Price, pjesme, intervjui...

[MedenoSrce]

http://othersounds.com/interview-dusko-gojkovic/

How many ways is there to spell your name?

My real name is Dusan Gojkovic. Upon immigrating to the US in the 1960’s, I realized that Americans could pronounce it every way but right. I have been collecting these spellings for years: Dasco Godjkebich, Goyawich, Daskowich Goicowsky, Suzan Gayovitsh, Goiavik etc. Even my boss at one time, Woody Herman, couldn’t get it right after two years. One day I suggested that I should change my name. He was vehemently against that. He said, “You know, here in America you have to get attention any-which way. So, when I announce you and nobody gets the name right, asking, ‘what was that funny name of that European trumpetplayer?’ that’s how they will remember you.” I thought if they don’t remember me for playing my trumpet, then…

[MaD_ProfessoR]

http://othersounds.com/interview-dusko-gojkovic/

How many ways is there to spell your name?

My real name is Dusan Gojkovic. Upon immigrating to the US in the 1960’s, I realized that Americans could pronounce it every way but right. I have been collecting these spellings for years: Dasco Godjkebich, Goyawich, Daskowich Goicowsky, Suzan Gayovitsh, Goiavik etc. Even my boss at one time, Woody Herman, couldn’t get it right after two years. One day I suggested that I should change my name. He was vehemently against that. He said, “You know, here in America you have to get attention any-which way. So, when I announce you and nobody gets the name right, asking, ‘what was that funny name of that European trumpetplayer?’ that’s how they will remember you.” I thought if they don’t remember me for playing my trumpet, then…

hvala

[MedenoSrce]

hvala

drago mi je da jos neko prati ovu temu
osim mene i ludog profesora Saiana

[MaD_ProfessoR]

Naletim redovno, pročitam ako bude što interesantno, rijetko ostavljam upise a još manje komentarišem tuđe

[MedenoSrce]

Na dobrotvornoj gala-večeri, na kojoj su se prikupljala sredstva za
školu za dijecu sa posebnim potrebama, otac jednog od učenika podijelio je
sa prisutnima priču koju neće zaboraviti niko ko je tada prisustvovao
tom događaju.

Pošto je zahvalio školi i njenom predanom osoblju, postavio je slijedeće
pitanje:
"Ako nije ometena spoljašnjim uticajima, sve što priroda stvori je
savršeno kreirano. Ali moj sin Siniša ne može da nauči sve one stvari
koje mogu druga deca. Nije u stanju da razumije i uradi sve ono što i
njegovi vršnjaci.

Gdje je tu prirodni poredak stvari, kada se radi o mom sinu?"

Publika je utihnula poslije tog pitanja.

Otac je nastavio:
"Vjerujem da se, kada tjelesno i umno invalidno dijete, poput mog Siniše,
dođe na svijet, prilika za iskazivanje istinske ljudske prirode sama javi
i pokaže, i to u vidu načina na koji drugi ljudi tretiraju to dijete".

Potom produži:
Siniša i njegov otac šetali su pored parka, gdje su neki dječaci, koje je
Siniša inače poznavao, na terenu igrali fudbal.

Siniša je upitao oca:
"Šta misliš, tata, da li bi me pustili da igram sa njima?"

Sinišin otac je znao da većina dječaka ne bi željela da neko kao Siniša
igra u njihovoj ekipi, ali je isto tako vrlo dobro znao koliko bi
njegovom sinu značilo da mu dozvole da zaigra, i koliko bi mu to samo
dalo toliko potrebni osjećaj pripadnosti i samopouzdanja, uvjerenje da od
društva biva prihvaćen usprkos svom invaliditetu.
Sinišin otac je prišao jednom od dječaka pored aut-linije i upitao (ne
očekujući previše) da li bi i Siniša mogao da zaigra sa njima.

Momčić se u nevjerici okrenuo prema igralištu i rekao:
"Znate šta, gospodine, mi gubimo sa 4 : 1, a bliži se i kraj drugog
poluvremena. Pa, ..., može da igra za našu ekipu, pokušaćemo da ga
postavimo na poziciju lijevog beka".

Siniša se malo namučio hodajući do ekipe, ali je sa širokim osmjehom
obukao dres svog tima.

Otac ga je ozaren gledao sa majušnom suzom u oku i osjećajem narastajuće
topline u grudima.
Dječaci su mogli jasno da vide i osjete sreću ovog čovjeka, ganutog oca
koji radosno gleda kako njegov sin biva priman u njihov tim.

Pri kraju utakmice Sinišina ekipa je dala gol iz jedne brze kontre, ali je još uvijek gubila sa dva gola razlike.

Siniša je pokrivao lijevu stranu polovine terena.

Iako nikakve akcije tuda nisu išle, on je očito bio u euforičnom
raspoloženju jer je dobio priliku DA BUDE u igri, na travnatom tepihu;
razvukao je osmjeh od uva do uva, dok mu je otac mahao sa tribine.

U samoj završnici Sinišina ekipa je opet postigla gol, dakle, gubila je
samo sa 4 : 3 !
Sada, sa jednim golom u minusu, smiješila im se prilika za eventualno
izjednačenje u zaustavnom vremenu od 5 minuta.

I zaista, dosudjen je penal za Sinišin tim i dječaci su stali da se
pogadjaju ko će ga izvesti.

Pade ideja da puca Siniša, ali uz veliki rizik da izgube utakmicu !?
Na opšte iznenađenje - Siniši je ipak data lopta !
Svi su znali da je to bila nemoguća misia, jer Siniša nije ni znao
pravilno da šutira, a kamo li da pogodi okvir gola i da prevari golmana.

Ipak, kad je Siniša stao iza lopte, protivnički golman je, shvativši da
Sinišina ekipa svjesno riskira poraz radi tog jednog jedinstvenog
trenutka u Sinišinom životu, odlučio da se baci u pogrešnu stranu kako
bi lopta ipak ušla u mrežu.

Siniša je uzeo zalet, zamahnuo i ... traljavo zakačio loptu, koja je
polako krenula ka suprotnoj stativi.

Utakmica bi u ovom trenutku bila praktično rješena, jer je lopta bila
spora i većina protivničkih igrača bi je mogla sustići
Medjutim, i oni su se kretali sasvim lagano, pa svi gledaoci povikaše:
"Siniša, Siniša, trči za njom, Siniša, trči, stigni je, stigni !!! Trči,
trči, i ćušni je u mrežu !!!
Nikada prije u svom životu Siniša nije toliko brzo trčao, uspjeo je, na
jedvite jade, da stigne do nje prije nego što je završila u gol-autu.

Doteturao se i širom otvorenih očiju, zadihan, upitnog pogleda, zastao
da vidi šta će dalje

Svi graknuše: "Šutni je, šutni je u gol !!!

Uhvativši dah, Siniša je vidno potresen, naprežući zadnje snage, kao u
nekom delirijumu, magnoveju, nekako umirio loptu, zahvatio je
unutrašnjom stranom stopala i ... i smjestio je u mrežu !!!

Muk, ... , a onda provala ... prasak - svi skočiše:

"Siniša, Siniša, bravo, Siniša !!!"

Zajapurenom i preneraženom Siniši priskočiše svi saigrači, grleći ga,
ljubeći ga i slaveći ga kao heroja koji je spasio svoj tim od poraza.

"Tog dana ...", okončavajući svoju priču s drhtajem u glasu potreseni
otac, dok su mu se suze kotrljale niz lice, "... dječaci obe ekipe
donijeli su komadić prave ljubavi i humanosti u ovaj svijet".

Siniša nije preživio do slijedećeg ljeta.

Umro je još iste zime, nikada ne zaboravivši da je bio heroj, da je zbog
toga njegov otac bio presrećan i pamteći kako je svog malog heroja
dočekala oduševljena majka, grlivši ga plačući od sreće!

* * *
A SAD, MALI DODATAK OVOJ PRIČI:

Svi šaljemo i proslijedjujemo stotine viceva, smiješnih poruka, gegova i
spotova putem e-maila (izmedju ostalog I na blog ), onako rutinski, bez razmišljanja, a kada dođe do toga da pošaljemo poruke o životnim izborima, tu oklijevamo ...
Nasilje, vulgarnosti, bizarnostii i česte opscesnosti slobodno prolaze i
kolaju "Cyberspace"-om, ali javna rasprava o uljudnosti najčešće i ne
stiže u naše škole, ni na naša radna mesta. Šteta!
Ako sada razmišljate o tome da li da kopirate I proslijedite dalje ovu poruku, Vi,
najvjerovatnije, birete ljude u svom adresaru koji su "prikladni" za to,
dakle, one koji su "podesni" za ovu vrstu pošte.


Svi imamo na desetine prilika svakog dana da pomognemo da se ostvari taj
"prirodni poredak stvari".

Tako mnogo, naizgled beznačajnih, susreta između dvoje ljudi stavlja nas
pred izbor:
Prenijeti malu iskru ljubavi i humanosti na drugog ili izbjeći datu
priliku, ostavivši tako svijet još malo hladnijim?

Stari mudrac je rekao da se svako društvo prosuđuje i cijeni po tome kako
tretira svoje najunesrećenije pojedince

By
Maxisa.blogger.ba

[ptičica]

Na dobrotvornoj gala-večeri, na kojoj su se prikupljala sredstva za
školu za dijecu sa posebnim potrebama, otac jednog od učenika podijelio je
sa prisutnima priču koju neće zaboraviti niko ko je tada prisustvovao
tom događaju.

Pošto je zahvalio školi i njenom predanom osoblju, postavio je slijedeće
pitanje:
"Ako nije ometena spoljašnjim uticajima, sve što priroda stvori je
savršeno kreirano. Ali moj sin Siniša ne može da nauči sve one stvari
koje mogu druga deca. Nije u stanju da razumije i uradi sve ono što i
njegovi vršnjaci.

Gdje je tu prirodni poredak stvari, kada se radi o mom sinu?"

Publika je utihnula poslije tog pitanja.

Otac je nastavio:
"Vjerujem da se, kada tjelesno i umno invalidno dijete, poput mog Siniše,
dođe na svijet, prilika za iskazivanje istinske ljudske prirode sama javi
i pokaže, i to u vidu načina na koji drugi ljudi tretiraju to dijete".

Potom produži:
Siniša i njegov otac šetali su pored parka, gdje su neki dječaci, koje je
Siniša inače poznavao, na terenu igrali fudbal.

Siniša je upitao oca:
"Šta misliš, tata, da li bi me pustili da igram sa njima?"

Sinišin otac je znao da većina dječaka ne bi željela da neko kao Siniša
igra u njihovoj ekipi, ali je isto tako vrlo dobro znao koliko bi
njegovom sinu značilo da mu dozvole da zaigra, i koliko bi mu to samo
dalo toliko potrebni osjećaj pripadnosti i samopouzdanja, uvjerenje da od
društva biva prihvaćen usprkos svom invaliditetu.
Sinišin otac je prišao jednom od dječaka pored aut-linije i upitao (ne
očekujući previše) da li bi i Siniša mogao da zaigra sa njima.

Momčić se u nevjerici okrenuo prema igralištu i rekao:
"Znate šta, gospodine, mi gubimo sa 4 : 1, a bliži se i kraj drugog
poluvremena. Pa, ..., može da igra za našu ekipu, pokušaćemo da ga
postavimo na poziciju lijevog beka".

Siniša se malo namučio hodajući do ekipe, ali je sa širokim osmjehom
obukao dres svog tima.

Otac ga je ozaren gledao sa majušnom suzom u oku i osjećajem narastajuće
topline u grudima.
Dječaci su mogli jasno da vide i osjete sreću ovog čovjeka, ganutog oca
koji radosno gleda kako njegov sin biva priman u njihov tim.

Pri kraju utakmice Sinišina ekipa je dala gol iz jedne brze kontre, ali je još uvijek gubila sa dva gola razlike.

Siniša je pokrivao lijevu stranu polovine terena.

Iako nikakve akcije tuda nisu išle, on je očito bio u euforičnom
raspoloženju jer je dobio priliku DA BUDE u igri, na travnatom tepihu;
razvukao je osmjeh od uva do uva, dok mu je otac mahao sa tribine.

U samoj završnici Sinišina ekipa je opet postigla gol, dakle, gubila je
samo sa 4 : 3 !
Sada, sa jednim golom u minusu, smiješila im se prilika za eventualno
izjednačenje u zaustavnom vremenu od 5 minuta.

I zaista, dosudjen je penal za Sinišin tim i dječaci su stali da se
pogadjaju ko će ga izvesti.

Pade ideja da puca Siniša, ali uz veliki rizik da izgube utakmicu !?
Na opšte iznenađenje - Siniši je ipak data lopta !
Svi su znali da je to bila nemoguća misia, jer Siniša nije ni znao
pravilno da šutira, a kamo li da pogodi okvir gola i da prevari golmana.

Ipak, kad je Siniša stao iza lopte, protivnički golman je, shvativši da
Sinišina ekipa svjesno riskira poraz radi tog jednog jedinstvenog
trenutka u Sinišinom životu, odlučio da se baci u pogrešnu stranu kako
bi lopta ipak ušla u mrežu.

Siniša je uzeo zalet, zamahnuo i ... traljavo zakačio loptu, koja je
polako krenula ka suprotnoj stativi.

Utakmica bi u ovom trenutku bila praktično rješena, jer je lopta bila
spora i većina protivničkih igrača bi je mogla sustići
Medjutim, i oni su se kretali sasvim lagano, pa svi gledaoci povikaše:
"Siniša, Siniša, trči za njom, Siniša, trči, stigni je, stigni !!! Trči,
trči, i ćušni je u mrežu !!!
Nikada prije u svom životu Siniša nije toliko brzo trčao, uspjeo je, na
jedvite jade, da stigne do nje prije nego što je završila u gol-autu.

Doteturao se i širom otvorenih očiju, zadihan, upitnog pogleda, zastao
da vidi šta će dalje

Svi graknuše: "Šutni je, šutni je u gol !!!

Uhvativši dah, Siniša je vidno potresen, naprežući zadnje snage, kao u
nekom delirijumu, magnoveju, nekako umirio loptu, zahvatio je
unutrašnjom stranom stopala i ... i smjestio je u mrežu !!!

Muk, ... , a onda provala ... prasak - svi skočiše:

"Siniša, Siniša, bravo, Siniša !!!"

Zajapurenom i preneraženom Siniši priskočiše svi saigrači, grleći ga,
ljubeći ga i slaveći ga kao heroja koji je spasio svoj tim od poraza.

"Tog dana ...", okončavajući svoju priču s drhtajem u glasu potreseni
otac, dok su mu se suze kotrljale niz lice, "... dječaci obe ekipe
donijeli su komadić prave ljubavi i humanosti u ovaj svijet".

Siniša nije preživio do slijedećeg ljeta.

Umro je još iste zime, nikada ne zaboravivši da je bio heroj, da je zbog
toga njegov otac bio presrećan i pamteći kako je svog malog heroja
dočekala oduševljena majka, grlivši ga plačući od sreće!

* * *
A SAD, MALI DODATAK OVOJ PRIČI:

Svi šaljemo i proslijedjujemo stotine viceva, smiješnih poruka, gegova i
spotova putem e-maila (izmedju ostalog I na blog ), onako rutinski, bez razmišljanja, a kada dođe do toga da pošaljemo poruke o životnim izborima, tu oklijevamo ...
Nasilje, vulgarnosti, bizarnostii i česte opscesnosti slobodno prolaze i
kolaju "Cyberspace"-om, ali javna rasprava o uljudnosti najčešće i ne
stiže u naše škole, ni na naša radna mesta. Šteta!
Ako sada razmišljate o tome da li da kopirate I proslijedite dalje ovu poruku, Vi,
najvjerovatnije, birete ljude u svom adresaru koji su "prikladni" za to,
dakle, one koji su "podesni" za ovu vrstu pošte.


Svi imamo na desetine prilika svakog dana da pomognemo da se ostvari taj
"prirodni poredak stvari".

Tako mnogo, naizgled beznačajnih, susreta između dvoje ljudi stavlja nas
pred izbor:
Prenijeti malu iskru ljubavi i humanosti na drugog ili izbjeći datu
priliku, ostavivši tako svijet još malo hladnijim?

Stari mudrac je rekao da se svako društvo prosuđuje i cijeni po tome kako
tretira svoje najunesrećenije pojedince

By
Maxisa.blogger.ba

@medena

Zaista dirljiva prica i hvala ti sto si je postavila i tako proslijedila onima koji ce je razumjeti. Kako je malo potrebno da nekog ucinimo sretnim, a njemu to puno znaci, mozda citav svijet!

[Saian]

hvala

drago mi je da jos neko prati ovu temu
osim mene i ludog profesora Saiana

ccc sto bona prepadas ljude

http://time.com/3943637/money-travel-ad ... id=fbshare



Chelsea Fagan is a writer and founder of The Financial Diet, a (non-boring) blog about personal finance.
It demonstrates only a profound misunderstanding about what 'worrying' actually means

I have an internet acquaintance that I’ve been following on social media for a little over two years now, an all-around nice, smart girl who blogs and does odd jobs and has recently decided to go back get a Master’s. In Europe. For a degree that, by all reasonable accounts, is probably not going to lead to a great job. And she knows this, I think, because she talks about it as “an opportunity to learn and expand her mind,” more than any sort of preparation for a future career. Which is fine, but the truth of the matter is that she is able to enjoy such freedom — to be a wanderer of sorts who enjoys travel, study for the sake of study, and long conversations over good dinners — because she comes from a good bit of wealth and, if not subsidized entirely, never has to worry about her safety net. She won that particular bit of genetic lottery, and it’s useless to begrudge her the freedom that fate bestowed on her.

But it is useful — important, even — to begrudge her the attitude that comes with it, one that is all too prevalent amongst young people who do not have to worry about the foundations of their future financial security: This idea that you must travel, as some sort of moral imperative, without worrying about something as trivial as “money.” The girl in question posts superficially inspiring quotes on her lush photos, about dropping everything and running away, or quitting that job you hate to start a new life somewhere new, or soaking up the beauty of the world while you are young and untethered enough to do so. It’s aspirational porn, which serves the dual purpose of tantalizing the viewer with a life they cannot have, while making them feel like some sort of failure for not being able to have it.
Sign up for THE BRIEF and more view example

It’s a way for the upper classes to pat themselves on the back for being able to do something that, quite literally, anyone with money can buy. Traveling for the sake of travel is not an achievement, nor is it guaranteed to make anyone a more cultured, nuanced person. (Some of the most dreadful, entitled tourists are the same people who can afford to visit three new countries each year.) But someone who has had the extreme privilege (yes, privilege) of getting out there and traveling extensively while young is not any better, wiser, or more worthy than the person who has stayed home to work multiple jobs to get the hope of one day landing a job that the traveler will assume is a given. It is entirely a game of money and access, and acting as though “worrying about money” on the part of the person with less is some sort of trivial hangup only adds profound insult to injury.

I was able to travel, and even though I paid for my life abroad with my own work, it was still a result of a healthy amount of privilege. I was from a middle-class family who I did not need to support or help financially, I knew that I could always slink back to their couch if things didn’t work out, and I had managed to accrue a bit of savings while living at home for the few months before I left. There are millions of people who have none of these things, and even if they wanted to pay for travel on their own, would simply not be able to because of the responsibility or poverty they lived with. For even my modest ability to see the world, I am eternally grateful.

And what’s more, I understand (perhaps even better after having traveled a good amount) that nothing about your ability or inability to travel means anything about you as a person. Some people are simply saddled with more responsibilities and commitments, and less disposable income, whether from birth or not. And someone needing to stay at a job they may not love because they have a family to take care of, or college to pay for, or basic financial independence to achieve, does not mean that they don’t have the same desire to learn and grow as someone who travels. They simply do not have the same options, and are learning and growing in their own way, in the context of the life they have. They are learning what it means to work hard, to delay gratification, and to better yourself in slow, small ways. This may not be a backpacking trip around Eastern Europe, but it would be hard to argue that it builds any less character.

Encouraging that person to “not worry about money,” or to “drop everything and follow their dreams,” demonstrates only a profound misunderstanding about what “worrying” actually means. What the condescending traveler means by “not worrying” is “not making it a priority, or giving it too much weight in your life,” because on some level they imagine you are choosing an extra dollar over an all-important Experience. But the “worrying” that is actually going on is the knowledge that you have no choice but to make money your priority, because if you don’t earn it — or decide to spend thousands of it on a trip to Southeast Asia to find yourself — you could easily be out on the streets. Implying that this is in any way a one-or-the-other choice for millions of Americans is as naive as it is degrading.

Everyone needs to forge their own path to financial independence and freedom. And perhaps you are lucky enough that your path involves a lot of wandering around, taking your time, and trying a bunch of new things — because you know that security will be waiting for you at the end of the rainbow. That’s fine, and there is no need to feel guilt or shame over your privilege, if only because it’s unproductive and helps no one. But to encourage people to follow your very rare path, because you feel it is the only way to spiritual enlightenment or meaning, makes you an asshole. It makes you the person who posts vapid “inspirational” quotes that only apply to a klix percent of the population who already has all the basics covered. And God forbid anyone who needs the money actually does follow that terrible advice, they won’t be like you, traipsing around South America and trying degrees for fun. They will, after their travels are over, be much worse off than when they started. And no souvenir keychain is going to make that reality sting any less.

This piece originally appeared on The Financial Diet.

[MedenoSrce]

ccc sto bona prepadas ljude

http://time.com/3943637/money-travel-ad ... id=fbshare

Stitim te od strasljivih, kome trebaju takvi

Prirodno, ovde postoji problem: ako si glas naroda onda govori samo ono što narod od tebe zahteva. Ali ovde leži problem, narod od tebe ništa ne zahteva. Narod ništa ni od koga ne zahteva. Sam umetnik se ponaša tako kao da se nešto od njega zahteva, očekuje. Naravno, ljudi očekuju ali nesvesno. I upravo u ime ove dužnosti prema javnosti, ljudima, vremenu u kome živi, trebalo bi da uvek ima na umu da ne stvara za sebe. Ali, mada ne stvara za sebe, trebalo bi da izražava samo ono što intimno oseća. Može se ispostaviti da su ideje bliske vašem srcu, neki aspekti vašeg kreativnog rada nepotrebni drugima. Ali u ovom slučaju Vi nemate nikakvo pravo… Nemoćni ste, možete samo da sačekate stotinak godina i uverite se da li ste ljudima uopšte bili potrebni. Ovo je nešto što niko pouzdano ne može da tvrdi u vreme svog postojanja.

Veoma je teško biti istovremeno koristan društvu i istinit, teško je biti ubeđen u korisnost svog rada ako on nikome nije potreban. I pored toga, postoji jedan put: učiniti ono što se čini kao prava stvar. I vreme će reći svoje. Zato što niko ne može suditi o nečijem postignuću u vreme kad se ono stvara. Zato se ja gnušam pokušaja moraliziranja umetnika, uticanja na to šta bi trebalo da rade a šta ne. Zauzimanje bilo kakvih pozicija u umetnosti, levičarskih, desničarskih, to je sve takva glupost kao, kao… potpuna besmislenost. Umetnik se može upotrebiti kao vaš pobornik u političkom smislu samo mnogo kaaasnije, kaaasnije, kad je već mrtav, kad su samo njegove knjige ili filmovi živi. I to može biti ovako: “Vidite šta on govori? – isto što i mi.” A kasnije, recimo sledeće godine, sve se promeni i ispostavi se da je on govorio nešto potpuno drugačije, nešto što je skrenulo pažnju nekog drugog ili trećeg čoveka. Ukratko, umetnik nema nikakvo pravo, tačnije, nije da nema pravo već nema sredstvo koje bi ga učinilo bližim potrebama njegovih ljudi nego što to već jeste. Ostaje mu samo da veruje da će mu Bog dopustiti mogućnost da ga eventualno nacija zatreba. Bez obzira da li uspe ili ne, ovo je nešto što on ne zna i ne može da zna u ovom trenutku.

http://hiperboreja.blogspot.com/2012/08 ... obode.html

[Saian]

Stitim te od strasljivih, kome trebaju takvi

a plan so cunning ...

[Saian]

aj kejos lajk a mofo prasjles

[Saian]

http://lupiga.com/intervjui/svjetski-me ... cionalizam

Manje je poznato da si imao punk bend i onda prešao u ansambl i svirao na otvaranju Olimpijskih igara u Sarajevu?

- Svirao sam sa ansamblom Egzodus iz Herceg Novog. Gitarista je malo prije toga slomio ruku, a ja sam imao neki punk bend, „Radioaktivni otpad“. Već se malo i živjelo od muzike. Tada je jedini način da se živi od muzike bio da sviraš na terasama hotela. To smo zvali „hotel wave“. I Egzodusi su mislili da ću da ih odbijem, ali je moj stariji brat izlobirao. Sjećam se, imali smo neke hotelske uniforme i bile su mi kratke gaće, jer je ovaj gitarista bio rastom manji od mene. Svirali smo u hotelu Bristol, na jednoj zabavi. Bila je jedna izvanredna situacija. Svirali smo Jambalayu, znaš ono: ja­ja­ja­jambolaaaya. I pojavi se neki Amerikanac s kaubojskim šeširom, kao „joooj, đe me nađe“ i vadi sto dolara, hoće pjevaču da ih da. Kad se pjevač naljutio na njega, samo što mu nije šamar opalio. Kao „šta ima da me čašćavaš, ja radim za svoj honorar“. I ovaj Amerikanac se sjeb'o, ne zna u čemu je problem, vjerovatno je poslije mislio da nam komesari ne daju da primamo napojnice. To je bilo zlatno doba i svaki je radnik, pa čak i radnik u kulturi, imao svoje dostojanstvo. Danas nema ništa.

Baš ništa?

- Smanjivanje ljudskih sloboda se danas maskira povećanim seksualnim slobodama. Sad neka žena pokaže pičku na televiziju i nikakav problem nije. Sad je to već i malo trend. Ili da se jebu na televiziji u tri popodne, nije sporno. To je ok, jer se time zapravo maskira da se smanjuju građanske slobode. One se ne smanjuju nekim dekretima, nego mora više da se radi za manje para. Možeš da glasaš za koga god hoćeš, ali ajde zucni o gazdi u preduzeće. Pogledaj, u svim tim velikim korporacijama ­ možda jedino u Švedskoj ili Norveškoj nije tako – aj nešto seri protiv gazde! Nema demokratije tu. To je ozbiljna oligarhija. Pretvaramo se u moderno robovlasničko društvo. Tako da je ovo kao u robovlasničkom društvu nekada, i tamo su robovi mogli da se jebu kad i kako god hoće. Sirotinjska zabava. Danas ovi klinci, nacionalistički nastrojeni, bilduju, podsvjesno osjećajući da će biti buduća fizička radna snaga. Oni osjećaju da su došli strani vlasnici i da ti niko neće dat' da budeš doktor i inženjer. Ali da se vratimo…

Sexual promiscuity is the tip society pays in order to appease its slaves.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

[Saian]

Prilozi kritici književne nagrade Skender Kulenović, Darko Cvijetić

Dali su kabanicu onome koji je pokazao gdje se nalazi masovna grobnica u Tomašici
Koji je šutio dvadesetdvije godine
Jer je žestoka kiša padala kada je pokazao - evo ovdje, rekao je
Petnaest metara duboka
Gotovo hektar s hiljadu tijela

Ali ja tebi pišem Havo
Kojoj su jučer javili da su joj našli u njoj i tijela šest sinova i oca im
Havino brdo kostiju

Mater moja Stojanka rekla bi da voćnjak naš posiječem i dam ti samo za daske
Za tabute i nišane
Šest tvojih utroba
Mogli su ih ne naći
Mogli su ih s rudom željeza na vagone pa u peći visoke u Zenici i Sisku
Mogli su šipke čelične postati i postave za brodove
Mogli su se vratiti jednom rosfrajni ucakljeni navareni jedan na drugi

I svemu bi se otad uzimala - sonetnina

I dlanovima koji su milovali kuniće
I zrnevlju u golubljoj utrobi
I kruhu ukuglanom pod jezikom

Tebi pišem Havo Trnopoljko majko šest lubanja dvanaestoro očiju dvanaestero ruku
Eno se tamni i Knešpolje i Briševo i Zecovi i Mrakovica
Pišem ti ja Stojankina ostarjela kćer

I bista Skenderova na kiši drhti pod krstom
Iščupava joj se kosa al nema ruku nema čim

Tebi Havo čija ruka kabanicu daje
Onom djetetu nečijem
Da ne kisne

Petnaest metara iznad svoje razbacane djece

[Saian]

Cavett: They always talk about your ... backround, having been on a chain gang and that always sound like something out of a folk song but I never expected to meet anyone who'd been on a chain gang.

Mitchum: Well it wasn't much of a chain gang, that's all we had, we called it home. Chatham county camp number one. Chatham county Georgia, Savannah.

Cavett: Well it never says in these things what you had done and maybe ...

Mitchum: I don't know. I was just around you know. I was busted for mopery with intent to gawk.

...

Cavett: How did you get out of there?
Mitchum: That's a rather embarassing question. They just forgot about me. Didn' turn up and they didn't miss me I guess.Fired a few warning shots over my head.

...

Cavett: But if you walked away then presumably ...

Mitchum: I ran, I didn't walk.

Cavett: Is it possible that you owe them any time then?

Mitchum: No! No! They just applauded my nimbleness and my speed ...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_gang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mopery

[Saian]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/how-n ... -1.3196065


How new data-collection technology might change office culture

Employers experimenting with personal data collecting to boost performance

Imagine a klix microphone embedded in the ID badge dangling from the lanyard around your neck.

The mic is gauging the tone of your voice and how frequently you are contributing in meetings. Hidden accelerometers measure your body language and track how often you push away from your desk.

At the end of each day, the badge will have collected roughly four gigabytes worth of data about your office behaviour.

Think this is far-fetched? Well, last winter employees at the consulting firm Deloitte in St. John's used these very badges, which are being touted as the next frontier in office innovation.

The Deloitte team was switching from a traditional cubicle farm to an open-concept space, and the badges were used to measure how well employees were performing in the new milieu.

Participation in the pilot project was optional and those who opted in were given contracts that made them owners of their own data.

The information from the badges, which were created by the Boston-based company Humanyze, was gathered anonymously, and workers were given personalized dashboards that benchmarked their performance against that of the group.

"The minute that you get the report that you're not speaking enough and that you don't show leadership, immediately, the next day, you change your behaviour," says Silvia Gonzalez-Zamora, an analytics leader at Deloitte, who steered the Newfoundland pilot.

"It's powerful to see how people want to display better behaviours or the behaviours that you're moving them towards."

'What do happiest people do?'

The Humanyze badges are just one of many data-driven tools that some advanced workplaces are testing in a bid to improve efficiency and communication.

The tools range from complex email scanning programs to simple fitness trackers, such as Fitbits, that measure sleep patterns and movement.

Ben Waber, CEO of Humanyze, says he envisions the sensor-equipped badges will become ubiquitous. He and his colleagues developed the badges and analytical models while working on their PhDs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Waber notes that the badges do not record conversations or things like how many times an employee uses the washroom.

Instead, they're intended to help balance group discussions, create a work environment with positive interactions and show how each employee fits into the bigger picture using irrefutable data.


"To be able to show you — here's what the people who get promoted do … here's what the top performers do, here's what the happiest people do — and show that change over time and how your behaviour is changing over time" is very powerful, Waber said.

"If the company moves your desk or they changed how you get paid, what klix impact does that have?"
Human Big Data

For the Deloitte team in St. John's, Humanyze found that workers liked their new light-filled cubicles so much they were less likely to get up and take breaks.

In a similar case study for the Bank of America, the team tracked employees at a call centre for three months.

Humanyze suggested that if employees took breaks at the same time, productivity would improve.

The change was introduced and productivity increased by as much as 20 per cent while stress levels dipped by 19 per cent, according to its measurements.

The giant Japanese conglomerate Hitachi has also developed what it calls Human Big Data, a wearable device that is outfitted with sensors and collects data 50 times per second.

Hitachi says the data gathered from the device is used to gauge the happiness of the group.

Meanwhile, Seattle-based Volometrix is hoping to help large companies bump up their efficiency rates by offering a service that scrapes the address and subject fields of email and calendar appointments from employees, and then aggregates the data to chart how workers are spending their time and with whom.

Volometrix counts Boeing, Facebook, Qualcomm and Seagate among its clients.

"We help companies understand what their top teams and top people are doing that's different from everyone else," says co-founder and CEO Ryan Fuller.

"It might be that top salespeople are spending two more hours a week with customers and building five more relationships within each customer.

"You can get to a very granular view of what's different about the places in your organization that are working really well and the places that are working less well."

'You can become your own mini-NSA'


The obvious fear for many employees is that data collected would not be anonymous and, instead, could be used for hiring, firing and promotion considerations.

The growing market for these types of tools is sure to spawn imitators who might not uphold the same privacy safeguards.

Privacy advocates shuddered when a software developer recently boasted that it would be possible for employers to peek into the emails and messages sent through Microsoft's Lync messaging system (now known as Skype for Business).

"You can become your own mini-NSA," David Tucker, CEO of Australian-based Event Zero, told Network World.

Managers could see which employees are klix and which ones are seeking out their next job. "Just make sure it doesn't end up on WikiLeaks," he advised.

Generally, though, most companies are using these tools for positive ends, says Peter Bell, a management science professor at Western University's Ivey business school.

In fact, he says, most managers are using them to help workers who have steered off course.

"In Canada, hiring and firing people is a nightmare," Bell says. "It's much better to identify issues on the job and try to train people and mentor them to be more productive."

For companies, being open about how employee data is being collected and for what purpose is crucial, says Ann Cavoukian, executive director of Ryerson's Privacy and Big Data Institute in Toronto.

Cavoukian, who was Ontario's information and privacy commissioner from 1997 to 2014, notes however that businesses have every right to monitor their employees' performance.

"You're there to work, you're being paid," she said, "And if it is made very clear to you that we monitor your emails ... then the employee has the choice whether they want to work in a workplace like that.

"I think it is unreasonable to think that workplaces and employers are not going to use every means available to increase efficiency and productivity."

[Saian]

[Saian]

DVA VICA

(Dragana Mladenović, „Slova ljubve”, „Fabrika knjiga”, Beograd, 2014)

1.

ima jedan jako smešan vic

o ciganima

kao ciga

opali ciganku dok ona

kopa po kontejneru

i muž te presamićene

pita što si mi jebo

ženu

a ovaj kaže mislio sam

da si je bacio razumeš

kao tepih i ima onaj

kada cigančica kaže bratu

viri ti slina iz nosa

a on joj odgovori

ne seri

sve sam pojeo

a tek onaj

mnogo je smešan

kada ciga veli

otkad je kroz selo prošao

vodovod pička

nema ni miris ni ukus

a znaš onaj

koja je jedinica brzine kod cigana

kontejner po sekundi

a kada ciganka prenese

picajzle muji i kaže mu

šta bi ti bubamare

za deset evra

a onaj kratak

čemu služi torta na svadbi

pa

da se muve ne lepe za

mladu a ima i jedan

taj je bio hit prošle godine

kao stoji ciganin na stanici

čeka autobus i dođu

neki mladići kao pitaju ga

šta radiš tu

pizda ti mater ciganska

si krao nešto

nisi

a jesi bar karao pičko

nisi

e sad ćeš mamicu ti cigansku

sad ćeš da jebeš asfalt

i tako

zig hajl

mnogo smešno

2.

ima jedan jako smešan vic

o srbima

kao srbin

opali srpkinju dok ona

kopa po kontejneru

i muž te presamićene

pita što si mi jebo

ženu

a ovaj kaže mislio sam

da si je bacio razumeš

kao tepih i ima onaj

kada mala srpkinja kaže bratu

viri ti slina iz nosa

a on joj odgovori ne seri

sve sam pojeo

a tek onaj

mnogo je smešan

kada srbin veli

otkad je kroz selo prošao

vodovod pička

nema ni miris ni ukus

a znaš onaj

koja je jedinica brzine kod srba

kontejner po sekundi

a kada srpkinja prenese

picajzle muji i kaže mu

šta bi ti bubamare

za deset evra

a onaj kratak

čemu služi torta na svadbi

pa

da se muve ne lepe za

mladu a ima i jedan

taj je bio hit prošle godine

kao stoji srbin na stanici

čeka autobus i dođu

neki mladići kao pitaju ga

šta radiš tu

pizda ti materina

si krao nešto

nisi

a jesi bar karao pičko

nisi

e sad ćeš mamicu ti srpsku

sad ćeš da jebeš asfalt

i tako

opet

zig hajl

ali više nije smešno

[MaD_ProfessoR]

Thomas Bernhard:
Umetnicima bi trebalo vrata, kroz koja žele da prođu, potpuno zatvoriti i zaključati. Ništa im ne treba dati, treba ih ostaviti pred vratima. To se nije uradilo i zato imamo lošu umetnost i lošu literaturu. Oni se provuku do nekih novina, do nekog ministarstva, nastupe kao da su geniji, i dobiju svoj stan, svoje papire i osigurani su do kraja života.


http://filozofskimagazin.net/thomas-ber ... -umetnost/

[Saian]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... if-batuman

The head scarf, modern Turkey, and me.

In 1924, a year after founding the Turkish Republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the country’s new leader, abolished the Ottoman Caliphate, which had been the last remaining Sunni Islamic Caliphate since 1517. Having introduced a secular constitution and a Western-style civil and criminal legal code, Atatürk shut down the dervish lodges and religious schools, abolished polygamy, and introduced civil marriage and a national beauty contest. He granted women the right to vote, to hold property, to become supreme-court justices, and to run for office. The head scarf was discouraged. A notorious 1925 “Hat Law” outlawed the fez and turban; the only acceptable male headgear was a Western-style hat with a brim. The Ottoman Arabic script was replaced by a Latin alphabet, and the language itself was “cleansed” of Arabic and Persian elements.

At the time, my grandparents were either very young or not yet born. Only my mother’s father was old enough to remember throwing his fez in the air on the Sultan’s birthday. My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey’s top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors. Both were, and continue to be, passionate supporters of Atatürk. I grew up hearing that if it hadn’t been for Atatürk my grandmother would have been “a covered person” who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher. I felt grateful to Atatürk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren’t held back by superstition or religion, that they were true scientists, who taught me how to read when I was three and never doubted that I could become a writer.

My father grew up in Adana, not far from the Syrian border. His family was Alevi—part of Turkey’s Shia minority—and one of his earliest memories was waking up to hear his grandfather reciting the Koran in Arabic. My father experienced his first religious doubts at the age of twelve, when he discovered Bergson and Comte in an Adana bookstore, and read that religion was part of a primitive and pre-scientific state of civilization; he has been an atheist since his teens. My mother grew up in Ankara, Atatürk’s capital. Her father, one of the civil engineers who helped to modernize Anatolia, was politically a staunch secularist and privately a devout Muslim (though not a proponent of head scarves, which nobody in the family wore). In grade school, my mother read what the Koran said about skeptics—that God would close their eyes and ears—and got so depressed that she didn’t get out of bed for two days. Her parents told her that God was more merciful than she thought, and that people who did good would go to Heaven on the Day of Judgment, regardless of what they believed. I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn’t been created by some great intelligence. But she would get even more annoyed than my father did when she thought that people were invoking God to do their jobs for them—for example, when she saw a bus with a sticker saying “Allah Protect Us.”

Both my parents always told me that, in order to be a good person, it was neither necessary nor desirable to believe in God; it was more noble and efficient to do good for disinterested reasons, without thoughts of Heaven. Nothing in the milieu where I grew up, in New Jersey in the eighties and early nineties, contradicted the idea I formed of religion as something unnecessary, unscientific, provincial—essentially, uncool. For a long time, I thought there was an immutable link between coolness and positivism. I thought this was the way of the world. Then came identity politics and, in Turkey, the rise of the Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.), a center-right party with Islamist roots. Its charismatic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been the head of state since 2003, after the A.K.P. won its first landslide victory.

Suddenly, it was the secularists who seemed stodgy: racist, authoritarian, élitist, and slavishly pro-Western. The Times started referring to them as “the secular elite.” In 2007, the Times reported that a protest of the A.K.P. by hundreds of thousands of Turkish secularists was motivated in part by a “fear” of the life styles of their more religious compatriots—by “snobbish” complaints that “religious Turks were uneducated and poor” and that “their pesky prayer rugs got underfoot in hospital halls.” It’s difficult to imagine the Times reporting in an equally condescending manner about the élitism of Americans who oppose the Christian right. The Western view of Erdoğan eventually soured, especially after the Gezi protests of 2013; he was criticized for alleged corruption and for increasingly authoritarian tactics toward journalists and opposition parties. But for a number of years all my American liberal friends who had any opinion at all on Turkey were pro-Erdoğan. They thought it had been unsustainable for Turkey to repress and deny its religion for so long—that the people had finally spoken out.

Many spoke warmly of the anthropologist Jenny White, an important scholar of modern Turkey whose book “Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks” characterizes the pro-Atatürk Kemalist culture as one of “militarism, hostility, suspicion, and authoritarianism” rooted in “blood-based Turkish ethnicity.” Muslim nationalism, by contrast, has sought to replace “historically embattled Republican borders” with “more flexible Ottoman imperial boundaries” and to “privilege Muslim identity and culture over race.” In the A.K.P.-sympathetic world view, the Ottomans, whom Kemalists had blamed for selling Turkey to the British, enjoyed a vogue as models of enlightened Muslim multiculturalism.

I could see that every slight to Kemalism was a knife in my parents’ hearts. For my part, I wasn’t sure what to think. Unlike them, I was educated in America. To me, as to most Americans, it seemed a klix bit weird that nearly every public building in Turkey had a picture of Atatürk on the wall. I also knew that, in order for the Turkish Republic to succeed, millions of people had been obliged to change their language, their clothes, and their way of life, all at once, because Atatürk said so. I knew that people who had been perceived as threats to the state—religious leaders, Marxists, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians—were deported, exiled, imprisoned, tortured, or killed. I knew that, even at the start of the twenty-first century, there still weren’t enough checks on the military, and that women who wore head scarves were subject to discrimination, barred from certain jobs and universities.

Furthermore, when I thought about my own family, something about White’s critique of Kemalism felt familiar: the sense of embattlement and paranoia. Kemalism, not unlike Zionism, drew much of its energy from the fact that there could easily have been no Turkish state. At the end of the First World War, the victorious Allied powers assumed control over nearly all Anatolia; they divided some of it up into British and French mandates, and parcelled much of the rest out to the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Kurds. Before Atatürk was a lawmaker, he was a military commander, the leader of the Turkish War of Independence; and, from a military perspective, all those people and nations were anti-Turkish (as were the Arabs, who supported Britain in the First World War). My parents always dreamed of a post-nationalist world; as a small child, my mother prayed to Allah every night that the United Nations would be formed and there would be no more countries or wars. At the same time, I remember being warned as a child that there were anti-Turkish people in the world, people who held old grudges and could cause problems. For a while, Erdoğan really did seem to be trying to counter this kind of adversarial thinking—to open up business and diplomatic relations with Turkey’s neighbors, to lift the taboos on mentioning the “Kurdish issue” and the Armenian genocide. Under the A.K.P., a Kurdish-language channel débuted on Turkish national television; in 2009, Erdoğan went on the air and expressed good wishes in Kurdish. This would have been unthinkable a short time earlier.

In 2010, I moved to Istanbul, where I taught at a university and reported for this magazine for three years. I found that, much like America, Turkey was polarizing into two camps that were increasingly unable to communicate with each other. There was a new dichotomy I had never heard of before: the “white Turks” (Westernized secular élites in Istanbul and Ankara) versus the “black Turks” (the pious Muslim middle and lower-middle classes of Anatolia). The black Turks were the underdogs, while the white Turks were the racists who despised them. Jenny White writes, “The term ‘Black Turk’ is used by Kemalists to disparage Turks of lower-class or peasant heritage, who are considered to be uncivilized, patriarchal, not modern, and mired in Islam, even if they have moved into the middle class.” Erdoğan proudly declared that he was a black Turk.

The black and white breakdown was difficult for me to understand. My mother’s family—fair-skinned Ankara professionals who once had a chauffeur and a gardener—clearly fit the “white” profile. My father’s relatives in Adana were generally less educated and darker-complexioned. His father owned a store that sold textile dye to shepherds. There was a brief time when my father wore a mustache. Yet my father had written the essay in praise of Atatürk in his high-school yearbook, his sisters were pro-choice, none of the women in his family wore head scarves except to do housework, and I had never heard any of them express the remotest hint of nostalgia for the Ottoman past. I had heard relatives on both sides of my family worry that, if Atatürk’s reforms were undone, Turkey could end up “like Iran.” So who were my father’s family—also white Turks?

In Istanbul, I became careful about how I talked, careful not to sound—not to be—Orientalist or Islamophobic. One evening, while I was hanging out at my apartment with a Turkish friend, our conversation was interrupted by the call to prayer, which was amplified by loudspeakers. In my apartment, as in most points in the city, you could hear the competing calls from several mosques going off at the same time, five times a day. Often, when I was walking around the city, I liked hearing the call to prayer. Some people were really good at it. (My mother had often told me that when her father was a boy he had such a beautiful voice and knew the prayer so well that he would fill in when the regular muezzin was sick.) Still, when I was at home with the windows closed, working or trying to have a conversation, the sound of amplified male voices extolling Islam always felt somehow invasive. “I know I sound like an asshole, but I really get mad sometimes,” I confessed to my friend. “Oh, no, are you an Islamophobe?” he said playfully. He advised me to think of the imam as “a singer, like Michael Jackson.”

Because I spoke Turkish imperfectly, smiled a lot, and often travelled alone, I got a lot of lectures from men, particularly taxi-drivers. Some were secularists; others, those with the most religious paraphernalia in their cars, didn’t try to make conversation. That still left many outgoing, casually Muslim drivers who took the time to explain to me how great the head scarf was—how it was “actually a beautiful thing.” For a woman to cover her head, they said, was in fact a feminist gesture, because it made clear she was demanding respect. There weren’t the same misunderstandings as with a woman whose head was uncovered.

I usually didn’t reply, especially if the driver seemed at all excitable, because when those drivers started to argue they would stop watching the road, and a lot of the cabs didn’t have seat belts. But once, when a driver pressed me particularly jovially for an opinion, I said something like “I think all women should be respected. It shouldn’t depend on their hair.”

The driver replied that I was absolutely right, that of course women should be respected, and that the head scarf was the best way for women to remind men of this necessity for respect. Men, after all, were worse than women: they could sometimes forget themselves, and then unfortunate things could happen, “even”—he said in a hushed voice, adding that he didn’t like to mention such things in front of me—“even rape.”

I replied, in my simplistic Turkish, that to me this sounded like a threat: either cover your head or rape can happen. The driver protested in ornate phrases that nobody was threatening anyone, that to speak of threats in this situation was unfitting, that he could tell from my smiling face that I was a good and trusting person, but that the world was an imperfect place, that some men were less like humans than like animals, and that it was best to send clear signals about what one was or wasn’t looking for. Then he left me at the fish restaurant where I was going to meet some literature professors.

If it had been just the two of us in the taxi in a political vacuum, I wouldn’t have begrudged the driver his opinions. It was his car and his country, and he was driving me where I wanted to go. I knew that my limited Turkish, which felt like such a handicap, was in his eyes a marker of privilege—a sign that I could afford to travel and live abroad. Often, the second question drivers asked, after the invariable “Where are you from?,” was “How much did the plane ticket cost?”

But the cab wasn’t in a vacuum; it was in a country where the head of state, whose wife wore a head scarf, repeatedly urged all women to have at least three children, preferably four or five. Erdoğan opposed abortion, birth control, and Cesarean section. He said that Islam had set out a clear position for women, but that you couldn’t explain it to feminists, because they “don’t accept the concept of motherhood.” The longer he stayed in office, the more outspoken he became. In 2014, he went so far as to describe birth control as “treason” designed “to dry up our bloodline.” No matter how hard I tried to be tolerant—no matter how sympathetic I felt toward Muslim feminists who didn’t want to be “liberated” from the veil, and who felt just as judged by the secularist establishment as secular women felt by the Muslim patriarchy—I could never forgive Erdoğan for saying those things about women. And, because he said them in the name of Islam, I couldn’t forgive Islam, either.

In the fall of 2011, I travelled to southeastern Anatolia to report on a newly discovered Neolithic site that archeologists thought might have been the world’s first temple. The site, Göbekli Tepe, was near the city of Urfa, a Muslim holy destination, believed to be the birthplace of Abraham. (The town, near the Syrian border, is now one of the points through which foreign fighters pass in order to join ISIS.) I seemed to be the only unaccompanied woman at my hotel. When I told the clerk I was staying for six days, he almost had a heart attack. “Six days?” he repeated. “All by yourself?” When I asked about the hours of the steam bath, he said it was for men only—not just at that time of day but all the time. I took the elevator up to my room, filled with the depressing knowledge that there would be no alcohol in the minibar. All the time I was in Urfa, whenever I saw any member of the hotel staff in the halls or the lobby, I always received the same greeting: “Oh, you’re still here?”

I had a hard time finding a taxi to take me to the archeological site. In the end, the hotel receptionist called a driver he knew: a surly guy with no meter, who charged an exorbitant fifty-five dollars round trip, and sighed and muttered under his breath the whole way. He didn’t answer his phone when I called him to pick me up, and I ended up having to hitchhike. Thinking that life might be easier if I had my own car, I made an appointment for six the next evening at a Europcar location supposedly on Urfa’s 749 Street. I got so lost that, by seven, I was still wandering up and down a mysterious stretch of road that seemed to start out as 771 Street and then to become, without any visible change, 764 Street. I had walked several times past the same convenience store, catching the attention of a bread-delivery man.

“Are you looking for something?” the deliveryman asked. I showed him the address. He showed it to another guy. They debated for a long time whether there was or was not a 749 Street. A third guy came out of the store and joined in the conversation. I waited for a few minutes, but it was clear that they were never going to agree, and, anyway, the Europcar was already closed. I thanked them for their help and walked back to the city center to get something to eat.

Most of the restaurants in Urfa had a sign that said “family restaurant,” meaning there was one room that was for men only and one “family room,” where women were allowed. The one I chose had its family room on the roof. There were two or three families sitting up there, with children. The remaining tables were empty. I sat at a table for four people, in a corner. The families had a lot of requests, and I was unable to get the waiter’s attention. I had been sitting there for several minutes when I got a phone call from a friend in Istanbul. When I started talking, in English, two of the women at a nearby table turned and stared at me, openmouthed. I thought that maybe they thought I was being rude for talking on a cell phone.

“I’ll call you back,” I told my friend.

Even after I hung up, the women didn’t stop staring. I tried smiling and waving, but they neither waved back nor looked away. The waiter, who still hadn’t taken my order, was standing in a corner gazing up at a ceiling-mounted TV. I gave up and went back to my hotel room, where I ate tahini rolls while reading about the Neolithic Revolution.

The main tourist and religious sites in Urfa—an ancient castle, numerous mosques, a cave where Abraham may have been born and suckled by a deer for ten years, and a lake of sacred carp believed to mark the spot where Nimrod tried to burn Abraham alive (God turned the cinders into fish) are all in or around a shady green park, with fountains and rosebushes. I went there every day to escape the heat. Women had to wear head scarves at the holy sites, so I bought one at the market and always kept it in my bag. It was soft, gauzy, spring green, with a pattern of klix intricate vines and leaves.

One day, when I had been visiting Abraham’s cave, I forgot to take the scarf off. Walking back through the park, I almost immediately felt that something was different. I passed two beautiful young women in scarves, walking arm-in-arm and laughing about something. When I looked at them, they looked right back into my face and met my eyes, still smiling, as if we were all in the presence of a great joke. I realized that no young women had met my eyes or smiled at me in Urfa till then. As I walked on, I felt a rising sense of freedom, as if for the first time I could look wherever I wanted and not risk receiving a hostile glance. So I kept the scarf on. And then I went back into the city.

This isn’t a scientific study; I didn’t try it multiple times, or measure anything. All I have is my subjective impression, which is this: walking through the city with a head scarf was a completely different experience. People were so much nicer. Nobody looked away when I approached. I felt less jostled; men seemed to step aside, to give me more room. When I went into a store, a man held the door for me, and I realized that it was the first time anyone had reached a door before me without going in first and letting it shut in my face. Most incredibly, when I got to a bus stop shortly after the bus had pulled away, the departing vehicle stopped in the middle of the street, the door opened, and a man reached out his hand to help me in, calling me “sister.” It felt amazing. To feel so welcomed and accepted and safe, to be able to look into someone’s face and smile, and have the smile returned—it was a wonderful gift.

How long can I keep wearing it? I found myself thinking, as the bus lurched into motion and cars honked around us. The rest of the day? Forever?

I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something I could do. It wasn’t difficult, or expensive. Why should I not cover my head here, if it made the people who lived here feel so much better? Why should I cause needless discomfort to them and to myself? Out of principle? What principle? The principle that women were equal to men? To whom was I communicating that principle? With what degree of success? What if I thought I was communicating one thing but what people understood was something else—what if what they understood was that I disapproved of them and thought their way of life was backward? Did that still count as “communicating”?

I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk?

And yet, when I thought about leaving the scarf on for the rest of my stay, something about it felt dishonest, almost shameful, as if I were duping people into being kind to me. Those klix who smiled into my eyes—they thought I was like them. The guy who helped me on the bus—he thought I was his sister.

At that point, another thought came to me, a kind of fantasy, so foreign that I could barely articulate it even to myself: What if I really did it? What if I wore a scarf not as a disguise but somehow for real? I was thirty-four, and I’d been having a lot of doubts about the direction my life was taking. I had had an abortion the previous year, with some reluctance, and everything—every minor defeat, every sign of unfriendliness—still hurt a little extra. I had never felt so alone, and in a way that seemed suddenly to have been of my design, as if I had chosen this life without realizing it, years earlier, when I set out to become a writer. And now a glimmer appeared before me of a totally different way of being than any I had imagined, a life with clear rules and duties that you followed, in exchange for which you were respected and honored and safe. You had children—not maybe but definitely. You didn’t have to worry that your social value was irrevocably tied to your sexual value. You had less freedom, true. But what was so great about freedom? What was so great about being a journalist and going around being a pain in everyone’s ass, having people either be suspicious and mean to you or try to use you for their P.R. strategy? Travelling alone, especially as a woman, especially in a patriarchal culture, can be really stressful. It can make you question the most basic priorities around which your life is arranged. Like: Why do I have a job that makes me travel alone? For literature? What’s literature?

These thoughts recently came back to me when I read “Submission,” the latest novel by Michel Houellebecq, a satire set in a 2022 France ruled by democratically elected Islamic moderates. The Islam in “Submission” is largely a fantasy designed, by Houellebecq, to appeal to someone just like Houellebecq, with lavishly funded universities, fantastic meze, freely flowing French and Lebanese wines, and multiple teen wives for every intellectual who converts to Islam. But the political rhetoric of the movement’s leader, Mohammed Ben Abbes, is well reasoned and coherent, bearing a certain resemblance to Erdoğan’s klix platform, and presented with a frankness and lucidity that made me understand the logic of the A.K.P. in a way I never had before.

Internationally, Ben Abbes seeks to transform Europe into a Mediterranean and North African union of Muslim states: a program similar to the “neo-Islamism” of Ahmet Davutoğlu, the A.K.P. prime minister. Domestically, Ben Abbes supports entrepreneurialism, family businesses, and the free market; socially, he seeks to bolster Muslim education and to encourage women to be stay-at-home mothers, while continuing to tout the supreme value of democratic rule. I had never understood how all these goals were related, or even compatible. How could someone who opposed feminism—who was O.K. with half the population being less educated than the other half—be in favor of democracy? How could a democratic constitution not be secular? How could it be compatible with any of the Abrahamic faiths, with anything that came out of that cave in Urfa? I had always assumed that Erdoğan was being insincere about something: either he was just pretending to care about democracy or he was just pretending to care about Muslim family values—or, as my relatives said, he was pretending both about democracy and Islam, and the only thing he really cared about was building more shopping malls with Gulf money.

Reading “Submission,” I saw that there is, in fact, a logical consistency in the Islamist moderate free-trade platform. Democracy, like capitalism, is a numbers game, and “family values” is a machine that boosts the population. As one Houellebecq character puts it:

Couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That’s why atheist humanism—the basis of any “pluralist society”—is doomed.

The atheist humanists in Houellebecq’s 2022 are doomed, not just to extinction but also to uncoolness. The 1968 movement in Europe, much like the Kemalist revolution in Turkey, was once youthful and countercultural, and then it won, and itself became an old and crumbling establishment. Ben Abbes, Houellebecq writes, gets no trouble from “the last of the soixante-huitards, those progressive mummified corpses—extinct in the wider world—who managed to hang on in the citadels of the media.” The outnumbered, irrelevant zombies, still naïvely believing themselves to be the defenders of the downtrodden, are so “paralyzed” by the Muslims’ “multicultural background” that they don’t even put up a fight.

Houellebecq’s narrator, François, is a middle-aged professor of French literature—a specialist in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans’s “Against Nature” (1884), widely considered a masterpiece of the decadent movement, tells the story of a dissolute aristocrat who devotes his life to aesthetic pursuits, such as eating all-black meals and hanging around with a giant jewel-encrusted tortoise. These activities fail to bring him happiness, even as they seem to exhaust the possibilities of the decadent novel. Huysmans converted to Catholicism after writing “Against Nature.” The parallels between François and Huysmans’s hero are clear. François, too, has devoted his life to aesthetic pursuits: reading, watching television, chain-smoking, drinking supermarket wine, and klix undergraduates. He, too, finds these indulgences empty and exhaustible: literature stops seeming interesting, and sex gets more difficult every year. In much the same way that Huysmans converted to Catholicism, François converts to Islam.

When the Muslim government subsidizes a Pléiade edition of Huysmans and commissions François to write an introduction, he does some rereading and realizes, for the first time, that “Huysmans’s true subject had been bourgeois happiness, a happiness painfully out of reach for a bachelor.” That was all Huysmans ever wanted: not the all-black meals, not the jewel-encrusted turtle, but simply “to have his artist friends over for a pot-au-feu with horseradish sauce, accompanied by an ‘honest’ wine and followed by plum brandy and tobacco, with everyone sitting by the stove while the winter winds battered the towers of Saint-Sulpice.” Such happiness is “painfully out of reach for a bachelor,” even a rich one with servants; it really depends on a wife who can cook and entertain, who can turn a house into a home.

This is the cost of bourgeois happiness, in Houellebecq’s Islamic utopia: the independence of women. It’s fascinating to see how Houellebecq rises to the challenge of making female domestic enslavement seem palatable in the novel, not just to the Islamo-curious François but also, to some extent, to the women of France. For example, early in the novel, François looks up two of his exes, successful single women in their forties; these scenes suggest, not implausibly, that the penalties of aging, and the psychic toll of klix and singleness, are even harder for women than for men, and that they aren’t really balanced out by the joys of a career in, say, wine distribution or pharmaceuticals. François subsequently visits a female ex-colleague who has retired to domestic life pending the Islamization of the university. “To see her bustling around the kitchen in an apron bearing the humorous phrase ‘Don’t Holler at the Cook—That’s the Boss’s Job!,’. . . it was hard to believe that just days ago she’d been leading a doctoral seminar on the altogether unusual circumstances surrounding Balzac’s corrections to the proofs of Béatrix,” he observes. “She’d made us tartlets stuffed with ducks’ necks and shallots, and they were delicious.” In a later passage, set on a train, François contrasts the visible stress of a Muslim businessman, who is having a clearly harrowing phone conversation, with the high spirits of his two teen wives, who are solving puzzles from the newspaper. Under the “Islamic regime,” François realizes, women—or “at least the ones pretty enough to attract a rich husband”—live in an eternal childhood, first as children, then as mothers, with just a few years of “sexy underwear” in between: “Obviously they had no autonomy, but as they say in English, fuck autonomy.”

Houellebecq’s vision of an Islamic state, for all its cartoonishness, has a certain imaginative generosity. He portrays Islam not as a depersonalized creeping menace, or as an ideological last resort to which those disenfranchised by the West may be “vulnerable,” but as a system of beliefs that is enormously appealing to many people, many of whom have other options. It’s the same realization I reached in Urfa. Nobody has everything; everyone is trading certain things for others.

I didn’t wear the scarf again, after that afternoon. I couldn’t explain it rationally, but it didn’t feel right. I stuck to my original strategy of smiling and ignoring social cues—the American way. “In the vast majority of cases,” as a French intellectual once said, “people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in.”

In the course of multiple trips to the site, the surly taxi-driver gradually opened up, especially after I complimented him on the skill with which he avoided hitting pedestrians at the last possible second. “That was nothing,” the driver said, and told me about the time he had managed not to run over an old man who was walking right down the middle of the road as if it were the sidewalk, and who, in response to the driver’s honking, simply stood where he was and shouted, “Pretend I’m a tree.”

“How can you reason with someone like that?” the driver demanded, adding that when he drove in Urfa he conducted himself according to logic and not according to the traffic laws, because the rate of survival for someone who followed traffic laws had dropped to zero per cent.

We pulled up at the hotel. “So you’re still with us,” the receptionist said, not unhumorously, when I walked in.

“Of course,” I replied. “What person who has come to Urfa would ever want to leave?”

[Saian]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... ay-routine

Unplug and unwind: We’ve recently started doing this thing where we totally disconnect for a few hours, and it’s been really liberating. No cell phones, no iPads, no laptops, nothing. We don’t even use language. We limit ourselves to vowel sounds and grunts, and just get back in touch with our primal selves, roaming around the apartment, pissing and shitting at will, and foraging for scraps of salami. Heaven.

[Saian]

Oral/aural sex -ed of the most sublime order regarding masturbation. Nathan Lane reads a letter by Dalton Trumbo to his son on the subject of masturbation. It's the brilliant, hilarious show stopper from TRUMBO (2007)


My Dear Son,
I am sending you two books I think appropriate for a young man spending 5/7ths of his time in the monkish precincts of John Jay Hall.

The first is Education of a Poker Player, by Herbert O. Yardley. Read it in secret; hide it, whenever you leave quarters, and youll be rewarded with many unfair, but legal, advantages over friend and enemy alike.

The second book I think you should share with your young companions. It is: Sex Without Guilt, by a man who will take his place in history as the greatest humanitarian since Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Ellis, PhD. This good man has written what might be called a manual for masturbators. The result (mailed in plane wrapper under separate cover) is one of those fortuitous events when the right man collides with the right idea at precisely the right time.

This whole new approach, this fresh wind blowing under the sheets, so to speak, this large hearted appeal for cheerful self pollution invokes, perhaps, a deeper response in my heart than in most for I sneaky, timorous, incontinent little beast with my pavian obsessions was never wholesomely at home with my penile problem, all because of that maggoty, mountainous pustule of needless guilt that throbbed like an abscess in my young boys heart. On warm summer nights while exuberant girl-hunting contemporaries scampered in and out of the brush under high, western stars, I, dedicated fool, lie swooning in my bed with no companion save the lewd and smirking demons of my bottomless guilt. Cowering there in seminal darkness, liquescent with self-loathing, attentive only to the stealthy rise and crafty ebbing of my dark scrotumnal blood, fearful as a lechwe, yet firmer of purpose than any rutting buffalo, I celebrated the rights of Shuas son with solemn resignation. Poor little chap on a summers night, morosely masturbating. Tut, tut, tut.

Even now, more than three decades later, even now when I forget a friends name, or mislay my spectacles, or pause in mid-sentence idiocy even now such lapses set a clammy chill upon my heart. Its then, while panic tightens my sagging throat, that I whisper to myself Its true after all: it does make you crazy! It does cause the brain to soften. Why, oh why did I like it so much?! Why didnt I stop while I was ahead of the game?! Ah well, little good to know it now. The harms done, the jigs up, youre thoroughly rattled, better youd been born with handless stumps.

I recall a certain chill, winter night on which my father took me to one of those Calvinist fertility rights disguised as a father and son banquet. Master of the revels was an acrid old goat named Horace T. McGuiness. He opened his discourse with a series of blasphemous demands that the Almighty agree with his ghastly notions, and then got down to the meat of the program, which, to no ones surprise, was klix. When you go out with a young lady, he slavered you go out with your own sister! It seemed plain to me that if one day I did burst upon the world as the hymeneal Genghis Khan of my dreams, I would be in for an extremely incestuous time of it. I can still hear that demented old reprobate howling his bill of particulars against poor Onan, the Bibles first recorded masturbator, shaking his fist at us and sweating like a diseased stoat. He wasted his seed! Ohhhh monstrous, shameful, nameless act! He spilled it right out onto the ground all of it. And this displeased the Lord, and the Lord slew him.

Yet, the more I think on it, the more positive I become that you will never truly be able to comprehend, in all its horror, that interminably sustained convulsion which was your fathers youth. Its only reasonable that this should be so, since you had so many advantages that were denied to me. To name but three of them: a private room, a masturbating father, and Albert Ellis, PhD.

I carried the ball for all of us, and carried it farther than anyone had a right to expect. I was the Prometheus of my secret tribe, a penile virtuoso, a gonadic prodigy, a spermatiphorous thunderbolt in fine, a masturbators masturbator.



a pinajl virtuoso

[Saian]

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/disaster/katastrofa
Aleksandar Hemon

My father likes to talk to people, ask them questions, tell them stories. More than once, if I found myself reading, or watching TV, or just silently staring into space, he’d sit next to me and order: “Talk!” I’d bristle, but then I’d talk, of course. It’s not just that he cannot stand silence, or endure the thought that people have nothing to say to each other. It’s also his voracious curiosity—everyone, he assumes, has some story to tell, not least his professionally storytelling son. He expects other people to reveal themselves to him by way of stories. Silence is the death of narration, and thus of love.

Once, we were visiting my wife Teri’s parents in Pensacola Beach, Florida, and my parents came from Canada (where they have lived for the past twenty-three years) to join us for Christmas. Teri and I had married earlier that year, which was when my parents had encountered her parents and got splendidly along. Now, in Pensacola Beach, my parents spent time with her extended family, which, like my family, frequently gets together and features untold numbers of cousins and friends who have been absorbed into the kinship. My parents saw that the essential structure and practices of an African American family are very much like those of our Bosnian one. But one thing was somewhat lacking, however—Teri’s family didn’t do much of what my family did (and does still): they didn’t tell stories the way we did. Their history, for whatever reason, was not entirely available by way of public narration.Thus, as we walked one balmy day along the splendid white-sand beach, seabirds coasting over our heads, clouds scarce and meringue, my father said to my wife: “Teri, tell me about your family. What bad happened?”

Teri was gracious but could not satisfy his curiosity. Apart from the general calamity of being black in America—applicable to an entire population, even if not necessarily equally—there were few family disasters to talk about. My father found that perplexing, even a bit disappointing—for if nothing bad had happened, it was hard to imagine how any stories could be forthcoming. If nothing bad happened, what do we have to talk about?

Teri knew, of course, that my parents had ended up as refugees in Canada, escaping the siege of Sarajevo. She knew that bad things had happened in our family, the baddest one being the war in Bosnia. But this was one of those moments when I felt compelled to interfere and explain my parents to my wife, to establish and introduce the theoretical foundations of their thought system, to instruct her—and anyone willing to submit and listen—on the ways in which trauma alters the very structure of the world and reality. For I understood instantly why my father would ask a question like that. I recognized his compulsion. The “what bad happened” was a shorthand (or longhand) for catastrophe. He asked her to lead him into the history of her family by way of outlining the catastrophes that defined it—for that’s how he would tell the story of our family: the wars, displacements, losses, struggles. There is no history without catastrophe; to outline a history one had to narrate its catastrophes. And what could not be narrated could not be understood. A family—or a world, or a life—without a catastrophe was incomprehensible, because it was an impossible proposition. If catastrophe (according to the theory of tragedy) is the dramatic event that initiates the resolution of the plot, then its absence suggests a possibility that the tragic plot will never be resolved. A catastrophe, in other words, might be a trap, but it also allows for a narrative escape. If you were lucky enough to have survived the catastrophic plot twist, you get to tell the story—you must tell the story.

I’m of a staunch belief that anything that can be said and thought in one language can be thought and said in another. The words might have a different value or interpretative aura, but there is always more than enough overlapping not to dismiss the project of translation, which is essential not only to the project of literature, but to the project of humanity as well.

But then there is the Bosnian word kata­strofa, which, most obviously, comes from the same Greek word (katastrophe [καταστροφή], meaning overturning) as its English counterpart catastrophe. But in Bosnian—or at least in the language my family uses—katastrofa has a substantially different value and applicability than catastrophe has in English. We use it all the time, deploying it in the contexts that would be less appropriate in English. My mother would thus reprimand my father by saying, “Ti si, ćale, katastrofa!” (translatable as: You, Pop, are a catastrophe!) because he left a trail of dirty socks all the way to the bedroom. Or my father, in his report on a pipe bursting in their house wall, would use katastrofa to refer to the necessity of digging through said wall to find the source of the leak. My sister, who lives in London, would describe the leaden January skies depressingly looming over England and her head as katastrofa. And I could apply katastrofa to, say, the inability of Liverpool FC to defend corner kicks, or to the realization that I’m in the bathroom without toilet paper and the nearest roll is a hallway away. One of the few Bosnian words Teri understands is katastrofa, mainly by way of hearing me bemoan various unfortunate turns of events.

None of this suggests that we don’t take the possibility of catastrophe seriously. On the contrary, the ease with which the word katastrofa is applied is related to its very ubiquity. Rather than existing exclusively in magnanimous, tragic dimensions, katastrofa is everywhere, its particles always shimmering like shrapnel on a sunny day.Against their will, despite their desires, my parents are experts on katastrofa. I called them not so long ago to discuss their theoretical positions on the idea.

Without a doubt the most recent war was the greatest catastrophe in their lifetimes. (World War II was part of their childhood, but they were less traumatized by it, because their youth turned out to be pretty good.) My mother hadn’t expected the war to come, so it crashed into her life like a meteorite, and she still remembers the shock: the shelling, the curfew, the dissolution of her routines, her inability to fit the fact of war into the structure of reality within which she operated, saying to me, who called her from Chicago in the spring of 1992: “It’s going to stop soon, they’re already shooting less than yesterday.” And she remembers how everything they had worked for was erased overnight, not only being rendered meaningless, but also irreversibly destabilizing the very possibility of any structural permanence in their subsequent life. After the experience of war, she couldn’t sustain her belief in the inertia of reality—in the force that makes things continue as they are. She claims that her mind now rejects the possibility of another war, but the unnatural rupture made any kind of stability suspect. Back before the war, she, like many, was protected by the unimaginability of the unimaginable—a comfortable, if false, assumption that what cannot be imagined cannot happen, or even be happening. Now, she would hide behind the unimaginable, but what has already happened is always necessarily imaginable, and thus has that screen been shredded. To her, being old or sick is not a katastrofa—for that is, she says, natural—so she’s not afraid of it. It’s not that she fears war either—what she fears is that something will rupture her newly acquired (very Canadian) stability, that something might undo that particular reality.

My father was also traumatized by the war, but what he experienced as a katastrofa—a very personal one, he says—was primarily the rupture in the continuity of human nature. Before the war, he could believe in the stable goodness (or not-goodness) of people—they were who they were and you knew who they were; you avoided the bad ones, liked the good ones. What catastrophically shocked him was the abrupt shift he saw among some of his friends and acquaintances from neighbors into haters, from good to bad, from decent people into killers—that was the unimaginable for him, that overturning of human nature. When I ask him if he spends time expecting another katastrofa, as yet unimaginable, he says, “We’re old. There might be a katastrofa, but we won’t be around, so we don’t care.”

As for my sister, who has switched career paths in her forties to become a psycho­therapist, she appears clear-eyed about the whole thing. “Katastrofa is the imaginary (and sometimes real) actualization of the worst possible outcome of a given situation,” she wrote to me. “The situation could vary from a missed bus or burned lunch to death and war.” She went on: “Katastrofa is the state of expectation of the worst, as well as preparation for avoidance, for the struggle against or the managing of the outcome. That state is sometimes conscious, but it is permanently subconscious.” She also thinks—and I agree—that there is some cultural determination to this perpetual expectation. We both remember the slogan, attributed to Comrade Tito himself and repeated to all the children and citizens of Yugoslavia for decades before the war: “We must live as though peace will last for a hundred years, and be ready as though war will start tomorrow.” (And the war did start tomorrow.) My father recalls his father (Ivan) firmly believing that it was impossible to live for fifty years without experiencing war—Grandpa Ivan himself had experienced two world wars. And if scientists are right in claiming that trauma can alter the genetic code, which can then be passed to ancestors, then katastrofa is inscribed in my genes.

I also asked my parents what the opposite of katastrofa would be. “Normal life,” they said, in unison. To them, normal life is a self-evident category—it’s a life that is normal. After I pressed them, they expounded: normal life requires stability, always dependent on the stability of the state, which allows for raising, educating, and empowering children, as well as for an overall sense of progress. Normal life, my father clarified, also has nuances, and it’s improved (though the exact translation of the word he used would be beautified) with things like skiing, sports, singing, children, beekeeping, etc. At which point I realized that normal life was in fact the life they had before the war, what they had lost. Normal life is therefore simultaneously a nostalgic and utopian project, both irretrievable and unachievable.Which is to say that normal life is delimited and defined by catastrophe—it’s the life ruptured, the life made both unavailable and visible by katastrofa. And, inversely, katastrofa is whatever ruptures life, what makes its stability, its necessary biological and emotional inertia, impossible. Much as catastrophe in tragedy necessitates the resolution of the plot, katastrofa necessitates a narrative of normal life, which we can perceive only through the catastrophic screen dividing our life into before and after.

As for me, I have a confession to make: my mind is linguistically obsessive, ever relentlessly and involuntarily generating wordplay and verbal distortions. There has to be a diagnosis related to that kind of constant chatter, or to the fact that, every day of my normal life, I talk to myself in Bosnian, usually in a voice of a Sarajevo street thug—cursing, threatening, insulting, mainly myself (or rather the part that is not a Sarajevo thug). Well, that language-obsessed mind has spontaneously come up with the name of Sergei Katastrofenko—an imaginary Slav, probably Ukrainian—who flickers as a possibility of a character, or a joke, or a catastrophe. The name Sergei Katastrofenko often bounces around my head as I scan the world for the ripples of disaster, even as he hasn’t quite acquired a full voice, let alone a body. But when he does acquire it—and when that happens, I’ll be losing my mind—he’ll become a perfect embodiment of katastrofa, of the idea that no reality—or the narrative of it—is possible without catastrophe.



Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo in 1964. In 1992, while Hemon was in a journalist exchange program in Chicago, war broke out in Bosnia. He became a political refugee, living for the past twenty-four years in Chicago. Hemon is the author of six books, most recently the novel The Making of Zombie Wars.

[hadzinicasa]

pa ne znadoh gdje bih ovo... pa evo tu. nije mi stilom toliko sjajan koliko su mu tekstovi prozeti nekom spoznajom Zivota koju, cini mi se imaju samo oni Koje isti nije mazio bas...

Samo nek je živo i zdravo (i da liči na mene)

23/03/2016
Pošto je življenje danas postalo pre iskušenje nego nagrada, došlo je vreme kada vaspitavanje više nije davanje, već se svelo na zabranjivanje. Na to šta sve dete ne sme. Više se život ne proba, ne kuša, ne diše. O spoljnom svetu se samo priča, posmatra se kroz televizor i na njega se upozorava. Deca se ne vaspitavaju, samo se čuvaju. Od svega, od svačeg, od svakog. Nekad osnovano, a vrlo često i neosnovano.

Ta deca koja su samo čuvana umesto vaspitavana jedino su naučila šta ne smeju, ali nisu naučila da razlikuju šta je dobro, a šta loše. Kad si od svega lošeg zaštićen, teško naučiš da ceniš ono što je dobro. Onda kada bude postalo punoletno i kada tim roditeljima koji su pod izgovorom brige previše čuvali svoju decu njegovi mladalački koraci postanu neuhvatljivi, kada brigu da ne udari glavom o ivicu stola zameni briga da će udarati glavom o zid, ti roditelji shvate da ga možda za taj spoljni svet i nisu najbolje pripremili.

Prvo nek je živo i zdravo. Ali uz sve to moglo bi da bude i najbolje, najpametnije, najlepše, najuspešnije. Vrlo često se pod izgovorom davanja podrške krije forsiranje dece kako bi sprovela neostvarene ambicije svojih roditelja. Kad bi ga neko pitao, reklo bi da bi volelo da ide na balet, ali zbog tate mora na fudbal. Tada dobijate frustrirano dete koje je ljuto na svoje roditelje i nezadovoljnog roditelja koji je razočaran svojim detetom. Tako terano, kalupljeno, prekrajano, brušeno, postaje sve što vi želite da ono bude, a odlazi daleko od sebe. Ukratko – od sreće.

Zna da podvuče šta je bitno u lekciji, ali nije naučilo šta mu je bitno u životu, zna matematiku, ali ne zna da se sebere, zna da govori strane jezike, ali ne zna da se ugrize za svoj, naučilo je da namesti vodu za tuširanje, ali ne zna da se njom kaljav obraz ne pere. Imate bivšeg školarca kojeg škola jeste učila stvari o životu, ali onu najbitniju nije – kako se živi. A niste ni vi. Tada sledi vatreno krštenje.

Ako ga pustiš da radi šta hoće, možda će biti nevaspitano, ali ako ga pustiš da bude šta hoće, sigurno će biti srećno. Roditelji su spremni sve da urade za svoje dete. Osim jednog. Da ga puste da bude svoje. Vrlo često se pod izgovorom „to je za tvoje dobro“ krije se „ja znam najbolje“ jer suviše je opasnosti u tome da će – ukoliko bude biralo samo – biti drugačije od onog što ste vi za njega planirali.

Budite svesni da u tom malom čoveku nema ničeg što je vaše. To biće je potpuno svoje od momenta kada mu je presečena pupčana vrpca. Samo mu vi ponekad ne dopuštate da to bude. Ne dozvolite da zabranjivanje njegove suštine shvatate kao vaspitavanje. Jer nije. Jedino što u njemu može da se primi a da je vaše jeste vaša ljubav. Ne sujeta, kompleksi, neostvarene želje, strah, niti ambicije. Softver bilo kog ljudskog uma ne čita te kodove. Dete ume da reaguje samo na ljubav.

Ako već nešto hoćete da mu branite, ne dajte mu da bude kao vi. Ukoliko bude, znajte da ste podbacili kao roditelji. Mora da bude bolje.


https://blogdan.rs/2016/03/23/samo-nek- ... i-na-mene/

[petunija]

Fenomenalan tekst, da imam neku moć, ovo bih umnožila i podijelila svim roditeljima

[Saian]

fino razmisljanje, mislim da vecina ljudi ovako razmislja i planira tesko mi je zamisliti da buduci ili sadasnji roditelj koji ovo procita nece odobravajuci prepoznati sebe u ovome

[hadzinicasa]

fino razmisljanje, mislim da vecina ljudi ovako razmislja i planira tesko mi je zamisliti da buduci ili sadasnji roditelj koji ovo procita nece odobravajuci prepoznati sebe u ovome

Mislis ovo?