El vaso quebrado

Hay veces en que el alma
se quiebra como un vaso,
y antes de que se rompa
y muera (porque las cosas mueren
también) llénalo de agua
y bebe, quiero decir que dejes
las palabras gastadas, bien lavadas,
en el fondo quebrado
de tu alma,
y que, si pueden, canten.

(el poema).

Francisco Brines.

(artículo en el Babelia de hoy)

Un monstre meravellós i mític

ARA vol ser el referent informatiu sòlid en aquest moment de canvi i de noves agendes. ARA vol ser la certesa diària dels que busquen noves fonts i noves visions, que concordin amb les que es van obrint pas amb naturalitat al compàs del canvi generacional i el curs de la història. ARA vol fer aquesta contribució amb humilitat, sense complexos, i amb plena llibertat, parlant de tot.

Tenim clar que la veritat té múltiples cares, que és un monstre meravellós i mític, que sempre la cerquem i mai l’arribem a trobar. Tindrem, doncs, la ingenuïtat i la valentia d’empaitar-la a cada pas i la humilitat de saber que mai serà nostra del tot. I tindrem, alhora, la convicció que el diari és dels qui el fem, però també dels qui el llegeixen. I per això, en primer lloc, entenem que un diari és més que un negoci privat.

Diari ARA, manifest fundacional.

The book will save you

“The book will save you.” Yehoshua told him, “Don’t change the book. It is an organic thing. Go with the book, and the new elements that will enter, let them enter.”

The day after the end of shivah, [David] Grossman returned to his novel. Everything was now broken to pieces—the world was no longer a home. Yet if this was to be his fate he wanted to explore its every nuance, and in this novel he could. The book would become his home. For that, at least, he was grateful. The story and the themes of the novel didn’t change, but the process of writing became heightened, as if he were seeing with new eyes.

Within a year, the novel was finished, and in 2008 “Isha Borachat Mi’bsora” (“Woman Flees Tidings”) was published in Israel. An English translation, by Jessica Cohen, appears this month, under the title “To the End of the Land.” Grossman told me, “This book was such an act of choosing life.”

George Packer, The New Yorker. The unconsoled.

Wooing and hanging

It has been described as one of the greatest battles of all time -- the fight between Henry V of England and the French army on October 25, 1415, at Agincourt in northern France. Henry, whose goal was to reclaim English territory seized by France in earlier centuries, had approximately 6,000 men. The French army, depending on which historical report you read, had anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 soldiers, many of them knights in armor prepared to fight on foot and on horseback. The English army had neither armor nor horses, and they were exhausted by their two-month trek across France trying to reach what was then the English port of Calais.

But they did have what turned out to be a decisive advantage -- Henry V's leadership skills and his ability to innovate in ways that would turn significant disadvantages into game-winning advantages. In addition, before the battle started, he delivered one of the most famous motivational speeches in history -- at least as it is written in Shakespeare's Henry V. The speech has been played on Allied ships crossing the English Channel to Normandy during World War II; in locker rooms by football coaches losing at half time, and on the Internet for U.S. soldiers about to leave for duty in Iraq.

Here is how Henry won: He stopped his army on a field that was flanked on either side by woodlands, thus forcing the French army to move forward through a narrow funnel and neutralizing their superior numbers. He took full advantage of a rainfall that had muddied the battlefield and that would prove disastrous for the armored French soldiers -- when they slipped backwards wearing their 60-pound armor, they couldn't hoist themselves back up; when they fell forward, they drowned in the mud.

In addition, rather than rely on the more traditional, easy-to-use crossbow, Henry chose the long bow, which could fire arrows more quickly and at greater range. The resulting hail of arrows killed French soldiers behind the front line, taking away urgently needed reinforcements. Henry armed his men with pikes a foot longer than those used by the French, allowing English soldiers in hand-to-hand combat to deliver the first, and usually lethal, blow. And, in what has been described as a last minute innovation, Henry planted sharp stakes in the ground just at the point of the battle's engagement. The French army's horses, rushing forward, were impaled on the stakes and fell to the ground, crushing soldiers around them and blocking the path forward for others.

When the fighting stopped after several hours, the French had lost about 6,000 men, and the English about 450.

Some version of this battle has been told in history books, in Shakespeare's play and, two weeks ago, by Carol and Ken Adelman, founders of Movers & Shakespeares, which uses the world's greatest playwright to teach modern management skills to executives. The Adelmans were at Wharton as part of a Wharton executive education program called "The Leadership Journey."

Carol Adelman is director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Prosperity where, among other things, she developed the annual Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances. Ken Adelman is a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and director of the U.S. Arms Control & Disarmament Agency during the Reagan administration.

The two started Movers & Shakespeares eight years ago because, as Carol noted during the course, William Shakespeare offers his audience exceptionally astute insights into human nature and has a genius for telling stories, which, she suggested, "is the best way to learn." The downside to the bard, she added, is that the language can be tedious and hard to understand -- something that comes as no surprise to high school students everywhere.

The Adelmans' approach is to delve into the language and extract leadership lessons from Shakespeare's plays. In this particular session, the focus was on Henry V, brought to life by a series of scenes from the 1989 movie starring Kenneth Branagh as Henry and Emma Thompson as the French princess Katharine. The class discussion centered on the battle scene, the motivation speech, Henry's wooing of Katharine, the punishment meted out to a soldier caught stealing, and the conference between Henry V and the Archbishop of Canterbury before Henry sets sail for France.

From the description of the battle at Agincourt, it's clear that Henry V displayed remarkable leadership capabilities, said Ken Adelman. He led by example, situating himself in the middle of the fighting whereas the French king, Charles VI, stayed in Paris, leaving the army under the leadership of a group of nobles. "Henry was willing to innovate, recognizing, for example, the superiority of the long bow and making sure his men were well-trained in how to use it," Adelman noted. Before Agincourt, the English army was 80% foot soldiers and 20% archers. After Agincourt, it was 20% foot soldiers and 80% archers.

Yet perhaps the English army's biggest asset was the speech Henry made to his men just before going into battle, including the famous sentence, "All things are ready if our minds be so." (The words are Shakespeare's; the actual text of the speech does not exist.) Even before speaking, Henry walks among his troops listening to what they are saying and feeling, and then positions himself in their midst to deliver his address. By contrast, the French leaders (in the Branagh movie) are shown at the head of their army, uttering confident phrases unable to be heard by any of their soldiers.

Here are excerpts from Henry's speech in the play:

"That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us...

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that shed his blood with me
Shall be my brother."

Knowledge@Wharton. What Shakespeare's 'Henry V' tells us about leadership, motivation, wooing and Hanging.

The darkest poem

It seems to me to be the darkest poem that he wrote about the death of Sylvia Plath. There is a kind of deafening agony, blinding agony to this new poem. It seems to touch a deeper, darker place than any poem he’s ever written.

There’s undoubtedly plenty of agony in the poem, but its power to move is closer to that of an uncontrolled diary entry than of a speech by King Lear or Macbeth.

“Last Letter” is unlikely to do much to rehabilitate Hughes with those who hold him responsible for the death of the great young star of American poetry—and for the suicide of Assia Wevill, his companion after Plath’s death, some six years later. (Like Plath, Assia gassed herself, and killed her four-year old daughter by Hughes, Shura, as well.) It was his affair with Assia, begun in the summer of 1962, that precipitated his separation from Plath, and a decisive moment inBirthday Letters, his narrative of the events leading up to Plath’s suicide, comes in the poem “The Inscription,” which recounts an occasion when husband and wife nearly got back together; in the course of this almost-reconciliation, however, Plath’s eyes happen to fall on Hughes’s edition of Shakespeare, a volume that in a fit of fury she had earlier ripped to pieces. The book has been miraculously “resurrected”:

Wondering, with unbelieving fingers,
She opened it. She read the inscription. She closed it
Like the running animal that receives
The fatal bullet without a faltering check
In its stride.

The resurrector of the book who inscribed it was of course Assia.

Well, Assia Wevill, or so “Last Letter” tells us, was not the woman in whose arms Hughes spent the weekend his wife committed suicide; he was in fact with one Susan Alliston. Alliston, like Plath, was a poet who would die young—not by her own hand, but of Hodgkin’s disease, in 1969.

Mark Ford, The New york Review of Books. Ted Hugues's "Last Letter".

Bolas de mierda (liberalismo de pacotilla)

Todos esos medios de comunicación que una y otra vez ponen el grito en el cielo cuando en Catalunya se multa a las empresas que incumplen la ley de lenguas y no tienen sus rótulos como mínimo en catalán han pasado de puntillas por la noticia de que, el año pasado, la Generalitat de Catalunya multó a 94 empresas por no etiquetar en castellano. Son esos diarios, esas radios y esas cadenas de tele que generan gigantescas bolas de mierda a base de deformar la realidad, voceando que aquí se prohíbe rotular en español y que a quien no habla en catalán nos lo comemos con patatas fritas para desayunar. A la cabeza de ese alud de patrañas, el Partido Popular y su lazarillo, Ciudadanos, que, en esta ocasión, han decidido mirar hacia otro lado y silbar Siboney, que es la mejor melodía para disimular.

Pues sí: el año pasado la Generalitat multó a 94 empresas por no etiquetar en castellano y en esta ocasión la caverna no dice ni mu. Silencio absoluto. Ni una queja, ni un gemido, mucho menos un asomo de rebelión. Nada de "¡Vaya atropello!". Nada de "¡Ustedes no tienen derecho a decirme en qué lengua debo etiquetar mis productos!". Ningún grito de "¡Libertad!". ¿Por qué no repiten ahora aquello tan sobado de "Prohibido prohibir"? Leo en El País, el sábado, que Jordi Anguera, director de la Agència Catalana del Consum, explica diversas cosas respecto a esas multas. Una: "La regulación, en el caso del etiquetaje, es favorable al castellano. Hay cerca de 120 leyes estatales que obligan a etiquetar en español". Ojo al dato: ¡"120 leyes estatales que obligan a etiquetar en español"! Por mucho que aguzo el oído no oigo que nadie se rasgue las vestiduras, ni que aúllen en Intereconomía. Otra cosa que explica Anguera: "Las indicaciones obligatorias del etiquetado deberán figurar, al menos, en castellano, lengua española oficial del Estado". ¿Dónde están ahora las acusaciones de nazis, por seguir la ley? Escasamente críticos con el nazismo –y su versión cheli, el franquismo–, a la mínima llaman nazi a cualquiera que no piense como ellos y, ante las multas que los de la Generalitat imponen por no etiquetar en castellano, se callan y esta vez no los llaman nazis. ¿Qué pasa? Explica también El País que la Generalitat "multó a la multinacional del mueble Ikea con 8.000 euros por varias deficiencias en la información al consumidor; entre otras, no disponía del etiquetaje en castellano". Si las multas hubiesen sido por no etiquetar en catalán, ya habría ahora mismo dos nutridas manifestaciones de catorce o quince personas: una frente a Ikea Montigalà y la otra frente a Ikea L'Hospitalet –con Albert Rivera y Sánchez Camacho a la cabeza, respectivamente–, pidiendo que no se multe a nadie y exigiendo que de una vez por todas acabe esta terrible dictadura nacionalsocialista catalana.

Quim Monzó, La Vanguardia. Siboney, en tu boca la miel puso su dulzor.

Crises are not the end of the world

Kenneth Rogoff, who lives in Boston, is extremely near-sighted. With his bald head and wire-rimmed glasses, he bears a passing resemblance to a character in a Woody Allen film. He has the biography of a misfit -- a chess genius who lost himself in the game. Rogoff won the New York State Open at 14, and at 15 he played simultaneously against 26 opponents with his eyes blindfolded. He won the title of a grand master at 25, but then he stopped playing chess, like an alcoholic going cold turkey. He hasn't touched a chess piece in 30 years. It's "too dangerous," he says.

Instead, he threw himself into a much bigger game: the global economy. How can the complexity of the world be mastered? How effective are models, and on what basis do institutions like the IMF make their decisions?

In his book, Rogoff suggests that many of the theories currently in circulation cannot be correct. "Wall Street," says Rogoff, by which he means all stock markets, "ultimately believes in a simple calculation: If prices fall by 4 percent today, they will eventually rise by 8 percent. We have demonstrated that this isn't true. It's more complicated than that. And much of this we don't understand."

Rogoff and Reinhart show that the Lehman case was a symptom for the biggest recession since the 1930s, which was fed by many factors. Most of all, the two authors show that financial crises like the current crisis always lead to national debt crises, no matter what remedies governments take. Unemployment and bailouts cause public deficits to explode, leading to panicked cost-cutting programs, which in turn lead to new recessions. This vicious cycle is what is happening today, a cycle Rogoff and Reinhart described before Greece's troubles began. Anyone who reads their book can discover what is likely to happen next.

Sitting in his bare office at Harvard University with the shades drawn, Rogoff says, coolly and soberly: "A Greek bankruptcy is unavoidable. There is a 95 percent chance that Spain will go bankrupt. Hungary is on the brink. Things will get much worse in Eastern Europe. We will have a certain number of countries that will go bankrupt. We will have a number of euro zone countries that would be well advised to take a sabbatical from the euro for a year. The situation in the United States is very worrisome. The markets will refuse to tolerate this level of debt." The worst of it is that it sounds as if he were expressing unavoidable facts.

"What we need is radical change," Rogoff says, but he doesn't seem to believe that it's possible. Not too long ago, he says, the US government asked him to comment on a draft bill on the regulation of the financial sector. "The draft had 2,000 pages," says Rogoff. "I don't know what to say to that. I suspect that those 2,000 pages are filled with enough loopholes that Wall Street will discover and exploit to come up with new business models."

Is he implying that there is no way out? "There are many ways to skin this cat," he says. A real reform of the banking and finance sector would have to drastically shrink the system to a business volume that existed 30 years ago. Rogoff says: "The financial market, with all of its products, adds up to $200 trillion, $120 trillion of which represents trading in debt securities. I remember a speech given by Angela Merkel. She said that the Americans make the profits while distributing the risks, with all those debt securities, worldwide. That's true. This could be curbed."

Rogoff says that he never understood why banks are allowed to inflate their capital with loans. Why can they do business with many times more capital than is available to them? "I don't know," says Rogoff. "There's no reasonable explanation." According to Rogoff, new regulatory institutions would have to be created that were on a par with the financial industry and that had drastic sanctioning powers.

He can't understand why the IMF and many governments are patting themselves on the back for their crisis management efforts. "We are fundamentally too quick with bailout packages and too hesitant with default," he says. Rogoff believes that the G-20 and the IMF, with their protective mechanisms, have already pre-programmed future misconduct. Experts call this a "moral hazard," the notion that bailout packages, instead of preventing crises, simply create new ones. "It boils down to the banks ultimately speculating with taxpayer money," says Rogoff.

But that's human nature, which Rogoff has studied in various ways: on the chessboard, in life and on the basis of the numbers he is constantly producing. He has concluded that the notion of "normalcy" constantly reinvents itself. France has been bankrupt before, Greece has been bankrupt five times in 200 years, and the German Reich was both insolvent and bankrupt. Crises, says Rogoff, are crises, not the end of the world.

Klaus Brinkbäumer, Ullrich Ficthner. Der Spiegel. An inside view of the IMF's massive global influence.

Vencedores y vencidos

"Sentía repugnancia ante tan numerosos asesinatos, no podía aprobarlos". El capellán de la cárcel de Torrero (Zaragoza), Gumersindo de Estella, tampoco pudo impedirlos, pero dejó escritas unas estremecedoras memorias, en las que relató todas las atrocidades del franquismo de las que fue testigo. En las tapias del cementerio de la ciudad fueron fusilados 3.543 republicanos: 3.096 durante la Guerra Civil y 447 más después. El capellán acompañó a muchos de ellos. Antes, en capilla, intentaba ofrecerles auxilio espiritual. "Las derechas están matando en nombre de la religión, y una religión que les inspira tanta crueldad no la quiero", cuenta en su diario que le respondió uno de ellos. Después, "entre el fusilamiento y el tiro de gracia, les daba la extremaunción", afirma el historiador Julián Casanova. El miércoles, el Ayuntamiento de Zaragoza inaugura en ese cementerio una enorme espiral con tantas placas como fusilados, sus nombres, edades y fechas en que fueron asesinados.

La espiral con los 3.543 nombres se integra en una ruta de la memoria única en España, que conserva los monumentos levantados por Franco para homenajear "a los héroes y mártires de Zaragoza, caídos de liberación" y añade los que se han construido "a cuantos murieron por la libertad y la democracia".

Casanova, que ha elaborado los textos que explicarán al visitante las distintas estaciones de esa ruta de memoria, y Pedro Villasol, empleado en el cementerio durante 53 años, hacen el recorrido con EL PAÍS. La primera parada es la tapia. "No se dejó de fusilar ni un solo día, ni siquiera en Nochebuena", cuenta Casanova. Desde la madrugada del 19 de julio de 1936 hasta el 20 de agosto de 1946 se descargaron frente a aquel muro miles de balas. "Traspasaron la pared y los nichos que había del otro lado, y tuvieron que colocar tablones de madera y sacos de arena para que las balas no entraran en los ataúdes", cuenta Villasol.

Natalia Junquera, El País. Una ruta de la memoria une en Zaragoza a vencidos y vencedores.

El Sagrado tocamiento

"El obispo tentaba las pantorrillas de una de ellas, una modelo muy guapa del barrio de Montparnasse llamada Philomène, que encarnaba de forma poco seria a Diana Cazadora. Cuando notó el sagrado tocamiento, Philomène no pudo contener un estallido de risa enloquecida y se hizo pipí en la mano de Monseñor. En ese mismo instante, el soberbio gran danés sobre cuya cabeza apoyaba la mano Philomène levantó el rabo y perpetró un zurullo monstruoso. El obispo bendijo ambas deyecciones y fue a sentarse en la primera fila de butacas, en medio de una atronadora salva de aplausos.

El tutú. Princesa Safo.

We didn't start the fire

Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire
Cargado por harrison73. - Videos de música, entrevistas a los artistas, conciertos y más.

We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world has been turning.

Billy Joel.