January 1, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We must, in this age of integration and complexity, work to recognize those areas where we can learn from cultures that build into our own, that enrich or sustain us, that give humanity, broadly, its metaphysical sense, its creative-adaptable quality. We know France as a place of great culture and profound philosophical insights and a highly developed legal system. But we tend not to think of France as a country whose most famous culture is simply one of many that came to dominate, and very really did stamp out the other cultures competing for survival, in a fractious agrarian society outside the capital, in the 19th century.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Poetry is the frontier where language in use comes in contact with future meaning, and in the process, when best executed, brings a wealth of transcendent truths into the present. Poetry is relevant to all uses of language, though there may be trends that suggest popular culture is looking to new forms of poetic activity to replace specific old models: many musical artists now play the role of mythic historian or wandering troubadour, but poetry is not confined to these purposes.
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.
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November 3, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
It is often lamented that the United States suffers from a culture that plays to the “lowest common denominator”, even as it gathers its collective urges to proclaim the loftiest of philosophical aspirations. So we are forced, as citizens, as intellectuals, as free spirits —as followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson or of Kerouac, Jerry Springer or Madonna, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.— to grapple with the argument that American culture is inherently “anti-intellectual”, and therefore unable to deal with overtly complex thought patterns, or convoluted, multiply parenthetical (or as Woody Allen might say it, polymorphously nested) sorts of syntax.
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May 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.
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December 5, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
¿Sabemos sobre qué terreno pisamos, qué fundamento se levanta debajo de nuestros pies para darnos lugar? si las palabras tienen un peso variable incluso en el momento en que se dicen, y cuál es el trasfondo de esa variación? o sea, qué mensaje escondido pueda haber en la energía que conllevan y dejan caer sobre nuestra percepción de la realidad? sabemos, acaso, si hay significado alguno ni constancia en la forma que elegimos para expresarnos, si tal vez vayamos construyendo dos historias a la vez, la que nos sirve ver en el momento y la que veremos con tiempo, cuando otro significado nos sirve de una manera más completa…
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October 31, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
máscara de matiz y de vidrio
r e m o t a i n c i s i v a t r i s t e y a p t a
te matizamos queriendo ir más allá
entre las angustias —y soberbias— y humildades
más implacables
con pies que no andan
que son glándulas de mitología
de esmeraldas que cerebrales nievan
s o b r e n i e v e s s i n f i n . . .
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September 8, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Nada es estable, todo es por decisión : solemos pensar que las circunstancias nos exculpan de la problemática de la decisión, que “no tenía opción” o “no había remedio”, que “no tuve la situación adecuada”, como si vivir en lo óptimo fuera un derecho, y cuando llega a tanto, ya hemos ido bastante lejos en nuestras expectativas…
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June 26, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Elindulnék significa “comenzaría”, o “arrancaría”, o incluso “tomaría ya el camino”, despegar en condicional, con el futuro inseguro, sin garantías, y porque comenzar es lo que hay que hacer…
se puede decir que el proyecto principal, siempre, es comenzar, o volver a comenzar, o respirar hondo y saber que el próximo paso no es una repetición, [...]
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May 16, 2007 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
La exposición y seminario “El mundo escrito”, capítulo más reciente de Café Sentido, culminó en la mesa redonda sobre los miles de idiomas en vías de extinción. La charla siguió la política y las metas del proyecto de forma excepcional: una mesa redonda, diálogo informal, puntos de vista apasionados, y la oportunidad de aprender, el [...]
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May 16, 2007 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
La exposición y seminario “El mundo escrito”, último capítulo de Café Sentido, culminó en la mesa redonda sobre los miles de idiomas en vías de extinción. La charla siguió la política y las metas del proyecto de forma excepcional: una mesa redonda, diálogo informal, puntos de vista apasionados, y la oportunidad de aprender, el uno del otro.
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May 15, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
El mundo está escrito sobre una tela de voces que ninguna puede ser en sí más que un hilo, un cruce, un fortalecimiento muscular del éter. Está construido de gestos y formas, figuras tanto desnudas como revestidas para otro fin… en cada escena se ve una ráfaga de trasparentes incertezas que proponen a su manera y en el ritmo que les consten las circunstancias, texto que es también cuerpo, sangre, oxígeno, hierro, ley, contratiempo, y sagaz paciencia.
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May 8, 2007 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
LA MITAD DE LOS IDIOMAS ACTUALMENTE HABLADOS DESAPARECERÁN DENTRO DE 100 AÑOS
Si las tendencias actuales se realizan, en menos de un siglo, más de 3.500, la mitad de todos los idiomas actualmente hablados, desaparecerán. La civilización humana está enfrentando el momento de mayor peligro para las culturas más locales y periféricas, y será necesario tomar [...]
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May 8, 2007 :: jr3o :: No Comment Yet
Si las tendencias actuales se realizan, en menos de un siglo, más de 3.500, la mitad de todos los idiomas actualmente hablados, desaparecerán. La civilización humana está enfrentando el momento de mayor peligro para las culturas más locales y periféricas, y será necesario tomar en cuenta lo que se va a perder en este proceso de purgación involuntaria y extinción.
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May 2, 2007 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Un poeta trabaja en los rodeos y pertinencias de un universo propio, de unas ansiedades experimentadas y de un ambiente o dado o inventado. Pretende hacer llegar esa constelación de gustos y desgastes, conocimientos y acercamientos, al ámbito humano general. Es, por etimología, “creador” que busca descubrir, sintetizar, ampliar terrenos idiomáticos, expresar fórmulas y significados futuros, a través de una atención elevada, dirigida a los detalles de lo mundano y de los misterios del espíritu.
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May 1, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
El segundo libro de poesía en castellano, publicado por el autor y editor Joseph Robertson. Esta obra consta de una serie de obras en verso que forman “rezos” y meditaciones, exploraciones del amor y de la naturaleza de la existencia tal como la desea establecer el ser humano.
Es una carta afectuosa a los seres [...]
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February 10, 2007 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
Jenny es pintora cubana radicada en el sur de Francia, donde dirige el Artelier Habana. Explica de su trayectoria que se trata de “la Tierra como capullo, la Madre Tierra, la tierra natal, mis orígenes. La naturaleza y la unión simbiótica necesaria con otros individuos. Casi todas las obras salen ‘cubanizadas’, muy coloridos. En el [...]
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October 6, 2006 :: jr3o :: One Comment
The world’s three most widely-spoken languages, English, Spanish and Mandarin, each enjoy more than 450 million speakers worldwide. These languages are increasingly useful for international business and for diplomacy in an interconnected global society. But languages with fewer than 10 million speakers are now considered “minor” and many long-standing cultures are in danger of disappearing, as only a handful of people remain who can speak them. In North America, there are now only half the number of indigenous languages spoken as there were 500 years ago, when Europeans began to settle permanently. There are 329 distinct languages spoken in the United States, roughly half indigenous…
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May 25, 2006 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Is the United States an “English-speaking nation”, or a place where all cultures are welcome to converge, mix and evolve? To answer this question, we must consider that there is a natural human tendency to fear what is perceived as the definite and invasive “other”, that which is different and which we feel can be categorized in a way that fits our worries.
The push to establish a single national language can only be sustained on the basis of a number of false premises. We will explore seven such lies and misperceptions here, all of a particular sort, having to do with a way of rationalizing one’s aversion to difference or to change. And, in each case, it is fairly easy to illustrate how the lie works against the interests of both a democratic society and American tradition itself.
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December 20, 2004 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
A great and resonant thinker dies, and a great and resonant newspaper publishes an obituary dismissing his work as destructive and “abstruse”. It is an unjustifiable communicative travesty. When Jacques Derrida passed away, in October of this year, the New York Times wrote that his work was an attempt to undermine Western culture.
The obituary was full of factual errors and infected with a hard-line bias against complex and rigorous thought… the facile and mistaken point of view that to distinguish between meaning and truth is to call for nihilist or morally bankrupt agendas in thought and politics… it failed to look at the work itself or the man himself and instead paraphrased poorly wrought critiques and conceptual gossip to try to discredit a monumental life of study in Western philosophy.
That complex and rigorous thought, involved in much of postmodern theory, which characterized Derrida’s research and theory, has proven vital to extending human understanding in disciplines as diverse as science, literature and policy. The Times obituary railed against this level of self-conscious complexity, accusing Derrida of questioning the very right of Western thought to exist at all. It is as if the goal were to declare, against all evidence, that we are not living at this moment, after what has been seen and done, as if nothing had been learned from political history, as if the 21st Century did not exist… because postmodern is not a philosophy, it is an era, and one not easily defined.
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