Category: Cuaderno público
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Maman died today
El extranjero, de Albert Camus, empieza con una de las frases más famosas de la literatura del siglo XX: «Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.» Cuatro palabras en francés. Y en ellas, en una sola de ellas, hay un problema de traducción que lleva ochenta años sin cerrarse del todo y que dice más sobre qué es…
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Neither authentic nor false
In the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, there resides a Greek statue that has spent forty years awaiting a verdict that remains elusive. It is a kouros, one of those rigid, naked youths that archaic sculpture replicated towards the sixth century BC, crafted from marble and slightly larger than life-size. The museum acquired it in 1985…
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Four separable components
I state my position at the outset: Kripties has been appointed by Eurosky as a trusted verifier on mu.social for art and culture accounts in Spanish. Eurosky has not reviewed this article and bears no responsibility for my statements, including any criticisms. I write from within; for this reason, I have taken particular care to avoid promoting...
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Burn it all
When Franz Kafka died in 1924, he left two notes for his friend Max Brod: that his diaries, letters, and manuscripts should be burned unread. In his possession, unpublished, Brod held three novels: The Trial, The Castle, and the one we know today as Amerika. He could either obey and strike the match or betray the final request...
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A year of clocking in
On 11 April 1980, Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese artist based in New York, installed a time clock in his studio—the type utilised by factories to monitor the arrival and departure of workers. He imposed a strict rule upon himself: to clock in on the hour, every hour, twenty-four hours a day, for a...
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The closed cone
Within the lodgepole pine forests of the Rocky Mountains, certain trees secure their seeds under lock and key for decades. Unlike almost all other pine species, their cones do not open upon maturation; they remain sealed by a hardened resin, year after year, with the living seeds contained within. They may persist in this state for twenty or thirty years,...
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There is no neutral map
Exactly 504 years ago, on 6 September 1522, a vessel named Victoria arrived in Sanlúcar with eighteen survivors from an expedition that had departed with over two hundred. Juan Sebastián Elcano was in command, and this arrival marked the completion of the first circumnavigation of the globe. They did not demonstrate that the Earth was round—that...
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I am sitting in a room
In 1969, the American composer Alvin Lucier created a work consisting entirely of a procedure. He sat in a room, recorded his voice reading a brief text, and played that recording through a loudspeaker in the same room while simultaneously recording it again with a microphone. He then played that second recording and recorded it a...
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For want of a comma
Una sentencia de un tribunal federal estadounidense, de marzo de 2017, empieza con una frase que parece de fábula: «Por falta de una coma, tenemos este caso». No es una licencia literaria del juez, es la descripción de lo que había sobre la mesa. Un grupo de conductores de una empresa láctea de Maine, Oakhurst…
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You press the button
En 1888, una empresa de Rochester puso a la venta una cámara con un eslogan que resumía algo más grande que un producto: «Usted aprieta el botón, nosotros hacemos el resto». La cámara se llamaba Kodak, la frase se atribuye a su fundador, George Eastman, y esas siete palabras describían, sin que nadie lo notara…