Paulo Seabra

In what was a beautifully written show, full of characters who are strikingly and perhaps surprisingly eloquent, Bubbles stands tall among all of them. All throughout the sixty episodes we get the distinct impression that, though he fits in rather well and survives in his own world, the seedy underbelly of the Baltimore drug trade, we also can't help but wonder how, all things considered, Bubbles is just a normal man caught up in a very bad situation. In fact, he's a good man, a smart man, a kind man... He could well be the heart of The Wire, what with his street wisdom and off-the-cuff poetry and all, which is a truly remarkable sight and, though the show is often pessimistic in a way that is sadly commensurate with reality, it also leaves us with a very hopeful finale for ol' Bubs. Because even stuck in between the needle, the bullet, the fist, or even just the stone cold of a Baltimore winter, he perseveres, even maintaining his upbeat demeanor in dire circumstances, an...

O meu cão morreu. Ele morreu no passado dia treze de abril, tendo vivido neste mundo sensivelmente dez anos e um mês. E apesar de tudo, comparado com os milhões de cães neste mundo, cães cujas vidas e mortes são tudo menos invejáveis, o Nero teve uma boa vida. Fiz o melhor que pude por ele e ele tornou-se o meu melhor amigo ainda antes que eu me apercebesse disso... É preciso um coração de pedra para que alguém não se afeiçoe a um cão ao longo dos anos, ou até ao fim de um ou dois dias, e embora eu tenha uma forte tendência para pensar que quem tem um coração de pedra vive muito melhor e que está muito mais preparado para enfrentar o mundo, talvez comece a mudar de ideias e a achar que estar triste de vez em quando valha a pena em troca de dez anos com o nosso melhor amigo. My dog died. He died on april thirteenth, having lived in this world roughly ten years and one month. And all things considered, compared to the millions of dogs in this world, dogs whose lives and deaths are everyt...

I suppose belated congratulations might be in order because this little blog of mine celebrated its very first birthday yesterday, and as such I did write something down about it, but I still felt it wasn't quite enough. In my constant obsession with time, its oddly deformed circularity and its inherent synchronicity, or so I like to imagine, I started thinking about how my life was like in those days. They were weird times indeed, and though my life was and still is kinda stuck, so was everyone else's. However, for the first time in a long while I now had some business to attend to, I now had a place on which to impulsively write all of my many ideas. Of note I wrote something that can't quite be called an essay on Robert Frost's My November Guest, a poem I've been fascinated by for a long while now, and thus it's my personal favorite. I published said something on the first of may but I can't quite recall what kind of day it was. I do distinctly remembe...

This blog turns one year old today. Congratulations then, I guess... But I've never been given to celebrations, so what could I say instead? Maybe I could say I've come a long way and that I've been getting the hang of it. In fact I've spent countless hours not only writing and editing all of the articles I've posted but also going over tiny presentation details and doing some boring stuff, like for example reuploading each individual picture due to weird bugs and programming issues I don't quite understand. I can say I've been working hard and, in a way, it's a bit disappointing to not yet have gotten any readers aside from the very occasional and understandably distant friend. And in a more worldly sense, though it goes hand in hand, it's annoying to not have gotten any money out of it. Obviously I'd like to start getting my life in order but I don't call my failure to do that disappointing because I kinda wasn't expecting to be able to...

Como tenho dito, fiz questão de escrever sobre o terceiro e agora quarto volumes de Em Busca do Tempo Perdido o quanto antes para que possa concluir a obra na íntegra antes do final do verão. E como tal, é algo irónico que comece este artigo num dia em que, já se fazendo sentir o calor, ainda se encontra lá fora um céu estranho e cinzento. Não sei bem porque é que incluo esse detalhe mas agora deixo estar... Na verdade a leitura deste volume e do anterior foi, apesar de a ter concluído muito antes do que esperava, bastante árdua, sendo que deixei que passassem muitos mais dias do que queria, sempre com os volumes a ocupar-me espaço na secretária e na mente. E talvez seja essa a principal sensação a ler Marcel Proust, esta coisa de adorar e de detestar ao mesmo tempo, esta coisa de às vezes ler cem páginas seguidas numa daquelas tardes em que se perde a noção do tempo, mas outras vezes passar dias sem sequer ter apetite para abrir o livro. Quanto a mim diria que foi esse o caso, agrava...