Sudden remembrance of Jacques Prévert’s poems

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Remembering Jacques Prévert’s poems that I loved when youngster.

Chanson

Quel jour sommes-nous
Nous sommes tous les jours
Mon amie
Nous sommes toute la vie
Mon amour
Nous nous aimons et nous vivons
Nous vivons et nous nous aimons
Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que la vie
Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que le jour
Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’amour.

Song

What day are we?
We are every day
My friend
We’re the whole of life
My love
We love and we live
We live and we love
And we don’t really know
What life is
And we don’t really know
What the day is
And we don’t really know
What love is

“Poems of Jacques Prévert“, Alastair Campbell. Deep South v.3. n.1. (Autumn 1997)

Of course, a quick glance on the Web fetched quite some nice stuff. For instance this collection of poems from Paroles translated into English by none other than Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Which brings us to a very current one, Pater Noster, which Ferlinghetti took inspiration from for his Last prayer video (below).

Our Father who art in heaven
Stay there
And we’ll stay here on earth
Which is sometimes so pretty
With its mysteries of New York
And its mysteries of Paris
Worth as much as that of the Trinity
With its little canal at Ourcq
Its great wall of China
Its river at Morlaix
Its candy canes
With its Pacific Ocean
And its two basins in the Tuileries
With its good children and bad people
With all the wonders of the world
Which are here
Simply on the earth
Offered to everyone
Strewn about
Wondering at the wonder of themselves
And daring not avow it
As a naked pretty girl dares not show herself
With the world’s outrageous misfortunes
Which are legion
With their legionaries
With their torturers
With the masters of this world
The masters with their priests their traitors and their troops
With the seasons
With the years
With the pretty girls and with the old bastards
With the straw of misery rotting in the steel
of cannons.

— Jacques Prévert, Paroles. Translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. City Lights Books, San Francisco 1958, 1990. Available here: http://words-in-lines.tumblr.com/post/10837208157/our-father-who-art-in-heaven-stay-there-and

Ferlinghetti’s own City Light Bookstore in San Francisco posted on Scribd a selection online of poems from Paroles.

Now, Prévert reminds me the French chansonnier Jacques Brel. Here is the famed Les feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves) sung by the great Yves Montand and then Jacques Brel singing Ne me quitte pas.

 

[Featured Image: “Riviera” flickr photo by geofroi  shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license]

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The New Year. Sounds good, from western Puerto Rico.

Posted on January 3, 2017 by Antonio Vantaggiato

The new year sounded good from the aquamarine waters of western Puerto Rico, where we had the luck to spend New Year’s Eve. This is the door to tranquillity at Crushboat beach at Aguadilla.

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And this is the very first sunset of the year from this latitude, over the magnificent horizon.

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The night before, New Year’s Eve, we had a wonderful night on the beach too, with a fantastic bonfire.

Of course, sooner or later there would be someone with good loudspeakers sharing his (always a male) fancy muzak.

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Fortunately, one could turn his attention to a good book. This one I just began the night before and did savor it on the beach. It’s Roseanna, the first novel by the Swedish duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (husband and wife in real life), with the celebrity detective Martin Beck. Nice and calm, the most gruesome and horrible crime gets committed and they turn on their typewriting machine and little by little the story unfolds, stopping only at the end. This is the foremother of all the nordic crime stories, including Wallander and Stieg Larson.

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Of course, what the

img_5713! A nice beer would finish off the first day of the year in style, on the rocks of the Aguadilla lighthouse ruins, just on the northwest corner of this awesome island.

[All photos by moi meme. License is granted through CC: BY-SA-NC]

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A Year Lived Fully: A Condensed Story of 2016 in Images

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato

So I am rushing a last 2016 post before 2016 actually goes, quite inspired from a post the great cogdog Alan Levine just did… ‘Twas an unbelievable year, 2016. The good thing, great! The bad ones, terrible, including a bad flu that grabbed breadth from Hilda and me just during Christmas week. The students this year were great, and they produced the best blogs ever, to be shown in a next post. If I weren’t that lazy, I’d have done it a month ago. Three groups of students also won prizes for videos on the Internet for the Internet Society.

I did 35 posts in 2016, that is one every two weeks. Too little, now that we ought to reclaim and defend the Web. Yes, I fell into apathy with Twitter and other networks, but I participated a lot with my classes and students. That was a lot of fun.

So, 2016 began in Rincón, under the tropical sun with the four of us.

Rincón, Puerto Rico

Then came Alan for a month-long stay at Sagrado, where we had a wonderful time sharing the Inf115 course and his genius “Una foto cada día” activity, cloned from the famed ds106 assignment bank. I cannot thank Alan enough for the great inspiration and time together. I have suspicion he had some good time himself!

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The two big events of 2016 were our daughters’ graduations, of course. Chiara graduated from Syracuse University with a hard-earned BS in Biology and we went to upstate NY to share a little with her, her friends and environment. We saw her house, her neighborhood, her workplace at one cafeteria, where she was loved and commended by fellow workers.

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On our way back to NYC we stayed at the famous “quirky, art-focused” Carlton Arms Hotel, a place close to Madison Square Park, where everything is made and decorated by the artists who have been living there. Great place, if spartan–and cheap.

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In NYC, we had the luck to savor a wonderful meal at one of my favorite restaurants, the Hundred Acres, down in the Village. Spring menu, fantastic!

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At B&N of course, I bought a copy of this book, just to have with me. It would serve me well during the rest of the year!

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We also spent one night in Pennsylvania on the route from Syracuse: that was when we learned that we’d actually cross this state in mid NY. It was a nice stay, and of course we were so happy and proud for Chiara.

Younger daughter Flavia (on the right here, with friend Gaby) graduated from High School later, and she felt so adult, having just marked her 18th year!

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So, mission accomplished, in one sense, but still a long road to go.

During the summer nobody made a move: Chiara was studying, Flavia partying and I kept sort of going to my office to begin working on the STEMmED project’s end that was closing in fast.

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Flavia continued to do her dance and theater pieces, better and better. I kept on with my culinary passion (here a home-made roman Tomato Stuffed with rice, one of the delicacies of Rome’s ubiquitous rosticcerie).

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And now, since autumn, the STEMmED project is over, and we’ll soon complete its final report. As the last hours of this year come and go, I am enjoying a tranquil time with the family, here in San Juan, and recovering from the flu. Just want to thank friends and foes who helped make this a very non-conforming one!

[All photos taken and shared by moi meme. Please use according to CC-license BY-SA-NC]

[Featured photo–also by me– is of baby turtles being rescued by specialized personnel from a beach in eastern Puerto Rico. We were amazed and speechless witnessing the experience.]

Baby turtles being rescued on the beach.

Baby turtles being rescued on the beach.

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I love to read newspapers’ curation

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Every day I read newspapers and I love doing so. Usually, I read them in their online editions. Rarely do I buy a paper, except perhaps on particular occasions, like Sundays’ New York Times, for instance.

So, I just though a salute to newspapers would be most appropriate for me at this point,  when I devote so much time to the Web and its more or less open stuff, like blogs. In fact I religiously awaken every day with the rhythm of two papers: Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día, and Italy’s La Repubblica. I tend to scour titles and main articles and read a couple while having breakfast. On Sundays, I love reading a few editorials from both newspapers’ best journalists and then I love to navigate my “other” preferred newspapers, like The New York Times (I pay an educator subscription at $4/week!), The Guardian and El País. In fact, the Web has bestowed upon me the incredible gift of being able to read in real time newspapers from Italy from very afar.

Screenshot from The Guardian

Screenshot from The Guardian

This is a really healthy practice, and I do enjoy it greatly. I like to discover stuff with a little serendipity and often I end up opening one tab too many or quickly filling up my Instapaper.

Articles Do Not Carry Links

One thing I have to say, though, that resembles a common practice at news sites big and small: articles do not carry links. Yes, they are published on the Web (so they are Web pages) but rarely do they have links to other Web pages. It’s very difficult to find links on the Web these days!! I try and teach my students to enjoy and enrich the wealth of linked webs of media; to learn and speak (write) the language of the Web, namely a language of  diverse (hyper-)media and http links. They end the semester with a good understanding of that. But news outlets? Nope, it seems that in the blue books of their best practices lie in gold:

Thou Shalt Not Place Links Upon Your Pages.

I understand why, but it’s a pity, and one big examples of an entire industry not appreciating the true nature of the Web. They then lament their diminishing sales.

Still, they (at least some) do a great job of navigating and curating the world for us. I end up enjoying my own curation from my best sources on the open Web, and I also appreciate very much the external curation made professionally by such outlets. It’s two worlds, and sometime they even coincide! I don’t count on social networks for my feed of newspaper articles. First because it’s much more pleasant to do that directly on their sites; second, since the news outlet sites are already well curated by professional journalists; and third because I don’t trust Facebook’s own curation and fear too much of the tunnel effect. It appears that this way I am also well defended from social networks’ tumor of fake or false news.

News Commons

Screenshot from La Stampa

Screenshot from La Stampa

One morning, while reading an Italian newspaper online, La Stampa, I discovered one little gem: I don’t know how diffused is the practice, but it’s very Web-like and promising in its vision. La Stampa puts all its content under a Creative Commons License (BY, NC, ND). It’s the first? I don’t know. How many news outlet do so?

Its’ so nice to return to society what society hath invested in you. Even if your purpose is to make money. I conclude there is a lot of improvement available for news outl;ets and good journalist work, solidly attached to the open arms of the Web.

 

[Featured image: flickr photo shared by illustir under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license]

 

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Closing that internet up in some way.

Posted on December 6, 2016 by Antonio Vantaggiato

Wait a minute: Closing that internet up in some way? That [annoying] internet?

Internet Archive Servers
Paleofuture published this: Anticipating the Worst From Trump, the Internet Archive Is Building a Backup in Canada.

We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet,” Trump said in a speech last year, referring to ISIS recruitment. “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some way.

Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech,’ Trump continued during his tirade. ‘These are foolish people.’

Yes, that will be the position of one powerful authority figure. And that is somehow the attitude a lot of people seem to have (with the complicit participation of the mainstream media) with the Internet and the Web (for all effects the two–though different things– are confounded every day). People are afraid of losing privacy, of being too distracted, of losing intimacy, of being exposed to fake stories and news, of being constantly under observation, by governments and corporations alike. The Big Data phenomenon is alarming because we all are but data providers who benefit big “content” companies in exchange of… well, the Web. And the same big companies are starting to charge, especially in universities. What is going to happen to Tim Berners-Lee’s idea of the Web? The open Web? I think we have somehow to defend it. I feel worried that the ideal that myself and my generation grew with may degenerate. But still, hey, it’s the same Web. The Web where one can produce, write, publish, compose, exchange and communicate and have plain old serendipitous fun.

On the other hand, “at EU level there is in Bruxelles a very strong battle on linking,” which is considered, by the powerful “content” industry, a violation of copyright. From:   Embedding isn’t copyright infringement, says Italian court, ArsTechnica UK, 12/5/2016.

There’s a lot to fear for in the times that are approaching. The Internet and the Web are not by any means the free, open spaces they were in the 90’s and the early 2000’s. The Web 2.0 is still there, and powerfully affording speech privileges to all. Already newspapers and media abdicated the power of links on their online articles. Then Facebook has no use of them. Now, some want to limit the Internet. Well, in some countries that’s what they have already done. Closing that internet in some way.

BTW: Glory to the Internet Archive! Beware, thou who publish on Facebook or other walled garden. If and when it is gone, your work will be too. Poof. Compare that with websites from the ol’ times which are still there in the open, at least in the Archive.

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