The Encyclopaedia Britannica poorly affirms that Melville's Moby Dick (1) admits “numerous, if not seemingly infinite, readings” (2), and that the keys to understand it are the biblical verses and names. This suggestion is based in the old hermeneutics, whose three mainstays are: “mystice”, “allegorice”, “symbolice”.

I’ve been weening the time-honored distinction between ancient and modern art. Time, I guess, isn’t a keen concept to split art. I’m going to talk a bit about this. Will we be “modern brethren” within ten thousand years? This discussion could endlessly be enlarged. I would like to hie the piebald literary connoisseurs to regard the microscope, or rather the microscopical worldview, which was well imprinted on the curious minds of the Greek pointy-heads (the phrase “οφθαλμος σου απλους” in Matthew 6: 22, and the word “καρδια” in Matthew 6: 21, evoke microscopical images) and on the minds of a Leibniz, of a Newton, as the hallmark of the said artsy rivers.

If metaphysics is the morningtide of art, and if the whilom is arrayed by the minion ideas of soul (“Seele”), world (“Welt”) and God (“Gott”), and if these flapping cloddish concepts are the tokens of the three main cravings of the human mind, videlicet, the setting of strong adjectives, the hoisting of stout hypotheses, and the blurbing of cosmogonies and apocalypses, then artists are those who can depict objects by means of an original garb, arrange them in an unmovable manner, and homogenizing them without lacking of accurateness. An artist is, ere all, one indued with the wit to beget a new sleight, to contrive hallowed dispositions, and to harmonize sundry objects within a tale.

The ensuing anthropological depictions of moral corruption, I hope, will be useful for those propagandists who are working on behalf of justice. This brief text is the result of my observations in the spheres of politics and my multifarious readings. Our mind, when we suffer an accident here, a misfortune there, a disgrace today, and the bitter fruits of our improvident facts dropping like a rain of pain upon us, tends to frame a metaphysical scene in which tragedy is the main protagonist. Tragedy is a system too, which sometimes presents a light in order to alleviate the painful life of humanity. This light is called, in accordance with the analyses of Machiavelli, “occasione” (1).

Henry Louis Mencken was a penetrating writer, who represented the crux of the journalism of America. Then, a philosophical analysis of his work will be useful to understand that journalism. To do this, I have perused A Gang of Pecksniffs^[1], which is a compendium of texts engaged against the hypocrisy of mediocre newspapermen. Our point d’appui could be this simple Kantian sentence: we can not know things in an objective manner. Our necessary representations a priori, like geometry and arithmetic, give a form and an order to the various data coming from the exterior world.

^[1] Mencken, Henry Louis, A Gang of Pecksniffs. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House-Publishers, 1955.

Jorge Luis Borges asseverates in scarce, arid lines, that F. S. Fitzgerald, whose vital mission was “to be brave”, represents, more than other authors of the American Jazz Age, the World War I´s post-days^[1]. The Great Gatsby^[2], ergo, is a historic document. H. L. Mencken declares that the Gatsby´s plot is just a “glorified anecdote” developed in “bawdy house parties”, in colorful fallacies that are inhabited by “marionettes”. Such an anecdote is valuable, he affirms, due to “the charm and beauty of the writing”, due to the sentences, which “roll along smoothly, sparklingly, variously”^[3]. We will test these three adjectives.

A literary personage is neither the psychological outcome of an eery aery fluke, which may be termed “fiction”, nor bread swelled by merely leavening dough with the sour sweat of our foreshadowing brows, which can be named “mimesis”. Writers of the world, we’ve a bunch of easy techniques to hoist plausible personages. In my sight, for instance, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies has been a top-notch well of aesthetic wisdom. Furthermore, it contains, in a buttonholing way, some well wrought literary tricks.

Our scooping finite mind, which is jostling athwart the fleeting and hitherandthitering reality from morning to night, is prone to sublime chimeras, to helter-skelter expressions without some tail tressed by adjectives or some head made of nouns, and to descry odds from the top of its wavering teleology. We can regard this hodgepodge of mental movements, with Kant, as the main crux of the “human intellect” in an “unphilosophical state” (1). The bleak lack of philosophy leads us to give an apparent rhapsodical accommodation to the sundry deeds of the world, and such an arrayment stands for a “Weltanschauung”, which is conveyed through religious words (2), which as spells hie us to believe in divinities. This apparent rhapsodical accommodation might be called “common sense”.

Las criptomonedas han demostrado ser una excelente opción para los inversionistas. A pesar de que este mercado es muy volátil, cada vez hay más personas que deciden probar suerte intentando predecir los cambios de valor de monedas como el Bitcoin, Ethereum y hasta Dogecoin.

The “logical thinker”, as Borges affirms (1), can find “patterns” in poetic metaphors. I will try to indicate some logical patterns in eight books.

In the last days I read the American press, and I remembered an old, classic problem between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences, which I can formulate in the next fast question: are the Humanities useless for Natural Sciences? Leon Wieseltier says^[1] (1) that the Humanities, in the technocratic world, without solid reasons have been accused of having a “nonutilitarian character”. With criticism he remarks, besides, “the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation” of human concerns, such as Soul, God, World, Freedom, abortion, euthanasia, etc. He argues that “the character of our society cannot be determined by engineers”. He says that “no distinction between human and machine”, as a director of engineering at Google wants, is nonsense.

"Entre el mundo y yo" de Ta-Nehisi Coates es la carta de un padre a su hijo en la que se enfrenta a la historia de EE.UU. Una profunda reflexión sobre la realidad social de la Norteamérica actual que recoge grandes temas universales como la discriminación, la desigualdad y el activismo necesario para combatirlas. Obra ganadora del National Book Award 2015 de no ficción es ahora publicada en nuestro país por la editorial Seix Barral.

ES LA COLECCIÓN DEFINITIVA DE LA MÍTICA BANDA QUE OFRECE MÁS MATERIAL INÉDITO EN UN 2CD+DVD

El 10 de noviembre, AC/DC publica Backtracks, el álbum definitivo para los coleccionistas y seguidores de la mítica banda australiana. Backtracks se lanza en dos ediciones diferentes y abarca la trayectoria de AC/DC con canciones, tomas de estudio inéditas, actuaciones en directo difíciles de encontrar y el esperadísimo Family Jewels Disc 3, un DVD con videoclips de la banda. El disco doble original Family Jewels fue elegido DVD del Año por la revista británica Classic Rock y la RIAA entregó a la banda diez discos de platino por superar el millón de ejemplares vendidos sólo en Estados Unidos.