Os meus vastos conhecimentos sobre a internet já me permitiram topar uma coisa espantosa que vai com certeza revolucionar a maneira como todos vocês olham para o mundo: a internet sabe onde é que nós estamos. A internet sabe onde é que nós estamos! Várias pistas contribuiram para esta descoberta, nomeadamente a quantidade de sites a prometer-me que "nasty sluts from Cova da Piedade want to strum your banjo", e o facto de a William Hill me tentar convencer com alguma insistência a apostar nos jogos do Vitória de Setúbal. Mas devia haver uma maneira qualquer de impedir que um blog literário americano encaixasse a Máquina dos Peidos entre posts sobre Calvino e Sebald. Entre Burroughs e Bukowski uma pessoa aceita estas coisas, mas Calvino e Sebald? Eu sou uma pessoa séria. Tão séria, aliás, que consegui terminar este post sem elaborar uma piada com a Máquina dos Peidos e a expressão "tracking cookie".
quinta-feira, abril 23, 2009
Italo Calvino e a Máquina dos Peidos
Os meus vastos conhecimentos sobre a internet já me permitiram topar uma coisa espantosa que vai com certeza revolucionar a maneira como todos vocês olham para o mundo: a internet sabe onde é que nós estamos. A internet sabe onde é que nós estamos! Várias pistas contribuiram para esta descoberta, nomeadamente a quantidade de sites a prometer-me que "nasty sluts from Cova da Piedade want to strum your banjo", e o facto de a William Hill me tentar convencer com alguma insistência a apostar nos jogos do Vitória de Setúbal. Mas devia haver uma maneira qualquer de impedir que um blog literário americano encaixasse a Máquina dos Peidos entre posts sobre Calvino e Sebald. Entre Burroughs e Bukowski uma pessoa aceita estas coisas, mas Calvino e Sebald? Eu sou uma pessoa séria. Tão séria, aliás, que consegui terminar este post sem elaborar uma piada com a Máquina dos Peidos e a expressão "tracking cookie".
quinta-feira, abril 16, 2009
Que ninguém volte a dizer mal da internet à minha frente
O que aconteceu foi o seguinte. No final dos anos oitenta, o Canal 1 da RTP passou um filme. Eu vi o filme. Depois esqueci o filme. No final dos anos noventa, meti na cabeça que me queria lembrar do filme. Um colega de faculdade chamado Nuno falou-me numa coisa chamada google. Mostrou-me o que era a coisa chamada google. A minha primeira pergunta ao google foi "Como é que se chama aquele filme dos anos oitenta em que há assim uma família num subúrbio, e depois um gajo que quer entrar no Inferno, mas num Inferno onde só se pode entrar com fato de astronauta, sabes? Obrigado." Mas nada aconteceu. Fiquei desiludido com o google. Repeti a pergunta a umas duzentas pessoas ao longo dos anos seguintes. Em vão. Fiquei desiludido com as pessoas. Decidi esquecer-me outra vez do filme. Entretanto, a internet cresceu. Eu não. Voltei a querer lembrar-me do filme. E ontem à noite, com os termos de busca menos promissores da história dos termos de busca, cheguei a um fórum com o comovente título «Post The Plot Of That Movie That You Can't Remember The Name Of Here», onde alguém chamado Mr. Hat colocava a seguinte questão, que eu li com uma sensação muito próxima daquilo a que vocês humanos se referem como felicidade:
«I seem to recall something that involved a guy who ends up using a spacesuit (or similar) to visit hell. Or possibly that hell somehow came to earth and he used the suit to survive in it. I think the suit had a special HUD as well.
Probably either a film around the 80's or maybe a Twilight-zone style thing.Anyone got a clue what it was called?»
O filme chama-se Invitation to Hell. Há aqui um clip e tudo, por amor de Deus. Que ninguém volte a dizer mal da internet à minha frente.
(A internet ainda não foi capaz de solucionar esta outra dúvida, mas é só uma questão de tempo).
(A internet ainda não foi capaz de solucionar esta outra dúvida, mas é só uma questão de tempo).
domingo, abril 05, 2009
I am a bankruptcy
Ainda estou a recuperar do facto de uma pileca anoréxica a 100/1 ter ganho a Grand National deste ano. Tinha já as férias planeadas com as 25 libras da praxe no State of Play - odds modestas a 14/1, mas apostar que a próxima corrida vai favorecer o State of Play costuma ser o equivalente a apostar que o próximo livro do Philip Roth vai favorecer a nostalgia do bóbó em Newark. Ainda vasculhei a lista de participantes à procura de referências ao The Wire para uma apostazinha suplente, mas em vão.
O que não significa que não tenha achado referências ao The Wire noutro sítio - elas hoje aparecem nos sítios mais insólitos. Uma das coisas que me incomodara a memória nos primeiros episódios tinha sido a utilização de construções do género "he's a good police", que eu sabia ter já ter lido algures no meu passado selvagem. Para grande consternação de membros da família mais chegados (inclusivamente aqueles que subscrevem a dúbia teoria de que «a maionese te anda a deixar queimadinho») só demorei três semanas a lá chegar. O Night Train do Martin Amis começa assim:
"I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement -- or an unusual construction. But it's a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police".
Uma pesquisa exaustiva entretanto efectuada por mim, envolvendo aproximadamente um copy-paste para o google, revelou que este parágrafo deu origem a uma resposta histérica de John Update, que, na crítica que fez ao livro no Sunday Times, terá afirmado "'I am a police' . . . the first of a number of American locutions new to this native speaker". John Update, evidentemente, é o primeiro escritor americano que vem à cabeça quando se pensa numa autoridade em calão policial.
Curiosamente, uma segunda pesquisa exaustiva entretanto efectuada por mim, envolvendo aproximadamente um segundo copy-paste para o google, recuperou a seguinte resposta de Martin Amis: "There's nothing strange about it," Amis says, bristling slightly. "I got a lot of my stuff from David Simon's book Homicide. His city is Baltimore, and that's what they say there, and I'll bet they say it in a few other cities, too. It's a wonderful book, and a great help to me. That's where I point people like John Update".
sexta-feira, abril 03, 2009
quinta-feira, abril 02, 2009
Certifying the nonexistence of elves
Um artigo do espectacular Michael Lewis na Vanity Fair que é citável de uma ponta à outra. De uma ponta à outra:
«(...) The best way to see any city is to walk it, but everywhere I walk Icelandic men plow into me without so much as a by-your-leave. Just for fun I march up and down the main shopping drag, playing chicken, to see if any Icelandic male would rather divert his stride than bang shoulders. Nope. On party nights—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday—when half the country appears to take it as a professional obligation to drink themselves into oblivion and wander the streets until what should be sunrise, the problem is especially acute. The bars stay open until five a.m., and the frantic energy with which the people hit them seems more like work than work. Within minutes of entering a nightclub called Boston I get walloped, first by a bearded troll who, I’m told, ran an Icelandic hedge fund. Just as I’m recovering I get plowed over by a drunken senior staffer at the Central Bank. Perhaps because he is drunk, or perhaps because we had actually met a few hours earlier, he stops to tell me, “Vee try to tell them dat our problem was not a solfency problem but a likvitity problem, but they did not agree,” then stumbles off.
(...)
Because Iceland is really just one big family, it’s simply annoying to go around asking Icelanders if they’ve met Björk. Of course they’ve met Björk; who hasn’t met Björk? Who, for that matter, didn’t know Björk when she was two? “Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”
(...)
When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland—even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. When Iceland became a tourist in global high finance it had the same problem as Neil Armstrong.
(...)
There’s a charming lack of financial experience in Icelandic financial-policymaking circles. The minister for business affairs is a philosopher. The finance minister is a veterinarian. The Central Bank governor is a poet.
(...)
Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”
(...)
Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can’t help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. (“This will take at least six months—it can be very tricky.”) But not nearly so many as the place needs, given its talent for turning cod into Ph.D.’s. (...)»
«(...) The best way to see any city is to walk it, but everywhere I walk Icelandic men plow into me without so much as a by-your-leave. Just for fun I march up and down the main shopping drag, playing chicken, to see if any Icelandic male would rather divert his stride than bang shoulders. Nope. On party nights—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday—when half the country appears to take it as a professional obligation to drink themselves into oblivion and wander the streets until what should be sunrise, the problem is especially acute. The bars stay open until five a.m., and the frantic energy with which the people hit them seems more like work than work. Within minutes of entering a nightclub called Boston I get walloped, first by a bearded troll who, I’m told, ran an Icelandic hedge fund. Just as I’m recovering I get plowed over by a drunken senior staffer at the Central Bank. Perhaps because he is drunk, or perhaps because we had actually met a few hours earlier, he stops to tell me, “Vee try to tell them dat our problem was not a solfency problem but a likvitity problem, but they did not agree,” then stumbles off.
(...)
Because Iceland is really just one big family, it’s simply annoying to go around asking Icelanders if they’ve met Björk. Of course they’ve met Björk; who hasn’t met Björk? Who, for that matter, didn’t know Björk when she was two? “Yes, I know Björk,” a professor of finance at the University of Iceland says in reply to my question, in a weary tone. “She can’t sing, and I know her mother from childhood, and they were both crazy. That she is so well known outside of Iceland tells me more about the world than it does about Björk.”
(...)
When Neil Armstrong took his small step from Apollo 11 and looked around, he probably thought, Wow, sort of like Iceland—even though the moon was nothing like Iceland. But then, he was a tourist, and a tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there. When Iceland became a tourist in global high finance it had the same problem as Neil Armstrong.
(...)
There’s a charming lack of financial experience in Icelandic financial-policymaking circles. The minister for business affairs is a philosopher. The finance minister is a veterinarian. The Central Bank governor is a poet.
(...)
Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”
(...)
Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can’t help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn a living: trawler fishing and aluminum smelting. There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. (“This will take at least six months—it can be very tricky.”) But not nearly so many as the place needs, given its talent for turning cod into Ph.D.’s. (...)»
Subscrever:
Mensagens (Atom)