domovique

 

Em março próximo, comemoro bodas de seda na relação mais saudável, próspera e longa que já tive até agora: a com a minha terapeuta. Por mais que eu entenda que é triste, por um lado, admitir isso, acho que o paradoxo que se estabelece a partir dessa relação é válido. Somente a partir desse relacionamento com ela (que é, na verdade, um relacionamento comigo mesmo, projetado, em partes) é que eu tenho conseguido propor formas novas e mais saudáveis de relacionamento com o outro.

Lembro que cheguei em seu consultório ansioso por um diagnóstico. Sempre tive um anseio por certezas e um possível diagnóstico supriria essa minha necessidade pois, a partir daí, seria apenas uma questão de saber qual o tratamento correto para que eu pudesse, rapidamente, tornar-me um membro funcional da sociedade. Ocorre que esse era o primeiro problema: eu nunca fui um membro ~desfuncional~ e confrontar-me com a premissa de que a minha terapeuta não me diagnosticaria pura e simplesmente (uma vez que eu nunca apresentei traços de nenhum transtorno de personalidade mais grave) foi um pontapé nos culhões das minhas expectativas.

Aos poucos, lidar com o lado mais, digamos, obscuro da minha personalidade (que tem a ver com a forma como eu lido com os afetos) tem sido devastador. Mas num sentido positivo. Sempre investi pesadamente no meu lado profissional e, desde cedo, ter os livros como companheiros inestimáveis me fez viver os afetos em bases muito teóricas. (Claro, ter um pai ausente e perverso, como foi o meu, não ajudou muito mas isso é algo que, hoje, consigo perceber claramente). E demorou muito tempo até que eu pudesse perceber os padrões afetivos que vinham regendo as minhas tentativas de aproximação com o outro: premissas de que uma relação a dois é baseada em uma hierarquia de poder (a la Foucault), onde haverá, necessariamente, uma frustração em relação ao outro a partir de uma desconfiança de que o outro é perverso.

E, como nosso inconsciente funciona na base da neurose, minha neurose só conseguia enxergar a neurose do outro. E atrair-se por ela.

Hoje, quase 4 anos depois, estou em um momento de vida onde a minha proposta de afeto é diferente. Tenho tido contato com algo que, por muito tempo, jurava não existir em mim: sentimentos de amor e paixão. E, por mais que isso fosse extremamente assustador no começo, hoje eu percebo que eu não preciso controlá-los e, tampouco, temer que eles me controlem. Temos tido um convívio de respeito e tolerância mútuos.

E é aí que reside o dilema no qual me encontro hoje: no outro. O outro que é e deve ser merecedor desse afeto. Eu sempre tive relações afetivas baseadas no poder — meu sobre o outro ou do outro sobre mim — e agora isso já não me basta mais. O que eu desejo é alguém que aceite uma proposta de afeto que se baseie em alicerces sólidos e sobre os quais possa-se construir algo. O problema é que eu devo entender que esse outro não é necessariamente um constructo que passe por mim. Ele é real, concreto, de carne, sangue, ossos, músculos e bagagem. O outro me interpreta a partir de si e é a partir de si que ele se propõe — ou não — a uma aproximação.

Se eu permaneço, é porque a minha visão do outro me preenche. Se eu permaneço, é porque eu vejo no outro coisas (reais) que me fazem permanecer.

Isso significa que eu mudei? Acho que não. Talvez signifique que eu esteja me tornando uma pessoa próxima daquela que eu deveria ter sido desde o começo.

E não há nada mais difícil e dolorido do que tornar-se quem se deve ser.

Originally hailing from a small town in Iowa, Adonna Khare was this year’s recipient of the Art Prize 2012 for her amazingly detailed large-scale pencil on paper works. All of Khare’s work evolve naturally without much pre-planning, essentially building her pieces as she continues to work.

http://adonnak.com

Amy Shira Teitel is a freelance space writer whose work appears regularly on Discovery News Space and Motherboard among many others. She blogs about the history of spaceflight at Vintage Space, where this post originally appeared, and tweets at @astVintageSpace.

According to YouTube, eight million people watched Felix Baumgartner’s high altitude jump on Sunday morning. It was exciting and death-defying, but at the end of the day it was a just an elaborate publicity stunt that will likely see Red Bull sales skyrocket this month. But I’d argue that the event wasn’t entirely a success from a publicity standpoint. Red Bull, who sponsored the jump, wasted an incredible opportunity. It had an eight million person audience captivated, but did nothing to teach that audience about the context behind Baumgartner’s jump. Joe Kittinger’s 1960 jump was amazing, the heritage behind these types of tests is fascinating, but without any context the audience just saw a daredevil break a record for record-breaking’s sake.

I realize I sound like an irritated historian, but I also have a background (albeit a brief one) in publicity. Not taking advantage of an opportunity to teach eight million people a few awesome things about science is a terrible waste, from an historian’s standpoint and a public relations standpoint.

A little background first. Austrian-born Baumgartner started skydiving at 16. He perfected the art and in 1988 began performing skydiving exhibitions for Red Bull. His adventurous spirit and Red Bull’s out-of-the-box thinking meshed well, sparking a now decades-long collaboration. The idea for a free fall from the stratosphere, a planned altitude of 120,000 feet, was conceived in 2005. It was finally named The Red Bull Stratos project, and its goal was defined as transcending “human limits that have existed for 50 years.”

Baumgartner during the record-setting event. Courtesy of Red Bull Stratos.

Ostensibly, the jump was designed to expand the boundaries of human flight. More concrete goals listed on the project’s website include: developing new spacesuits with enhanced mobility and visual clarity to assist in “passenger/crew exit from space”; developing protocols for exposure to high-altitude and high-acceleration environments; exploring the effects of supersonic acceleration and deceleration on the human body; and testing the latest innovations in parachute systems.

It’s not entirely clear what applications this data would have, like the research on “passenger/crew exit from space.” The morning of the jump, people asked me whether the point was to prove that astronauts could jump from the International Space Station in an emergency. It wasn’t. Baumgartner’s 128,000-foot altitude (he overshot his mark) is only about 24 miles; the ISS orbits at an altitude of about 200 miles. Not to mention the astronauts on the ISS are weightless because they’re falling (i.e., orbiting) around the Earth at the same rate as the station, and that wouldn’t change if they stepped outside. It’s also unclear what other high-altitude/high-acceleration and supersonic environments in which people would find themselves that we need to know more about. Yes, there may have been some interesting data gathered from the jump, but it’s not enough to classify the stunt as any kind of research program.

The International Space Station, which you really shouldn’t jump out of. Courtesy of NASA.

But what bothered me the most is how Red Bull presented the jump. Saying that the Stratos project was designed to “transcend human limits that have existed for 50 years” is a good tagline, but it’s vague. Jumping from 24 miles doesn’t push human limits so much as technological limits. Technology kept Baumgartner alive during his ascent, protected him from the harsh environment during the fall, and slowed him to a soft landing. The other thing that stands out in the tagline is its implication that we haven’t learned anything about surviving in these types of extreme environments since 1962. In reality, test pilots and astronauts in the mid-to-late 1960s were subjected to high G-forces, relied on intricate life support systems throughout missions, and were spared exposure to the vacuum of space by spacesuits.

A schematic showing the layers of Earth’s atmosphere.
The stratosphere isn’t quite space. Courtesy of NASA.

Which brings up another problem with Red Bull’s promotion of the Stratos jump. It was touted as being a jump from space, but 24 miles isn’t space. There’s no clear limit where the atmosphere ends and space begins, but the general consensus is that it’s around the 62 mile mark. NASA, which was established to run the space game in 1958, has awarded astronaut wings to pilots who’ve flown higher than 50 miles. Calling the Stratos event a jump from space is just not true (widely known as “#spacejump” on Twitter); unfortunately, with eight million people watching, those eight million people now have a mistaken idea about space.

This was far from the only misinformation associated with the event. Red Bull did a terrible job at presenting Kittinger’s 1960 jump. A real shame, especially since Kittinger was the person directly in touch with Baumgartner during his fall (his capsule communicator, or “capcom”). From the Red Bull Stratos website:

Joe’s record jump from 102,800 ft in 1960 was during a time when no one knew if a human could survive a jump from the edge of space… Although researching extremes was part of the program’s goals, setting records wasn’t the mission’s purpose. Joe ascended in [a] helium balloon launched from the back of a truck. He wore a pressurized suit on the way up in an open, unpressurized gondola. Scientific data captured from Joe’s jump was shared with U.S. research personnel for development of the space program.

This description isn’t just wrong, exactly, but it completely ignores the history of, reasoning behind, and accomplishments of Kittinger’s jump.

In the 1960s, pilots were pushing the envelope of supersonic flight at high altitudes. But this was a dangerous approach. While it’s easy to fly fast in the thin upper atmosphere it’s harder to control an aircraft. With no air for control surfaces to push against, aircraft tend to tumble, and when aircraft tumble pilots tend to eject. Tests with dummies showed that when falling from high altitudes, human bodies tended to get into a flat spin. It would be like rolling down a hill really fast but without the hill, and the G-forces would certainly be fatal. The Air Force needed a way to stabilize a pilot from a high altitude ejection, and Francis F. Beaupre had a sequential parachute that would do just that. Kittinger jumped from 102,800 feet in 1960 as part of Project Excelsior to prove that Beaupre’s parachute would work. It did, the Air Force had data and a healthy Kittinger as evidence, and the project ended. There was no live video of his jump. He was a Captain in the Air Force, and he jumped from 102,800 feet for Captain’s pay to complete a mission.

The full story behind Kittinger’s jump is a fascinating one. It pulls together classic themes like 1960s test pilots’ egos, their relationships with their aircraft, the push from atmospheric flight to spaceflight, and the era where men were probing unknowns because they were unknown.

Joe Kittinger in his Air Force days.
Courtesy of United States Air Force.

During Baumgartner’s more-than-two-hour-long ascent to jump altitude, Red Bull could have told Kittinger’s story. The announcer could have talked about the technology keeping Baumgartner alive, what made his suit different or special, told us how he was able to break the sound barrier in a free fall, talked about problems like aerodynamic heating in atmospheric entry. Instead, Red Bull held an audience captive and offered them almost nothing but shots of Baumgartner in a suit and Kittinger at the capcom console. Even when the announcer talked about the possibility of Baumgarner entering a spin during his fall, he failed to mention the parallel that Kittinger had proved the graduated parachute system that stabilized a pilot’s fall. He didn’t even mention that Baumgartner’s supersonic jump came on the 65th anniversary of Chuck Yeager’s first supersonic flight.

Red Bull Stratos was an incredible opportunity to teach a huge audience about the past and future exploration of high altitudes and space. Having a scientist or historian narrating the jump would have brought a level of prestige to the event. It could have been less of a publicity stunt and more of an event designed to return scientific data that just happened to be sponsored by a corporation.

I can’t help but think this Stratos jump could have been more powerful and interesting had we learned the context behind the mission. In the end, I have to wonder how much we’re gaining if the public is excited by space exploration but doesn’t understand the technology behind it or why it matters.

In September 1924, the wheels of a truck sank into the ground behind the Pelham Courts apartments in Washington, D.C. On investigating, the building’s manager and janitor discovered a mysterious brick-lined passageway that led to a bizarre network of concrete tunnels extending as much as 32 feet underground.

The discovery put Washington into two days of wild speculation. Was this a German plot? A relic of the Civil War? But then Smithsonian Institution entomologist Harrison G. Dyar came forward to admit that he had dug the tunnels when had lived in the capital 10 years earlier. From Modern Mechanix, August 1932:

Dyar’s obsession had begun innocently enough. He told the Washington Star that in 1906 he had dug a flowerbed for his wife, and “When I was down perhaps six or seven feet, surrounded only by the damp brown walls of old Mother Earth, I was seized by an undeniable fancy to keep on going.” He had continued the project in secret for 10 years, stopping only in 1915, when he moved out of the area.

“I did it for exercise,” he told the New York Times. “Digging tunnels after work is my hobby. There’s really nothing mysterious about it.”

(Thanks, Allyson.)

GALLERY.

Generally when I think of Polaroid photographs I’m reminded of old family snapshots, perhaps a camera passed around close-quarters at a party, or a few artistic captures of flowers, textures or an old beat-up vehicle. Photographer Bastian Kalous has a very different approach, carrying his Polaroid camera around the world into the sweeping vistas of the Grand Canyon, the valleys surrounding the Grand Tetons, and other expanses of forests and mountains near his home in Freyung, a town in Bavaria, Germany. These are locations rarely explored with instant film these days, and I find his work both refreshing and mysterious. Luckily he has several hundred photos to explore, and I strongly urge you to do so.

MORE.

Petit Sphinx Ermite by Leonor Fini (1948)

In a couple of recent blogs I looked at the life and works of two female artists who were possibly best known because of their partners. I featured Frida Kahlo whose fame partly derived from her marriage to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and I showcased the life and works of Gabriele Münter whose one-time partner was Wassily Kandinsky. Today I want to introduce you to an artist who on her own merits would become the most celebrated female painter of her time. Her name is Leonor Fini.

I would like to tell you that I have always been a lover of her work but sadly I have to admit that until last Monday I had never even heard of her. It was purely by chance that I came across a painting of hers, which I am featuring today. It was one of those paintings, which once viewed, was hard to forget. I found it fascinating. I was mesmerised by it and I had to return to stand in front of it a number of times. It is housed in the Tate Modern in London and I was there primarily to see the Edvard Munch exhibition but thought that I would take the opportunity to look at some of the paintings in the permanent collection of the museum. I think I have said before that I am not a lover of modern art and find a lot of it very hard to understand but I am constantly being told that I should “embrace all types of art” a suggestion I tend to ignore! I had just sailed up the Thames on the Tate to Tate boat which transports you from the Tate Britain to the Tate Modern as I had been to the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain in the morning. It was interesting to note the difference in the age group of the people attending the two Tate museums. The Tate Modern certainly had a younger audience and maybe for the young there was an element of rebellion in the art on display there, in comparison with the more staid, more formal art work of the Tate Britain.

Leonor Fini was born in Buenos Aires in August 1907. Her father, Erminio, was an Argentinean of Italian descent and her mother, Malvina Braun Dubich, was a Trieste-born Italian with German and Slavic origins. Her parents’ marriage was anything but happy and their turbulent partnership ended in divorce when Leonor was just one year old. Her mother left her abusive husband and took Leonor back to Trieste to live with her grandparents. Leonor’s father made a number of attempts to abduct his daughter and have her back with him in Argentina. His wife, who received no protection from the local authorities and was so afraid that Leonor would be taken from her, decided to take the matter into her own hands and so for the next six years she dressed her daughter up as a boy whenever they ventured out the house. Eventually Leonor’s father gave up his attempts to snatch her and went back home to Argentina and was never seen again. Despite this traumatic early part of her life in Trieste, Fini grew up in a very cultivated, well-ordered household. Having had to suffer the threat of being kidnapped during her early life, Leonor was to suffer another trauma during her early teens when she contracted an eye disease, which forced her to wear bandages on both of her eyes. She was now locked into a prison of darkness in which she had no alternative but to develop an inner vision and during these long periods of darkness, she would visualise fantastic images, which in some ways would be later mirrored in her art. It was with these strange images that she had conjured up in her mind during those days of enforced darkness that once her sight was restored she decided that she wanted to become an artist.

Leonor Fini

Leonor was a very determined and headstrong teenager and was expelled from several schools on account of her rebellious behaviour and her unwillingness to abide to school regulations. Like many teenagers she was very precocious and in a way this manifested in the creation of a persona of incredibly strong will and intense sensitivity. She became an avid reader and it is said that by the end of her teenage years she had read all the works of Freud. In a way she educated herself and this thirst for knowledge made her popular within the local artistic and literary circles. Her interest in art was furthered by her visits to her uncle, a lawyer, where she spent many hours in his library rummaging through and reading his extensive collection of art books about the lives of artists and was especially enthralled by those of the artists of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt. She also travelled widely in Italy and Europe visiting all the museums. Once her decision had been made to become an artist and having no formal training, she taught herself anatomy by studying corpses in the Trieste mortuaries. When she was seventeen years of age she had some of her artistic works shown at an art exhibition in Trieste and this led to her receiving portrait commissions from some leading dignitaries in Milan. In 1929, aged just twenty-two years of age, she managed to stage a show of her work at the Galerie Barbaroux in Milan. Seven years later she left Italy and went to live in Paris, a city Leonor would often referred to as “my real city”.

In 1936, in Paris, she staged her first one-woman exhibition of her work at the Galerie Bonjean, whose director was Christian Dior and the success of this brought her into contact with a number of Surrealist painters such as René Magritte, Paul Eluard, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Viktor Brauner and their de facto leader, André Breton. It was around this time that she started to paint Surrealist images and began to be drawn close to this artistic movement. However her youthful rebellious nature once again surfaced and she would not kowtow to the dictates of André Breton’s and intensely disliked his authoritarian leadership. She sided with Dali’s view of Breton and his Surrealist theories. Dali described Breton as having a typical petit bourgeois mentality. However, despite this, she did exhibit with the Surrealist group. The eminent American feminist writer and curator Whitney Chadwick wrote about Leonor’s early days in Paris:

“…In Paris she became a legend almost overnight. When one of the Surrealists saw a painting of hers in a Paris gallery in 1936 and sought out its creator, she arranged a rendezvous in a local cafe and arrived dressed in a cardinal’s scarlet robes, which she had purchased in a clothing store specializing in clerical vestments. ‘I liked the sacrilegious nature of dressing as a priest, and the experience of being a woman and wearing the clothes of a man who would never know a woman’s body…”

Leonor’s dislike of Breton’s despite his redoubtable charisma was mirrored by his dislike of what he viewed as her often scandalous behaviour and pension for the company of homosexuals. Breton was known to be fiercely homophobic. Although she strongly denied she was a Surrealist she did align herself with the group and they welcomed her. She made her first trip to New York in 1936, showing at the Julian Levy Gallery and in December of that year she participated in the famous “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art

With the onset of the World War II looming, Leonor fled Paris with her close friend André Pieyre de Mandiargues, a French writer and an associate of the Surrealist set. The two of them spent part of the summer of 1939 as guests of Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington in Ardèche, before they moved on to Arcachon, where Salvador and Gali Dali had their wartime refuge, the Villa Salesse. From there the pair went to Monte Carlo.

The bottle for the perfume “Shocking”
designed by Leonor Fini

In the 1940’s, after World War II her career branched out and she began to design theatre sets and costumes for the theater, opera and ballet. She also worked for Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian fashion designer, and designed the bottle for the perfume Shocking, which was to become the top selling perfume for the House of Schiaparelli. The bottle was in the shape of a woman’s torso, which was said to be inspired by Mae West’s tailor’s dummy and Dalí paintings of flower-sellers. The packaging was also designed by Fini and was in shocking pink, which was one of Schiaparelli’s signature colours.

Leonor Fini had a number of lovers but was married only once. Her husband was Federico Veneziani but the marriage was short lived and following her liaison with the Italian Count, Stanislao Lepri, she and her husband divorced in 1941. Lepri, who was the Italian consul in Monaco where Leonor was living, abandoned his career shortly after meeting Fini and the two lived together. With her encouragement, Lepri became a painter, and the couple moved to Rome shortly before the Allies liberated the city in 1943. Several years later, they returned together to what had once been her home in the rue Payenne, Paris. In 1952 she met the Polish writer Konstanty Jelenski, known as Kot Jelenski, in Paris soon after the war. Kot joined Leonor and Lepri in their Paris apartment in 1952 and the three remained inseparable until their deaths. In a way she managed to put into practice one of her more famous quotes:

“…Marriage never appealed to me, I have never lived with one person. Since I was 18, I’ve always preferred to live in a sort of community – A big house with my atelier and cats and friends, one with a man who was rather a lover and another who was rather a friend. And it has always worked…”

In the summer of 1954, Leonor, during her travels, discovered a haven of tranquility in Corsica. It was a ruined monastery near Nonza. It was set in a wild landscape and she immediately felt at peace in this place and from then on she would return to it every summer to paint. Leonor was, from an early age, a great lover of literature and reading and she illustrated more than 50 works by writers such as Charles Baudelaire, who was one of her favourite authors. In her later life, she continued to design sets and costumes for the theatre, opera, and film. In early 1960, Leonor Fini moved to an apartment in Paris’ rue de La Vrillière, between the Palais Royal and the Place des Victoires. She was rarely alone, always in the company of her friends and surrounded by her numerous Persian cats, (at one point she had 23 cats) which along with the sphinx, often featured in her paintings. Fini adored cats, which were Egyptian symbols of dignity and power, and she identified herself with the sphinx, the mythological hybrid of lion and woman. She divided her time between the apartment and her home in Saint-Dyé-sur-Loire, in Touraine, up until her death in January 1996. Leonor Fini died at the age of 88 but one of her obituaries commented that it was impossible to imagine her being old. It went on to say that she would always be, for those who admired her, the wild, raven-haired, ill-proportioned beauty who haunted her pictures. The lethal yet irresistible sphinx, the vampire we would most like to visit us. Her obituary in The Times paid homage to her beauty, the erotic quality of her art and mentioned her legion of lovers whose names “read like a roll call of the literary and artistic talents of that brilliant age.”

She continued to be friends with some of the best known writers, artists, and thinkers of her time while simultaneously being a bona fide cat lady. Throughout her artwork, Leonor always venerated the female form. She would often show females as the dominant ones of a partnership, who were protecting their male lovers or in some instances, women loving other women. She depicted women exploring their own identity at a time when female identity, both physically and mentally, was being defined by men.

My Daily Art Display featured work today is the painting entitled Petit Sphinx Ermite, (Little Hermit Sphinx), which Leonor Fini completed in 1948. Fini adored cats, and she used the image of the Sphinx, the mythological hybrid of a lion and woman, partly as a self-portrait. She looked upon the Sphinx as a symbolic intermediary between the human and animal realms, and between the conscious and the uncharted areas of the mind and spirit. The sphinx in this work is child-like domesticated creature, which we see sitting in front of its ramshackle home. At its feet we see a skull of a bird and more bizarrely above the sphinx’s head we see a creatures body hanging from the door lintel, which in a way adds a sense of violence to the scene.

Maybe having seen the painting you will understand why I kept coming back to it, trying to fathom what it was all about !!! Her works of art are fascinating and I urge you to take a look at more of her paintings.

Vincent Fournier’s epic photo journalistic series ‘Space Project’ was originally featured back in April 2010 but what I didn’t realize was the lead up photo series to the mars-like landscape. Vincent’s collection of photo is more of a pre-production look to the illustrious blast off.

If you’ve missed the original Space Project series click here.

http://www.vincentfournier.co.uk

Previous Space Project Series
http://www.emptykingdom.com/main/featured/space-project-1-vincent-fournier/

William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, "The Elements of Style Illustrated"
2005 | ISBN-10: 0143112724, 1594200696 | PDF, EPUB, MOBI | 176 pages | 48 + 14 + 14 MB

F. Scott Hess is an oil painter originally hailing from Baltimore, Maryland, but is currently based out of Los Angeles, California. Hess has exhibited his work internationally from Austria, France, Germany, and all throughout the United States. Clearly, Hess’ work truly speaks for itself, as he explores themes that “magnify and reveal human frailties” depicted through intriguing narrative scenes.

 

 

 

via F. Scott Hess | EMPTY KINGDOM You are Here, We are Everywhere.

Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit By Robert Macfarlane
2004 | 320 Pages | ISBN: 0375714065 | EPUB | 4 MB

Stephen the Little

Stephen the Little was a skinny, middle-aged ordinary white dude from Montenegro who became the supreme dictator of his country by somehow convincing all of Western Europe that he was Tsar Peter the Third of Russia, a feat that was made much more difficult by virtue of the fact that it was a relatively well-known fact that Tsar Peter the Third of Russia was very very dead and there were quite a few Russians who had been there when it happened. Willfully ignoring any and all challenges to his obviously-untrue wild statements about being at the top of the Russian Imperial royalty food chain, Stephen the Little improbably embedded himself as the glorious leader of Montenegro, brought a period of unprecedented peace the region, ended political infighting among the people of the Balkans, personally fought off a massive Turkish invasion force with nothing more than an unruly pitchfork-swinging mob and ridiculous amount of luck, resisted the political intrigues of Catherine the Great, and then died in his bed content in the knowledge that he was the greatest and weirdest hero his country had ever known.

Awesomely enough, we really don't know much where this guy came from. Maybe he really was the Tsar, and truly had escaped from a tragic fate at the hands of would-be assassins to seek asylum with his Slavic brethren (he wasn't). Maybe he actually was a hero sent by God to deliver the people of Montenegro from the clutches of Ottoman tyranny (also unlikely). Our best guess is that he's probably just some regular Serbian guy from Montenegro, though some historians speculate he might have been from Russia or possibly somewhere on the Dalmatian Coast near Herzegovina. Nobody knows for certain, which is part of what makes it so fucking cool. Hell, we don't even know the dude's real name Montenegrin history refers to him only as Šćepan Mali, meaning either "Stephen the Little" or "Stephen the Small" depending on the translator, although even that's a weird oxymoronic epithet because contemporary sources basically describe this dude as being a totally average, unremarkable guy of ordinary height, normal physical strength, and generic looks. All we really know for sure is that in 1767 a thirty-five year old dude named Steve showed up on the border of Montenegro wearing the ragged robes of an Orthodox monk and telling everyone he was Tsar Peter III, the former (but now deceased) supreme ruler of All the Russias a man who by all accounts had been strangled to death four years earlier on the orders of his wife Catherine the Great and was now being used as fertilizer in an undisclosed location somewhere in Imperial Russia.

This is not Stephen the Little. It's Tsar Peter III.
Please note that he looks absolutely nothing like the guy at the top of the page.

Sure, this wasn't the first time some jackass had gone around trying to convince everyone he was Russian royalty, but up until this point roughly every attempt at retconning your way into Russian history earned the imposter a one-night-stand with excruciatingly painful death. About a hundred years earlier some asshole showed up in Russia claiming to be Ivan the Terrible's son Dmitry (who was also dead, BTW, beaten to death by Ivan in a bout of drunken nerd-rage after a heated debate about whether Klingons or Jem'Hadar were the most badass alien species in Star Trek), but after a couple weeks of that nonsense the False Dmitry broke his leg jumping out of a palace window in a futile effort to avoid the angry mob that eventually tore him apart limb from limb and had his pieces shot out of a cannon in the general direction of Poland (where the imposter was allegedly from). That worked out so well for him that two other dudes decided THEY were going to be False Dmitries as well, and both of them ended up being decapitated within months of their announcements and then having their heads used as doorstops and paperweights in the Imperial palace.

So, I guess we've established that it took some balls to come out in Early Modern Eastern Europe and make wild accusations about being royalty, but it just so happened that Stephen the Little's nickname was definitely not a reference to his gigantic brass ones. In addition to an excess of testicles, Steve also had two Russian guys who swore he was really the Tsar, and the three of them had this amazing and completely untrue tale of heroism about how they all escaped Catherine's assassins, fled across Russia, got thrown in prison, escaped in a daring display of vertical leaping and other badassitude, then ran through waist-deep snow barefoot in the rain uphill both ways until they'd reached Montenegro. The story, while compelling in it's over-the-top pulp fiction radness, didn't convince the supreme ruler of Montenegro at the time -- a decrepitly-old Bishop named Sava who had actually met the real Tsar Peter. But, whatever, that guy was feeble and powerless and nobody pays attention to old people anyways so the citizens of Montenegro flipped out, baked a gigantic cake, made Stephen the ruler of their Council of Nobles, and had the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church send him a fucking awesome new horse. Once he was in charge, Stephen used cunning, diplomacy, and his own magnetic natural charisma to unite the warring tribes of Montenegro for the first time in centuries, organize the first national census, order construction of a massive network of roads, and set up a central police force that was allowed by law to cap thieves and robbers and other criminals on sight. He was beloved by his people, brought crime to an all time low, and somehow momentarily convinced Yugoslavian people to stop killing each other all the time. One awesome old historian claimed that this guy's ability to successfully run a country should have been proof enough to the people of Montenegro that he wasn't the actual Tsar Peter, because that guy was a fucking tremendous tool and Catherine probably did her country a favor by having that douchebag whacked in an alley somewhere.

The Real Tsar Peter III's horse.

Ok, so as you might have guessed, Tsarina Catherine the Great of Russia was a little interested to hear that there was some asshole running around claiming to have boned her, so she sent a powerful Russian noble and thirty of his best men to publicly declare that Stephen the Little was definitely not her ex-husband. When the Russian delegation reached Podgorica, Steve personally met them at the gates of his capital with open arms, three gigantic casks of his finest vodka, and two dozen of the hottest women in Montenegro.

He had found the Russians' weakness.

The Russian delegation left a week later, content with having Stephen the Little serve one day of house arrest in his palace bedroom as punishment for his crimes. Despite most of these guys HAVING BEEN THERE when the real Tsar Peter III was executed, none of them said shit about this guy not actually being the true fugitive dictator of Russia.

Somewhere a trio of False Dmitries rolled around in their graves.

Well hello there.

By this point in history the Ottoman Turkish Empire had blitzed throughout Greece and now shared a border with Montenegro, and these guys really weren't too keen about living next door to a unified Christian mountain kingdom cohesively organized under a competent ruler. Naturally, the Sultan decided to wax them into oblivion. He put together a force of 60,000 of the most feared warriors in the world, marched into Montenegro, and proceeded to start laying waste to everything he could find. Stephen the Little responded by putting together 10,000 Montenegrin volunteer citizen-soldiers armed with pitchforks and foul language (they couldn't afford bullets or gunpowder) and decided, what the hell, it's worth a try. He formed a solid wall of Serbian-ness across the narrow Ostrog Mountain Pass outside the town of Niksic and prepared to do his best impression of Leonidas holding the Gates of Thermopylae.

The Turks were the most technologically advanced army in the world. Sixty thousand men who had conquered all that stood before them for centuries, these battle-hardened asskickers were equipped with state-of-the-art muskets, cannons, and grenades, and they were more than capable of jamming them up the asses of anyone who fucked with them. They outnumbered the defenders six to one (maybe more according to one source this battle was 100,000 Turks vs. 2,000 Montenegrins), didn't give a shit about anything, and were more than confident that they were going to beat these guys so hard that their grandchildren would be born with congenital birth defects and weird-shaped dented heads.

But Stephen the Little's men were mostly Serbians, and if there's one thing you should know about the Serbs, it's that these guys love to fight. And they're pretty good at it.

The Turks attacked, hurling everything they could at the defenders in a bloody, vicious battle that took a grisly toll on both sides, each army's men lashing out with everything from bayonets and musketballs to wooden spears and running knee strikes to the ballsack. When the smoke cleared on a vicious day of no-holds-barred face-stomping, the Montenegrins were seriously fucked-up, obviously, because despite what this website might lead you to believe that's typically what happens when you're outnumbered by an obscene margin by guys who are better equipped and better trained than you. But still, despite being badly bloodied and losing almost half of their army, the Montenegrins held the line, and Stephen the Little, blinded in one eye by a nice heaping dose of shrapnel to the face, continued to urge them to fight on and defend their homeland.

Modern-day Montenegrin military training. Yeah.

The next day it rained like a motherfucker, and nobody wanted to come out and fight because they didn't want to get their hair wet and also because gunpowder doesn't work in heavy rains. The day was cold and miserable and the only cool thing was when an awesome bolt of lightning streaked down from the sky, hit a powder keg in the Turkish camp and blew up in a gigantically-fucking-rad mushroom cloud that everyone agreed was totally Metal.

The next morning, the Turks packed up their shit and left. They ignored the shattered Montenegrin Army, marched off into the distance, and left Stephen the Little standing alone on the battlefield.

Stephen was a hero across Eastern Europe overnight. Sure, we later found out that the Russians had been in the middle of planning an attack while the Ottoman Army was away, so the Sultan was forced to order his army to stop wasting time ob this Fake Peter asshole, turn North, and go beat the shit out of some real Russians instead, but fuck it, right? If this public relations genius could convince the entire world he was a dead Tsar that bore absolutely no physical resemblance to him it wasn't that much of a stretch to think he could dial this up as, "I'm a war hero who defeated the Ottomans because God is on my side, and the only reason they're currently beating the piss out of Russia is because they know they were overmatched by our military power." Which is of course exactly what he did.

Stephen the Little was the champion of Christendom. Songs and praises were sung not only among his own people (who were already convinced he was the greatest thing since LeBron James), but throughout Europe, with tales of his "epic victory against impossible odds" being told from the British House of Commons to whatever the fuck the 18th century equivalent of the New York Times was in the New World. Nobody else fucked with Stephen again, and he ruled competently and intelligently for the next six years. He died in 1774 when he was strangled to death in his sleep by his personal barber, a Greek dude who was being paid off by the Turks to turn on his boss. Everything in Montenegro kind of went downhill from there.

Sources/Links:

Denton, William. Montenegro. Dalby, Isbister & Company, 1877

Pavlovic, Srdja. Balkan Anschluss. Purdue University Press, 2007.

Roberts, Elizabeth. Realm of the Black Mountain. Cornell University Press, 2005..

Stevenson, Francis Seymour. A History of Montenegro. Elibron, 2005.

Tozer, Henry Fanshawe. Researches in the Highlands of Turkey. Kessinger, 2004.

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Rasputin in hospital recovering from an attempt on his life, 1914.

Antes de mais nada eu devo mencionar que não sou um profundo conhecedor de literatura. Especialmente se tratando de escritores contemporâneos. Nessas horas sempre sigo as dicas de amigos e vejo o que que me interessa ali pelo Goodreads e quando surge a oportunidade, compro o tal do livro.

Logo, o texto que se segue não tem a menor intenção de ser uma CRÍTICA LITERÁRIA séria, só um registro das impressões que eu, como pessoa extremamente impressionável, tive do livro. E não esqueçam:

Conheci a obra de Murakami por intermédio da patroa, que fez o favor de comprar Após o Anoitecer e Kafka à Beira-Mar, sendo este último o único que tinha lido do autor até então. Me surpreendeu pacas. Ritmo alternando entre o frenético/tenso e o calmo/contemplativo, com vários momentos de beleza que ainda me deixam nostálgico só de lembrar. É um daqueles livros que tu simplesmente não quer que acabe, porque sabe que vai bater uma saudade bruta dos personagens. Isso e o fato de que Murakami parece ser meio obcecadão com gatos. Eu, como o feliz pai de quatro desses bichos, não tinha como não nutrir nada além de alguma simpatia pelo homem. Sou assim, facinho.

Em Kafka, um dos protagonistas, Nakata, um senhor de meia-idade com problemas mentais, consegue se comunicar com gatos, o que rende alguns diálogos memoráveis com um gato que, vejam só, TAMBÉM tem problemas mentais. No mais, tremendo livro, todos deveriam ler,  excelentes momentos. Algumas palavras-chave: gatos, Johnny Walker, transexualidade, natureza, profecia, Coronel Sanders. Se falar mais, estrago. Na Amazon você pode ler uns trechos, ó. A tradução para o português (que foi a que eu li), é bem simpática e pode ser encomendada no site da Livraria Cultura.

Mas vamos ao que interessa: em The Wind-Up Bird, a história começa com o desaparecimento de um gato. Um bom sinal, já que o outro livro também envolvia gatos. Debrucei-me sobre o catatau de 606 páginas e li tudo em menos de uma semana. Fazia tempo que  isso não acontecia.

Capa da versão americana

Inclusive, a obra acabou FURANDO a fila do outro romance que eu estava por terminar. O enredo começa básico: Toru Okada, o narrador-personagem, e sua esposa, Kumiko, buscam o bichinho de estimação perdido pela vizinhança, sem sucesso. Logo recorrem aos serviços de uma espécie de CONSULTORA PARANORMAL ou algo que o valha, chamada Malta Kano, auxiliada por sua irmã, Creta Kano (que terá um papel de destaque maior do que o esperado no desenrolar da trama).

Após o sumiço do gato e a entrada destas mulheres na trama, a vida de Toru, um homem comum, sem grandes feitos ou até mesmo ambições, desempregado e sem perspectiva alguma do alto de seus 30 anos de idade, entra em desalinho de uma vez. Entre um casamento em ruínas, a falta de ânimo de vida e uma sucessão de fatos aparentemente sem sentido, Toru não consegue mais distinguir a realidade da ilusão, culminando na realização de que as circunstâncias e acontecimentos em sua vida e na daqueles que o cercam é maior do que o próprio poderia imaginar e muitas das vezes a única medida a se tomar é aceitar as coisas pelo que são.

O estilo de Murakami segue inconfundível, com menos alusões óbvias à cultura ocidental, como muito acontece em Kafka, mas prendendo a atenção do leitor do começo ao fim, mantendo a proporção entre onírico e cotidiano que fizeram valer sua fama. Se há um erro neste livro, é o de inserir personagens e fatos demais, que acabam por destoar do tom geral ou simplesmente não são desenvolvidos como deveriam. É o caso dos capítulos voltados à campanha japonesa na Manchúria, durante a II Guerra Mundial.

Capítulos estes, aliás, responsáveis por alguns dos momentos mais tensos e obscuros da narrativa, contados do ponto-de-vista de um veterano de guerra. É de um destes capítulos que saiu uma das MAIORES PRAGAS já rogadas na literatura que já vi:

There was nothing wrong with your shooting. It was just you couldn’t kill me. You aren’t qualified to kill me. That is the only reason you missed your chance. And now, unfortunately, you will have to bear my curse back to your homeland. Listen: Wherever you may be, you can never be happy. You will never love anyone or be loved by anyone. That is my curse. I will not kill you. But I do not spare you out of goodwill. I have killed many people over the years, and I will go on to kill many more. But I never kill anyone whom there is no need to kill.

No mais, é um tremendo livro. Há de se respeitar um contador de histórias que faça com que mais de 600 páginas passem numa brisa.

Peter Høeg's surreal existential romp keeps Sarah Moss entertained

The Elephant Keepers' Children is narrated by Peter Finø, the 14-year-old son of the priest on a Danish island also called Finø. The island is almost as much a character as a setting, a surreal place where tough-talking, plain-living working-class families mingle with, and sometimes become, millionaire Buddhists and nouveau riche landowners. There is an ashram in what was once Pigslurry Farm, and an ex-headmaster, Einar Flogginfellow, who likes to "offer sacrifices to the ancient Nordic deity at every full moon on top of Big Hill". (Outsiders question the status of "Big Hill" – 111m above sea level – at the risk of being beaten up by Peter's exquisite astrophysicist brother Hans, who is strong enough to lay horses on their backs and tickle their tummies; the shadow of Pippi Longstocking falls far.)

Hans has left for university in Copenhagen, where Peter and his older sister Tilte are visiting him. While they are there, their parents disappear on holiday in La Gomera, "a wannabe Finø in the Canary Islands". Finø's authorities step in, in the form of the Kommune's director "Bodil Hippopotamus", two plainclothes police officers who stick out on Finø "like two tree frogs on a fish rissole", a drug-addled count who runs a rehabilitation centre as directed by the little blue men who bring him magic mushrooms, a bishop and a forensic psychiatrist.

Tilte and Peter are illegally tagged and imprisoned in the rehabilitation centre, alerting them to the importance to the state of whatever their parents are doing. The pair escape by impersonating a non-existent lizard, stealing a car and inventing a religious cult in order to board an arms dealer's luxurious cruise ship while pretending that a dead body in the wheelchair they are pushing is the ship's doctor. Hiding from the police in a film star's apartment in Copenhagen, they must evade the forces of evil – which invariably turn out to be subject to redemption at Tilte's hands – do the right thing and, if possible, save their parents from the consequences of their own wrongdoing.

Peter Høeg displays a glorious facility for the absurd as well as the picaresque, and the hilarity of Peter Finø's narrative makes this a delightful novel even for readers who have limited tolerance of surrealism. Jokes are not easy to translate and Martin Aitken is to be congratulated. But, as one would expect from Høeg, this a book with ambitions beyond entertainment. The title comes from an "old Indian saying": "In case you wish to befriend an elephant keeper, make certain to have room for the elephant." Peter sees that almost everyone except himself and Tilte has an elephant – a passion or vocation that disrupts relationships and calls its owner to break rules and laws to fulfil a life's ambition. His father's elephant is his own charisma and his mother's is the manufacture of special effects, an unfortunate combination that leads them towards criminal lives.

Other adults – even the most frightening terrorist mastermind – are driven by other gifts and fears, and the other-worldly Tilte sees, forgives (and manipulates) all; readers of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow know that Høeg can frighten his readers, but that gift is almost entirely restrained here. The children are clear-sighted about the philosophical questions they encounter in the course of this existential romp: exactly how far do ends justify means? What is the virtuous relationship between personal loyalty and abstract moral rectitude? Should one live with loneliness and, if so, on what terms?

However relevant to the story, these sober moments work less well than the outright comedy. Adult readers tend to have limited patience for the existential musings of even the most entertaining 14-year-old, and most authors must choose between creating strong teenage narrators (as Høeg does here, stretching credibility only as far as his picaresque narrative licenses) and obvious philosophising. Peter intersperses his tale with advice to the reader about "finding freedom" and "opening the door", introducing an element of adolescent moralising that seems – perhaps deliberately – less accomplished than the rest of the book. It's enough of an achievement to bring together Voltaire and PG Wodehouse; you don't need Salinger as well.

Sarah Moss's Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland is published by Granta.

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Sarah Moss
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