All posts by Indy

literature, quotes

>Fernando Pessoa: Apocalyptic feeling

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Since every step I took in life brought me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That’s how badly life terrifies and tortures me.
To make a decision, to finalize something, to emerge from the realm of doubt and obscurity – these are things that seem to me like catastrophes or universal cataclysms.
Life, as I know it, is cataclysms and apocalypses. With each passing day I feel that much more incompetent even to trace gestures or to conceive myself in clearly real situations.
With each passing day the presence of others – which my soul always receives like a rude surprise – becomes more painful and distressing. To talk with people makes my skin crawl. If they show an interest in me, I run. If they look at me, I shudder.
I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, published for the first time 50 years after his death. Pessoa died in 1935.

politics

>Financial crisis ’caused by white men with blue eyes’

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>Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva: “This is a crisis that was caused by people, white with blue eyes. And before the crisis they looked as if they knew everything about economics. Once again the great part of the poor in the world that were still not yet [getting] their share of development that was caused by globalisation, they were the first ones to suffer. Since I am not acquainted with any black bankers, I can only say that this part of humanity that is the major victim of the world crisis, these people should pay for the crisis? I cannot accept that. If the G20 becomes a meeting just to set another meeting, we’ll be discredited and the crisis can deepen.”
The Independent

Let’s say a president said “XXX was caused by black people”. Whoa! Hello race war!
To me this isn’t about race or the colour of the skin. It’s about power and extreme capitalist ideology, and yes, the crisis is the fault of Western bankers and Western politicians – but the traits of greed, corruption and ignorance are definitely colour blind.

One of the comments to the article concludes: “Politicians created the bloody regulatory environment, banks abused it and foreign governments of the developing World milked it.”

And the worst is yet to come…




politics

>90% of humanity vanished

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Click the image to enlarge
The yellow parts are uninhabitable desert.
The brown parts are uninhabitable due to
floods, drought or extreme weather.

If the planet warms by 4 °C – as it might by 2099 – it will change beyond all recognition, says Gaia Vince in an article in New Scientist. The article closes with the quote of Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen: “I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be. In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2015. We are currently putting in 3 per cent more each year.”

Reducing emissions by 70 per cent in six years? That will never happen. Never. Mankind is simply too dumb.
People will definitely be forced to migrate in order to survive. It will require “a wholesale relocation of the world’s population according to the geography of resources”, meaning moving people where the water is. In the northern hemisphere they’ll end up in Scandinavia, Siberia and Canada. In the southern hemisphere, “Patagonia, Tasmania and the far north of Australia, New Zealand and perhaps newly ice-free parts of the western Antarctic coast”.
Like a friend of mine just said: “Soon you’ll be begging us to let you move to Sweden”…

You might also want to read A survey of the the sea: Troubled waters, a series of nine articles in The Economist. Start with the first one, Troubled waters, and read on.
“It is clear, in any event, that man must change his ways. Humans could afford to treat the sea as an infinite resource when they were relatively few in number, capable of only rather inefficient exploitation of the vasty deep and without as yet a taste for fossil fuels. A world of 6.7 billion souls, set to become 9 billion by 2050, can no longer do so. The possibility of widespread catastrophe is simply too great.”

To the death!

literature, movies

>F.X. Toole – Pound For Pound

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>I was recommended this book by work colleague Ronnie Haag the other day and I was totally blown away. My fellow worker is into boxing, Bukowski, writing and real life – amongst many other things, of course (check out his books, one about Charles Bukowski and one about Muhammad Ali) – and since real life is a bitch, and this book is all about that, it’s a book that touched my soul. It made me cry, just like when I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy (I wrote some words about that masterpiece in 2006, read the article here).
At first, it may seem like it’s a book about boxing. Nothing wrong with that, since F.X. Toole (pen name for Jerry Boyd), a boxing trainer himself, is a magician when it comes to describing the art. However, to me this ain’t that much about boxing. When you get past the first fifty pages or so, you’ll see that this is about life and its setbacks and tragedies, the grieving of lost friends and family, sorrow and tears, shattered dreams. It’s about friendship and trust. Loneliness and sadness. But as darkness descends there’s still light at the end of the tunnel. Or is there?
It’s a truly heartwrenching story that really made me think deeply about life. You know, the usual crap one thinks about everyday, but sometimes some things make you think harder. Pound For Pound is such a thing. Mind you, it’s not a Rocky story. Life has very few happy endings…

Toole’s way of handling characters is magnificent. The characters are real. The story is real. You can feel the pain and the intensity. You can taste the blood and defeat. Like it says on the back cover: ”Pound For Pound is the story of men down but not out: old men whose lives have been tough and young men searching for glory”.
But don’t get caught up by this ”men” thing, though. It’s about people, not about gender.
In fact, I first noticed F.X. Toole when Clint Eastwood adapted Toole’s collection of short stories Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner into the worthy film Million Dollar Baby in 2004. The movie tells the story of Maggie Fitzgerald, a 31 year old white trash waitress who decides to make a difference through boxing. I think the movie kind of captures the sadness and melancholy, how life is about finding your passion and giving it your all, even though you still won’t make it (whatever that means). It’s about being able to look back and say ”I did alright” instead of ”I did nothing”. When reading Pound For Pound this feeling is so much stronger.
As real as it gets, to quote an old UFC slogan.

F.X. Toole
Born 1930
Published Rope Burns, his first book, in 2000 at the age of 70
He died in 2002
Pound For Pound was released in 2006