TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT (T.S ELIOT) AND THE MIND OF THE POET AS A CATALYST

I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. 

The text it self explains the analogy very well, there is not much one could add. The catalysts, indeed, remain intact at the end of the reaction; they only make it possible for the reaction to runs in a more favorable, faster way..

There is another quote by Eliot about poets that I like. He said about bad poets: “In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious”. I used this sentence, conversely, to praise the last Kiko Veneno albums

MY LAST SIGH ( LUIS BUÑUEL) AND THE SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUÑUEL AND CAJAL

There was much ado about this in the literary world. We decided to give a banquet to tribute Araquistain so as to collect signatures for supporting him. My ultraist friends were aware that I was acquaintance with Cajal from the Natural History Museum, where I would prepare platelets for his microscope in the Entomology section. So, they asked me to get his signature, which would have been the most prestigious of all. So, I did . But Cajal, very old at that time, refused to sign it. He claimed the excuse that the newspaper ABC, where the Audacious Sir collaborated regularly, was going to publish his own memoirs and he was afraid that by signing that, the newspaper terminated the contract.

Although for different reasons, I do always refuse to sign the requests I am given. The sheets of signatures are nothing but a way to calm down your conscience. I know my attitude is arguable. That is why if something happens to me, if I end up in jail, for example, or I disappear, I beg nobody to sign for me.

It´s not the first time that Cajal has appeared in this blog. In the first one, Cajal was told off by Emilia Pardo Bazán, and that must have been serious business.

I had no idea of this collaboration between Buñuel and Cajal before reading this book and it´s not the only amazing thing I´ve discovered. I´ve also found out that Buñuel was about to kill Gala and also that John Wayne led a supporting association for Franco.

But the most practical information of the text is the one dealing with collecting signatures. I think I´m going to use it the next time a girl from an NGO comes up to me and tells me: do you have a second? I´ll say no moving my finger, while speeding up my pace and saying: “I know my attitude is arguable”

THE PALE KING (DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND NON INERTIAL FRAMES OF REFERENCES

 Sylvanshine then spent some time trying to feel the fact that his personal body was traveling at the same speed as the craft he was inside. On a large jet it felt like merely sitting in a loud narrow room; here at least the changes in the seat’s and belt’s pressures against him allowed him to be aware of movement, and there seemed to be some security in the physical candor of this, which partly offset the fragility and spatter-potential of the sound of the propellers, which Sylvanshine tried to think of what the props sounded like but could not except as a gnawingly hypnotic rotary hum so total that it might have been silence itself. A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket, the term was always ‘frontal’ lobotomy; but was there any other kind?

The non inertial frames of reference are those that move with aceleration and that is why an observer would be able to see how a motionless body gets aceleration. Newton Laws are not applicable to non inertial frames of reference, except if you add unreal forces called fictitious forces.

In good planes, when you are flying you don´t feel any sort of movement, only the noise, as stated in the text by David Foster Wallace (such a great writer unfairyly critized as too officially postmodern; I am very sad about the fact that there will not be any new books written by him), because they are (the good planes, I mean) inertial frames of reference, in other words, they move with constAnt velocity.