Medo de amar (Vinícius de Moraes) - Chico Buarque

Morte e Vida Severina - Chico Buarque

Morte e Vida Severina

João Cabral de Melo Neto

"...E não há melhor resposta
que o espetáculo da vida:
vê-la desfiar seu fio,
que também se chama vida,
ver a fábrica que ela mesma,
teimosamente, se fabrica,
vê-la brotar como há pouco
em nova vida explodida;
mesmo quando é assim pequena
a explosão, como a ocorrida;
mesmo quando é uma explosão
como a de há pouco, franzina;
mesmo quando é a explosão
de uma vida severina."

(Morte e Vida Severina)

 
Retrato: por Percy Deane

Nome:
João Cabral de Melo Neto

Nascimento:
09/01/1920

Natural:
Recife - PE

Morte:
09/10/1999

A carta apaixonada de Olavo Bilac

Olavo Bilac foi objeto de uma admiração apaixonada entre os brasileiros letrados nascidos no começo do século passado. Ainda hoje admirado como o maior poeta parnasiano do Brasil, Bilac foi eleito, em 1907, “príncipe dos poetas brasileiros”, título que hoje soa algo cafona, mas que em seu tempo foi tido como uma grande consagração. Bilac é autor de alguns dos versos mais famosos da poesia brasileira e várias gerações aprenderam de cor seus poemas.
Sua fortuna crítica entrou em certo declínio a partir dos anos 60, mas as últimas décadas devolveram-lhe o papel de destaque que lhe cabe, como grande criador no estilo que prevaleceu em seu tempo, e que Bilac ajudou a firmar. A homossexualidade provável de Bilac era naturalmente ocultada por este, mas parece ter sido comentada abertamente por seus contemporâneos, como comprova uma famosa charge de Seth publicada numa revista ilustrada em 1911, na qual o poeta aparece apontando para as costas empinadas de uma estátua de efebo grego e observando: "Ah! Se todos os homens fossem assim...".
Aos 22 anos, Bilac, que talvez ainda não se soubesse homossexual, apaixonou-se e tornou-se noivo de Amélia de Oliveira, irmã de Alberto de Oliveira, cuja poesia parnasiana talvez só perca em qualidade para a de Bilac. Nessa ocasião, louco de felicidade, Bilac escreve de São Paulo a carta famosa reproduzida nesta página, dirigida a Luiz de Oliveira, outro irmão de sua noiva, para comunicar-lhe o ocorrido, carta que vale a pena transcrever na íntegra:

“Meu querido Luiz
Cheguei ontem do Rio, onde fui passar oito dias. Cá estou de novo n’esta medonha Paulicéa. Que inferno!
Participo-te que sexta-feira passada, 11 de Novembro de 87, ás 2 horas e 35 minutos da tarde, ficou sendo minha noiva tua irmã Amélia. Minha noiva, leste bem? Minha noiva! É a primeira vez que escrevo estas duas palavras. Minha noiva! Como estou feliz! Como é bom viver! Como é bom amar e ser amado!
Manda-me dizer se ficas satisfeito com a notícia, e se ainda és meu amigo, Luiz. Escreve-me, assim que receberes esta carta, para o Diário Mercantil, S. Paulo. Fico ansioso pela tua resposta. Tenho lido a Vida Literária. Estás um poeta de mão cheia. Abraço-te. Escreve-me, escreve-me, escreve-me.
Não te mando dizer se tenho feito versos porque não estou agora para tratar d’essas coisas. Qual poesia, nem qual nada! Não há nada como o amor! Não há nada como amar e ser amado como amo e sou amado! Estou com vontade de sair para a rua e de abraçar toda gente, amigos e inimigos, monarquistas e republicanos, Deus e o Diabo! Tal é a minha alegria.
Escreve-me. Abraça -te, o teu amigo leal
Olavo Bilac”

O casamento nunca se realizou, supostamente por oposição da família, que não considerava Bilac um noivo suficientemente promissor. O mais provável é que os irmãos da noiva tenham compreendido que Bilac, brilhante poeta, não tinha vocação para o casamento. Esta carta − reproduzida em várias publicações a respeito de Bilac − figurou em diversas coleções de literatos brasileiros e acabou nas mãos de Noronha Santos, cujos pertences foram leiloados no Rio de Janeiro em 2001.

http://revistapiaui.estadao.com.br/blogs/questoes-manuscritas/geral/a-carta-apaixonada-de-olavo-bilac

John Edwards Facing Toughest Vote of Life

John Edwards is facing the biggest vote of his life as the case against the former president candidate is expected to be given to the North Carolina jury this morning.

Edwards, 58, could be hit with a prison term as high as 30 and fined up to $1.5 million if convicted of all the charges, although it is unlikely he would be hit with the most severe penalty.

The two time presidential candidate for the presidency is charged with using nearly $1 million in donations to hide his mistress Rielle Hunter and their love child during his bid for the 2008 election.

Federal Judge Catherine Eagles will finish charging the jury this morning and the panel will retire to begin its deliberations.
The jury consists of nine men and seven women and includes four alternates.

In closing arguments, Edwards' lawyer Abbe Lowell told the jury that the money to hide his mistress came from former campaign treasurer Fred Baron and elderly supporter Rachel "Bunny" Mellon. Both people gave him the money as a gift for his benefit, not as part of his political campaign.

And the money, Lowell argued, was used to hide the affair from Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, who was dying of cancer.

"John was a bad husband, but there is not the remotest chance that John did or intended to violate the law," Lowell said.

"If what John did was a crime, we'd better build a lot more court rooms, hire a lot more prosecutors and build a lot more jails," he said.

Lowell said the real culprit was Edwards' aide Andrew Young who helped hide Hunter. He claimed that Young solicited the money from Mellon and used the scandal to enrich himself. Lowell said Young, who was the prosecution's chief witness, and his wife Cheri would "shame Bonnie and Clyde."

Prosecutor Robert Higdon tried to convince the jury that Edwards was an archly ambitious politician fixated on obtaining a higher office.

"He would deny, deceive and manipulate," Higdon told the jury. "The whole scheme was cooked up to support John Edwards' political ambitions."

Neither Edwards nor Hunter took the stand during the month long trial.

By JAMES HILL and RUSSELL GOLDMAN | ABC OTUS News

Facebook IPO Probably Will Not Affect You

 

Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, all your sharing of personal information and photos of your children and harsh opinions about the Kardashians is about to pay off bigtime. For a handful of insiders who owned private shares of Facebook before the company's ginormous IPO this Friday. "As a Facebook user, give yourself a pat on the back for helping the company make it this far. You are one of 900 million, and you spend an average of 20 minutes per day surfing the network. You've become worth an average of $100 to the company," says Mashable, which among much other coverage has created a nifty Facebook-style Timeline graphic about the IPO (on the premise that "if the Facebook IPO were a real person, we certainly wouldn't blame it for posting braggy status updates.") Crazily, the folks at Inc. seemed to have a really similar idea. Mashable analyzes "13 Ways the IPO Could Affect You." Most of them seem to be about the company's future imperative to keep growing at an unbelievable rate to please Wall Street, a drive that could lead to various money-making schemes: "Recently, Facebook indicated that only 12% of your friends see your average update.... users might even need to pay to get more visibility on their updates."
The fear that Facebook might begin billing us to expose ourselves has created at least one ancillary boondoggle. Reports Naked Security: "A hoax claiming that Facebook is planning to start charging users continues to spread across the social network, and has now been adapted by mischief-makers into a claim that the service will be free if users forward a message before midnight." Everybody has a scheme where fistfulls of dollars are involved. Look at poor Eduardo Saverin, a where-are-they now Facebook co-founder who seems to be doing just fine. Reports Inc.: "Depending on what happens when the IPO launches, Saverin could get more than $3 billion. As an American, he might have owed about a billion in capital gains tax, but he won't owe any now because he decided to renounce his American citizenship." Saverin insisted his national carpetbagging move isn't about the taxes, really! He said "I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen." VentureBeat says: "I don't really buy his logic. Captain Planet is a global citizen. He's also a hero who's going to take pollution down to zero. Saverin is a billionaire with a Harvard economics degree who lives in capitalist-friendly Singapore."
Of course there is the main man, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who stands to make at least a billion zillion dollars. He's been the subject a growing catalog of reverential literature. Betabeat has assembled links to "documents concerning St. Zuckerberg of Palo Alto," pronouncing: "Future generations may treasure bits of mystic St. Zuck's Hoodie cloth in jewel cases. They might even pray over them for hearty harvests of 'likes' and 'shares' of their next paid highlight status. " Some people - well Om Malik at OM.co anyway - are congratulating themselves simply for writing about Zuck before he was famous : "At the end of 2004, I pitched my editors at Business 2.0 a story on Facebook, which at that time was known as Thefacebook.com. I was super excited about Facebook." Gosh!
Ah, at least the halo effect has been generous, spreading to some other tech companies. "Some investors are looking for ancillary ways to profit from it," reports AllThingsD. "Shares of LinkedIn, Zynga, Pandora, and Yelp have all been trading up in advance of Facebook's IPO."
Of course all most outsiders can do is gawk, or make musical parody videos. Zuckerberg: the Musical, made by those "History of whistling video" people, is pretty funny, says WebProNews: "Highlights include the segment that deals with the invention of the 'Like' button. For my money, it's hard to compete with the following: "I can like anything better than you." "No you can't." "Yes I can." "No you can't." "Yes I can." "No you can't." "YES I MOTHERF***ING CAN!""
You know what would be cool? One. Billion. Dollars. No, what really would be cool is A WHOLE MOVIE about Zuckerberg. Wait - that's already been done? Oh yeah, the one with the Dragon Tattoo Girl in it. Now the screenwriter who wrote that Facebook movie, Aaron Sorkin, is switching up tech saints to do a film about Steve Jobs. Perez Hilton tellz: "Sony picked up the rights to Walter Issacson's authorized biography of the technology wizard and officially announced today that the Social Network screenwriter will be adapting it for the big screen. Much like Armegeddon and Deep Impact...Hollywood has TWO movies about the Apple co-founder in the works. This particular project does NOT star Ashton Kutcher, as that film is already in production." Apple 2.0 says "Sorkin should have a blast" and lists three scenes from the book it can't wait to see in the movie.
That's right. It's not all-Facebook-all-the-time here. We've got other stuff. Here's something about Nick Hanauer, who gave a speech at one of those thought-provoking TED conferences, but the TED bosses decided it was a little too provoking so they declined to not publish it online like all the others. "The slogan of the nonprofit group is Ideas Worth Spreading," says National Journal. "There's one idea, though, that TED's organizers decided was too controversial to spread: the notion that widening income inequality is a bad thing for America, and that as a result, the rich should pay more in taxes." Maybe they should just get Eduardo Saverin on stage to offer an opposing view.

http://www.blogs.com/2012/05/17/best-in-blogs-how-the-earthshaking-facebook-ipo-probably-will-not-affect-you.html