¿Mama, que será lo que tiene el negro?

It seems Andy has forgotten he owns a blog. This is an e-mail he sent me, and I thought it was interesting:

"The American election, according to Spain's El mundo:

"Yo voto por Hillary porque va a hacer más por los hispanos y va a
solucionar la cuestión migratoria", confesó Gerardo. "Del 'moreno' leí
su biografía y no me gustan sus raíces musulmanas. Nosotros no tenemos
nada que ver con eso".

Mariana Fuentes, 53 años, protestó enérgicamente en cuanto vio a Bill
Clinton haciendo campaña en la entrada del 'caucus'. "Le di la mano
por pura cortesía, pero está bien de vagabundear por aquí", protestó.
"Ya hemos decidido a quien votar y no necesitamos que vengan a
comprarnos. Yo voto por el moreno porque es buen hombre y pasó más
hambre".

Translation:
I will vote for Hillary because she is going to do more for hispanics and will solve the immigration question," confessed Gerardo. "I read the "moreno's" biography, and I didn't like his Muslim background (connections? -- keep in mind I am not a professional translator). We have nothing to do with that.

Mariana Fuentes, 53, protested energetically when she saw Bill Clinton campaigning in the caucus. "I shook his hand out of courtesy, but he is welcomed to wander around here (again, probably not the best translation). "We have decided who we are going to vote for, and we don't need him coming by to try and buy us. I will vote for "el moreno" because he is a good man and has suffered hunger."

...I don't like the black one's Muslim roots, but I do like that he has
experienced hunger. ¿Mama, que será lo que tiene el negro?"

In response to Gerardo: Where is he getting that "el moreno" is Muslim? This report has been proven false for quite some time now. Just look here or here

And well... I'll leave it up to you to make some comments about that second comment. And what is it with these Spainards calling Obama "the black one"? Can't they just use his name?

Fire of My Loins

It turns out that the world might get to read Nabokov's last work. Thanks to Ron Rosenbaum who has been writing Nobokov's 70 year old son and telling him to let the world have the elder Nabokov's last work.

I can see the conflict: you want to respect your father's last wishes, but you also want the world to see his greatness one last time. Especially as a son respecting his father's wishes. It, I believe, was a different situation when Max B. ignored Franz Kafka's wishes. Max was a good friend (not a son). Nonetheless, thank God Max didn't listen to Kafka and gave us all his disturbingly existential literature.

And I hope that Dimitri will do the same. He shouldn't worry that the "Lolitologist" will ruin his fathers work with their misinterpretation. After all, the different critical readings are only read by the critics and scholars... Which is no reason to keep your average, everyday bibliophile from reading the last great words of the greatest [Russian] American writer.

Sad? Good!

There is a great article talking about the value of melancholia here.

It talks about modern society's obsession with wanting to be happy while ignoring sadness, and the problem with this will be the end of beautiful art that taps into that sadness in order to create:

I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

Jung said

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

So I think the article has a point. We cannot have one without the other, and even worse, we would have no art without both!

No Time

So I have been slacking on the posting. It has been hard for me to get back into the swing of things since the holidays. I just don't seem to have enough time. But it turns out that time might not even exist. I love the way Western science has wrestled with this for years.

Meanwhile the Buddhist have been saying the same thing for years (even before Jesus Christ):

Regarding the Buddhist concept of time, our philosophy has. adopted several positions. The Sautrantika school, also known as the "Holders of Discourse," affirms that all phenomena and events exist only in the present moment. For this school, past and future are nothing other than simple concepts, simple mental constructs. As for the Madhyamika-Prasangika school, the Consequence School of the Middle Way, it generally explains time in terms of relativity, as an abstract entity developed by the mind on the basis of an imputation, the continuity of an event or phenomenon. This philosophical view &scribes, therefore, an abstract concept whose function is dependent on the continuum of phenomena. From this point on, to try to explain time as an autonomous entity, independent from an existing object, proves impossible. That time is a relative phenomenon and can claim no independent status is quite clear; I often give the example of external objects which can be easily conceived of in terms of the past or future, but of which the very present seems inconceivable. We can divide time into centuries, decades, years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. But as the second is also divisible into multiple parts, milliseconds for example, we can easily lose our grasp of the notion of present time!

As for consciousness, it has neither past nor future and knows only present moments; it is the continuum of a present moment being trans . formed into another present moment, whereas with external objects the present disappears in favour of notions of past and future. But further pursuit of this logic will lead to absurdity, because to situate past and future we need a frame of reference which, in this case, is the present, and we have just lost its trace in fractions of milliseconds.. . .

I remember being throughly confused when my philosophy professor was explaining how Kant says time starts at the same time of space, and that while both are, in a sense, constructs-- it is the only way we can experience our surroundings...

Now, don't quote me on that as I am pretty sure I got the concept wrong. I better go read Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics again. If anyone knows, please, feel free to post the proper concept in the responses.