A free space where people can share some ideas, that primary matter from what everyone has been made of. Ficciones, contracultura, y poesia.
Monday, August 09, 2010
Friday, August 06, 2010
FUCK YOU, TRUMAN (Hiroshima / Nagasaki Anniversary again)
The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the dropping of Little Boy
The Fat Man mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rises 18 km (11 mi, 60,000 ft) into the air from the hypocenter
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Obscenidad, estupidez y censura (Sobre el Proyecto de Ley de Censura de Obscenidad en la Prensa del Perú)
Por Jorge Bruce
Dado que la inmensa mayoría de iniciativas de nuestros congresistas configuran soberanos despropósitos, procuremos por lo menos extraer alguna enseñanza de su reiterada estupidez. La última ha sido el proyecto de censura vinculado a la obscenidad en los medios. Como todo parece indicar que esta movida es otro más de esos fallidos globos de ensayo que pueblan semanalmente nuestro cielo, vamos a tomar en serio aquello de no hay mal que por bien no venga.
Yo sabía que en mi biblioteca tenía algo preciso al respecto. Gracias a la ignorancia de nuestros padres de la patria, lo recordé. Hace tiempo me entrevistó el más erudito en materia de obscenidad entre nuestros presentadores de televisión. Al concluir, me preguntó si me interesaría recibir un compendio de trabajos suyos sobre obscenidad y pornografía. En el mejor estilo nacional dije que sí, recibí el voluminoso texto en casa y lo relegué. Hasta hoy (¡Gracias hermanón!). El entrevistador era, por supuesto, Marco Aurelio Denegri y sus textos una delicia que aguardaba con paciencia entre mis libros.
Extractos: “¿Todo lo obsceno es pornográfico? No, porque no todo lo obsceno es sexual. Lo pornográfico, en cambio, siempre lo es (…). Además de la obscenidad sexual, existe la obscenidad excretoria, que comprende la micción y la evacuación fecal; y además de la excretoria, existe la obscenidad pédica. Orinar, mear, cagar y peer son actos ciertamente obscenos, habida cuenta de que no sean adecuados los sitios de su cumplimiento”. (Recuérdese a los presidentes Piñera, recientemente fotografiado meando contra una pared, o Toledo en el neumático de un helicóptero).
Esto es producto de la cultura, claro está: “Las mujeres de la tribu Musgu, del Camerún, localizan el pudor en el culo; se lo tapan escrupulosamente, pero dejan completamente descubierta la parte anterior del cuerpo”. Mientras los tembuanos y los peruanos ocultamos el pene, los masainos, “cuyo miembro es enorme, estiman vergonzoso ocultarlo”.
De ahí la dificultad de precisar la obscenidad. Denegri: “No podemos decir ‘esto’ es obsceno –advierte Bataille–. La obscenidad es una relación. No existe la ‘obscenidad’ como existe el ‘fuego’ o la ‘sangre’ (…). Algo es obsceno si alguien lo ve y lo dice; no se trata exactamente de un objeto, sino de una relación entre un objeto y el espíritu de una persona”.
Lo cual nos lleva a la censura propuesta por nuestros preclaros representantes: “Y a propósito de la censura, si hay algo obsceno per se, eso es la censura.”
Y por eso: “Señala Bataille con justa razón que el hombre tiene permanentemente miedo de sí mismo; sus movimientos eróticos lo aterran; por eso desbarra, porque no comprende lo que pasa; incomprensión debida al desconocimiento que profesa de sí propio; pero como tampoco se esfuerza por conocerse, no domina lo que le aterra y sigue inevitablemente cometiendo estupideces.
Mientras nos espante el erotismo y nos angustie el placer, habrá censura, vale decir estupidez a borbotones, expulsada con el mismo arrebato con que brota el petróleo de la tierra”.
Acallado el ruido del proyecto retrógrado, ¡que alguna editorial publique los escritos de Denegri!
Friday, June 18, 2010
Two essays about Saramago's Blindness
Comments of Bob Corbett
October 2001
How are we to imagine a world in which some central part of our meaning system suddenly disappears? I've played with the idea in thinking about having survived an atomic war which destroyed most humans, and all the basic infrastructures of everyday life. The problems one runs into even in such a game of imagination is to be consistent and being able to step far enough away to see what it is that really changes. In my day-dreaming imaginings I never went so far as to even dare to consider the inner changes in my person or the other survivors around me. It was much more than I could do to even anticipate and manage the physical problems of change and how to deal with them.
Jose Saramago presents us with exactly such a problematic, yet his masterful analysis deals not only with the physical aspects of change and how his characters deal with them, but he inters into the psychological realm and astounds us with his insights and brilliance.
A man is sitting at a traffic light one day waiting for the light to turn green and he suddenly goes blind. This is the "first blind man." Slowly this mysterious form of blindness, the like not known in the literature of modern medicine, spreads to the whole nation. As best we know, there is only one sighted person left in the realm. We follow a cast of fewer than 10 characters in detail. We have no names, only descriptors. After all one character tells us "blind people need no names." There is the first blind man, the first blind man's wife. The blind man had a seeming good semaritan who helps him home and but then steals his car and is thus called the man who had stole the car. There is the doctor whom he consults and the doctor's wife, the girl with dark glasses, the boy with the squint and the man with the black eye patch. There are a few others, but these become our key characters, later on adding the dog of tears.
In the early days of the white blindness in which each person seems only a white creamy mass, the government freaks out at the quick contagion of it and inters a large number of the blind in an old insane asylum. There, in scenes which are quite reminiscent of Golding's The Lord of the Flies, pure anarchy reigns and a gang sets itself up to control the government delivered food.
Soon however, the 7 central characters have escaped the asylum when it turns out that all the guards who are keeping them interred have themselves gone blind and they simply walk out into a world of all blind people.
All blind people that is, save one. The doctor's wife somehow remains sighted and she is able to give this small group the advantages that allows it to survive when others could not. She can locate places, keep them all in line and, most importantly, find food and water in a world gone blind.
What is this odd book of Jose Saramago? Is it an allegory? If so an allegory of what? Of the dependency of humans on basic systems of order in the manner of Thomas Hobbes? Is it a condemnation of humans as being only on the edge of civilization and being shown to be ready to plunge into barbarism at the least shaking of central systems of order? Or on a more positive note, is the tiny group of 7 the hopeful core that even in such catastrophic circumstances would maintain humanity and re-create a safer environment? Were this latter the case then the critic has a difficult time explaining the presence of the one sighted person who survives and leads. Or does this problematic suggest that leaders are essential to the continuation of the human species?
Or, abandoning the allegory theory, is this simply an astonishing tour-de-force of imagination, being just what it is literally and no more, the investigation of the logic of life when something such as sight disappears and the sighted woman is necessary as a sop since no other believable mode of survival would be easily available. This view would harmonize with the direction one finds in other Saramago novels especially The Stone Raft and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, perhaps even of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Saramago seems to have a passion for playing with alternative realities and attending with care to the logic of the system he once sets up.
I believe I lean much more to this notion that we are to understand Blindness not as an allegory, but as an exploration of an alternative reality. On his view we are freer to remain inside the story as given and just marvel at how he unravels the story and develops not only the physical ramifications, but especially how he deals with the inner realities and changes in the character's minds. However, on this view we are left with the curious status of the doctor's wife's sight, and then the even more curious recurrence of the "special" dog which we had in The Stone Raft as well. Saramago seems to like dogs in nearly occult roles in his fantasies. This one, however, plays no central as the dog in The Stone Raft. Rather, it gets it name by licking away the tears of the doctor's wife when she breaks down in near despair on see what has happened to the blind city. The dog of tears remains with the group the rest of the tale, but seems to have no other role.
After just the first few pages I nearly lost my faith in Saramago. The blind man goes blind at the stop sign, gets taken home by the car thief and soon is taken to the doctor, who is an ophthalmologist, by his wife. I began to wonder -- how in the world can he sustain an entire moderately long novel as the story of this blind guy. Where could this go? What is there to build on? I suspected I may have had a weak Saramago novel in my hand. And then the thunderous second shoe drops, the doctor goes blind in the night. I simply gasped aloud on the subway I was riding when that happened. I knew I was now in for something odd, but I had no idea just how odd and soon people were falling into blindness with great rapidity and I was hooked on a new alternative world according to Saramago. The ending, which I won't mention was very unsatisfactory to me, but I'll leave that to the reader to discover and evaluate on his or her own.
Jose Saramago is one of the great masters of storytelling and fiction of our time. His language is impeccable and he plays with it often, calling attention to it, even interrupting the story to reflect on words and modes of expressing thoughts. The story itself is captivating and in the later sections when the group of 7 are wandering in this nightmare of a city where all are blind is one of the most frightful and even terrifying scenes I know in fiction. This is in no way a horror story, yet I can't imagine a novel in the genre of horror rising to the level of terror that Saramago strikes in us in these scenes of wandering bands of blind people struggling to find food and stay alive. It is a macabre and brilliant painting of pictures for the verbally sighted and yet another addition to the marvelous list of Saramago triumphs.
Special thanks to George Snedeker for this note:
George Snedeker
I have just read your review of Saramago's BLINDNESS. As a visually impaired person, I have been trying to make sense of his use of blindness as a trope. blindness operates in his text as both an intertextual sign and as a referent. blindness represents limitation. this is true in the very obvious sense of the analogy between knowing and seeing. blindness also leads the characters to return to the state of nature. I have always been troubled by the doctor's wife. her eyes allow her to lead the others to safety. she is also necessary as the narrator of the story. without her, who would describe the events and scenes of the novel.
BETWEEN METAPHOR AND REFERENT:Reading Saramago's "Blindness"
George Snedeker
Sociology Program
SUNY/College at Old Westbury
Jose Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Although several of his books were available in English translation, not many people in the United States had read his novels prior to the award. Soon his latest novel, Blindness, was on the New York Times Best-Seller List. If I had not previously read two of his earlier books, I would not have been much interested in reading an allegorical novel that uses blindness as its master sign.
Saramago uses a quotation from the Book of Exhortations as the epigram to Blindness: "If you can see, look. If you can look, observe". Near the end of the novel, when the blind people are getting their vision back, he has one of his characters remark:" I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see" (292). These two quotations indicate the political and philosophical intention of the novel. They indicate, but do not disclose it. The greatest problem with an allegorical novel like Blindness is that it grants too much freedom to the reader. It allows too many interpretations.
Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for both personal misfortune and social catastrophe. The story begins when the first blind man loses his vision in his car while waiting for a traffic light to change. The man who helps him get safely home goes back and steals his car. The next day the wife of the first blind man takes him to see the eye doctor. Within a few days, the wife of the first blind man, the car thief, the doctor and all of the patients in his waiting room also go blind. The only character in the novel that miraculously avoids the affliction of blindness is the doctor's wife.
With a large number of people going blind quickly and with no apparent cause, public health officials panic and the blind are interned in a former mental hospital to protect the population from infection.
They are provided with food but are left to fend for themselves within the walls of the abandoned mental hospital. Soldiers keep watch and threaten to kill anyone who tries to escape.
The numbers of infected persons increases rapidly. New groups of blind people are imprisoned in the hospital. Among the new inmates are a group of hoodlums, one of whom possesses a gun. The hoodlums soon demand that the other internees pay for their food and provide them with women to fulfill their sexual desires. This outrage soon leads to a revolt. A few days later, the blind internees realize that the entire population of the city has gone blind and they leave the hospital in search of food.
As the narrative of Blindness progresses, the conditions of the blind continue to get worse. They find themselves in a society that no longer functions. Blind people roam the streets looking for food and shelter. After scavenging for days, they realize that soon it will be impossible to obtain enough nourishment to keep alive. While they are at the edge of despair their vision miraculously begins to return. The novel abruptly ends without making clear in what ways people have been transformed by the horrific experience of collective blindness.
As I mentioned earlier, the doctor's wife is the only character who does not go blind. She remains free from infection. This allows her to assist the group of blind people. Her eyes allow her to exercise a degree of control over the situation. It is she who kills the blind man with the gun. It is she who leads the blind in their search for food and shelter.
Blindness is clearly a sign of limitation in this novel. It causes the entire society to no longer function. It also places blind people in the condition of physical jeopardy and psychological torment. The society no longer functions because the blind are not able to provide the ordinary services that we are routinely dependent upon for survival: the production and distribution of food, water and electricity and the maintenance of the infrastructure of transportation and communication.
The central problem with Saramago's novel is that his master sign "blindness" is a floating signifier. No matter what his intention, the metaphor of blindness has a real referent. Readers of this novel are faced with an ambiguity, the relationship between the "symbolic" and the "real". The authorial voice of the novel and the critical response which has appeared in the mainstream press has occluded the problem of the referent. Saramago writes as if his metaphorical depiction of misfortune and catastrophe could somehow be innocent of the cultural meanings that are routinely associated with visual impairment. It is interesting to note that reviews which have appeared in the mainstream press fail to even consider that the use of blindness as a metaphor might pose a problem.
Reviewers have often made the comparison between Blindness and Camus' Plague, Kafka's Trial and Golding's Lord of the Flies. None of the reviews I have read have made the more obvious comparison to H.G. Wells' short story "The Country of the Blind". In this story, Wells uses blindness to represent a restricting society and the struggle of the individual against social conformity. Both Saramago and Wells use blindness as a sign of limitation because this idea is readily available. It is part of our common stock of cultural images. They use "blindness" for the same reason that Golding uses "children" in Lord of the Flies.
Like Camus, Saramago uses disease as a way of representing social and political crisis. Both authors emphasize the human response to social catastrophe. However, there is a problem with the representation of historical events by means of a medical model. In this representation, nature displaces the social and replaces it with an image of fate. As a consequence, blindness is defined as a physical condition.
Saramago's writings have often been discussed as an example of "magic realism". However, Blindness has more in common with Kafka's allegorical novels than it does with works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie.
The fundamental problem posed by allegorical novels is how to locate their political and social meaning. Saramago provides his readers with few clues to guide interpretation. The story is set in an unnamed country, somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century. There are few identifying characteristics that provide a context for the events that transpire.
The epidemic of blindness takes place without any apparent cause; the disease spreads quickly and as the novel ends the blind are getting their vision back. Their recovery has as little explanation as the onset of blindness. The problem the reader is faced with is what to make of the metaphorical illness, the social catastrophe, and the miraculous recovery. What does it all mean?
Near the end of the book, Saramago has one of his characters suggest that perhaps they had never really been blind, that perhaps the sighted do not really see. If this is meant to be the underlying message of the novel it is, in fact, not a very original idea, since the analogy between "seeing" and "understanding" is one of the oldest ideas in Western philosophy. It is perhaps most clearly illustrated in Book 7 of The Republic, where Plato uses a visual metaphor to illustrate the limits of human understanding. He describes a cave where several people are seated in such a way that they cannot see the direct light of the fire. Instead, they can only see its distorted shadows upon the wall of the cave.
I suspect that Saramago is more interested in probing the human capacity to understand social reality than the Platonic concept of Absolute Truth. I wish he had chosen a better way of representing this quest.
Bibliography
Plato. 1961.The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Saramago, Jose. 1997. Blindness. New York: Harcourt Brace
Wells, H. G. 1911. The Country of The Blind and Other Stories. London: T. Nelson
Muere escritor portugués José Saramago
Muere escritor portugués José Saramago
Vie, 18/06/2010 - 07:34
El escritor portugués y Premio Nobel de Literatura José Saramago falleció hoy, viernes, en su casa de Lanzarote a los 87 años de edad, a causa de una leucemia crónica, informaron fuentes de la familia.
La muerte se produjo cuando el escritor se encontraba en su residencia canaria, acompañado por su mujer y traductora, Pilar del Río.
José Saramago había pasado una noche tranquila. Tras desayunar con normalidad y haber mantenido una conversación con su esposa, comenzó a sentirse mal y al poco tiempo falleció, explicaron las citadas fuentes. (Madrid, EFE)
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Lukanikos, the Greek [awsome] riot dog
Monday, April 26, 2010
En Octubre No Hay Milagros (extracto)
Y así como a Don Lucho, mañana, a ti, también, pueden sacarte los muebles a la calle. Será como abrirte el estómago y dejar, a la mirada pública, tus intestinos: lo más íntimo que tienes. Entonces, después de muchos años de trabajo, comprenderás que nunca tuviste un pedacito de tierra para vivir, que todo lo tuyo fue ajeno, que ni siquiera eres dueño de tu patria. Y todos estarán contra ti: los pobres sólo verán, desde lejos, tu desgracia; los ricos dirán que fuiste un hombre sin voluntad, que te faltó energía para conquistar un sitio en tu país. Y si reclamas, la fuerza del orden te acusará de rebeldía y, violentos, te enseñarán los deberes de todo buen ciudadano. La iglesia te aconsejará paciencia, humildad; los políticos te prometerán un cielo terrenal a cambio de un voto; los sabios et avergonzarán al demostrar que no supiste emplear la inteligencia para hacer fortuna; los poetas señoritos verán tus cosas en la calle y luego cantarán al geranio de tu maceta rota o a tu gato que juega sonámbulo con el sol; los escritores puros tomarán debida nota de tu tragedia y escribirán un cuento perfecto en donde tú sólo serás un personaje interesante para sus artificios verbales. Y será anti-literario, nada formal, para los críticos de los diarios de Don Manuel, dialogar contigo, a través de esta novela, decirte que la revolución socialista depende de la acción colectiva y consciente de todos los que, como tú, no tienen un pedacito de tierra en su país, para vivir.
En Octubre No Hay Milagros
Oswaldo Reynoso
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Explanation of the Higgs Boson
A quasi-political Explanation of the Higgs Boson;
for Mr Waldegrave, UK Science Minister 1993.
1. The Higgs Mechanism
2. The Higgs Boson.
from David J. Miller, Physics and Astronomy, University College London.
(cartoons courtesy of CERN).
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Carnegie Mellon Student Uses Skin as Input For Smart Phones and Other Mobile Devices
Chris Harrison demonstrates Skinput technology.
PITTSBURGH—A combination of simple bio-acoustic sensors and some sophisticated machine learning makes it possible for people to use their fingers or forearms — and potentially, any part of their bodies — as touchpads to control smart phones or other mobile devices.
The technology, called Skinput, was developed by Chris Harrison, a third-year Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), along with Desney Tan and Dan Morris of Microsoft Research. Harrison will describe the technology in a paper to be presented on Monday, April 12, at CHI 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery's annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Ga.
Skinput, www.chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput/, could help people take better advantage of the tremendous computing power now available in compact devices that can be easily worn or carried. The diminutive size that makes smart phones, MP3 players and other devices so portable also severely limits the size and utility of the keypads, touchscreens and jog wheels typically used to control them.
"With Skinput, we can use our own skin — the body's largest organ — as an input device," Harrison said. "It's kind of crazy to think we could summon interfaces onto our bodies, but it turns out to make a lot of sense. Our skin is always with us, and makes the ultimate interactive touch surface."
In a prototype developed while Harrison was an intern at Microsoft Research last summer, acoustic sensors are attached to the upper arm. These sensors capture sound generated by such actions as flicking or tapping fingers together, or tapping the forearm. This sound is not transmitted through the air, but by transverse waves through the skin and by longitudinal, or compressive, waves through the bones.
Harrison and his colleagues found that the tap of each fingertip, a tap to one of five locations on the arm, or a tap to one of 10 locations on the forearm produces a unique acoustic signature that machine learning programs could learn to identify. These computer programs, which improve with experience, were able to determine the signature of each type of tap by analyzing 186 different features of the acoustic signals, including frequencies and amplitude.
In a trial involving 20 subjects, the system was able to classify the inputs with 88 percent accuracy overall. Accuracy depended in part on proximity of the sensors to the input; forearm taps could be identified with 96 percent accuracy when sensors were attached below the elbow, and 88 percent accuracy when the sensors were above the elbow. Finger flicks could be identified with 97 percent accuracy.
"There's nothing super sophisticated about the sensor itself," Harrison said, "but it does require some unusual processing. It's sort of like the computer mouse — the device mechanics themselves aren't revolutionary, but are used in a revolutionary way." The sensor is an array of highly tuned vibration sensors — cantilevered piezo films.
The prototype armband includes both the sensor array and a small projector that can superimpose colored buttons onto the wearer's forearm, which can be used to navigate through menus of commands. Additionally, a keypad can be projected on the palm of the hand. Simple devices, such as MP3 players, might be controlled simply by tapping fingertips, without need of superimposed buttons; in fact, Skinput can take advantage of proprioception — a person's sense of body configuration — for eyes-free interaction.
Though the prototype is of substantial size and designed to fit the upper arm, the sensor array could easily be miniaturized so that it could be worn much like a wristwatch, Harrison said.
Testing indicates the accuracy of Skinput is reduced in heavier, fleshier people and that age and sex might also affect accuracy. Running or jogging also can generate noise and degrade the signals, the researchers report, but the amount of testing was limited and accuracy likely would improve as the machine learning programs receive more training under such conditions.
Harrison, who delights in "blurring the lines between technology and magic," is a prodigious inventor. Last year, he launched a company, Invynt LLC, to market a technology he calls "Lean and Zoom," which automatically magnifies the image on a computer monitor as the user leans toward the screen. He also has developed a technique to create a pseudo-3D experience for videoconferencing using a single webcam at each conference site. Another project explored how touchscreens can be enhanced with tactile buttons that can change shape as virtual interfaces on the touchscreen change.
Skinput is an extension of an earlier invention by Harrison called Scratch Input, which used acoustic microphones to enable users to control cell phones and other devices by tapping or scratching on tables, walls or other surfaces.
"Chris is a rising star," said Scott Hudson, HCII professor and Harrison's faculty adviser. "Even though he's a comparatively new Ph.D. student, the very innovative nature of his work has garnered a lot of attention both in the HCI research community and beyond."
The HCII is a unit of Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, one of the world's leading centers for computer science research and education. Follow the School of Computer Science on Twitter @SCSatCMU.
###
Contact:
Byron Spice
412-268-9068
bspice@cs.cmu.edu
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