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.

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.

Missão. Próximo ‘senhor Justiça’ terá que decidir o que fazer com os detidos de Guantánamo antes de fechar prisão
É uma “quase certeza” entre os media americanos que Eric H. Holder Jr. será nomeado procurador-geral da Administração de Barack Obama, tornando-se no primeiro ‘senhor Justiça’ afro-americano nos EUA. Depois de, na noite de segunda-feira, a revista Newsweek ter revelado que o advogado estava no topo da lista do futuro presidente, ontem a imprensa americana começou as suas investigações sobre a carreira do antigo procurador-geral adjunto que terá como missão fechar Guantánamo.
Antigo juiz e procurador federal, Holder, 57 anos, é reconhecido e elogiado por congressistas republicanos e democratas, mas a sua escolha deverá reavivar os fantasmas do escândalo do perdão ao fugitivo financeiro, Marc Rich, concedido por Bill Clinton no seu último dia na presidência. Holder que se pronunciou “neutral ou inclinado para o perdão”, admitiu mais tarde ao Congresso ter-se precipitado. A justificação parece ter chegado para os republicanos no Comité Judicial do Senado que terão admitido ao presidente-eleito que não criarão obstáculos a uma possível nomeação.
Se assim for, Holder terá frente grandes desafios. Antes de mais, o novo procurador-geral deverá lidar com um departamento desmoralizado por alegações de interferência política durante a era Bush e será obrigado a decidir se avança com processos contra os membros da administração que ordenaram escutas telefónicas ilegais. Mais importante que isso, terá de encontrar um destino para os detidos na prisão de Guantánamo se,  como prometido, Obama decidir encerrar aquela prisão.

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.

Saturday night. The sound of the accordion escapes the room beneath the white wooden door but the spell cast is all kept inside. In the last room of the tiled corridor of Fábrica do Braço de Prata (Factory of the Silver’s Arm), the characters of bohemian Lisbon enjoy the music of their new best-kept secret.

Indoors the scene is surreal. Mismatching iron-made tables and chairs, looking one hundred years old, share the space with hanging miscellanea imported from a never-happened past. The artist in the centre shows his smiling teeth not getting any younger as he stretches the boisterous French accordion. And the audience of no more than 40 boggling eyes gazes his washed-out sailor hat. Only the cat of glass in the table refuses to turn his head from me.

The Fábrica, to be one-year-old next month, is indisputably Lisbon’s most bizarre bookshop. The building, located in the abandoned East sector of the Portuguese capital, used to be a powder factory producing rifles, cannons and bullets for the armies of a decadent colonial empire. Nowadays, it crafts culture in industrial quantities.

There are books: 40 000 of them asking to be taken off, leafed through and talked about, in the shelves and tables of the room devoted to Nietzsche. There are also petite concerts, independent cinema showings or themed photo-shootings every evening from Wednesday to Sunday, around the other eleven rooms of the converted factory.

The first dozens of the Fábrica’s visitors, dissidents of the predictable Bairro Alto, ended up dragging here certain hundreds. “Today it is a meeting point for nameless artists daring to show their works and starving intellectual Lisbonners who want more than a drink when going out at night”, says José Pinho, one of the owners.

recovered movie

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.

It will use a robotic arm to dig through the protective topsoil layer and lift samples of both soil and ice to its deck for scientific analysis.

Dr Tom Pike of Imperial College, London, is part of the British team involved in the project.

“The main goal of the mission is to get below the surface of Mars to where we are almost certain there is water,” he told BBC News.

“The orbiters that are around Mars have already surveyed in great detail the area in which we are landing and we know that there is ice – solid water – 10cm, or maybe even less, below the surface.

“Water, of course, is of critical importance because it is one of the building blocks – one of the essential habitats we need – for life.”

Landing on Mars was a notoriously tricky business. Of the 11 missions that have tried to land probes on Mars since 1971 – only five have succeeded.

Phoenix is an apt name for the current mission, as it rose from the ashes of two previous failures.

Source BBC

A Guerra Colonial está na moda. Houve tempos em que só se falava dela de surdina. Hoje todo o cabo raso que serviu além mar tem história para contar. É assim que, para além dos livros de encomenda que enchem os tops das livrarias outros tantos romances de longas páginas jazem nas gavetas como projectos que não passaram disso.
Com Antunes Ferreira foi diferente. Tudo começou com uma crónica postada no seu recém cirado blog, A Treavessa do Ferreira, sobre sua partida para Angola, 40 anos antes, onde serviu dois dos cinco anos do serviço militar.

No Cais de Santos, mais 1784 homens fardados e um “formigueiro de famílias, namoradas, amigos despediam-se com muitas lágrimas à mistura”.

“Os amigos da tropa”, contou o autor ao DN “diziam que tinha muita leitura”. Daí foi um salto até pôr de lado o romance que estava a escrever e dedicar-se a recordar. Angola, Luanda e a mata. As brancas que ficaram para trás. E as pretas que se encontraram pelo caminho. Amigos que morreram no mato os outros que podiam ter morrido.

Foi escrevendo short stories, uma atrás da outra , umas ficcionadas outras reais e vividas – desafio é descobrir quais – e no final a possibilidade de publicar surigu naturalmente.

Morte na Picada retrata uma guerra sem sentido pelas histórias dos soldados e pela boca grosseira dos soldados. Uns que só queriam voltar para casa, outros só queriam ser livres. Acabavam todos à pancada, mais a medo que com raiva.

Numa história dois amigos de infância reconhecem-se apenas no momento em que disparam um contra o outro. A morte é surpresa e presença constante, o ponto final das biografias que se vão seguindo no livro. O sexo anda sempre na cabeça dos soldados.

A Morte na Picada não é mais do que a memória de uma guerra que “começou há quase meio século e já terminou há quase 30 anos, mas ainda hoje continua presente em todos nós”, como disse Joaquim Furtado, jornalista que apresentou o livro.

É narrativa brutal sobre homens que se matam e morrem sem razão. Como no desfecho do livro, quando carrasco e prisioneiro, repartem a refeição e são mortos por quem não soube sonhar com a reconciliação.

Morte na Picada – online shoping

Travessa do Ferreira – blog

Antunes Ferreira

Hugo Coelho

Jornalista