Happy birthday HST!

Gold

He is definitely not the most skilled figure skater but he is a hottie.

A sad good-by

J.D. Salinger died today. On Tuesday, I have finished re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. Boy, what a coincidence.
It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 21

わたしを離さないで

Yesterday I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go", a book from the same category as McCarthy's The Road, the one that leaves you speechless in utter shock. England, late 90s. Kathy B. describes her childhood in Hailsham, a somehow special boarding school. We meet her friends Tommy and Ruth and her teachers or "guardians", who greatly support artistic abilities of the students. However, even in these idyllic times, there are some cracks in the façade and we start to realize that something terrible is awaiting these kids in the future. We learn that they cannot have babies and they will work as "carers" and later "donors". It's in the second part of the novel, with the three friends as teenagers living in a farm community, when we are finally told the truth: the students were human clones, raised only to have their organs harvested. During the "donations", other clones, the "carers", are supporting the "donors" and after three or rarely four donations, the "donors" are "completed". In the third part of the book, Ruth and Tommy both started to "donate" and Kathy works as "carer". After Ruth "completes", Kathy and Tommy go to visit one of their former guardians, the Hailsham director, to ask if there was anything true about rumours that if two former Hailsham students were in love, their "completion" would be postponed so they could live together for some time. They are told not just that it's a pure nonsense, but also that Hailsham doesn't exist anymore, that the gentle way of raising the clones in the boarding schools have been abandoned. For something much worse, I assume. What is the most disturbing part of the novel is the fact that the clones accept their miserable destiny, their imminent deaths, without fighting or even questioning it.
One of the key scenes of the book takes place while they are still in Hailsham. Kathy has an audiotape with her favourite song called "Never let me go". As a child, she thinks that the song is about a mother and her child, as the chorus goes: "Baby, baby, never let me go...". She is singing the song in her bedroom and accidentally sees the Hailsham director looking at her, crying. She doesn't understand why the teacher cries and in fact, she may never understand. I believe that the director saw humanity deteriorating, something we should "never let go".

Montpellier, je t'aime

... and thanks to you guys, it was also so much fun.

Life Is a Bitch

Martin Zach won Mr. Czechia 2009 on Friday. Less than 24 hours later, he had an accident during some stupid ski-jumping competition, injured his cervical vertebrae that left him quadriplegic.

Smilla/Lisbeth

I just finished the second book from the Millenium series. While the first book seemed slightly out of focus (yet still worth reading), the second is a true gem, both stylistically and plot-wise. Lisbeth Salander, the major character in the Millenium books, reminded me a lot of Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen from Peter Høeg's "Smilla's Sense of Snow". Both heroines are outcasts, extremely intelligent (Smilla is a world-known glaciologist while Lisbeth is a computer guru), Scandinavians, both come from dysfunctional families... and equally hate men who hate women.


Can't wait for the third (but unfortunately also the last) book to be out (October 2009).

March 15, 1939

Hypocrites

Michael Phelps, one of the greatest athletes of all time, is 23 year old, smoked pot at some party and some idiot provided the tabloids with the photo. He was out of the training season. If he was holding a bottle of vodka, nothing would have happened. In this judgmental society though, Michael Phelps was suspended from the team for three months and has lost his Kellogg's endorsement because he was "no longer consistent" with the image of the company. Fucking hypocrites!
Seems that Seth Meyers agrees:

Time machine

Today after the swimming, I used for the first time some lotion that I bought on Saturday. In a blink of an eye, the smell sent me to the West Blaine Street, crossing the railway track on a bike and watching Mt. Baldy covered with snow. The smell of orange blossoms.

Cândido Godói

Pretty mysterious.

Yes, You Should

Yeah, things sure will be different...

Entropa

by David Černý. More here, including the clarification pdf.

UPDATE: It all turned out to be a big joke. Nevertheless, I still like the Polish design a lot, Catholic priests raising a gay flag? Priceless.

Bird nest

Stephen Sackur discussed with other four BBC correspondents what was ahead for us in the coming year. He predicts a big theme for 2009: the era of hubris is over, a new age of humility and realism is upon us. As an example, he uses the 900-meter tall skyscraper in Dubai, hoping that nobody will care about this monster anymore and the abandoned tower will serve as a nest for the desert birds.
Me too.
An extreme, neo-luddite view on the same thing:
In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club.

Dr. Aue is not my friend

but he is one of the most fascinating characters I have ever encountered. When Jonathan Littell published his "Les Bienveillantes/The Kindly Ones" in 2006, the book became a literary sensation, promptly awarded the Goncourt prize. The novel follows the raise of Dr. Max Aue to a respected SS-officer, travelling with him through the Ukrainian marshes, actively participating in the early steps of the infamous Endlösung, reaching the Caucasus where involved in the "scientific" dispute whether the Bergjuden are indeed Jews or "just" Persians and where, because of his homosexuality, became an enemy of a local SS-leading officer and was sent to Stalingrad as a punishment. There, for the first time, witnessing the fall and deterioration of the Nazi dreams, being wounded and sent back to Berlin, where he meets Albert Speer and starts to be involved in his plan of running the concentration camps "more economically". For that, he visits Auschwitz, the underground Dora factory and other camps, he is in Budapest where the monstrous 1944 transports just started and finally, he spends the last weeks of the WWII in Berlin. What is the most striking about this book is that Max Aue is an educated man, very passionate about books, art and music, and yet, we follow him through these horrors of the XX. century as those were just reasons for a slight nausea that accompanies him through the novel, which is an over 900-pages thick trip to the darkest times of the mankind. For this strange contrast between this almost adorable, young, hansome and intelligent man and his indifferent actions, some reviews even accused Littell of writting a pornography of violence. I wish I were more familiar with the structure of the classic Greek tragedies, because the last two (almost cryptic) chapters were difficult for me to understand and I feel I will have to go back soon to re-read them.

Gaza

Mark Steel comments for the Independent. Nuff said.

Resolutions, f@$k them

I went to the lab today, to water my plants and to check the ones of my co-workers. Quite a light day, in fact. Before lunch, I went to swim as always and when I got there, I found the pool full of people. Wondering what's up I realized that it must have been the usual "New Year's resolutions" that I am witnessing repeatedly every first week of September and the first week of January. I won't see any of those guys there in two weeks, isn't this world really a funny place?
Anyway, today I have also accidentally found what they call "A dress code rules for the 4-H California Summer Camps". I thought they must have developed a time machine in the US and brought this piece of joke back from the XV. century. According to these rules, one can't wear a Speedo to the swimming pool! The only option are the clown pants. Crazy, crazy world. The Crisis not included.

F@#k the neocolonialists

Sick. Sick. Sick. South Korea buys land in Madagascar. Saudis buy land in Pakistan. China is shopping for land in Laos. Libya buys land in Ukraine. Kuwait and Qatar in Cambodia.

Obamatrix

Obamanadas de gran obamagnitud, writes Julio Somoano in Metro today. The big election turnout is clearly the reason why Barack Obama will be the 44th president of the US. In Europe, a big turnout usually means a socialist government. In the US, it will mean an Afroamerican with "white" education and "white" diction, ruling the (still) most powerful country on Earth. It also meant that Proposition 8, banning the same sex marriage in California, had passed. I keep reading that one of the reasons might be the Afroamerican view on the gay "lifestyle". Apparently, around 70% of black people supported the same-sex marriage ban contrasted with 45% of Caucasians and 48% of Latinos. It seems that the oppressed became the oppressors. I cannot stop thinking of charismatic Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay politician who was assassinated in 2002 and claimed that the uncontrolled immigration of culturally different people might affect his freedoms in the Netherlands, when the minority becomes a majority and subsequently changes the liberal laws through the general elections. Let's see where does the Obama's politics move but the first quite shocking signal came by appointing "Rahmbo" Emanuel as his chief of staff.
UPDATE 8/11: Oh, no. Another disappointment.
UPDATE 9/11: Ok, maybe not. (Funny, BBC has deleted the previous article)

Dog

I am reading José Saramago's Blindness now and today I have encountered a part worth mentioning: the protagonists are discussing the time when they went blind and one of them was just in a gallery. He doesn't remember the artists and he describes what he saw and the audience is suggesting who might have painted that one. There was a picture of a cornfield with crows and cypress trees. Sounds like a Dutch painter, they said. There was a picture of a naked woman inside a conch floating on the sea. Obviously Italian, they said. And then there was a drowning dog. In that case it must have been a Spanish painter, they concluded.