harmful for young or old to read

...'Perhaps reading Dickens’s novels quietly alone doesn’t have this immediate effect, but great writing initiates a real relationship that urges us to think and feel as the author does. It is in this sense that it can indeed do harm.'

Overwhelmingly

They talked always of pothouses, of feeding-time – by which they meant any hour between one and four of the afternoon; they talked of most things, even of some of the greatest, in a manner that gave, or that they desired to show as giving, in respect to the conditions of their life, the measure of their detachment, their contempt, their general irony. Their general irony, which they tried at the same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to each other, was their refuge from the want of savour, the want of napkins, the want, too often, of shillings, and of many things besides that they would have liked to have. Almost all they had with any security was their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly invulnerable, or as yet inattackable; for they didn’t count their talent, which they had originally taken for granted and had since then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive reason, to reappraise.

Saturn’s modern melancholy

'In an article Verlaine wrote at the same time as the publication of Poèmes Saturniens he attacked the Romantic idea of inspiration and of “life” and “human nature” and came out in favour of a poetry completely mastered, controlled and formal. Nor did he in his best work present “themes” that preceded and were external to the actual poems; as we read we feel that we are watching those poems materialize under his pen, just as Chopin’s Nocturnes come to life under his improvising fingers. Nevertheless, since this first book brought together some very early poems written in his collège days as well as his most up-to-date experiments, it is something of a grab-bag, and anything but consistent or programmatic.'

the way Socrates questioned

Now a new study, recently reported in Scientific American, has found that excessive online time can literally rewire our brains, causing mental health problems as well as shrinkage of surface-level brain matter. While the study focused on genuine Internet addiction, it joins a growing body of evidence suggesting that frequent computer use may impair students’ academic performance...The Times review alludes specifically to a passage from Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates approvingly quotes an Egyptian king’s skepticism about writing:' This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves…you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing. (Phaedrus, Benjamin Jowett trans.)'

Constelaţii răsturnate

"Dropia magică, de o-nălţime amară şi o supleţe noptatică, întâlnită numai la seminţiile nomade, desfăcu larg aripile şi înaintă cu paşi siguri spre fântâna cu mir răsărită şi ea pe neaşteptate în micul vad al bălţii. O trupă de arici cu ţepii ascuţiţi făcu roată în jurul fântânii, gata să răspundă oricărui atac. Din surpări de timp, poate din constelaţii răsturnate, se auzi din nou glasul doamnei cu mantilă violet şi mănuşi albe: -E vremea ca puii de zeu egiptean să se arate. O privighetoare roşie începu un cântec fermecat în cuibul ei dintre trestii. Întrupaţi parcă din trilurile vrăjite sau răsăriţi din fântâna de mir, puii de zeu egiptean se înfăţişară în poiană: închipuiri de abur şi de lună. "

quête de sens

Régis Jauffret et Amandine Pudlovska : "N’attendez pas que Régis Jauffret soit mort pour le lire." from La Quinzaine littéraire on Vimeo.

New Travels

As it turned out, he never did settle down, exactly. Instead, he spent his last years planning on “speaking from the grave”—his phrase for the memoir that has now appeared upon the centenary of his death. With the excusable vanity of genius, he had high expectations for its reception. It will “live a couple of thousand years without any effort,” he told Howells, and will “then take a fresh start and live the rest of the time.” In one way or another, he worked at it for much of his life. “The truth is,” he told a friend, “my books are simply autobiographies” in the sense that they are stocked with fictional versions of people he had known, including himself. But starting around age forty, he made some tentative attempts at a memoir of a more conventional kind.

The Question is

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all

Reasoning

"shift mental pathways and open possibilities for what the brain can do."

-An adjective is made into a verb: 'thick my blood' (The Winter's Tale)

-A pronoun is made into a noun: 'the cruellest she alive' (Twelfth Night)

-A noun is made into a verb: 'He childed as I fathered' (King Lear)

Read the four sentences below, and ask yourself which one you like the best. 1. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you enraged. 2. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you charcoaled. 3. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you poured. 4. A father and a gracious aged man: him have you madded. The first sentence should elicit a normal reaction. The brain recognizes that it makes sense, unlike the next two lines, which the brain rejects. The fourth line is an example of functional shift, which is taken from King Lear. Your brain is now thanking Shakespeare.

altminteri

Worldly temptations

Yet the real early modern masters of a thousand arts seem to have come from parts farther north. Peter Paul Rubens was famously both a student of philosophy and a diplomat as well as painter, but no artist may have diversified his talents as widely as the elder Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), mayor of Wittenberg, tavern keeper, and, more than incidentally, court painter for more than half a century to the Electors of Saxony. Cranach is best known now, as he was in his own day, for his paintings of women—impossibly long-legged coquettes with catlike eyes and purring expressions, one of whom, a Venus clad in nothing but a red velvet hat and a gossamer veil, is the centerpiece of a special exhibition being staged this winter within the permanent collection of Rome’s Borghese Gallery.

Arrangements settled

..We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready. Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found. Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup. Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down. It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

hereinafter QM

When an observer interacts with this wave function by taking a measurement, the wave function suddenly manifests as a particle with a position and speed to which numbers can be assigned. It ceases to be a quantum-mechanical phenomenon and becomes a “classical” one. This seems to give the observer’s consciousness a privileged position in our description of the world.
The fact that observer A takes measurement M is nothing to do with interaction between A and the universal wave function. They are already, and for ever, interacting — “entangled.” All that happened was that the universe split in two at the instant of observation (as it is always doing, observed or not) and the version of A that we know about was carried off willy-nilly on the branch associated with co-ordinate M. A copy of him, A2, was carried off on a different branch, with a different measurement. So were innumerable other copies. The universal wave function governs them all. Actually, it is them.

• This was the germ of what later became known as the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM.

There is also the small matter of evidence for the existence of these other universes. Are they in fact physically real? Everett, an atheist and a materialist, was as little inclined to metaphysics as his nemesis Bohr, though for different reasons

Thirty years later

For Italian columnist Giacomo Papi, the essence of contemporary society has been revealed once and for all in the way we eat. It all started, he maintains, in the 1980s, when bow tie pasta with salmon in cream sauce began to appear on Italian menus. Cooking began to be an aesthetic experience. Thirty years later, the salmon has been replaced by tuna (tartare, seared, with ginger), risotto is triumphant, the cream has disappeared, and every ingredient comes mysteriously supplied with its own geography…Thirty years later, it is impossible to eat and discuss some other subject.

Cautiously

Everything was happening so oddly that she didn't feel a bit surprised at finding the Red Queen and the White Queen sitting close to her, one on each side: she would have like very much to ask them how they came there, but she feared it would not be quite civil. However, there would be no harm, she thought, in asking if the game was over. `Please, would you tell me -- ' she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen. -`Speak when you're spoken to!' The Queen sharply interrupted her. -`But if everybody obeyed that rule,' said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, `and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that -- ' -`Ridiculous!' cried the Queen. `Why, don't you see, child -- ' here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation. `What do you mean by `If you really are a Queen"? What right have you to all yourself so? You can't be a Queen, you know, till you've passed the proper examination. And the sooner we begin it, the better.' -`I only said "if"!' poor Alice pleaded in a piteous tone. The two Queens looked at each other, and the Red Queen remarked, with a little shudder, `She says she only said "if" - ' -`But she said a great deal more than that!' the White Queen moaned, wringing her hands. `Oh, ever so much more than that!' `So you did, you know,' the Red Queen said to Alice. `Always speak the truth -- think before you speak -- and write it down afterwards.'

“nuclear option”

Amazingly, some voices within the art establishment call for going with this “nuclear option.” British art critic Brian Sewell struck a blow for the sell outs in a recent BBC interview responding to the Cimam statement. “The art world is not sacred,” Sewell declaimed. If the choice is between selling off some art and cutting public services, then Sewell will take selling the art. Ever the critic, Sewell claimed that up to 800 paintings in the National Gallery of London alone “aren’t up to scratch”—just the tip of the iceberg of the vast storehouse of unseen art kept in museums around the world. “Why have a museum full of rubbish?” Sewell concludes. Of course, one man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure. Aside from the question of just how plentiful the art market would be for critically condemned “rubbish,” there lingers the question of who gets to label and then take out the trash.