"Progress is the realization of Utopias" (OW) ... novo mundo 39

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is
not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias" (Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 27)

"Sarkozy, lecteur de Gramsci" ??? (JS)... novo mundo 38

Jérôme Sgard

Nicolas Sarkozy, lecteur de Gramsci
La tentation hégémonique du nouveau pouvoir

Au fond, j'ai fait mienne l'analyse de Gramsci : le pouvoir se gagne par les idées. C'est la première fois qu'un homme de droite assume cette bataille-là.Nicolas Sarkozy, Le Figaro, 17 avril 2007

On A beaucoup commenté le " retour du politique " suscité par la campagne présidentielle de cette année. Curieusement, on n'a pas rapproché ce constat de celui, très comparable, formé à l'issue de la campagne référendaire de 2005 sur la constitution européenne. Pourtant elle avait déjà vu une mobilisation très forte de l'opinion publique et des électeurs, une activité éditoriale intense, et l'on avait souligné également combien l'enjeu avait partagé les familles, les amis, les affinités politiques acquises. Quitte à regretter parfois le résultat du vote, la presse étrangère avait elle aussi jugé positivement cette nouvelle expression de la passion politique des Français : un débat public majeur avait été mené jusqu'à son terme avec, disons, une forme de sérieux collectif plutôt honorable. Des commentaires comparables ont pu être relevés cette année, soulignant la participation électorale massive, le public nombreux mobilisé par les meetings, ou le taux d'écoute lors du débat télévisé entre Royal et Sarkozy.

(....) On ne peut donc qu'être inquiets de la proximité affichée du nouveau pouvoir avec les autres puissances de ce monde -les grandes entreprises et les médias. Cette concentration qui se dessine aujourd'hui n'est pas seulement illibérale politiquement, mais elle est aussi dangereuse au regard des règles du jeu qui émergeront, dans l'économie et les institutions, en réponse aux réformes. Il ne s'agit pas d'une menace directe sur les libertés publiques et la règle démocratique, mais de cette variante d'économie de marché, en principe plus dynamique, qui se formera progressivement si les réformes annoncées aboutissent.

(read the whole text in

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-07-25-sgard-fr.html)

Les Back
Beaches and graveyards
Europe's haunted borders

"It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than the renowned." The epigram on Walter Benjamin's memorial in Portbou, Catalonia, leads Les Back to reflect on the fate of the African migrants found dead on the coasts of Spain today.

There is a sign at the foot of the hill that leads to Portbou's cliff side cemetery, it reads: "Memorial W. Benjamin" and an arrow directs visitors to the philosopher's grave. Next to this public notice is a "no entry" sign. Benjamin took his own life here in this coastal town on 26 September 1940, after the Spanish border police had ruled that he did not have the appropriate papers to exit Vichy France. His aim was to escape via Lisbon and join other intellectual émigrés like his friend Theodor Adorno in America. In the Hotel de Francia he wrote on a scrap of paper his final message:
In a situation with no escape, I have no other choice but to finish it all. It is in a tiny village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life must come to its end.I would ask you to pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the situation in which I have now found myself. I no longer have enough time to write all those letters I would dearly have written.[1]Refused entry to Spain and unable to break free of the magnetic field of Nazi Europe Benjamin made what Marshall Berman called a "pre-emptive strike on himself".[2] Like many exiles he carried vials of morphine in case he arrived at just such a moment of hopelessness. The "no entry" sign that sits innocently here is a profane illumination like one of Benjamin's "dialectical images". As it basks in the afterglow of a Catalonian summer, the sign is a reminder of the deadly exit and entry points that were policed in this small innocuous resort town. (...).

(read the whole text in:

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-05-30-back-en.html)

"Why cry?" (CH) ... in novo mundo 37

Chenjerai Hove Tyrant

Why cry

for the wingless spirit bird?

Why cry

for the honeybird?

The king attends a funeral

and dances with his eyebrows,

his naked words

smelling of sandand gunpowder.

The polluted windonly

smells of lost dreams,

some kinds of amorphous declarations

about blood mixed with dance songs.

Our royal king

smokes a tired cigarette

and eats biscuits with a fork.

He lives in volcanic tempers,

sniffing the wind

for armed insurgency

in all locked places.

The king, he wears necklaces of bullets

his lips stiff with pronouncements.
Tomorrow's funeralis banned,

the corpse detained for further questioning.

(in wordswithoutborders http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?lab=HoveTyrant)

"God does not even go to church" by The The in 1986 ... in novo mundo 36

PLEASE TURN IT ON...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZhAAgjNM6Q&feature=related

in " as cores da infâmia" (AC) ... novo mundo 35

..."não era por gosto de estelas funerárias, nem para perfazer conhecimentos metafísicos no decurso de subtis conversações com os mortos, que o letrado Karamallah tinha escolhido domicílio neste cemitério de renome mundial desde que milhares de sem-abrigo aqui se haviam instalado sem pedir autorização a ninguém. (....) para karamallah, a escolha de tão austera residência tinha por origem o despotismo de um governo impermeável ao humor e ferozmente hostil a toda a informação de algum modo relacionada com a verdade (....)

"But for how much longer? (PW)... novo mundo 34

Per Wirtén

Unacknowledged, unseen, unmentioned
Poverty in Europe

Impoverished German children dream of the USA; one Greek person in four is behind with their most basic bills; sixty per cent of the poor in Romania have outdoor toilets. Cracks are appearing in Europe's beloved image of itself as the egalitarian alternative to the United States, writes Per Wirtén.

What do we really know about poverty in Europe? Not a lot. The constant flow of facts, images and stories from the other side of the Atlantic means I know more about American poverty than its European counterpart. There is a steady stream of books and articles about "the working poor" at Wal-Mart, Latinos in Los Angeles and Afro-Americans in run-down slum districts. How many of us have read books like Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's account of struggling to get by in low-wage hell? Or avidly immersed ourselves in the slums of Baltimore in the TV series The Wire? (read the original text in: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-01-25-wirten-en.html)

"A blind intelligence, true" (JH) ... novo mundo 33

Jane Hirshfield
Optimism

Optimism
More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow,

whose foam returns over and over to the same shape,

but the sinuous tenacity of a tree:

finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another.

A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth.

(in http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/jane_hirshfield/janep/optimism/)

"Two roads diverged in a wood" (RF)... novo mundo 32

Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

(in http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/robert_frost_poems/the_road_not_taken)

"L'estude de Gargantua, selon la discipline de ses precepteurs (...) FR ...novo mundo 31

"LA VIE TRES HORRIFICQUE DU GRAND GARGANTUA PERE DE PANTAGRUEL.

Jadis composée par M. Alcofribas, abstracteur de Quinte Essence. Livre plein de Pantagruelisme.

AUX LECTEURS

Amis lecteurs, qui ce livre lisez,

Despouillez vous de toute affection;

Et, le lisant, ne vous scandalisez:

Il ne contient mal ne infection.

Vray est qu'icy peu de perfection

Vous apprendrez, si non en cas de rire;

Aultre argument ne peut mon cueur elire,

Voyant le dueil qui vous mine et consomme :

Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escripre,

Pour ce que rire est le propre de l'homme. (...) "

in (http://abu.cnam.fr/cgi-bin/donner_html?gargantua2, Rabelais, François - Edition Garnier (sans date, fin XIX)

Texte basé sur l'édition de François Juste, Lyon, 1542, dernier texte revu par Rabelais)