My birthday

         Today, I reckon I should leave a message due to my birthday. Sincerely, I did not get that excited as I did when I was young since I used to count how many days there would be for the occasion. Today is important to think over the past, reconsider when I failed and I succeeded, but mostly important embracing life as an important gift  to be shared with the ones I love.

       If I look at my past, I see many difficult situations, but thanks to those, I have brought to myself too much experience and developed a more mature point of view. I still need to make a lot of effort to accomplish all my projects and concerning these, I can afirm I am pretty obstinate: what I want, I am going to get. It does not matter how long it will take, I will go for it.

       I would like to thank God for making this career move happening to me in a very nice way and also for sending me the right members to make my life happier: my beloved dog Pierre, my boyfriend, my friends and family who stood by me and still do through my entire life. I can not take for granted the memories of my father whom I would like to give a hug on right now, however his life was given to God's hand. If I just could send a Sedex to Heaven, the message would be: "Thanks for being my father, I miss you deeply in my heart". I also thank my Guardian Angel for protecting me in a lot of situations.   

Clarissa

Happy Mother's Day!

Dear mom,

It is pretty hard to express my gratitude in words. You were, are and always will be my heroine. I know I used to express more my feelings when I was a little girl. In such an age, we can be more emotive.

You gave me the best adolescence I could have ever asked for in my beloved Teresópolis. You helped me out throughout all those years. Thanks for everything, especially for letting me come to this world, learn with you, share all the moments. Life is a delightful journey and it has been a great one with you by my side. 
Happy Mother’s Day!

Love you,

From: Clarissa

To: Myriam

Answering about hunger in the world...

How can the distribution of food be more equitable? Is hunger caused by lack of food or lack of distribution? What can people in the developed nations do to help abolish world hunger?

There has been a great movement of products, capitals and services among various countries for the past decades. This is supposed to increase since obtaining profitable results is the goal of all companies in the world. But, at the same time, all continents have to face a reality: How can a country make progress in some sectors such as e-commerce, chemical, electronics, toys if it is not capable of fighting against misery and hunger? All kinds of incentives are given to investors to invest in the national companies so that they can increase profits through mass production. However, the problem of hunger is due to a lack of money in people’s hands, not of distribution. If a country comprises a large number of miserables, of course they will not be able to feed themselves properly. So, hunger is the consequence of not giving people a reasonable access to society. Everybody needs good education to find a job which  can provide some basic things to live, although this does not allow them to have a complete access. What about the minimum salary? If people do not take part in it, they will always be excluded.  Governments do not usually worry  much about this situation, although some institutions like ONGs (not the corrupt ones) dedicate their time and money to provide people the access to food. Campaigns should involve more other classes of societies and get them to help these people. Distribution should be more equitable, but it depends on how governments will see to this problem. Maybe, it is possible to guarantee a part of food production and a spare part  from companies and supermarkets as donations to ONGs . Yet, creating  these programs can be a good option to minimize hunger and misery. Let's hope it gets better in the future.

Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare

by Jonathan Bate

© Random House

Random House, 2009

When I first began studying and reading Shakespeare, there was just a handful of indisputable facts about William Shakespeare. These facts and reasonable suppositions have grown exponentially in the last half century, fueled by a corresponding rise in literary research, sleuthing, and sometimes luck. Consider, for example, the recent revelation of what is very likely a portrait of Shakespeare that was simply hanging in a private home.

Subtitled "A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare," Soul of the Age "is intended as an intellectual biography of the man in the context of the mind-set into which he was born and out of which his works were created." While Bate has drawn from the plays and poems, along with contemporary Elizabethan history and treatises, he minded Barbara Everett's admonition that such a task is "never literally and never provably" true. Perhaps the preeminent Shakespeare scholar writing and teaching today, Bate is a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Warwick. Living near Stratford-upon-Avon with his wife and children provides ample opportunity to soak up the mystique of Shakespeare and to research his life.

Jacques' famous speech delineating the seven ages of man in As You Like It frames the chronology of the Bard's life, from the "infant mewling and puking" to that ultimate moment that comes to us all: "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything." Trying to resuscitate someone born 445 years ago requires dogged detective work coupled with literary analysis within the historical framework of Shakespeare's life. The facts around him are easy to come by; the facts about him are more problematic. Bate's masterful work presents a solid case for new facts and speculations.

This is not a biography to be read straight through; rather one should take time to ingest and savor the delectable banquet that Bates sets. Or, as Shakespeare's contemporary Bacon would have it, this is a book to be devoured. The writing is clear and unencumbered, the arguments presciently presented. In fact, Bate tells us in the introduction that this is "not an exact mapping," but that we can "follow the tracks" of Shakespeare from Stratford to London and back again. In writing this life of Shakespeare's mind, Bate sought to avoid the "deadening march of chronological sequence that is biography's besetting vice..." Each section draws from the span of Shakespeare's life to demonstrate how, for example, the lessons learned as a child informed his work throughout his life. Bate has succeeded in spades.

There is something to learn on every page, although there is much here that the "ever reader" (i.e., serious reader) will already know. So much of this information is put into a different context as to make it new and fresh again, giving new interpretation to the most mundane of previously known information. Bate writes about the so-called "lost period," a seven-year stretch beginning in February 1585. It begins with the christening of his twins Hamnet and Judith, and ends with Robert Greene's "Shake-scene" reference in 1592. Speculation has had Shakespeare fighting in the Dutch wars, studying to be a lawyer, teaching school, or traveling to Italy. Bate indicates that Shakespeare was mentioned twice in connection with a legal case filed in 1588 and heard a year later in 1589 before the Queen's Bench in London. He believes that Shakespeare was in London during this period, "reading the law" as it were, because he was actively involved in trying to recover money in this particular property case.

Shakespeare's birth was literally and figuratively in the "deep heart" of England, geographically and culturally. It was to this birthright that he returned repeatedly with actual visits home and literary returns in his references to the flora and fauna of Warwickshire, the people, their daily lives, and their folkways. Bate builds a cogent argument to explain how Shakespeare came to write as he did with the classical allusions and storytelling expertise. A teacher's handbook of that time, for example, indicated that students were to "keep in fresh memory the argument, matter and drift of the place which they are to construe." For Shakespeare, this meant paying attention to the "speaker, the context, the motivation for the speech." Paying attention to the fiction of the story meant that it would be consistent in the telling of its "facts."

Through each of the seven stages (Infant, Schoolboy, Lover, Soldier, Justice, Pantaloon, Oblivion) Bate builds his case for Shakespeare and the milieu that informed his writing. There can be no de Vere, Bacon, or Marlowe writing under the guise of Shakespeare. There is only one, and his life created a mind so encompassing that it is incomprehensible to imagine that anyone could have written in his stead. If you are going to read one book about William Shakespeare this year, this is the one. The scholarship is impeccable, the writing felicitous, the knowledge to be gained immeasurable.

Source: http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/memoir/fr/soul-of-an-age.htm

Note: All other related articles in the site are advisable to be read.

A Novel About the Creation by Alan Lightman

Mr. g A Novel About the Creation

by Alan Lightman

 “As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe.”

So begins Alan Lightman’s Mr. g: A Novel of the Creation, in which the narrator, Mr. g, recounts the story of his creation of the universe. Mr. g, or if you will - God, lives in a place he describes simply as the Void. His only companions in this vast nothingness are his Aunt Penelope and his Uncle Deva, a pair of bickering yet well-meaning elders who throughout the novel attempt to guide Mr. g in this new hobby of his, the creation of a universe.

Or universes (plural), really, because after fine-tuning the basic elements of both time and space, Mr. g experiments with the act of universe creation - a spin here, a pinch there - until, “After a time, a gigantic number of universes were flhying about - spinning on their axes, throbbing and pulsing, expanding and contracting at fantastic speed.” Before long however, Mr. g, taking Aunt Penelope’s advice, decides to focus on a single universe that he names Aalam-104729 (the Muslim name for “universe” prepended to the 10,000th prime number), in which he not only invests some organizational principles, but also decides that each living thing in the universe will have a sort of soul, an awareness of his or her maker.

Mr. g is a short and relatively breezy read, particularly for a novel that ruminatively bridges the matters of creation and evolution and turns its attention on sticky notions like predestination and free will. That said, Lightman, who in addition to being a novelist is also a theoretical physicist, has the keen ability at times to turn physics into poetry:

"Following my laws for the electrogmagnetic force, each such quivering of charged particles unleashed a flood of polarized photons with kaleidoscopic colors, creating a display far more spectacular than the evanescent veils of the Void. There were cascades and blooms of light, spiraling helices of energy, resonant oscillations of quark clouds. And the most eerie sounds: ultra-high-frequency moans and rips and dissonant crescendos as the gaseous plasma filling up space shuddered with each passing shock wave and compression of energy.”

Lightman also employs the perspective of his narrator uniquely to shed light on philosophical matters of existence, as in this Creator’s-eye-veiw of the passage of time and impermanence:

"Nothing was lasting, nothing was permanent. Living creatures, beings with minds, were the most fleeting of all. They came and went, came and went, came adn went, billions upon billions of lives, each quick as one breath. Atoms converged in their special arrangements to make each precious life, held together for moments, then scattered to dull lifeless matter again."

A huge and potentially contentious topic turns beguiling in Lightman’s deft hands. While drawing from Muslim, Hebrew, and Christian apocrypha for some of his nomenclature, he manages to steer clear of delving into any specifics of religion, instead marrying a more generalized notion concerning creation with current theories in the realms of physics, astronomy and biology. Lightman’s ability to abstract principles both scientific and philosophical and then filter them through the eyes of an all-powerful yet humble narrator makes Mr. g a fascinating thought experiment.

Source: http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/Mr-G-A-Novel-About-The-Creation.htm

The future of mankind

       

        A doctor and a beggar. Knowledge and wisdom: a nobel interchange of new perceptions. A fascinating story explaining how having the knowledge of theories is not enough to solve a human being’s life, if it were not for the devotion of one Medical student declares regarding the interests in solving the secret enigmas of mind.

      

       The characters of the plot are so intense in their emotions that they start taking part in our daily lives. Certainly, it is a masterpiece which lead us to an encouraging reflection concerning the future of each one of us. Marco Polo, Falcão e Ana: these are the characters who go through the rebuilding of their own beings, one teaching the other.  The conviction of those who learn along their way invite them to a journey of great teachings to all of us.

       I invite everybody to read this book that does belong to a special catalogue within Brazilian Literature. Take a break from the conventional and start your transformation through the author’s proposal, Augusto Cury, embracing concepts of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry into the approach of man in the 20^th century.

        I took two quotes which state this proposal: “The wisdow of a human being is not defined by how much he knows, however it is related to how much of his consciousness is aware of his not knowing.” & “Most of those who have right address go through their existence without never striding their own avenues. They are outsiders of themselves. Thus, they can neither take the right routes nor get over their crazynesses”. Nice reading!

The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo

The Angel Esmeralda

by Don DeLillo

The level of controlled finesse at work in The Angel Esmeralda is the product of a masterful author who has fully accepted the constraints of short fiction and one capable of utilizing every inch within its conceived boundaries. These stories are achingly good and brilliantly fleeting; Don DeLillo (Point Omega) works with a strict allowance of characters and settings, and with his impeccable meter is able to imbue these meager elements with a novel's strength in the span of just forty or so pages.

Written between 1979 and 2011, the nine pieces in The Angel Esmeralda are short stories at their finest. Each maintains DeLillo's exceptional standards of quality, yet manage to thematically adapt and reflect America's ever-evolving society. And, by compiling these stories chronologically, The Angel Esmeralda gains a new, troubling arc; throughout the collection's nine-step sequence, DeLillo shows not just how far the world's come in thirty years, but how bad things may be getting.

It's oddly fitting that an author with such a well-tempered command would write about those things outside our own realms of influence and control. In "Creation," a couple is endlessly on standby as they try to fly out of a West Indies vacation spot. In 1983's "Human Moments in World War III," a pair of men in a space station quietly orbit the Earth monitoring the military movements on terra firma. Physically and emotionally, these astronauts are miles away from the humanity they once knew. They search quietly for any "human moments" that may still linger within them and reflect on the deadly pace of mankind's recent developments:

 

"We are no longer delicate biological specimens adrift in an alien environment. The enemy can kill us with its photons, its mesons, its charged particles faster than any dusting of micrometeoroids. The emotions have changed."

This change of emotions is the result of a dying world. People have changed and societies have changed, all at the hand of globalization and our endless sprint towards the future. But not all this crumbling is inter-personal: "The Ivory Acrobat" tells of a literal tectonic shift as a woman tries to cope with an influx of earthquakes while living alone in Greece. Already somewhat alienated by the city, she finds she can no longer connect with the once-reliable ground beneath her. As her paranoia grows, she imagines the worst, "that these were not aftershocks at all but warnings of some deep disquiet in the continental trench, the massing of a force that would roll across the marble-hearted city and bring it to dust."

"The Angel Esmeralda" is the story of two nuns trying to help the needy in their impoverished South Bronx community. With little means to make a meaningful difference, their story recedes into the realms of faith and hope as the sisters and their flock try to get by on spirituality alone. When Esmeralda, a young local girl is killed, the community begins to see her face nightly in a mural, under the headlights of each passing elevated train. The sisters struggle with this miracle, uncertain what to believe in. In a breathtaking paragraph, DeLillo describes the conflicting views of Sister Edgar, who seems to want harmony as bad as she wants something real to pray for:

"Edgar was a cold-war nun who'd once lined the walls of her room with aluminum foil as a shield against nuclear fallout from Communist bombs. Not that she didn't think a war might be thrilling. She daydreamed many a domed flash in the film of her skin, tried to conjure the burst even now, with the USSR crumbled alphabetically, the massive letters toppled like Cyrillic statuary."

Growing in step with the imminent doom of today's society, how does one begin to fathom what could genuinely be an act of God, a true angel sighting? The brief, uplifting turn of faith in "The Angel Esmeralda" shines a new kind of light on the other eight stories in DeLillo's collection. What if these stories weren't just about our disintegrating society, but about the human things we cling to in the face of inevitable decomposition? What of the art exhibitions ("Baader-Meinhof") and movie screenings ("The Starveling") we frequent in solitude: could these stave off the decay of progress? It's possible. There's a complex glimmer of hope in each of DeLillo's desolate stories, and it's in these human moments that The Angel Esmeralda achieves its greatest, most resonant success.

Source: http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/The-Angel-Esmeralda-Don-DeLillo.htm?nl=1