of familiar reasons, “economic growth” may be a more arduous process in the future. But a credible medium-term fiscal plan will eventually be needed. Ironically, it will be needed to impress those financial markets that have got it so spectacularly wrong, and which, in the case of banks, have been bailed out (or can rely on being bailed out) with public funds that contribute to the rise in the deficit - as, indeed, does that part of the recession attributable directly or indirectly to the financial crisis.

One of the reasons the Bank is so bearish about the recovery is that it knows that insufficient credit is getting through to industry. After the feast, the famine. There is plenty of credit getting through to the bankers themselves, however.

How lucky they are that the drip torture of the political system by the media has diverted the wrath of the nation from bankers to politicians. And how unlucky for so many decent politicians that they have been tarred with the same brush as the minority of miscreants. So we have a “Labour” government coming to the end of its life having achieved little on the inequality front but apparently still being too craven to take on abuses of the financial system, even when it has rescued the wretched system. You could not make it up. As Gore Vidal says of a world in which the financial elite are offered carrots but no sticks, it is a case of “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest”.

Almost all the analysts who have been helping the Queen with her inquiries into what brought about the crisis cite the distorted rewards system as one of the key factors provoking excessive risk-taking. And here we go again. I was particularly struck by an article on The Banking Crisis and Inequality (World Economics January-March issue) by Tim Lankester, a distinguished civil servant, now President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He argues that the growth in inequalities of income and wealth in the US and UK in recent decades – quite apart from any moral and social aspects – itself contributed to the financial and economic crisis.

He sees the huge increase in top incomes, supplemented by massive borrowing, as having driven up property prices, which forced families on middle and lower incomes to borrow beyond their means: “When the financial and property bubbles burst, falling prices reduced the value of collateral pledged by borrowers – thus weakening the banks’ balance sheets.” He concludes that in capitalism’s last great crisis, in the 1970s, the problem was the declining share of profits and the rising share of wages and salaries. In the latest crisis the problem has been that “too large a share of national income has gone to high-income earners and not enough to the lower paid”. In other words, by kowtowing to the financial elite, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic helped that elite to wreck the system. And, with the intriguing exception of Mervyn King, they are kowtowing all over again.

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Francisco Vidal, ministro de Defensa
(Terra, miércoles 1 de julio de 2009):

«El viaje de Piñera a Europa es tan bien, si está de luna de miel, lo he visto a punta de patos [besos] por ahí».

Big Up VAG  Everytime…. Vidal didnt know u could sing brother… u kept that one quiet!! Also gotta big up my homegirl Natalie on her cameo aswell… tunes actually decent aswell!!