Mais um da série sobre o Comissario Brunetti e Veneza. Cada vez melhor.

Prá mim um dos grandes pintores da nossa época. Sem dúvida o maior retratista. Os quadros dele são tão completos, e sendo nem um pouco realista ele consegue mostrar a pessoa e as coisas da forma mais íntima e profunda.
Esse é um auto retrato:

A rainha – nem preciso dizer que esse retrato não fez muito sucesso entre a família real.

Esse é o quadro que acabou de bater record de preço – US$33.6 milhões.

Uma beleza.

Obesity experts overwhelmingly condemned a letter in the medical journal the Lancet Thursday that suggested growing rates of obesity pose a threat to the environment.

The letter, submitted by researchers from the United Kingdom, implicates the rising tide of obesity in greater oil consumption, more food production — and, ultimately, in an increase in the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

“It is a significant contribution,” said Phil Edwards, co-author of the letter and senior statistician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom.

“Eighteen percent more food energy is required in many populations where there is a large prevalence of obesity,” he said, citing a 460-calorie increase in daily food intake for an obese individual. “There is a clear impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions in order to grow that food.”

Edwards and colleague Ian Roberts wrote in the letter that “more transportation fuel energy will be used to transport the increased mass of the obese population, which will increase even further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more.”

While some nutrition and obesity experts said the rationale for the findings were sound, they said the research on which the letter is based overlooks more important, well-known factors involved in increased food production.

“We throw away far more food that the extra 460 calories per day they point out,” said Dr. Tim Church, chairman in health wisdom at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “In other words, most of our food overproduction is due to waste, not overeating. It is estimated that one-fourth of the food produced in the U.S. goes to waste.”

Church added, “Does having 50 extra pounds in a Chevy Tahoe really affect gas mileage? I do not think so.”

But more troubling, some said, was the stigma that could arise from the suggestion that those who are obese pose a greater environmental burden than their slimmer counterparts.

“There is enough stigma attached to obesity as it is,” said Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale Prevention Research Center in New Haven, Conn. “We should very carefully avoid making it seem as if overweight people are responsible for environmental decline.”

“Obese people have enough issues to deal with without being demonized for their impact on the environment,” agreed Keith-Thomas Ayoob, pediatric nutritionist and associate professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “The truth is, all people are an environmental burden.

“It is offensive, and I’m not overweight,” he said. “I hope the writers are not in the position of seeing patients. They must have missed the lecture on bedside manner.”

A Growing Environmental Impact?

Edwards maintains the rationale for his calculations is solid. Out of the roughly 6 billion people alive today, about one billion live in developed countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. It is in such countries that obesity rates are the highest. Edwards and his colleagues created a hypothetical model of these 1 billion people using the U.K. population as a template.

The researchers then divided the total amount of greenhouse gases generated by the world’s population — about 42 billion tons — equally among the world’s population. By this method, each billion-person segment would be responsible for about 7 billion tons of greenhouse gases every year. Edwards estimated that one-fifth of these greenhouse gases are generated through food production — in total, about 1.4 billion tons.

But assuming that roughly 40 percent of this population is overweight or obese — the current figures in the United Kingdom — the 18 percent increase in food demand means that the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted through food production climbs to 1.66 billion tons.

According to these figures, an additional 250 million tons of greenhouse gases may be released every year to sustain an ever more obese population.

“As the population is becoming heavier, more food energy is required in order to maintain that mass,” Edwards said. “This is not pointing the finger at people with a BMI [body mass index] over 30. … I think that the population has the responsibility to be aware that we are seriously impacting greenhouse gas emission by our weight. These are basic physics equations.”

But some nutrition experts noted that the equations do not take into account other factors — many of which could affect the big picture of how our diets affect the environment.

“It is true that obese people eat more than lower-weight people,” said Madelyn H. Fernstrom, associate professor and director of the UPMC Weight Management Center in Pittsburgh. “However, it’s only in places where there’s a lot of food. I don’t see this as an environmental issue. … I understand the concept but do not agree with the authors’ conclusions.”

Jackie Newgent, a New York City culinary nutritionist and author of an upcoming cookbook on “green” culinary options, agreed.

“The bathroom scale is not a good judge of someone’s carbon footprint,” she said. “It is possible that if an active, underweight person eats overly packaged, heavily processed, meat-based food that’s transported from all over the world, it’ll be more problematic for our environment than if a sedentary, overweight person eats too many calories from organic, local, seasonal, plant-based foods.”

The Stigma Factor

And then there is the issue of stigma. Increasingly, advocacy groups for people who are overweight and obese have suggested that as obesity rates surge, so too do negative messages and discriminatory policies against these individuals.

“If anyone is taking offense, there is certainly no offense intended,” Edwards said, adding that the burden of finding a solution to this problem rests mainly with cities and other urban centers.

“Urban centers are where it is possible to increase active transportation — transportation policies that encourage people to walk or cycle more.”

But even those experts who agreed with the numbers said they fear such a letter, published in a prominent journal, could have a stigmatizing effect.

“I can see the point, that obese people are more likely to use natural resources for transportation and food consumption,” said Dr. Sarah Armstrong, director of the Healthy Lifestyles Program at the Duke Global Health Institute in Durham, N.C. “However, my hope would be that this data would not be used to further stigmatize and blame obese people for both their own problems and, now, the problems of the planet.”

“Obese people don’t need to be told that they may contribute a disproportionate share to the global warming problem,” said Dr. Paul Shekelle, director of the Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Center for the RAND Corporation. “Even if it is true, which it probably is, I doubt this would have any beneficial effect.

“Certainly at an individual level, it stretches the imagination to think that this knowledge would be the tipping point for an obese person to finally make the commitment to lose weight.”

A 30,000-Volume Window on the World

FOR the last seven years, I’ve lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious, all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.

One of my earliest memories — I must have been 2 or 3 at the time — is of a shelf full of books on the wall above my cot, from which my nurse would choose a bedtime story. This was my first library; when I learned to read by myself a year or so later, the shelf, transferred to safe ground level, became my private domain. I remember arranging and rearranging my books according to secret rules that I invented for myself: all the Golden Books series had to be grouped together, the fat collections of fairy tales were not allowed to touch the minuscule Beatrix Potters, stuffed animals were not permitted to sit on the same shelf as the books. I told myself that if these rules were upset, terrible things would happen. Superstition and the art of libraries are tightly entwined.

That first library was in a house in Tel Aviv, where my father was the Argentine ambassador; my next one grew in Buenos Aires, during the decade of my adolescence. Before returning to Argentina, my father had asked his secretary to buy enough books to fill the shelves of his library in our new house; obligingly, she ordered cartloads of volumes from a secondhand dealer, but found that when she tried to place them on the shelves, many wouldn’t fit. Undaunted, she had them trimmed to size and then bound in deep-green leather, a color that, combined with the dark oak, lent the place the atmosphere of a soft forest. I pilfered books from that library to stock my own, which by then covered three of the walls in my bedroom. Reading these circumcised books required the extra effort of supplanting the missing bit of every page, an exercise that no doubt trained me well for reading the cut-up novels of William Burroughs years later.

The library of my adolescence — a time when the simultaneous discoveries of sex and the injustice of the world called for words to name the frightening stirrings in my body and in my head — contained almost every book that still matters to me today; of the thousands that have been added since, few are essential. Generous teachers, passionate booksellers, friends for whom giving a book was a supreme act of intimacy and trust, helped me build it. Their ghosts kindly haunt my shelves and the books they gave still carry their voices, so that now, when I open Isak Dinesen’s “Seven Gothic Tales” or Blas de Otero’s early poems, I have the impression not of reading the book myself but of being read to. This is one of the reasons I never feel alone in my library.

I left my books behind when I set off for Europe in 1969, some time before the military dictatorship. I was 21 years old and wanted to see the world I had read about, the London of Dickens, the Paris of Marcel Aymé. My books, I thought, would faithfully wait in my parents’ house for me to come back one day. I could not have imagined that, had I stayed, like so many of my friends, I would have had to destroy my library for fear of the police, since in those terrible days one could be accused of subversion merely for being seen with a book that looked suspicious (someone I knew was arrested as a communist for carrying with him “The Red and the Black.”) Argentine plumbers found an unprecedented call for their services, since many readers tried to burn their books in their toilet bowls, causing the porcelain to crack.

In every place I settled, a library began to grow almost on its own. In Paris and in London, in the humid heat of Tahiti where I worked as a publisher for five long years (my Melville still shows traces of Polynesian mold), in Toronto and in Calgary, I collected books and then, when the time came to leave, packed them up in boxes to wait patiently inside tomblike storage spaces in the uncertain hope of resurrection. Every time I would ask myself how it had happened, this exuberant accumulation of paper and ink that once again would cover my walls like ivy.

The library as it now stands, between long walls whose stones carry in some places the signature of their 15th-century masons, houses the remnants of all those previous libraries, including, from my earliest one, the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers in two volumes, printed in somber Gothic script, and a scribbled-over copy of “The Tailor of Gloucester.” There are few books that a serious bibliophile would find worthy: an illuminated Bible from a 13-century German scriptorium (a gift from the novelist Yehuda Elberg), half a dozen contemporary artist’s books, a few first editions and signed copies. But I have neither the funds nor the knowledge to become a professional collector, and in my library, shiny young Penguins sit happily alongside severe-looking leather-bound patriarchs.

Since my library, unlike a public one, requires no common codes that other readers must understand and share, I’ve organized it simply according to my own requirements and prejudices. A certain zany logic governs its geography. Its major divisions are determined by the language in which the books are written: without distinction of genre, all books written originally in Spanish or French, English or Arabic, come together on the same shelves. (I allow myself, however, many exceptions: Certain subjects — books on the history of the book, biblical studies, versions of the legend of Faust, Renaissance literature and philosophy, gay studies, medieval bestiaries — have separate sections.)

Certain authors are privileged: I have thousands of detective novels but few spy stories, more Plato than Aristotle, all Zola and hardly any Maupassant, almost all of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick. I have dozens of very bad books that I don’t throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad. The only book I ever banished from my library was Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” which I felt infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain. I put it in the garbage; I didn’t give it to anyone because I wouldn’t give away a book I wasn’t fond of. Nor do I lend books. If I want someone to read a book, I’ll buy a copy and offer it as a gift. I believe that to lend a book is an incitement to theft.

These days, after my 60th birthday, I tend to seek the comfort of the books I’ve already read rather than set out to discover new ones. In my library, I revisit old acquaintances who will not distract me with superficial surprises. I no longer need to wonder who’s making those dreadful phone calls in Muriel Spark’s “Memento Mori,” or who’s killing all those monks in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose.” We know one another, these books and I, and we can take our time with the unfolding story.

Like every library, mine will eventually exceed the space allotted to it. Barely seven years after setting it up, it has already spread into the main body of the house, which I had hoped to keep free of bookshelves. Travelogues, books on music and film, anthologies of various kinds now cover the walls of several rooms. My detective novels fill one of the guest bedrooms, known now by friends and family as the Murder Room. There is a story by Julio Cortázar, “House Taken Over,” in which a brother and sister are forced to move from room to room as something unnamed occupies, inch by inch, their entire house, eventually forcing them out into the street.

I foresee a day in which my books, like that anonymous invader, will complete their gradual conquest. I will then be banished to the garden, but knowing the way of books, I fear that even that seemingly safe place may not be entirely beyond my library’s hungry ambition.

Rauschenberg sempre foi um dos meus favoritos, desde que descobri as imagens fotográficas transferidas para telas através do processo de silkscreen. Foi assim um “coup de foudre” artístico prá mim: olhei, vi e amei.

Não são as obras mais famosas ou criticamente bem recebidas dele; essas são os “combines”, como esse com a águia e esse outro, o mais famoso de todos, Bed, que está no MOMA.
(um texto sobre Bed, do site do MOMA:

Bed is one of Rauschenberg’s first Combines, his own term for his technique of attaching cast–off items, such as rubber tires or old furniture, to a traditional support. In this case he framed a well–worn pillow, sheet, and quilt, scribbled them with pencil, and splashed them with paint, in a style derived from Abstract Expressionism. In mocking the seriousness of that ambitious art, Rauschenberg predicted an attitude more widespread among later generations of artists—the Pop artists, for example, who also appreciated Rauschenberg’s relish for everyday objects.

Legend has it that the bedclothes in Bed are Rauschenberg’s own, pressed into use when he lacked the money to buy a canvas. Since the artist himself probably slept under this very sheet and quilt, Bed is as personal as a self-portrait, or more so—a quality consistent with Rauschenberg’s statement, “Painting relates to both art and life. . . . (I try to act in that gap between the two).” Although the materials here come from a bed, and are arranged like one, Rauschenberg has hung them on the wall, like a work of art. So the bed loses its function, but not its associations with sleep, dreams, illness, sex—the most intimate moments in life. Critics have also projected onto the fluid-drenched fabric connotations of violence and morbidity.)

Mas como dizia em um texto que li (vou acabar sendo processada, nunca me lembro onde li as coisas) essas imagens são uma espécie de versão dos objetos achados (“found objects”) dessa fase mais famosa. Só que aí ele achava imagens e não objetos. Não que eu não goste dos “combines”. Gosto, acho geniais, interessantes. Mas as imagens nas telas são uma viagem, com cores e misturas deliciosas. E eu gosto principalmente das imensas, que vão parede afora, metros e metros.
Outra coisa sobre Rauschenberg: ele morava em Captiva Island, na costa oeste da Flórida, um dos lugares mais gostosos que já conheci.

“I’ve decided to be happy because it’s good for my health.”
Voltaire

Lloyd Jones é um escritor da Nova Zelândia. Mora em Wellington e tem 53 anos. Esse livro ganhou o Commonwealth Writer’s Prize e ficou na lista final para o Booker Prize de 2007.
É um livro simples, quero dizer, o enredo não é lotado de fatos e personagens e viradas. Tem o suficiente prá contar uma boa estória e é exatamente isso que faz. É triste, interessante, inteligente.

Dias de insônia. Semana perdida. Porcaria. Mas quase resolvido.

Samuel Pepys (23 de fevereiro de 1633 a 26 de maio de 1703) foi um inglês que trabalhou para a marinha britânica e foi membro do parlamento. De 1660 a 1669 ele escreveu um minucioso diário que se tornou uma das melhores fontes primárias da época da restauração britânica. É

uma combinação de eventos pessoais e acontecimentos da época como a grande praga (1665-1666) e o incêndio de Londres (de 2/9/1666 a 5/9/1666). É muito interessante; existem versões mais curtas do diário, resumidas, e edições completas. E tem um site com o diário todo, que a gente pode ler dia a dia; se se for no site hoje, lá está o que ele escreveu no dia 5 de maio.
http://www.pepysdiary.com/