Thursday, July 31, 2014

Devaneos vocacionales



MARIANO GARCIA
Pierre Klossowski (1950). La vocation suspendue. Paris: Gallimard.
Extraña trasposición en clave de las vicisitudes de la propia vocación religiosa de PK, toda la novela se narra como el comentario de una novela publicada en “Bethaven en 194…” y todo corre por cuenta de un narrador del que resulta imposible hacerse una idea de quién es. El motor narrativo se pone en marcha a partir de un fresco en el que un pintor vanguardista catalán, Malagrida, representa a Pío IX contemplando el lecho de muerte de una hermana carmelita que ofreció su vida por la promulgación del dogma. El cuadro es considerado blasfemo y a partir de entonces Jerôme, el protagonista, se encuentra tironeado desde distintos ámbitos, uno de los cuales es la secta llamada “Partido Negro”, la idea del mariage blanc, la fusión entre el doctor Angélico y el doctor Freud (93). Al final, en un golpe de teatro algo ajeno a la asepsia discursiva del texto en general, Malagrida se revela como Inquisidor de la Fe: había estado tentando a Jerôme para ver si lograba vencerlo.
Sin alcanzar las alturas deslumbrantes ni las cimas de rareza absoluta que convidó a manos llenas con Le Baphomet, esta primera novela se puede decir que ya adelantaba en buena medida lo que iba a ser la obra sorprendente de este autor impar.

“Chez Jeròme le don d’intelligence, contaminé par l’indéracinable orgueil, est devenu une simulation de la piété” (109)
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De MICROLECTURAS, 28/06/2014

Imagen: Ganymède, de Klossowski

Los últimos días de los escritores rusos: Maxim Gorki


Yolanda Delgado Batista

El 18 de junio de 1936, se anunció en una radio de Moscú la muerte de Maxim Gorki, “el gran escritor ruso, el maestro de la palabra, amigo de los trabajadores y luchador por la victoria del comunismo”.
El Kremlin celebró un funeral de Estado en su honor. Medio millón de personas acudió a la capilla ardiente instalada en el centro de Moscú. Tras la incineración, la urna con las cenizas —vigilada por la policía y los soldados del ejército y colocada sobre una camilla adornada— fue trasladada a hombros de Stalin y su equipo hasta la Plaza Roja, donde estaban aguardando más de 100.000 personas. Junto al mausoleo de Lenin, los políticos fueron pronunciando sus vehementes discursos.
El escritor francés André Gide, amigo personal de Gorki, habló en nombre de la Asociación Internacional de Escritores. Cuando la ceremonia hubo terminado, se enterró la urna en la Necrópolis de la Muralla del Kremlin, contraviniendo el último deseo del escritor, que deseaba descansar junto a su hijo en el cementerio Novodévichi.  
El amargo camino hacia la fama
Alexéi Maxímovich Peshkov adoptó el pseudónimo de Maxim Gorki, que en ruso quiere decir ‘Máximo el amargo’, a una edad temprana. Al igual que Charles Dickens, Gorki creó un fascinante muestrario de personajes marginales, vagabundos y maleantes único en la literatura rusa. Él mismo fue educado en ‘los bajos fondos’ y experimentó en carne propia el sufrimiento de aquellas personas.
Gorki alcanzó la fama literaria antes del estallido de la revolución. Grandes escritores como Tolstói y Chéjov aplaudieron con exaltación su escritura. A principios del siglo XX, Gorki era ya un famoso y adinerado escritor. En sus viajes al extranjero (Alemania, Francia, Italia y Estados Unidos), Gorki entabló amistad con muchos escritores foráneos como George Bernard Shaw, André Malraux, André Gide, Herbert G. Wells, Stefan Zweig y otros.
Desde el año 1900, Gorki se convirtió también en amigo íntimo de Lenin, lo que llevó a Gorki a defender, tras la llegada al poder de los bolcheviques, a muchos escritores y poetas que habían sido oprimidos por el régimen por una u otra razón. Finalmente, cuando Lenin se cansó de las mediaciones del escritor en favor de los intelectuales, persuadió a Gorki de que se marchara al extranjero para mejorar su salud. Tras abandonar Rusia en 1921, Gorki y su familia recorrieron Europa hasta asentarse finalmente en el municipio italiano de Sorrento.
Mientras tanto, Lenin falleció en la URSS, dejando las riendas del gobierno a Stalin. El nuevo líder sintió la necesidad de gobernar no solo las vidas, sino también las mentes y las almas del pueblo soviético, para lo que se buscaría un guía espiritual, un aclamado escritor que justificara sus políticas. La elección de Stalin recayó sobre Gorki. En 1932 este regresó a la URSS, donde recibió muchos honores. Fue elegido presidente de la recién formada Unión de Escritores Soviéticos y su ciudad natal, Nizhni Nóvgorod, fue rebautizada como Gorki.
Un alto precio
Gorki tenía que inaugurar el primer congreso de la Unión de Escritores Soviéticos, que debía celebrarse en verano de 1934. Poco antes de aquello, en mayo del mismo año, el hijo de Gorki, Maxim Peshkov, murió tras regresar de una borrachera con Guenrij Yágoda, el entonces Ministro de Interior Soviético. Se especuló sobre la posibilidad de que Maxim hubiera sido asesinado para asustar a Gorki y disuadirlo de realizar comentarios y discursos no deseados durante el congreso. Gorki estaba desolado. El congreso se tuvo que posponer, pero se celebró en agosto de 1934 con un discurso inaugural de Gorki sobre el futuro de la Unión Soviética.
El escritor también dirigió una campaña propagandística para el canal del mar Blanco (rebautizado como Belomor), que fue construido por los prisioneros del Gulag. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, en su libro Archipiélago Gulag, describe el comportamiento de Gorki de aquellos tiempos no como una ilusión, sino como una cuestión de ‘interés material’.
Pero la buena relación entre el escritor y el líder del Kremlin acabó truncándose. La ruptura definitiva surgió a raíz del primer Congreso Internacional de Escritores, organizado por Rusia y celebrado en junio de 1935 en París, en el que Gorki rechazó participar a última hora a causa de graves problemas de salud. Aunque era cierto que Gorki estaba muy enfermo, Stalin lo interpretó como una traición imperdonable, de modo que se le prohibió el contacto con escritores extranjeros. Se encontraba bajo vigilancia permanente y apenas salía de su lujosa mansión situada en el centro de Moscú. Corre el rumor de que en los últimos años de Gorki, Stalin le encargó que escribiera un libro sobre él, pero el escritor se opuso firmemente.
El cronista ruso Arkadi Vaksberg siempre apoyó la teoría de que Gorki fue envenenado por orden de Stalin y no murió de una enfermedad cardíaca, como afirma la versión oficial. Cualquiera que sea la verdad, por entonces Gorki ya estaba muy enfermo.
Solo unas horas después de su muerte se le extirpó el cerebro en una operación quirúrgica. El cerebro de Maxim Gorki se conserva en el Instituto Neurológico de Moscú junto con los cerebros de Mayakovski, Lenin y muchos otros pensadores, escritores y políticos rusos.
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De Russia Beyond the Headlines, 26/07/2014
Fotografía: Maxim Gorki

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

La vraie vie du Petit Prince


MAXIME ROVERE

Il est tout simplement le livre de littérature le plus lu et le plus traduit dans le monde : le Petit Prince, chef-d'œuvre de Saint-Exupéry, est l'icône absolue de l'enfant philosophe, de la tendresse qui ne pèse pas, du cœur doux et franc, tout empli de nuances pastel, à l'image des aquarelles originales dont la technique résume, à elle seule, ce personnage délicat. Universellement, on l'aime : traduit en 270 langues, vendu à plus de 150 millions d'exemplaires à travers le monde, le conte fait partie de ces rares livres qui peuvent prétendre avoir touché ce que l'humanité partage d'universel. Depuis sa publication à New York dans une édition en français et en anglais, le 6 avril 1943, chez l'éditeur américain Reynal & Hitchcock, son succès n'a cessé d'ignorer les frontières et les barrières des langues. 

Tandis qu'il fête son soixante-dixième anniversaire, ce double enfantin de Saint-Exupéry peut montrer au public de nouvelles facettes. Car, on le sait trop peu, il fait partie de ces rares personnages qui ont une vie en dehors de leur propre fiction. Né bien avant le livre dont il est le héros, il a traversé sous la plume de l'écrivain aviateur, d'un griffonnage à l'autre, plusieurs vies parallèles. 

Moins pures peut-être que les épisodes de son conte, elles n'ont jamais été vraiment racontées pour elles-mêmes : les commémorations ramènent toujours le personnage au conte, et c'est bien dommage. Les dessins qui le représentent, éparpillés entre un recueil publié par Gallimard en 2006 (Saint-Exupéry. Dessins, aquarelles, pastels, plumes et crayons) et un autre en 2008 (Lettres à l'inconnue), racontent pourtant des aventures qui rendent plus attachant encore ce petit garçon de rêve. 

La Belle Histoire du Petit Prince, recueil anniversaire où des extraits de textes anciens (Philippe Forest, Hayao Miyazaki, Joann Sfar...) complètent quelques études d'histoire littéraire, approche à sa manière ce petit miracle : un personnage presque autonome, promeneur inattendu dans la vie de son auteur. 


UNE GRANDE SOLITUDE
« Dans tous les contes de fées, remarquait l'auteur de Mary Poppins, Pamela Travers, dans le New York Herald Tribune du 11 avril 1943, l'auteur finit toujours par livrer son secret. Quelquefois, c'est voulu, quelquefois, involontaire. Mais c'est une règle immuable qui régit les contes de fées, il faut fournir la clé. Telle est la loi à laquelle Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ne s'est pas dérobé avec son nouveau livre le Petit Prince. Et, ce secret, il nous le dévoile dès le chapitre II : « J'ai ainsi vécu seul sans personne avec qui parler véritablement », dit-il. » 

On ne saurait mieux résumer de quoi naquit le Petit Prince. Un fort ennui, une grande solitude. Saint-Exupéry semble avoir emporté ces deux affects partout avec lui. Jeune soldat, il écrit : « Mon opinion sur le métier militaire est qu'il n'y a rigoureusement rien à foutre - du moins dans l'aviation. Apprendre à saluer, jouer au football et puis s'embêter des heures durant les mains dans les poches, cigarette éteinte aux lèvres. »

Huit ans plus tard, directeur de l'exploitation de la compagnie Aeroposta Argentina, l'auteur confesse : « Je me sens alourdi et vieilli par un rôle que je n'ai pas désiré. J'ai un réseau de 3 800 km qui me suce, seconde par seconde, tout ce qui me restait de jeunesse et de liberté bien aimée » (cité par Virgil Tanase, Saint-Exupéry). 

Alors, partout, tout le temps, l'aviateur griffonne des formes humaines destinées à refléter son état d'esprit. Curieusement, l'une des premières esquisses qui présagent de son style d'écrivain dessinant, tel qu'on le verra à l'œuvre dans le Petit Prince, est un portrait de femme retrouvé dans les feuillets d'Hélène de Vogüé (1908-2003). Les cheveux courts, ébouriffés, rassemblés en grandes mèches graphiques, annoncent la belle chevelure d'or du voyageur céleste. Mais ils rappellent aussi les dessins plus figuratifs où les rêveries d'Antoine se cristallisent sur l'une de ses premières liaisons extraconjugales. 

Dans un Nu de femme de trois quarts aux cheveux rouges, dont les cheveux sont également traités en épis, la fantaisie de la couleur rehausse une présence léonine, tempérée par de mignons petits seins. Est-ce à dire, à la lumière de ces rêveries, que le Petit Prince aurait pu naître femme ? « Le Petit Prince, remarque Delphine Lacroix, responsable de la fondation Succession Saint-Exupéry, même s'il fait référence au petit garçon qu'était son auteur, n'est pas un personnage sexué : au théâtre, il est souvent interprété par des jeunes filles ! » 


RÂLEUR, NOCEUR, DRAGUEUR 
Cependant, au long des années 30, l'univers graphique de «Saint-Ex» continuait de se répandre sur toutes sortes de feuilles, le plus souvent volantes, dans les marges des journaux, des lettres, des billets. D'où vient leur force émotionnelle ? De leur absence de prétention : l'écrivain ne sait pas dessiner, mais, régulièrement, il laisse la ligne prendre le relais des mots. En 1938 ou 1939, il abandonne ainsi à la porte de son ami Léon Werth, futur dédicataire du Petit Prince, le dessin d'un personnage au sourcil froncé exprimant son agacement, alors qu'il venait retrouver ses amis : « Ils sont partis ! » Impatient, exigeant, volontiers soupe-au-lait... Pas facile, le Petit Prince ! 

Pourtant, il est aussi un excellent convive - surtout après la publication de 1943, qui transforme le petit personnage en héros de conte, et les petits gribouillages en belles aquarelles. Car la vie, la vraie vie, ne s'arrête pas là. Quelques mois plus tard, alors qu'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vient de rejoindre l'Algérie pour y reprendre du service (« I want to die for France », explique-t-il aux Américains), il compose avec son double enfant un carton d'invitation humoristique : le Petit Prince, ayant laissé son étoile de côté, convie ses amis... aux funérailles d'un cochon, dont ils seront le tombeau. L'humour noir, ici, se mêle à un appel vibrant à l'amitié et aux plaisirs de la table, dernière conjuration contre la détresse. 


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Dessin original présenté à l'occasion des 70 ans du Petit Prince de Saint-Exupéry - Francois Mori/AP/SIPA

Ou plutôt, avant-dernière. Car, dans son ultime apparition, on surprend le Petit Prince à conter fleurette à une tout autre plante que sa rose. Nous sommes en mai 1943. Saint Exupéry, accompagné par son ami imaginaire, rencontre dans un train, entre Oran et Alger, une ravissante jeune femme. L'écrivain a 42 ans, l'inconnue en a 23. Elle est mariée, et lui aussi. Alors commence un jeu d'étrange dédoublement. 

Dans les lettres qu'il adresse à celle qu'il rêve de conquérir, Saint-Ex laisse le Petit Prince faire ses avances à la jeune femme, comme si la créature se substituait à son créateur. Plaintif : « C'est triste, on ne pense pas à me téléphoner », se lamente l'ange blond. Menaçant : « Dépêchez-vous de me téléphoner si vous ne voulez pas que je sois tout à fait infidèle. » Boudeur : « Elle n'est jamais là quand je l'appelle... Le soir, elle n'est jamais rentrée non plus... Elle ne téléphone pas... Je me brouille avec elle ! » La tête et l'écharpe du gardien d'étoile en viennent à remplacer la signature de Saint-Ex, comme si l'assimilation de l'homme aux caprices d'un garçon arrivait à son comble - jusqu'à risquer la phrase fatale : « Le Petit Prince est mort. » En quoi Saint-Ex se trompe. Ce ne sont pas les créatures qui meurent.


ET TOUJOURS INNOCENT
Là est au fond la véritable histoire du Petit Prince : un moment vient où rien ne peut faire déchoir un personnage devenu immortel. D'ailleurs, plusieurs apparitions annexes du Petit Prince montrent qu'il garda toujours sa belle âme. En témoignent plusieurs dessins offerts par Saint-Ex à New York, en 1942, à Marie-Sygne Claudel, la petite-fille de Paul Claudel. Hébergé par la famille, l'écrivain à cette époque travaillait la nuit, fumait beaucoup et buvait un café après l'autre. 

La petite Marie-Sygne, qui avait alors à peine plus de 4 ans, se réveillait tôt, et venait au petit matin surprendre le travailleur en bout de course. Il lui offrait des dessins, ou les lui laissait sur la table s'il ne la croisait pas. L'histoire du Petit Prince, qui exprime tous les espoirs et les tristesses de la tendresse, se trouve dans ce don d'un créateur déjà parti - emportant avec lui toutes les imperfections contre lesquelles il luttait sans relâche. 

« Quand je lis quelque part une citation de moi, écrivait-il, c'est que toujours, toujours et toujours il s'agit d'une phrase que j'ai refaite 125 fois. On ne voit aucune différence apparente, appréciable, entre la première et la dernière version. La dernière peut même, du point de vue du pittoresque, apparaître comme déficitaire - mais elle est nouée en profondeur. Elle est une graine. L'autre était un jouet pour la journée. Je ne me suis jamais, jamais et jamais trompé là-dessus. »  

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De MARIANNE, 28/04/2013

Foto: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Troubled Waters


PILITA CLARK

Den Kroolong got the jolting news in a 6am phone call at his home in northern Thailand one day in December last year. His boat had disappeared. Being an experienced fisherman, he had left it tied up securely on the banks of the Mekong River, a few minutes’ drive away.
But now a friend was calling to say something extraordinary had happened overnight to the river, which separates this part of Thailand from neighbouring Laos. It had suddenly become engorged by muddy, debris-filled flood waters and had risen by several metres. This was peculiar because December is in the region’s dry season, when the Mekong is normally so placid and low that people grow vegetables along its banks for cash and paddle off the sandy beaches that emerge on its shores.

Kroolong, a 53-year-old grandfather who started fishing on the Mekong when he was nine, was shocked by what he saw when he reached the river. “It was the first time in my life I had ever seen anything like it,” he said one steamy day in April when he took me down to the banks to explain what had happened.
Everything along the banks had been hit. Riverside crops of tomatoes and cabbage were swept away. Fish farms were wrecked. Boats were sunk, battered and, like Kroolong’s craft, carried off by the surging waters. He and a friend jumped into another boat and sped down the river to see if they could find the missing vessel, steering frantically to dodge the tree branches and rubbish being swept along the swirling water. 

A few hours later, they discovered that villagers on the Laos side of the river had picked up his boat. “I told them, ‘This is my boat. I want it back’,” said Kroolong.
“They said, ‘If you want it you have to pay 15,000 baht’.” That was about $460, a large sum for a man who had been making around $6 a day selling the fish he pulled from the river. Convinced the police would be no help, Kroolong left his boat behind, along with a way of life.
He had to take a job as a security guard at a nearby hospital, where he has had time to think about why the river suddenly turned into a swollen torrent that day. “It might have been raining up north,” he said, staring out at the huge stretch of water flowing quietly beside us. “Or it might have been the Chinese dams.”

The dams China has built hundreds of miles upstream from Kroolong’s home are what brought me to the Mekong, one of the world’s mightiest waterways. The river is so long that if it were in the US, it would stretch all the way from Los Angeles across to New York. It starts off high in the snowy peaks of the Tibetan plateau before plunging down through the mountains of China’s southern Yunnan province towards Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and finally Vietnam, where it pours into the South China Sea. Just under half the river’s length is in China, which first started damming it in Yunnan more than 20 years ago.
The early dams were large but nothing like two enormous, newer ones. The Xiaowan, completed nearly four years ago, is one of China’s biggest hydropower projects after Three Gorges on the Yangtze River, with a wall almost as high as the Eiffel Tower and a reservoir that can hold 15 billion cubic metres of water. It is dwarfed in volume, though not quite height, by the newer Nuozhadu dam, which can store 22.7 billion cubic metres of water. Together, the pair can hold enough to drown an area the size of London in water 24 metres deep.

There have long been odd stories about the impact these two dams might be having on the countries further south, where people have blamed them for everything from drought to a drop-off in fish catches. But what emerged from my visit to the Mekong, as I followed the story of the floods that took Den Kroolong’s boat, was even stranger – a cautionary tale about the world’s newest superpower, and about water, a resource under mounting pressure.
People have always fought over water. The word “rival” comes from the Latin rivalis, or someone using the same stream as another. But conflict is a rising concern today as the United Nations warns that demand for fresh water is on track to outstrip supply by as much as 40 per cent within 16 years. That means co-operation between countries sharing the same river is likely to become even more imperative. Collaboration has long been difficult along the Mekong, where countries are recovering from years of bitter conflict. Now, it seems even more distant as the economic gap between those nations widens.
On one side there is China, an economic giant that is home to nearly 40 major rivers running through more than a dozen neighbours and has a dazzling capacity to tame its waterways. Since the 1950s, a small army of trained hydro-engineers, including former president Hu Jintao and former premier Li Peng, has blocked, straightened and diverted its rivers as part of an accelerating industrialisation drive that has turned China into the world’s second-largest economy and lifted more than 500m people out of poverty.
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Because China has nearly 20 per cent of the world’s people but only about 6 per cent of its fresh water, it sometimes wants to simply shift water to where it isn’t. Hence its immense south-north diversion scheme to transfer huge volumes of water from wetter to drier regions. At the same time, its hunger for electricity has made China a hydropower dam builder like no other, with an estimated 22,000 large dams, almost half the global total.
As its cities choke on coal-fired power plants, China has put even more dams on the drawing board, including some in Yunnan, part of another bold engineering effort to transfer electricity to power-hungry factories hundreds of kilometres further east.
But downstream lie five southeast Asian countries where poverty and unemployment are still widespread and Chinese investment is important. The Mekong is a gigantic fish factory and crop irrigator that acts as an economic lifeline for tens of millions of people in these countries. People here eat around 46kg of fish a year, nearly double the global average. Half of Vietnam’s rice crop comes from the Mekong Delta.
That is why China’s dams have been regarded with such concern. Even middling-sized dams create well-documented problems on a river. They block fish from migrating to their spawning grounds and, by releasing water in bursts, scour riverbeds and disrupt fish breeding patterns. They also trap nutrient-rich silt that is needed to keep downstream deltas fertile and stop them eroding away. Years of conflict along the Mekong have made it hard to collect long-term records that could help measure the impact of China’s dams but studies show that fish catch rates and species numbers have declined in parts of the river since 2007.
The Lower Mekong countries’ dependence on the river is likely to intensify as some start building their own large hydropower dams, which will rely on predictable water flows from Yunnan.
International strategic experts say that all adds up to a worrying situation in a region now confronting fresh tensions as China and nearby countries make territorial claims to islands in the South China Sea. “It’s right up there with the South China Sea as a longer-term threat to peace and stability in the region,” says Richard Cronin of the Stimson Center, an international security think-tank in Washington DC.
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©Imagine China
The Xiaowan dam, in Yunnan province, can hold 15 billion cubic metres of water
  
If China fails to release enough water during the dry season, most of the new downstream dams will struggle to generate power at that time of the year, he says. And considering China’s own water shortages, it is possible Beijing could decide to prioritise water over energy production and withhold some of the flow for its use.
The situation is exacerbated by China’s deep reluctance to share information about the dams. According to several academics I spoke to, Chinese scholars studying the Yunnan dams treat their data as a state secret. Journalists reporting for foreign newspapers have been detained while trying to see them. One who tried to see the Xiaowan dam in 2010 told me that even Chinese people had to show proof of identity before being allowed near the site.
China has also been reluctant to negotiate the use of its rivers. The world has plenty of examples of countries figuring out treaties and agreements to manage shared waterways, says Peter Gleick, a global water conflict expert who runs California’s Pacific Institute, an environmental think-tank with a database of water disputes dating back 5,000 years. “But in the Mekong we have a situation where one party has a very strong history of acting unilaterally,” he says. China was one of just three nations to vote against the UN’s 1997 treaty governing shared international rivers and has never agreed to negotiate joint management of the Mekong.
This means that getting timely information about how much water China is withholding or releasing from its massive dams is far from straightforward, which quickly became apparent from an attempt to find out what really caused the December floods on the Mekong.
. . .
The spot in northern Thailand where Kroolong’s boat disappeared in December is in Bueng Kan province, a little over halfway down the length of the Mekong. It took a flight from Bangkok and a three-hour drive to get there, and it was not quite what I was expecting from a river that has always seemed faintly mythical, a haunting backdrop to the Vietnam war, and home to exotic creatures such as the Mekong giant catfish, which can weigh as much as a cow.

It was the middle of the day. The heat was unbearable. Vicious biting ants attacked my ankles. There was no sign of jungles or giant catfish, just Thai villagers sheltering quietly from the hammering sun under any available shade as the huge brown river flowed by, separating us by several kilometres from the hills of Laos on the other side.
It did not take long to meet more people who had been affected by the Mekong’s odd behaviour in December and most had little doubt about the cause. Just up from where Kroolong’s boat disappeared, Ladda T-horkham, a weathered grandmother, had put in a new crop of tomatoes, garlic and spring onions on the river’s banks before the waters rose. Half her plants were washed away and though she tried to grow more, it was so late in the season the new crop did not do as well. The traders who used to buy from her stopped coming, she said, forcing her on to a bike to sell the vegetables herself.
When we met at her house nearby, she said she thought she knew what had happened: “I heard they released water from the Chinese dams.”
A few hours’ drive further downstream, a line of sun-bleached branches and debris high above the water’s edge still marked the level that the Mekong reached in December. There, several fishermen said they had lost nets and engines in flooding they thought must have been caused by a release of water from China’s dams. “I wouldn’t mind so much but they should have given us some warning,” said Rut Nuamnuan, who added that the surge cost him more than Bt3,000 in damages and lost income after his engine and boat were damaged.
In just four Thai provinces alone, the sudden December flooding caused at least Bt7m worth of damage, or around $220,000, according to Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance, a Thai environmental organisation that spent weeks interviewing villagers about the incident. The total cost of the damage all along the river was undoubtedly greater but even that is a weak reflection of how people’s lives were affected by an event the group’s co-director, Srisuwan Kuankachorn, suspects was connected to the dams.
More troubling, he said, was the fact that China had said nothing public about the flooding. “It’s a mess. China will have to learn how to be more responsible and transparent in how it treats its neighbours if it wants to be seen as a civilised superpower,” he said.
. . .
The people who should have known most about what happened are the officials in the Mekong River Commission, a body set up in 1995 to co-ordinate the shared use of the river. Its executive office is in a grand building on the Mekong’s banks in Vientiane, the quiet capital of Laos, one of the world’s few remaining communist states.

It took a long drive along the Mekong to get there, followed by a short trip in a bus filled with backpackers across a bridge that spans the river between Thailand and Laos. The Mekong looks spectacular here. At sundown, people sit on its banks and gaze at the sun as it turns into a bright red circle that casts a stream of light down the river’s length before sinking out of sight.
Within sight of the commission building, however, memories of what had happened in December were still fresh. I met a married couple, Davon and Soonton Chanthabouly, in a simple wooden hut on the riverbank, where they had just put in a crop of peanuts worth about 350,000 kip (just over $40) before the river surged. “Nothing like that had ever happened before,” said Davon, adding she was not as upset about the lost money as she was about the week of work it had taken to plant the crop.
Inside the Mekong River Commission itself, Hans Guttman, the Swedish development expert who has been its chief executive since 2011, was as mystified as Chanthabouly about what had happened. “I came into the office and wondered why there was a lake in front of it,” he said as we sat in his large office overlooking the Mekong with senior commission officials. “It was like a flash flood,” said the commission’s international technical adviser, Simon Krohn.
A rise that sudden had not been seen at that time of the year in 50 years and, like the villagers in northern Thailand, Guttman’s first thought turned to China. “We worked on trying to sort out whether it was a release from the Chinese dams,” he said.
As it turned out, however, satellite images showed there had been torrential rains in southern China and northern Laos, where some areas had more than 120 millimetres of rain in just two days.
The commission therefore made a preliminary analysis that rain had caused the unusual flooding, not water released from China’s dams. But it still wanted to know what had been happening at the dams and finding out is far from straightforward.
Commission officials cannot simply pick up the phone and call the operators of the Yunnan dams. They may glean information at ad hoc meetings with Chinese officials but the established line of communication requires them to put a formal request to Beijing through China’s representative in a body based in Bangkok called Unescap, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the UN’s regional development arm.

It would be different if China were a member of the Mekong River Commission, which one might think it would be, given that 44 per cent of the river’s course is in China. But only Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are full members. If China joined, it would have to share information about the river’s management.
Instead, it is a “dialogue partner” that gives out data during the wet season, to help downstream countries manage flooding, but not in the dry season except in exceptional circumstances, such as a 2010 drought that sparked angry accusations that China was hoarding water to fill its recently completed Xiaowan dam. Beijing did eventually release data that year showing Yunnan province had also been hit by drought, leading Mekong River Commission officials to conclude the dams were not exacerbating the problem.
But damaging floods in the dry season, like those in December, are a new phenomenon, one some officials think could be part of a “new normal” for the river, which is likely to have lower levels in the wet season and higher ones in the dry period as China stores and releases water for the dams.
Guttman said he first broached the flooding with China through Unescap in January and he was still awaiting a formal response when we met in April. By then, however, he was trying to understand another oddity on the Mekong that had happened in February. The river’s levels had suddenly fallen by a metre in some parts, again without warning, and then risen fast to much higher levels than had ever been recorded for that time of year.
This time, there had been no rain and the MRC concluded the dams might have been to blame. “Our guess is that there was some halt in the production of electricity, or a halt in dam operation for some reason,” said Guttman. “There have been some claims made on Facebook that there were some repairs needed somewhere but we have difficulties in following up on that.”
A delegation of Chinese officials who visited the MRC’s Phnom Penh offices in March provided figures showing there had been no unusually big discharge of water from the Chinese dams in December and other data suggesting the flooding had been caused by very high rainfall. But they offered no explanation for the strange February fluctuations, the commission said.
The commission later sent a letter through Unescap in May, formally seeking information about both the December and February changes but Beijing’s response to that would prove even more baffling.

It is one thing for Mekong River Commission officials to be pondering Facebook for clues about China’s dams but it would seem odd if an independent and relatively wealthy country such as Thailand had so much trouble getting information. To find out, I took a flight down to Bangkok, which was already under strain from the political crisis that would erupt into a military coup several weeks later.
Protesters and army checkpoints choked streets around the city but it was calm inside the country’s department of water resources, where deputy director Chaiporn Siripornpibul was sitting in an office surrounded by graphs and diagrams charting the Mekong’s odd behaviour.
His records also showed there had been extremely heavy downpours before the river rose in December. But had such torrential rain ever caused the river to swell as rapidly as it did in December? “Not like this,” he said, adding he still thought the rain, not China’s dams, must have caused the flooding that month.
He had asked the Mekong River Commission to see if it could get more information from China about the curious fluctuations in the river’s levels, and was still waiting to hear back. Could he not just make a phone call to China and get the information himself? “Ah,” he said, with an apologetic smile. “That’s not easy.”
Officials in downstream Mekong countries are sometimes reluctant to criticise China’s dams, according to Brahma Chellaney, an Indian professor who has written extensively about the threat to regional stability posed by what he calls China’s “hydro-supremacy”. “The countries in southeast Asia, they’re all small countries. They’re too fearful to talk about China,” he said.
. . .
At this point, it still seemed possible that answers could be found a five-hour flight away in Beijing, where the Huaneng group, the sprawling state-owned company behind the Xiaowan and Nuozhadu dams, has its headquarters. The city was blanketed in a white haze of bad air, a sign of the coal plant pollution that is spurring China to get more of its energy from smokeless hydropower dams. A spokesman at Huaneng referred questions about the Yunnan dams’ operations to the ministry for water resources, saying it was the body that determined the amount of water discharged from the projects.
The ministry said it could not make anyone available during the week I was in Beijing. But it subsequently sent several documents about the dams, including an April speech by a senior water ministry official who said China used as little as 7 to 8 per cent of the hydropower potential of its trans-boundary rivers, which was far less than that in its inland rivers, or indeed that in large rivers in other countries. As well, it did careful environmental impact assessments on its dams to make sure they were “ecologically safe and environmentally friendly, causing no marked impacts on the neighbouring countries”.

Another paper said the Mekong dams benefited downstream countries because their “scientific regulation” of the river meant its flow could be reduced by 30 per cent during the wet season, when flooding was a problem, and increased by up to 70 per cent during the dry season, to help in drought conditions. This had already prevented drought in downstream countries in 2013, the ministry said. Not only were the dams therefore beneficial, the paper said, but they should not be blamed for any problems downstream because only 13.5 per cent of the water that flows into the Mekong comes from China.
This is misleading “nonsense”, according to Mekong experts such as Milton Osborne of Australia’s Lowy Institute think-tank, who says that during the dry season as much as 40 per cent of the river’s water as far south as Vientiane comes from China.
But what of the strange December flooding on the Mekong that caused so much damage downstream? The water ministry sent a separate written response about this, saying it was definitely due to torrential rains and not its dams, which had operated normally. This fact had been communicated “comprehensively and effectively” to the Mekong River Commission, it said, noting the delegation that had discussed the event with the commission in March. As for the river’s odd changes in February, a ministry official said it would take some time to supply an answer and it would be best to discuss it later.
Last week, as this article was being prepared for publication, I asked the commission if it had heard anything more about its official request in May for data about the December and February fluctuations. A spokesman said “China suggested that the request be tabled for formal discussion” in late August when the MRC was due to meet with Chinese officials in Phnom Penh.
So what is one to believe? How could the commission still be waiting for information in July about events that had happened more than five months earlier? Could it all be a misunderstanding, a case of simple miscommunication? It was tempting to think it might be, except for one thing. Towards the end of one of its statements, the ministry said this: “China’s current dialogue and communication channels with the commission are unimpeded, pragmatic and highly effective.” If one thing is certain, it is that China’s communications about its dams are anything but effective, let alone unimpeded.
This has long perplexed experts who follow its dam construction closely. “I’m the last person you would go to to find a China-basher,” says Professor Darrin Magee, a US academic who has spent years studying Chinese dams. “But in this case they need a new PR person. There’s no rational explanation for not sharing some of the data if indeed these dams are having as little impact as they claim they are.”
That sharing seems unlikely any time soon, given what has just happened on the Mekong. And it is this, more than anything, which makes China’s dams such a concern, for the future of the river and for the millions of people who depend on it.

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De THE FINANCIAL TIMES, 19-20/07/2014.

Pilita Clark is the FT’s environment correspondent. This report is part of the FT’s ‘A world without water’ series

Photographs: Bakas Algirdas; Imagine China

Monday, July 28, 2014

75 años prodigiosos: Marvel


Los orígenes de la apodada Casa de las Ideas, la  Marvel comic group, se remontan a los años 30 cuando un joven emprendedor de origen judío llamado Martin Goodman reestructuró su empresa dedicada a publicar revistas pulp en una editorial de comic books bautizada como Timely. Goodman había percibido el impacto de los primeros superhéroes, Superman y Batman, los cuales habían sido obra de autores judíos. Exégetas comoMichael Chabon consideran a esos trabajos una sublimación de las esperanzas y frustraciones de una minoría marginada: los emigrantes hebreos, que reutilizaban la leyenda del Golem  para diseñar unos campeones contra la injusticia y la tiranía.
Por ello, en un posicionamiento contrario a todo tipo de totalitarismos (tendencia omnipresente en toda la historia de la Marvel), Goodman editará el  31 de agosto de 1939, el día que la Alemania nazi invade Polonia, el primer número de la colección Marvel comics, que incluía a extravagantes superhéroes como La antorcha humana oNamor, el Príncipe submarino. Pero sobre todo fue vital en diciembre de 1940, antes de que los EEUU entraran en guerra contra El Eje, la edición del primer superhéroe nacional claramente antifascista: El Capitán América, el cual en la portada de su primer número le arreaba un soberbio manporro al mismísimo Adolfo Hitler. El personaje era obra de dos artistas Joe Simon y Jacob Kützberg que solía firmar como Jack Kirby. En dicha colección empezó a escribir guiones, Stanley Leiber, alias Stan Lee. Éstos dos últimos devendrían en la piedra angular  del universo Marvel.

De nuevo Marvel

Después de la Guerra, Timely se rebautizó como Atlas y languideció en una decadencia, consecuencia de la eclosión de la censura con el nefasto Comic Code, la implosión de la televisión  y la paranoia de La Guerra Fría. Hasta el paladín de la libertad, El Capitán América, había devenido en un vigilante de extrema derecha, calificado por el historiador Howard Zinn como fanático mccarthista. A la deriva en una serie de anodinos títulos de romance, western, y fantasía, Atlas que vuelve a renombrarse, como Marvel, resurge de sus cenizas con la edición en 1961 del primer número de Los Cuatro Fantásticos. Un grupo de bizarros superhéroes compuesto por Mr. Fantástico, La Chica Invisible, La Antorcha Humana y La Cosa, los cuales adquieren sus poderes al ser cósmicamente irradiados en un trayecto espacial, cada uno de ellos hábilmente delineado en su psicología y problemática individuales, constituyendo un trasunto de familia extensa tan conflictiva como unida ante la adversidad. La colección era resultado de la escritura de Stan Lee, asimismo director de todos los títulos de la editorial, y del grafismo titánico e inigualable de Jack Kirby y es denominada como el inicio de la denominada Edad de Plata en el comic book.Marvel ross
El dúo de creadores, (en el que los analistas aún no se han puesto de acuerdo en cual de ellos era en realidad el hombre de las ideas),  fueron presentando en un amplio abanico de títulos una inagotable panoplia de personajes que pertenecen al imaginario occidental: El increíble Hulk, Iron ManThor, Daredevil, Los Vengadores… Lee y Kirby sabían aunar el sense of wonder con una lógica aristotélica de la verosimilitud que acercaba la aventura fabulosa a la esfera de la cotidianidad. Tan importante como la acción eran las relaciones personales, el nivel emocional teñido de melodrama, así, como una ambientación en un escenario que no era otro que Manhatan Los superhéroes eran,  a partir de ese momento, seres de carne y hueso con dificultades similares a las de cualquier ser humano ante el desafío de la existencia. Tan importante como la acción eran las relaciones personales, el nivel emocional teñido de melodrama, así, como una ambientación en un escenario habitual que no era otro que Manhatan. Expresándose los héroes marvel  con los giros verbales de los habitantes de la Gran Manzana.
Lee era consciente de que su audiencia era esencialmente adolescente y del pathos dramático que tiene el rito de paso de la juventud temprana. Por ello alumbró en colaboración con el dibujante Steve Ditko Peter Parker, el chico mas rechazado del instituto que devino en el superhéroe con el que todos podíamos identificarnos:Spiderman. Arquetipo de  la ética que Lee quería  transmitir con sus héroes: “Un gran poder, exige una gran responsabilidad”.
spidermanjohnromitajr
Liberal simpatizante de La Nueva Frontera del presidente Kennedy, Stan Lee imponía una conciencia social a sus personajes. La defensa de la democracia, los derechos humanos y el respeto al diferente, siempre ha sido una característica de la Marvel. Como notificaba de forma transparente  la colección de los X- Men, el grupo de mutantes que sufrían el acoso racista de una sociedad intolerante que podía derivar hacia el fascismo. Asimismo, se recuperaba la dignidad de añejos arquetipos como El Capitán América investido en el rol de un modernoRip van Winkle que intentaba comprender cuanto habían cambiado los USA. Esa sensibilidad hacia las transformaciones culturales y políticas de América, ha estado siempre omnipresente en la trayectoria de La Casa de las Ideas Precisamente, esa sensibilidad hacia las transformaciones culturales y políticas de América, ha estado siempre omnipresente en la trayectoria de La Casa de las Ideas, posibilitando la incorporación de nuevos creadores como Steve GerberDon McgregorJim StarlinNeal AdamsDoug Moench,Paul Gulacy o Steve Englehart, que  se allegaban al espíritu de la contracultura y la contestación juvenil, generado por las secuelas de Vietnam y el Watergate.
La denuncia de las contradicciones del sistema  y una sensación de desencanto que se asentaba en el ánimo de los héroes fueron elementos que colorearon, con un frenesí casi lisérgico en los aspectos narrativos, aquella época. Como contrapeso el guionista y editor Roy Thomas efectuó una adaptación del personaje de los pulps,Conan, el bárbaro, creado por Robert Howard, enriquecida inicialmente por el modernista grafismo de Barry Smith.

Década de los 70

Portada Giant-Size X-Men 1 Sin embargo, la renovación de los jóvenes airados, algo inmadura e inconsistente, fue efímera. Kirby había abandonado la empresa a principios de los 70 y Lee se había ido paulatinamente alejando de las tareas creativas. La Marvel se sostenía por la labor de excelentes grafistas como John BuscemaGene Colan o John  Romita. Pero, las historias se descubrían reiterativas y adocenadas. Muy lejos parecía estar el aire fresco aportado por un Jim Steranko que había transfigurado las viñetas con un  hechizante y vanguardista estilo de gran belleza plástica. Tuvo que ser un nuevo director, Jim Shooter, duro e inexorable con los autores pero repleto de ideas, quien reanimará a finales de los 70 el coma de la empresa. Germinaron brillantes palimpsestos de los clásicos de la Edad de Plata, como el Thor de Walter SimonsonLos Cuatro Fantásticos de John Byrne los X-Men de Chris Claremont o la reconversión en clave de serie negra del Daredevil de Frank Miller. Shooter intentó atraerse al público adulto con una línea de novelas graficas en el formato europeo  y  sellos como Epic, en la que se ofertaban títulos de gran ambición estética y temática, donde centellearon barrocos talentos como  el dibujante Bill Sienkiewicz. Lamentablemente enajenó al público con la banal serie Secret Wars, escrita por  él mismo y editada a principios de los 80. Protagonizada por los principales caracteres de las series, originó un cross over (cruce de colecciones) que conectaba a la mayoría de los títulos de la Marvel. El propósito era trocar al lector en un voraz “marvel zombi” dedicado en exclusiva a la lectura compulsiva de todos los comics de la casa.

Los 80

A finales de los 80, la editorial naufragaba en la narcisista exaltación de cuerpos hipermusculados y un hueco virtuosismo  gráfico que proponía una generación de caricaturistas como Jim LeeErik Larsen, Rob Liefeld oTodd McFarlane.  También era inquietante el que el personaje de mas éxito en aquellos tiempos fuera el fascistoide justiciero urbano The Punisher. Para entonces, Shooter, había sido despedido y Marvel entro en una espiral de compraventa en la que “ el dinero nunca duerme”, propia de un film de Oliver Stone. La  modesta empresa de sus principios era ahora una pieza más del Mainstream, deviniendo, sucesivamente, propiedad de productoras cinematográficas, magnates de la cosmética o empresas dedicadas a la difusión de cromos.
ultimates_avengers_wallpaper_jxhy
A pesar de todo, aún subsistía la creatividad. En 1993 Kurt Busiek y Alex Ross presentaron Marvels, miniserie que revisaba la mítica de la casa, para un gran fresco de la reciente historia de los Estados Unidos a la altura de la obra de un EL .Doctorow. Mientras que en los inicios del siglo XXI eclosionó el concepto de los Ultimates, una interpretación alternativa de los orígenes de los personajes estelares de la editorial en la que sobresale Ultimate Avengers de Mark Millar y Bryan Hitch. Desmitificadora exploración sobre el lado oscuro de los héroes más poderosos de los USA, sin olvidar una mayor franqueza en la orientacion sexual de sus héroes, como acaece enRahwide Kid, miniserie, protagonizada por un “alegre” cowboy en busca su Brokeback Mountain.

 Marvel en la actualidad

En la actualidad, Marvel, se integra en la maquinaria de la multinacional Disney. Ésta  ha programado en los últimos años un proyecto que ensambla pelÍculas, series de tv o cortos en Internet, con Los Vengadores como punto de fuga, aspirando lograr el propósito de Jim Shooter: Convertirnos en adictos de una casi inabarcable mitología y sus inevitables consecuencias que se resumen en el merchandising como opción vital.
Pero el sueño que crearon Stan Lee  y sus asociados se resiste a morir. Aún perdura ese sentimiento que muchos adolescentes han sentido cuando han asistido al drama épico del tránsito iniciático a la madurez que encontramos en Spiderman o los X-Men. O el vigoroso manifiesto sobre la necesidad de la libertad y la democracia que la Marvel ha transmitido en los mejores momentos de su producción, el cual puede resumirse en el segmento de la saga deCivil War, en la que Steve RogersEl capitán América, fallece musitando toda una declaración de principios: “Que no sufran los inocentes”.
En fin, 75 años después de su génesis tal vez solo se pueda decir de Marvel la frase con la que Stan Lee se despedía de sus lectores: EXCELSIOR
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De NEVILLE, 18/07/2014