Lo normal en cada generación
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
— Douglas Adams. How to stop worrying and learn to love the Internet.
Por qué escribo lo que escribo
“This is the essential thing: that Western man has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since the classical age there has been a constant optimization and an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects on displacement, intensification, and modification of desire itself.”
— Foucault, The History of Sexuality I.
La trascendencia de la corrección de estilo
Todas tus vocales y comitas se van al diablo cuando pasas a otro idioma, y esto no importa si en el tuyo has dicho algo.
— Augusto Monterroso.
Mexico, revirtiendo discursos desde 1900
I will illustrate the kind of work that was accomplished by this intelligentsia by referring to a book that was published in the English and French by Justo Sierra and a team of illustrious científicos in 1900, Mexico: Its Social Evolution. This work is of special interest not only because Sierra was such a prominent and influential figure in Mexican culture and education, but also because it was printed specially in foreign languages, and its lavishly produced illustrations seem to answer point by point the negative comments and images of Mexico offered by Tylor ["Anáhuac", 1861] and other travelers.
(…)
Tylor complained of the state of abandon of Mexican education and its subordination to a retrograde church; Justo Sierra provided discussions of the development of Mexican positive science. Tylor smiled ironically at the lack of attention that was given to Mexico’s history and patrimony; Sierra shows the National Museum of Anthropology and the ways in which Mexico’s once conflict-torn races have been neatly studied and organized in it. Finally, Tylor noted the arbitrariness of Mexico’s government and lack of justice and institutions of social reform. Sierra shows the rapid and impressive development of courts of law, of councils, hospitals, schools, museums and prisons. In short, while Tylor spoke of country that had been ravaged by revolution, Sierra’s book spoke of evolution.
— Claudio Lomnitz. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. An Anthropology of Nationalism. 2001.
Dive
Este fin de semana fui al festival Nrmal y me la pasé muy bien. Esta banda fue una sorpresita para mí.