tenho pena

Tenho pena e não respondo.

Mas não tenho culpa enfim

De que em mim não correspondo

Ao outro que amaste em mim.

Cada um é muita gente.

Para mim sou quem me penso,

Para outros – cada um sente

O que julga, e é um erro imenso.

Ah, deixem-me sossegar.

Não me sonhem nem me outrem.

Se eu não me quero encontrar,

Quererei que outros me encontrem?

tu… nunca estás satisfeito

Walking around

Acontece que me canso de meus pés e de minhas unhas,
do meu cabelo e até da minha sombra.
Acontece que me canso de ser homem.

Todavia, seria delicioso
assustar um notário com um lírio cortado
ou matar uma freira com um soco na orelha.
Seria belo
ir pelas ruas com uma faca verde
e aos gritos até morrer de frio.

Passeio calmamente, com olhos, com sapatos,
com fúria e esquecimento,
passo, atravesso escritórios e lojas ortopédicas,
e pátios onde há roupa pendurada num arame:
cuecas, toalhas e camisas que choram
lentas lágrimas sórdidas.

Pablo Neruda

A farwell to arms

A Farwell to Arms Ernest Hemingway

Vintage Classics £7.99 pp.293

Wait please. Be patient. Enjoy the moment. If you are in a rush for the extraordinary, then Hemingway’s Farwell to Arms is not for you. I know it is a story about war and love, I know. But it is told in the most ordinary way it is possible to write about war and love. Few deaths. Few battles. No suspense. Little drama. A love so simple as it were if real. And I am sorry to tell: that is the best of it.

The story goes on in the north Italian mountains, during the war against Austria, in 1917. The storyteller is Frederic Henry – much of Hemingway himself –, an American voluntary driving an ambulance in the Italian army. Through Henry, Hemingway portrays the lives of common soldiers who are more worried about the coming whores than with the outcome of the battles. But the war stories are just an excuse to tell a poignant narrative, one of his best, on human love.

Above all things, this is a story about love. A love between il Tenente and Catherine Barkley, an American nurse. A love that is not a fairy tale. Nor even a burning desire at first sight. Hemingway made this love perfectly real. His vigorous verve, short of full of conversation and action, just helped to make Farewell to Arms seem more banal. But do not let yourself to be deceived for that is what makes it so moving.

When you reach to the last lines of the book, the ones that confessedly took him loads of tries, then you can understand it. You will turn the pages back and start to read it again. Every dialogue about Henry’s bear, about Cat’s clothes, will catch your eye. And you will wish that gone-banality of a simple love would last forever. When you know it won’t, you will be too dry to weep and too hollow to go on. And you will fell like joining Henry for a night walk in the rain.

Cut and action. Take 2 do juramento de Obama

Nestas coisas de rituais previstos na constituição, todos os cuidados são poucos. Terá sido essa convicção que levou Barack Obama a repetir o juramento depois de na primeira vez ter enrolado a língua e trocado uma palavra do texto da constituição. A culpa nem foi do presidente, mas sim do Chefe de Justiça John G. Roberts que lhe deu a deixa. Mas isso não foi suficiente para acalmar os conselheiros que temiam que o voto não valia. Assim, quarta-feira, no final do primeiro dia de trabalho na Casa Branca, o Presidente mandou chamar o Roberts à Map Room da Casa Branca para tentarem de novo. “Está pronto para prestar juramento?” perguntou o chefe de Justiça. “Estou” respondeu Obama. “Mas vamos fazer isto devagar”. Nem 25 segundos depois, Obama tornou-se Presidente outra vez.

The limits of public responsability

Is it fair for the society to stay still and watch funds and investors when they are making money and to run helping them when they face a crisis?

I know the world’s finantial system is different from bakeries’ economy. But I couldn’t help thinking about that these days. I am posting a sketch from FT of someone who made point better than I could hope to do myself.

John Kay in Financial Times

“The limits of Public obligation…

Still the bills roll in. Taxpayers have already written impressively large cheques for Northern Rock and Bear Stearns. This week they are asked to dip into their pockets for Fannie Mae and Equitable Life. Ten billion pounds is more than a week’s public spending. But the sum is now the small change of subvention to failing financial services businesses. The common cause of all these calls on the public purse is the gap between the responsibilities government is thought to have assumed and the powers and competence government has to discharge these responsibilities.

Equitable Life, the mutual life assurer that closed to new business in 2000, did not fail. Most of its policyholders did not do badly, but they did less well than they had been led to expect. Regulators did not cause the crisis, but things might have been done that were not done and there were specific procedural failings. In a world populated by real people, hindsight will almost always reveal such mistakes.

It is not uncommon for products to disappoint. But we now have high hopes of our regulators. We look to them to ensure our expectations are met. The parliamentary ombudsman seems to add the corollary that taxpayers have a responsibility to compensate the customers of regulated businesses whose expectations are not fulfilled.

Fannie Mae is an organisation the US government created, but could not control. It has always been difficult for Europeans to understand why Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exist in the heartland of capitalism. During the New Deal, measures to enable low-income households to buy their homes seemed a proper government objective. In more recent times private institutions have been all too willing to provide such mortgages.

But established agencies do not disappear quietly. Fannie Mae built up a balance sheet whose overall size was large even by the standards of the US economy and US Treasury. The business model exploited the difference between the rates at which money could be raised with an implied government guarantee and the rate at which it could be lent commercially. The gap not only provided mortgage guarantees but rewarded the company’s shareholders and, with considerable generosity, Fannie Mae’s own executives.

The company was a powerful influence on Capitol Hill. Its lobbyists attracted support across the spectrum: the left applauded its help for poor homeowners while the right relished the business Fannie Mae generated and subsidised. Only a nervous Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and a few ideologically hostile rightwing congressmen spoke for the poorly organised contrary interest: the future taxpayers who might one day be called on to honour pledges they had liberally if unknowingly given. Now that day has arrived.

The problem is that the difference between government powers and government responsibility can be addressed by increasing the powers or reducing the responsibility. We should do the latter.

The near collapse of Equitable Life happened because the company had encouraged its policyholders to believe they might receive almost the full value of the funds that underpinned the with-profits funds of the business. With-profits policies are vaguely defined contracts that are probably viable only in the traditional insurance world of benign cartels. It was a mistake for regulators ever to become involved in policing these arrangements and will be a disaster if the further consequence is that government becomes involved in underwriting them.

If Fannie Mae were to remain an institution distinguished mainly by its – outdated – social purpose, it should have had a limited remit and never have acquired private shareholders. If it were to become a significant financial institution in its own right, it should have severed its special relationship with the US government.

The costs of the casual assumption of government obligation for private actions will continue to mount. The inference of public liability for the alleged costs of regulatory failure may be the most potent argument of all for limiting the scope of regulation.

London Out Loud photoshoot

recovered movie

Spacecraft ready to explore Mars

A Nasa’s space craft has performed a successful edgy landing in Mars this night.

Nasa’s Phoenix lander touch down as planned at 2353 GMT on 25 May in the far north of the Red Planet, after a 680-million-km (423-million-mile) journey from Earth.

Now Phoenix will begin a three-month mission to search for ice beneath the Martian surface.

Portugal must increase investments in Defence, says minister

Portugal risks to lose a say on European foreign policy if it does not increase its defence expenditures, the minister of Defence warned yesterday in Lisbon during a conference on the “The Treaty of Lisbon and the Future of European Integration”.

Speaking on the day of the 58th anniversary of the Shuman declaration – the embryo of the European Union Severiano Teixeira said the Treaty of Lisbon has made the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFCP) the new driving force of the UE and said that Portugal must assume its responsibilities to stay on the lead of the European platoon.

“There is a choice to be made”, the minister said. “If Portugal is to be in the frontline of the European integration process, we must recognize that, once the period of budget consolidation is over, we need to increase our Defence budget up to the levels of our partners and allies”.

MY blueberry nights