In 1988 I was a newly minted shift technical adviser at the South Texas Project, a power plant near the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Gilbert, at the time a Category 5 storm, was bearing down on us. I received word from plant management that all workers should leave except for critical plant personnel like myself. I called my wife and told her to go inland with our 4-month-old daughter. Eventually the storm weakened and turned south. But there was never a question: my team and I would stay, regardless of what happened.

The situation facing the 50 workers left at Fukushima is a nuclear operator’s worst nightmare. Fortunately, despite harrowing situations like mine, almost none of us will ever deal with anything like it. But the knowledge that a nuclear crisis could occur, and that we might be the only people standing in the way of a meltdown, defines every aspect of an operator’s life.

The field attracts a very particular kind of person. I became a nuclear worker in the 1980s, in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s. Nuclear power, for all its risks, seemed like the best alternative, and people like me who signed up at the time saw ourselves as the guardians of America’s energy future. We were the ones who would prevent the risks of nuclear power from becoming a reality, who would keep the plants safe and, in turn, the country’s way of life secure.

The same spirit motivates today’s workers. Contrary to the depiction of nuclear operators as bumbling slackers in “The Simpsons,” the typical employee is more like a cross between a jet pilot and a firefighter: highly trained to keep a technically complex system running, but also prepared to be the first and usually only line of defense in an emergency.

Training to be a senior reactor operator takes up to two years and involves demonstrating one’s ability to process complex, sometimes contradictory information rapidly and under intense pressure. The training regimen also grinds into us the overwhelming importance of staying put in an emergency situation, even at great risk to our own safety. There are simply too many contingencies and too many functions that require close observation for an emergency to be handled remotely.

And so while the world wondered why the workers at the Fukushima plant didn’t flee, my fellow nuclear operators and I weren’t surprised. One employee is reported to have received a significant dose of radiation while trying to vent pressure on one of the reactor’s containment vessels. There is no question that this act saved countless lives. But there is also no question that the operator acted knowing full well that he could suffer long-term injury from doing so.

Those of us in the industry are also watching the management of the crisis. It’s easy to be critical, from a distance, and while I have yet to see anything that smacks of negligence or mishandling, a few obvious questions come to mind.

For one thing, considering the difficulties of managing a nuclear accident within a disaster zone, was the plant staff provided with the necessary technical support and equipment? It’s also clear that procedures need to be in place for better handling of the insatiable demand for information from the news media. Finally, given the multiple problems at Fukushima, we should revisit the standard protocol for dealing with a nuclear emergency, which assumes a problem with a single reactor, even at a multiunit site.

We will likely hear numerous stories of heroism over the next several days, of plant operators struggling to keep water flowing into the reactors, breathing hard against their respirators under the dim rays of a handheld flashlight in the cold, dark recesses of a critically damaged nuclear plant, knowing that at any moment another hydrogen explosion could occur.

These operators will be hailed as heroes, and deservedly so. But if they are like the rest of the tightly knit community of nuclear workers, they will simply say they were doing their job.

autor :  Michael Friedlander is a nuclear engineer.

Yo me acerqué y le dije: “Lo ve… Dios le ha castigado.”

Dicho esto, con una patada tumbé el féretro que guardaba al muertito, y al estrellarse en un piso lleno de pétalos, se salió el cuerpecito inerte del infante; pero ocurría algo muy raro; la cara del niño estaba azul, llena de moretones, y su estómago hinchado y palpitando como si fuera a reventar en cualquier momento. La gente del velorio se juntó alrededor y se impactaron al ver que del estómago del bebé brotaron dos patas insectoidales que rompieron la carne y abrieron un hoyo purulento que mostraba las entrañas y un pequeño cuerpo monstruoso en su interior. Se escuchó un abominable berrido infernal revestido de crujientes coágulos, y de la cavidad se asomó una cara de cabra llena de sangre y vísceras que nos dijo: “Eso pasa cuando fornican con animales, pendejos” Y todos nos echamos a reír y dieron pambazos con refresco.

* * *

Me causa bastante gracia cómo la gente que niega la existencia de Dios tajantemente para parecer inteligente luego de que terminaron de leer “Una breve historia del tiempo ” sin entenderle, son los primeros en acudir a Él llorando al primer golpazo trágico de cáncer testicular para pedirle que les conceda el milagro de que no les tajen los huevos y terminen hablando más agudo que Carlo Broschi.

Y está bien, todo mundo tiene derecho a soñar y a avivar sus esperanzas, ¿pero por qué mierda menoscabar a la gente que sí cree en Dios? Es decir, en estos tiempos regidos por la ciencia y la tecnología, ya uno no puede decir que cree en Dios sin que lo tachen de retrógrada e ignorante. Es una actitud prejuiciosa parecida a la de la inquisición de hace siglos. Están haciendo lo mismo que los inquisidores.

En los buenos viejos tiempos, a los herejes ateos se les execraba por negar a Dios y se les condenaba a la hoguera o cosas más espectaculares (para mí). Ahora, a los que dicen creer en Dios dentro de un ambiente cultural mediano-elevado que se jacte de serlo, se les los considera tontos por creer en cosas no fundamentadas en la lógica.

Esa animadversión y prejuicio contra la religión es bien justificada por los innumerables ultrajes de la iglesia a lo largo de la historia. Tantos engaños, tanta sangre derramada en el nombre de Dios, tanto robo, tanta hipocresía, tanta pederastia , tanta tergiversación de enseñanzas bien intencionadas para satisfacer fines mal intencionados, y tanto porquería de etcétera más.

Pero de nuevo… ¿por qué carajo esa actitud inflada de pretensión y supuesta superioridad intelectual por parte de los ateos contra los creyentes?

Ateo hipócrita:- jo jo jo, Yo no creo en Dios, Dios es para los tontos…

Médico:- Sr. Ateo, las pruebas indican que usted tiene una enfermedad mortal, le queda una hora de vida…

Ateo hipócrita:- Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos, santificado sea tu nomb…

Si van a negar a Dios niéguenlo bien hasta el día de su muerte y no anden con puterías a lo último cuando sientan el pito ponzoñoso del destino tocando la puerta de sus nalgas, hipócritas de mierda. Faltan quizás miles de años para que se pueda tener alguna prueba definitiva sobre la existencia o inexistencia de Dios; aunque si se quieren adelantar les tengo una sugerencia:

Tomen una pistola, apúntense a la sien y disparen. Si biológicamente mueren y no hay vida después de la muerte, significa que tenían razón. Pero si despiertan en una forma espectral, significa que sí existe el alma y sería lógico que también existiera Dios. Yo quisiera saber la respuesta y ustedes me la pueden comunicar de alguna manera -ya sabrán cómo- cuando estén gozando en el limbo o cuando estén quemándose en el infierno junto con su madre y abuelos.

Y no es que sea yo un santurrón persignado que se escandaliza de todo; yo creo en “Él”, o mejor dicho “Ello”, en mi muy particular y rara manera. Se podría decir que mi concepción de “Dios” es una embriagante bebida campechana de creencias, ciencia y filosofía; un batiburillo de ideas aportadas por Jesús de Nazaret, Juan, Tomás de Aquino, Baruch Spinoza, Einstein, Carl Sagan, el Conde de San Germaín, Ninel Conde (la mejor físico relativista del mundo) y otros más. No lo voy a explicar porque es muy personal y tardaría mucho en escribirlo porque es complicado para mí.

Albert Einstein, el hombre con el pene más grande en la historia, citó a Dios en varias ocasiones:

“Quiero saber como Dios creo este mundo. No estoy interesado en este o en aquel fenomeno, en el espectro de este o aquel elemento. Quiero saber SUS pensamientos, el resto son detalles. ” – dijo alguna vez en su juventud.

“Dios no juega a los dados” – Cuando cuestionó de manera quasi poética el principio de la indeterminación de Heisemberg.

Cuando le preguntaron si creía o no en Dios, respondió que no creía en un Dios personal, o sea, en el ser de hermosa y prolongada barba blanca manejando un convertible hecho de nubes, como nos enseñan en el catecismo, si no que se identificaba con el concepto panteísta de Baruch Spinoza, un filósofo portugués, judío igual que él (quizá por ello la intimación de ideas) que basó su filosofía en el trabajo de Descartes y sus tres sustancias cartesianas, pero atribuyéndole propiedades divinas para hacerla una misma, o sea Dios.

Spinoza y Einstein ideaban a Dios no como un ser antropomórfico, si no como un ente colectivo totalitario; todo lo existente. Un conjunto de leyes determinadas e inmutables. Para ellos no existía el libre albedrío porque el hombre está condicionado por las leyes físicas que lo rodean, llámesele mecanicismo, determinismo o por qué no, destino.

En pocas palabras, Einstein no creía en el Dios que la mayoría cree, pero sí en algo que va más allá de la moral, ajeno al miedo y el acomplejamiento que se nos inculca de generación tras generación: El sentimiento cósmico religioso -así lo llamo él- que según explica es la profunda apreciación sublimada por lo que le rodea en el orden de la naturaleza y del pensamiento, donde la existencia de uno mismo lo aprisiona y quiere sentirse parte de todo un universo significativo.

La ciencia y el arte son la manera de despertar éste tipo de sentimiento y los que son capaces de percibirlo lo mantienen vivo. (Leer su artículo sobre ciencia y religión)

Según vi en el History Channel, Einstein, al final de sus días y en su lecho de muerte trataba de demostrar con una ecuación la existencia de Dios.

Entonces… ¿En quién voy a creer más, en lo que me dice uno de los hombres más inteligentes que haya existido o en lo que me dicen un grupo de ateos penechicos queriendo llamar la atención?

Por cierto, aquí hay un universo presuntamente infinito, ¿saben para qué pueden usarlo? Aquí pueden buscarse un poco de personalidad e ideas propias, ateos y escépticos de mierda.

* * *

Aclaro que yo sólo creo en lo que escribí arriba. No creo ni en el infierno, ni en la penitencia, ni en el Génesis, ni en el bautismo, ni en las obligaciones impuestas por la iglesia, ni en los Iluminati, y mucho menos en ciertas cosas que profesa la iglesia católica, como por ejemplo: “es pecado usar anticonceptivos”; aunque si ustedes creen en eso lo respeto, al fin y al cabo no soy ateo ni perredista…

Pirrurris 2, versículo 9. ” No uséis un método anticonceptivo, porque los métodos anticonceptivos fueron hechos por el señor de las tinieblas”

Sí, cómo no… coff-coff…

autor : ateo hipocrita

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes.

It doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard and teaching political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. It consists of him; his assistant, Jamila Raquib, whose family fled Soviet oppression in Afghanistan when she was 5; a part-time office manager and a Golden Retriever mix named Sally. Their office wall sports a bumper sticker that reads “Gotov Je!” — Serbian for “He is finished!”

In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein Web site. (“I should,” he said apologetically.) If he must send e-mail, he consults a handwritten note Ms. Raquib has taped to the doorjamb near his state-of-the-art Macintosh computer in a study overflowing with books and papers. “To open a blank e-mail,” it reads, “click once on icon that says ‘new’ at top of window.”

Some people suspect Mr. Sharp of being a closet peacenik and a lefty — in the 1950s, he wrote for a publication called “Peace News” and he once worked as personal secretary to A. J. Muste, a noted labor union activist and pacifist — but he insists that he outgrew his own early pacifism and describes himself as “trans-partisan.”

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”

Autocrats abhor Mr. Sharp. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela denounced him, and officials in Myanmar, according to diplomatic cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, accused him of being part of a conspiracy to set off demonstrations intended “to bring down the government.” (A year earlier, a cable from the United States Embassy in Damascus noted that Syrian dissidents had trained in nonviolence by reading Mr. Sharp’s writings.)

In 2008, Iran featured Mr. Sharp, along with Senator John McCain of Arizona and the Democratic financier George Soros, in an animated propaganda video that accused Mr. Sharp of being the C.I.A. agent “in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries,” an assertion his fellow scholars find ludicrous.

“He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action,” said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that field at the University of San Francisco. “Some of these exaggerated stories of him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a joke. He’s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he is in disseminating it.”

That is not to say Mr. Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he flew to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a rebel camp in Myanmar at the invitation of Robert L. Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Colonel Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war. “Here we were in this jungle, reading Gene Sharp’s work by candlelight,” Colonel Helvey recalled. “This guy has tremendous insight into society and the dynamics of social power.”

Not everyone is so impressed. As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist and founder of the Angry Arab News Service blog, was outraged by a passing mention of Mr. Sharp in The New York Times on Monday. He complained that Western journalists were looking for a “Lawrence of Arabia” to explain Egyptians’ success, in a colonialist attempt to deny credit to Egyptians.

Still, just as Mr. Sharp’s profile seems to be expanding, his institute is contracting.

Mr. Ackerman, who became wealthy as an investment banker after studying under Mr. Sharp, contributed millions of dollars and kept it afloat for years. But about a decade ago, Mr. Ackerman wanted to disseminate Mr. Sharp’s ideas more aggressively, as well as his own. He put his money into his own center, which also produces movies and even a video game to train dissidents. An annuity he purchased still helps pay Mr. Sharp’s salary.

In the twilight of his career, Mr. Sharp, who never married, is slowing down. His voice trembles and his blue eyes grow watery when he is tired; he gave up driving after a recent accident. He does his own grocery shopping; his assistant, Ms. Raquib, tries to follow him when it is icy. He does not like it.

He says his work is far from done. He has just submitted a manuscript for a new book, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Terminology of Civil Resistance in Conflicts,” to be published this fall by Oxford University Press. He would like readers to know he did not pick the title. “It’s a little immodest,” he said. He has another manuscript in the works about Einstein, whose own concerns about totalitarianism prompted Mr. Sharp to adopt the scientist’s name for his institution. (Einstein wrote the foreword to Mr. Sharp’s first book, about Gandhi.)

In the meantime, he is keeping a close eye on the Middle East. He was struck by the Egyptian protesters’ discipline in remaining peaceful, and especially by their lack of fear. “That is straight out of Gandhi,” Mr. Sharp said. “If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble.”

Despues de estudiar periodismo en la Universidad de Berkeley y trabajar en Los Angeles Times y LA Weekly, que lo llevaron a hacer un par de viajes a la ciudad de México, Hernandez llegó a instalarse a esta capital en el otoño de 2007 con el solo propósito de hacerse chilango y escribir sobre esto.

El día de ayer comenzó a circular en Estados Unidos el libro que resultó de esa experiencia: Down and deliruous in Mexico City. The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century. (Scribner, 2011). Estamos frente de uno de esos preciosos momentos del periodismo narrativo: la danza de la realidad y el punto de vista personal con la música de las tribus urbanas, los mercados, las manifestaciones callejeras, los festivales, la violencia y las fiestas del DF.

“La vida en la ciudad de México es un deporte de contacto”, escribió Hernandez en el prefacio. “Puede asustarte al principio, pero para entenderla, debes liberarte de las inhibiciones, de las tapaderas culturales, debes jugar.”

En este libro, el lector presenciará el nacimiento de un chilango. Comienza, donde tal vez debiera de empezar cualquier aventura de la ciudad: la noche de un 11 de diciembre, en una peregrinación a la basílica de Guadalupe.

Hernandez ha decidido ir con unos extranjeros a La Villa, como experiencia antropológica. Pierde a sus acompañantes entre las multitudes, pero encuentra a otros: Christian, Gozu, Porku y El Cochino, un grupo de jóvenes que viene peregrinando desde la caseta a Cuernavaca. Los chicos tienen un plan. Llegar a la basílica e instalarse a fumar mariguana y beber. “Los jóvenes de la caseta de Cuernavaca representan la clase de conexión que necesitas en la ciudad de México”, escribió Hernandez, “gente joven, que te incluye sin preguntar, que te absorbe en su familia”.

Aunque Hernandez los pierde también, y luego no encuentra suficientes fuerzas para completar la pergrinación solo (siente que su educación gringa le quita estamina cultural), durante el resto de su experiencia en la ciudad el autor se queda principalmente con esos jóvenes: punks, darketos, emos, hipsters, y por medio de ellos explora la ciudad. En el postfacio del libro encontramos a un autor que ha hecho la crónica del deseo, el humor, la violencia, la belleza y los horrores de esta ciudad. Ha nacido como chilango, pero al releer de nuevo lo que escribió se siente distinto. “El escritor ya es un extraño”, escribió, “me siento en casa, pero eso no quiere decir que no me vaya a mover… Algunas veces veo mi futuro de regreso en Los Ángeles o en la frontera. La frontera es el único lugar del mundo que conozco, es una metáfora en la que todos vivimos”.

Pensando en todo esto, escojo un libro dentro de las tareas amables de un jurado francés, y lo hago por puro instinto, por “tincada” [presentimiento positivo]. Es la biografía de un novelista que en sus años de octogenario, en la década de los sesenta, cuando yo era joven y bastante indocumentado, se había pasado al periodismo. Es un grueso trabajo en dos volúmenes de 500 páginas cada uno escrito por el historiador Jean-Luc Barré sobre François Mauriac, el autor de Thérèse Desqueyroux, de Nudo de víboras, de algunos otros clásicos del siglo XX.

François Mauriac alcanzó una vigencia tardía a través de los famosos bloc-notes que publicaba en Le Figaro y después, durante muchos años, en la revista L’Express. Se convirtió en el cronista semanal de los finales de la IV República, del ascenso del general Charles de Gaulle, de la liquidación de la guerra de Argelia, de los procesos de descolonización de Marruecos y de Túnez. En épocas en que Jean-Paul Sartre hablaba de escritura comprometida, Mauriac, que era uno de sus más connotados adversarios, se había convertido en un seguidor apasionado de los sucesos, en un columnista incisivo, en un aliado indispensable de la política gaullista. A su modo, un escritor comprometido.

Los latinoamericanos que nos reuníamos en el París de esa década seguíamos las críticas despiadadas de Sartre, aceradas, burlonas, del adalid católico de la política del Gobierno, y pasábamos con notable soltura de cuerpo a otros temas. Que el viejo André Malraux, uno de nuestros ídolos literarios juveniles, fuera ministro de Cultura del Gobierno del general, nos tenía más bien sin cuidado. Nosotros leíamos a Faulkner, a Kafka, a James Joyce, al todavía joven Julio Cortázar, y lanzábamos una mirada distraída sobre los bloc-notes de Mauriac en las peluquerías o en las antesalas de los dentistas.

Ahora sigo los detalles de la lucha de Mauriac por la independencia del Magreb, los de su apoyo no siempre incondicional al gaullismo, me informo de los ataques peligrosos, amenazantes, que le prodigaba la extrema derecha nacionalista, y compruebo que nuestra visión generacional del personaje, como la de muchos intelectuales de esos años, era demasiado simplista. Descartábamos a personas, ideas, tendencias, de una sola plumada, de un papirotazo, para decirlo de algún modo, y sacralizábamos a otras, las convertíamos en ídolos intocables, en estatuas.

Nuestro problema de hoy consiste en hacer la crítica y la autocrítica necesarias de esas actitudes, y en hacerla en forma equilibrada, con auténtica libertad, sin reemplazar unas prisiones mentales por otras. Si estuviera comentando a Montaigne, lectura antigua y también reciente, agregaría: y con una sonrisa. Pero ni Mauriac, ni Malraux, ni el propio general, eran hombre de matices o de sonrisas. François Mauriac, por ejemplo, estuvo cerca de jugarse la vida en sus columnas sobre la relación de Francia con las ex colonias, en momentos de nacionalismo exacerbado, y habría sido interesante que nosotros, los latinoamericanos de París, dejáramos por un rato a Kafka a un lado y entendiéramos estas situaciones cotidianas, que se producían debajo de nuestras narices.

Quizá los problemas de mi generación, que planteaban nada menos que la transformación radical de las sociedades de América Latina, fueran, a pesar de las apariencias, menos urgentes que los de un viejo escritor periodista del estilo de Mauriac. Después de todo, la relación de la Francia cristiana, europea, con el islamismo magrebí, era reflejo, expresión, de uno de los nudos gordianos del siglo. Ahora sabemos, por ejemplo, detalles de la matanza de 21 cristianos a la salida de la iglesia de los Santos de Alejandría, en Egipto, en las primeras horas de este año. Es una historia ya larga, que no amaina. Y es conmovedor observar que los musulmanes de Francia, los de religión y los de cultura, se unen para manifestar su repudio de estos crímenes.

¿En qué radica la vigencia, la proyección de una escritura que se desarrolla en el ritmo de lo cotidiano? ¿Cómo entra en juego con la ficción pura, con el pensamiento abstracto, con la reflexión filosófica? Por ahora, solo podemos comprobar un fenómeno importante: el viejo maestro se la jugaba en cada página, en cada línea, sin atención al género que cultivaba: novela, ensayo, correspondencia, crónica. Lo que lo salvaba y lo mantenía vivo no eran los temas. Era una conciencia literaria apasionada, rigurosa, exigente. Por ahí comenzaba todo.

The Jets’ roster is filled with experienced, talented veterans. They did not ask Sanchez, who struggled with interceptions, fumbles and confidence throughout his rookie season, to win games by himself. They asked him not to lose them.

From that rallying cry came progress. Sanchez threw five more touchdown passes and seven fewer interceptions in his second season. He won his third and fourth playoff road games over the past two weeks, as the Jets ended the seasons of more respected, more renowned quarterbacks, guys named Peyton Manning and Tom Brady.

And when Sanchez tossed three touchdown passes Sunday against New England, he led the Jets back to the American Football Conference championship game, where he will become only the second quarterback in National Football League history to start the conference title game in each of his first two seasons. The other is Ben Roethlisberger, the quarterback for the team that stands between the Jets and the Super Bowl, the Pittsburgh Steelers, who host the Jets on Sunday night.

Along the way, it seems, Sanchez became so good at not losing games that he became more of a factor in actually winning them. Given the magnitude of Sunday’s 28-21 victory — against New England, a bitter division rival — Sanchez’s performance was perhaps his best professional game yet.

All of which could provide Sanchez, should the Jets defeat the Steelers, with his own version of a Joe Namath guarantee: a pledge not to lose the Super Bowl.

“He’s just now getting better and better,” Jets Coach Rex Ryan said. “He’s only been in the league for two years, and like I said last year, he’s not going to be looked at as the weakness of the team, but as the strength.”

Of course, Sanchez can still scare even the most serenely confident of Jets fans, to say nothing of his own teammates. For all his improvement, he can be shockingly inaccurate; he finished the regular season ranked 27th in passer rating out of 31 qualified quarterbacks — the lowest, by far, of any still in the playoffs.

Yet in the most important games, at the most important moments, Sanchez has, with something like reliability, delivered. On Sunday, he turned a busted first-half play into a 37-yard strike to receiver Braylon Edwards. Near the end, with the Patriots threatening, he lobbed a parabola-shaped fade to Santonio Holmes for what was tantamount to a clinching touchdown.

From his home in Florida, Namath, the most celebrated quarterback in Jets history, tracks Sanchez with great interest. Forty years ago, Namath was Sanchez, a handsome quarterback under an intense spotlight in New York. Namath remains the first — and only — quarterback to lead the Jets to a Super Bowl.

In Sanchez, Namath sees growth in terms of footwork, confidence and body language after mistakes. In Sanchez, then, Namath essentially sees much of himself — although, with Sunday’s triumph, Sanchez has now won twice as many playoff games as Namath did in his career.

“Look, Sanchez is an up-and-comer,” Namath said in a telephone interview. “It takes time. You can’t replace experience with enthusiasm, even though Mark had plenty of that. Each game, I see him grow.”

Certainly, Sanchez will enter this Sunday’s conference championship game — the Jets lost last year’s to the Indianapolis Colts — in a far better position than a year ago. Sanchez as a rookie often compounded his mistakes, throwing interceptions as if collecting them. Ryan considered benching Sanchez during a five-interception debacle against the Buffalo Bills.

But if Ryan’s faltering faith bothered Sanchez — and judging by his body language, it most definitely did — he never stopped his obsessive study regimen. He stayed after practice with receivers and tight ends. He basically lived at the Jets’ facility here after off-season knee surgery.

Sanchez started this season with the kind of accuracy usually reserved for Pro Bowl quarterbacks. He went five games without throwing an interception. His accuracy dipped from there, but not in crucial moments, not when he produced thrilling, late victories against Denver, Detroit, Cleveland and Houston. Sanchez’s statistics were never stellar. But he contributed mightily.

Patrick Turner, a college teammate at Southern California and a receiver for the Jets, lives with Sanchez. Most days, Turner said, Sanchez comes home around 8 p.m. and retreats to his film room, where they watch tape and study until bedtime. After the Jets toppled New England, instead of celebrating, Turner said, Sanchez went to sleep.

“Sometimes he eats,” Turner said. “But that’s about it.”

O.K., there was a photo spread in GQ magazine and a summer relationship with the actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler. But teammates describe Sanchez in terms that probably would have insulted the cosmopolitan Namath.

Linebacker Bart Scott said Sanchez acted like an overgrown child who “thinks he’s still at recess.” The injured defensive lineman Kris Jenkins compared Sanchez to a “southern California yoga instructor.”

Jenkins added: “But don’t let Mark fool you. He is dead serious, almost nerdy about football. The game against New England was the best game he ever played, when he went from game manager to the guy. If your quarterback plays like that, it’s almost like cheating. If Mark plays like that, we can win the Super Bowl.”

Most Jets refused Monday to look that far ahead. In their way stand Roethlisberger and the Steelers. Should the Jets advance to the Super Bowl, they will have beaten Manning, Brady and Roethlisberger in consecutive weeks, on the road, a run that would rank among the most impressive in N.F.L. playoff history. Those three quarterbacks have won six of the last nine Super Bowls.

The Jets will not be favored against the Steelers, and Sanchez will again not be the marquee quarterback. But few will be completely shocked if Sanchez, again, does not lose the game.

Ryan, the Jets’ coach, was asked about Roethlisberger on Monday.

“Quite honestly,” he said in response, “I like our guy.”

SHE MAKES FUN,

While the agonies of the European Union — sovereign defaults, deficits and bubbles — unfold like a great wonk drama, at their core is something more intimate: the fractured tale of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. They have been photographed across Europe giving the appearance of happy partnership. They are the best hope Europe has for continued unity. But they do not like each other at all.

As with any couple in trouble, economic difficulty has added to the strain. Two years ago, at the beginning of the crisis, Sarkozy burst out in public, saying, “France is acting, while Germany is only thinking about it!” Later, before a European Union meeting in Brussels on the Greek bailout, the French president was in a rage at his inability to persuade Merkel to do more for that country. After yelling at the E.U.’s president, Herman Van Rompuy, he threatened to boycott the meeting, muttering, according to French officials, “The Germans haven’t changed.” Later, when Sarkozy took camera crews in with him to a meeting, Merkel insisted they leave and, aides said, told Sarkozy, “I won’t let you do this to me.”

So it is not an easy relationship. But they know that they need to keep going for the sake of the kids — that is, for the sake of Europe. They have instructed their top foreign-policy advisers, Jean-David Levitte and Christoph Heusgen, both consummate diplomats, to make the relationship function. Some of the symbolism is a stretch — joint cabinet meetings, ceremonies at the Arc de Triomphe and the Berlin Wall. But there is an extraordinarily close coordination between the two staffs, and before every major European Union summit meeting, Sarkozy and Merkel hash out a joint position to take to the other 25 member states. This isn’t very democratic; it probably isn’t very pleasant either. Yet if the European Union is to function, Sarkozy and Merkel have to get along.

The Sarkozy-Merkel relationship matters because the challenges they and Europe face are both enormous and complicated, combining dismal economics, national pride and anxious electorates. They need to work out whether states that share a currency can still have independent fiscal policies — or, put differently, whether a currency union is viable without economic and even political union, and if it isn’t, whether it should be preserved. Behind this seemingly technocratic challenge, of course, are profound questions of democracy and citizenship, of national identity and self-determination and of the right way to handle Europe’s many ghosts.

Consider the meeting of Sarkozy and Merkel last October at the French seaside resort of Deauville. As they walked on the beach, they considered how to stabilize the European economy. The European Financial Stabilization Facility had kept Greece and Ireland from collapse, but it was ad hoc. Sarkozy wanted to extend it without touching the E.U.’s basic treaty. Merkel said that, constitutionally, she could not commit Germany to such an indefinite responsibility without a treaty change. She also did not want private investors to think that their national-bond investments were guaranteed a bailout if things went bad; she wanted private bondholders to face the prospect of a “haircut,” as the phrase goes, in the event of default.

Merkel committed herself to a permanent financial backstop, one whose stability would inevitably be based on the stability and solvency of Germany itself. Sarkozy agreed that with the new mechanism, beginning in 2013, investors would take some of the losses on bonds in insolvent euro-zone nations. That implied that some countries could actually default, and gave a strong signal to investors not to put money after 2013 in the bonds of countries like Greece, Spain or Portugal. The decision infuriated the European Central Bank chief, Jean-Claude Trichet, who predicted, accurately, that it would shake the markets and endanger Ireland.

But there was little Trichet or the plan’s many other opponents could do. Merkel is determined to make fiscal discipline the price of German credit. While Merkel did agree to drop her proposal for automatic penalties for countries that broke fiscal rules, she also refused to consider suggestions for a general “Eurobond” backed by all members. Many European countries like the idea of a Eurobond, because it might prevent private markets from trading on the differences between national economies and policies. But it would do so, ultimately, because of the strength of the German economy and its government’s own legendary prudence (and it would raise Germany’s own borrowing costs). That was not an obligation Germans wanted to take on. So Merkel said no.

As Ulrike Guérot, a German analyst once married to a Frenchman, puts it, Germans “sublimated hegemony. But we’re dropping the sublimation now.” She laughed, then added: “Of course, this doesn’t sound nice to others.”

A senior German official, however, says Sarkozy’s ambition to lead and his taste for big ideas — like his plans for the G20 this year to re-examine the role of the dollar and the regulation of food markets — are attractive and help Merkel. “She brings him down from 120 percent to 75 percent, and then they try to do half of that,” he told me. Sarkozy also sees an important role for himself in tethering Germany to the European Union, helping Merkel to resist demands at home that Germany stop financing anyone else. Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, a political scientist and German specialist at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, says: “Sarkozy is catching Merkel from floating Germany too far away, compromising to try to pull her back into the European framework. But she needs this, too.”

BORN ONLY SIX months apart, the two could not be more different in terms of personality and worldview. Merkel, 56, grew up in a left-wing household in the farthest northeastern corner of Communist East Germany, in the Protestant flatlands where the Russian wind whistles. She learned to speak Russian and Czech. She is a physicist; her second husband is a chemist, a quiet professor who keeps to himself; she has no children. After the unification of Germany, she was an apprentice to Helmut Kohl, his “underestimated maiden” from the East, and she moved to Berlin — itself considered un-German, in a way, conquered territory on what is thought of as the barbarian steppe, far from the rich soil of German culture.

It was from Chancellor Kohl that she learned the importance of pandering to French vanities about being the true beating heart of the European ideal. And then when Kohl got into trouble, his Eastern maiden became Germany’s first female chancellor.

That is when she had to face Sarkozy. “She’s a scientist, almost like a German cliché, planning everything, going step by step, unemotional, not a show horse,” Stefan Kornelius, a senior editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, told me. “But Sarkozy’s the kind of macho man that she doesn’t like at all. And she and the chancellery are irritated by his jumping from issue to issue, his lack of attention, his inability to do German systematic work. She’s a technocrat with a hidden husband, and he’s flamboyant, with a beautiful woman” — the singer and former model Carla Bruni — “at his side.”

Sarkozy has been much criticized for his love of money and gaudiness. A wealthy lawyer with wealthy friends, he lives a gilded French presidential life, surrounded by staff members always ready with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Merkel still lives in the central Berlin apartment she occupied before her election and can sometimes be seen out shopping, or stopping into a favorite French-style restaurant, Borchardt, for a quick meal with her husband.

Merkel has surrounded herself with strong women and technocratic men, and she manages men very well, a senior German official told me: “She takes them by their biggest weakness, which is ego, and caters to it to a point, and then coldbloodedly, like an aikido fighter, uses that energy and pulls it in her direction. She doesn’t function in terms of male mechanics, all ego and pumping up yourself and shouting; these male tools fail with her, and she uses these to her advantage. And those who team up with her, she lets take a lot of the credit.” It sounds similar to how she handles the French president. Unlike Sarkozy, famous for absorbing a complicated brief as he walks to a meeting, Merkel is an assiduous worker and normally the best-prepared person in the room. Sarkozy rules France like a king; Merkel is a coalition politician who wants to bring others along. The Germans like to tell a joke about Sarkozy piloting a plane and informing the passengers he has good news and bad news: “The good news is that we’re ahead of schedule. The bad news is that we’re lost.”

There was a time when the trans-Atlantic tie enabled Europeans to find direction in the world as part of an American-led, American-protected liberal West. That moment seems to have passed, leaving Europe to find its own way. The United States never did take more than a mild interest in European unification. In a meeting with European journalists in 2005, President Bush said airily that he appreciated “how hard it was to get a federalist system in place that was balanced and fair,” adding that “every time I meet with the European leaders, I ask them how it’s going.” President Obama’s approach has not been much different, particularly as the Europeans have made it clear they are not eager to help solve the Afghanistan problem. In general, the Obama attitude has been: Europe, lovely place; European Union, lovely idea but wish it would do more on defense; euro, well, good luck with that.

FRANCE AND GERMANY, with their shared bloody past, are unlikely allies, and they have radically different notions of how Europe should work. France wants a state-dominated, centralized, bureaucratic Europe in its own image. France also maintains a Mediterranean attitude toward budget deficits, having last balanced a budget 35 years ago. Germany, a federal state with powerful regions, coalition governments and an influential constitutional court, wants a Europe of laws, discipline and fiscal probity, with a strong currency and real penalties for the spendthrift.

Long the financier of the European Union, Germany has made it clear that it will no longer pay for the mistakes and frauds of others. While Germany has always acted in its own interests, the Kohl generation interpreted those interests as being embedded in institutions like NATO and the European Union, which protected the new democratic Germany and kept its ambitions in check. But Germany, reunited, sees NATO as less necessary, even hollow. It needs the European Union less. And it is turning more toward the east — the old Soviet bloc and Russia — for energy and markets.

If centralized France has traditionally supported European Union institutions and currently advocates a form of “European economic governance,” federal Germany has become much less willing to subordinate national interests to European ones and has been a strong defender of national sovereignty, especially over budgets. In a recent speech in Bruges, Merkel spoke of the need to move away from “the community method,” led by the European Union’s Commission, to what she called “the union method,” in which the nation-states effectively take the lead in cooperating with the Commission and other E.U. institutions. “The ‘community method’ can only be applied in those areas in which the European Union actually has competence,” she said tersely, adding: “Where the community has no competence, the ‘community method’ clearly cannot be applied.” In other words, the E.U. should do only what it is authorized to do and can do well. Otherwise power should remain with the states.

If Germany speaks for Europe’s largely industrial Protestant north, France has always combined north and agricultural south. “Sarkozy is being the spokesman for the south, but he also understands that Germany has the clout,” Le Gloannec says. “So you have to say yes to some of what they want, but at the same time Germany can’t talk to all Europeans or take a public leadership role. In a way, the Germans really don’t know how to talk to others. She and he may be like Laurel and Hardy — different but complementary.”

As the euro crisis grinds on and the German economy continues to outpace the others, Sarkozy is paying more attention to the German model and giving in more to German demands. He is extremely anxious, aides say, that France is losing its prominence in the new Europe, slipping behind Germany to second-class status. Inside the French cabinet, Germany’s economic model, labor relations and capacity for technical innovation are prominent topics, with German standards — and the fear of losing Paris’s AAA bond rating — driving French reforms and budget cuts.

The cliché used to be that nothing happened in the European Union without French and German agreement. Today France and Germany are regarded as necessary but no longer sufficient. Sarkozy fears, with some justification in a bigger European Union of 27 nations and a euro zone of 17, that French agreement may soon not be needed at all. The new E.U. members to the east are more German in their aspirations than French. The Czechs and Slovaks, as well as the Balts, are all fiscally conservative. Even Poland, which has such an emotional tie to France, sees its economic future with Germany.

THE FUNDAMENTAL problem is that Germans are worried that their manifold sacrifices for national prosperity will be dumped down the drain of Europe’s poorest and most profligate. Despite Germany’s economic success — almost a second economic miracle, after the expensive absorption of East Germany — Merkel therefore has serious political challenges. “The Germans have discovered that they are the only serious global economy in Europe, capable of competing with the United States and China,” says John Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany. “But they’re afraid their world is coming apart around them, and what they thought would support them, the European Union, is dragging them down. They realized that the stability pact isn’t working, that the Greeks were lying and maybe others, too, that their banks and French banks were deep in the muck, and they understood this is going to cost a lot of money. So they are behaving in a very demanding way, which smells to some like nationalism. But it really is fear.”

So while Merkel says she is deeply committed to the European Union and the euro, she must, as a politician, manage the angst. A strong minority of Germans feel she has already gone too far down the road of bailing out Europe’s “Club Med.” State elections in 2011 could further hamper her ability to make bold decisions to protect European unity. And she must always be mindful of the German constitutional court, which plays a very strong role in interpreting treaties like those that bind Germany to the E.U.

Sarkozy’s political problems are also legion and likely to worsen as austerity programs bite. To win re-election in 2012, Sarkozy needs first to reunite the right behind him, in the face of a vibrant challenge from the far-right National Front and divisions within his own center-right party. His main opposition, the Socialist Party, is divided, and both France and Germany are waiting to see if Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, will run for the Socialist nomination. It was Sarkozy who pushed Strauss-Kahn to take the I.M.F. job, figuring he was getting a rival out of the way. But the euro crisis has made Strauss-Kahn, 61, even more important, giving him the international reputation and gravitas to challenge Sarkozy and even win. While Sarkozy tried to keep the I.M.F. and Strauss-Kahn at a distance — the I.M.F. is based in Washington — Merkel insisted that only the I.M.F. had the experience to make the Greek salvage operation credible. Strauss-Kahn has been crucial to the Irish bailout as well and will have a strong part in any future defense of the euro. He is a German speaker and has been a key negotiator with Merkel. With a German almost sure to take over leadership of the European Central Bank in November, and another German due to take over the secretariat of the European Union’s Council of Ministers, there should be even more support for Merkel’s vision.

With Germany ascendant and looking both inward and eastward, Britain staying out of the euro zone and France carrying less weight, the question of German leadership is now at the fore. Germany has traditionally avoided trying to lead Europe from the front; memories from World War II, though faded, have not yet gone away in the rest of the continent. Even now, anti-German feeling is rising among Greeks, Portuguese and Spaniards, who feel abandoned, even betrayed, by Berlin.

Still, Merkel is going to have to exercise more leadership if the euro is going to be saved, even if she still hides to some degree behind France. And active German leadership of the E.U. means a clearer understanding that politically difficult compromises are going to have to be made and that money will have to be spent and promised — all in the face of growing German discontent.

John Kornblum, the former American ambassador in Berlin and still a resident there, sees a model for Germany in the United States and the way it helped keep Europe together after the war, mediating disputes and finding compromises. “The Germans don’t see it yet,” he says. “But they will have to take on the role of the United States in Europe, and have the same kind of balancing role we had for such a long time.” At that point, Germany’s marriage with France won’t matter so much anymore.

Su leyenda literaria no prescinde de una inteligencia provocadora, de un sentido del humor agudo, de una escritura obsesiva y de ciertos libros secretos. Uno de ellos es su primer libro, una colección de poemas publicada en edición privada de 200  ejemplares fuera de comercio, de los cuales, según lo confiesa en “Regreso a casa”, su discurso de ingreso a la Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, pudo “rescatar en las librerías de viejo, dedicados y las más de las veces intonsos, un gran número de ellos”. También parecía haber abjurado de su autobiografía, a la que posteriormente, en la bella edición de Aldus, llamó Autobiografía precoz. Ese texto es también una historia de iniciaciones; entre otras, la iniciación a la escritura y la revelación
del recuerdo, que se convirtieron en dos de sus obsesiones esenciales.

Cuando pretendía ser pintor, Elizondo descubrió los principios del montaje cinematográfico de Sergei Eisenstein, que se asemejan en sus resultados a los de los ideogramas chinos que conocería posteriormente. De ello se derivó un cuadro que “representaba una vista del Foro Romano en el que los elementos característicos de estas edificaciones se agrupaban sintéticamente construyendo un elemento formal orgánico y expresivo. Pero a pesar de ello el cuadro era muy malo”. Esos principios se hallan asimismo en la concepción de Farabeuf, en el que la escritura se conjuga con la tenacidad de la memoria.

En su Autobiografía precoz, Salvador Elizondo refiere que durante su estancia en Europa, luego de la contemplación reiterada de Las batallas de Paolo Ucello, La Calumnia, el Vapor en la tormenta de Turner, renunció a los pinceles y de una manera turbia al comienzo, “había germinado en mi personalidad una urgencia por expresarme, por dialogar conmigo mismo mediante la escritura”, que devino destino literario. Rememoraba asimismo que la contemplación de su hija recién nacida, Mariana, despertaba en él ciertas emociones de carácter mágico, “que no en poco contribuyeron a sumirme en un estado de constante evocación de la infancia”.

Su invención del recuerdo por medio de la escritura adquiría formas varias. A veces se trataba de indagar en la percepción y en el mecanismo de la memoria como en Farabeuf, que no por azar comienza con la pregunta: “¿Recuerdas?” y en cuyas páginas se asevera reiteradamente que “nada es más tenaz que la memoria” -por cierto, Pablo Soler Frost parece rendirle homenaje al empezar Yerba americana con la misma pregunta-. En ocasiones, como en “La Legión Extranjera”, imagina una evocación ficticia, pero también puede recurrir a sus recuerdos
para volverlos un relato por medio de la ficción, como en “Ein Heldenleben”, o para recrearlos literariamente como en Elsinore, un cuaderno en el que el rigor y la experimentación de la
escritura convergen en una narración clásica, placentera para el lector, a pesar de que prescinde del punto y aparte, acaso para que fluya como un sueño o una evocación.

Una de las definiciones posibles de Salvador Elizondo quizá está contenida en “El grafógrafo”, donde escribe que escribe que escribe… Aunque no publicaba con frecuencia, nunca dejaba de escribir lo que llamaba “cuadernos”, entre los cuales se encontraban sus diarios, hechos del devenir cotidiano, de ideas, de ocurrencias, de proyectos literarios…

Elizondo era noctánbulo. Al final de su Autobiografía precoz confiesa que “son las tres de la mañana. Es preciso que reitere mi amor a la noche por la quietud y la paz que trae consigo”. En Farabeuf se pregunta: “¿Quién es ese hombre que lleva la noche consigo dondequiera que va?” Uno de los textos que conforman Camera lucida tiene el título de “Anoche”, en el cual conjetura que “si tratamos de recordar una época del pasado no se aparece la época de nuestra vigilia en la realidad, sino las imágenes de los entresueños de entonces”. No debe resultar extraño, por lo tanto, que desde 1986 escribiera un diario nocturno al que llamó Noctuario, como el espacio del zoológico donde se exhiben los animales de vida nocturna -en el zoológico de Guadalajara hay uno admirable-, y que, por la generosa iniciativa de su viuda, la fotógrafa Paulina Lavista, acaba de publicar la editorial Atalanta en un volumen que contiene asimismo su Autobiografía precoz, “Ein Heldenleben” y Elsinore.

En los Noctuarios pueden hallarse mitologías íntimas a las que Elizondo suele aludir y en ocasiones son el origen de algunos de sus textos, algo del proceso de la concepción de Elsinore, la fidelidad a Paul Valéry, a James Joyce, a la revista La Nature, de ellos pueden deducirse otros textos y un somero retrato de su autor, pero sobre todo revelan la escritura en estado puro de un hombre hecho de escritur

autor : Javier García-Galiano

What he doesn’t have is a place to live.

“I am a homeless homeless advocate,” he often tells people. That’s the line that hooks them, the one that gives Sheptock – an unemployed former crack addict who hasn’t had a permanent address in 15 years – his clout on the issue of homelessness.

His Facebook friends and Twitter followers include policymakers, advocates for the homeless and hundreds of college students who have heard him speak on behalf of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Being homeless has become Sheptock’s full-time occupation. It’s work that has provided him with purpose and a sense of community. But it’s also work that has perpetuated his homelessness and, in a way, glorified it.

Sheptock, 41, wouldn’t take a 9-to-5 job that compromised his advocacy efforts or the long hours he spends tending to his digital empire, he says. He wouldn’t move out of the downtown D.C. shelter where he has slept for the past two years if it would make him a less effective voice for change.

“Too many homeless people have come to look up to me, and I can’t just walk away from them,” he says in a recent blog post titled “Tough Choices.” “My conscience won’t allow it.”

Having 5,000 friends on Facebook is more important to Sheptock than having $5,000 in the bank. And he lives with the consequences of that every day.

‘Lots of drama’

At 6 a.m., the lights flicker on at the Community for Creative Non-Violence, where Sheptock has occupied the same top bunk since he arrived at the 1,350-bed shelter in 2008.

Eleven other men share a 15-foot-by-18-foot room on a floor that teems with more than 200 people on a typical night. There’s not much privacy, Sheptock says. Younger people tend to be loud, older people cranky, and there’s drama. “Lots of drama,” he says.

That’s why, on most days, Sheptock takes a shower as soon as he wakes and then walks the four miles from the shelter near Judiciary Square to Thrive DC, a nonprofit organization in Mount Pleasant where he gets a free breakfast and Internet access. On the days he can afford it, he’ll take the bus.

His income varies. November was a good month: He made $330 from his blog posts ($25 a pop at Change.org) and his speeches ($40 for those he gives in the Washington region and $100 for those farther away).

It’s not enough to pay rent, he says, “not in this city.” But it’s enough to pay his cellphone bill and buy the occasional snack or piece of clothing.

“The tea party started with a tweet, you know,” he says.

A haunted childhood

It was Facebook that reconnected Sheptock to his family – the people who took him in after he’d been abandoned and probably abused as a baby.

There is much he doesn’t know about what happened. He can only point to the long, thin scar on the back of his head and repeat what he was told: He was found in a hotel room in New Jersey at 8 months old, head bleeding, skull fractured.

After three craniotomies and five years of foster care, he was adopted into a strict Pentecostal family, becoming the 10th of what would eventually be 37 Sheptock children. Thirty of the children were adopted like him; many had disabilities.

Although doctors once predicted that Sheptock’s head injuries would make it impossible for him to succeed academically or socially, he graduated from high school in 1987.

“He could do so many things very well,” says his mother, Joanne Sheptock, 73, who didn’t hear from Eric for years. “He could do math like you wouldn’t believe” but also was quiet, shy and slower than other kids.

After high school, Sheptock worked as a freight handler and maintenance man before getting into a dispute with his boss and walking off the job. On Feb. 14, 1994, the day before his 25th birthday, he received his last full-time paycheck.

He gradually fell into homelessness and started using crack cocaine – an addiction he conquered, but not before serving multiple stints in jail, including one for 10 months, for possession and other drug-related offenses.

In 2005, he came to the District to protest the war in Iraq and wound up moving into the Franklin School Shelter.

It was there, amid a long-running battle with the city over the shelter’s future, that Sheptock began to emerge as an advocate. And it was there that he realized how important it would be to learn to use a computer.

When the Franklin School Shelter closed in 2008, many of its 300 residents were offered transitional apartments. Sheptock was not one of them, he says.

He’s okay with that, although people frequently don’t understand why.

“I can hear the guy sitting in the living room, saying why doesn’t he get off his [butt] and do something, he’s doing all of this other stuff,” says Neil Donovan, executive director for the National Coalition for the Homeless. “It’s not that simple, though,” especially not for someone who has been living in shelters as long Sheptock has.

Studies have found that after six months of homelessness, people undergo a “psychological and sociological change,” Donovan says. They stop seeing themselves as a person experiencing homelessness and start seeing themselves as a homeless person. Their situation turns into their identity.

Homelessness, Donovan says, “becomes who you are.”

Work to do

Sheptock’s hands hover above the keyboard in a pearly white research room at the Library of Congress.

His backward hat bobs to the Arrested Development Pandora Radio station as he focuses on deciphering a fold-creased letter lying next to him.

He is transcribing the scribbled handwriting of a woman who lives at his shelter into a formal request for cleaning supplies so residents can deal with a bedbug infestation. It is signed “Deborah.”

She has asked for his help with the letter, he says, because she can’t use a computer.

So with his Facebook page and blog open in separate windows – surrounded by his thousands of friends and followers – the homeless homeless advocate types.

In a few hours, Sheptock will return to the shelter, his bunk bed and his 11 roommates. But for now, he has a job to do. He looks comfortable sitting there, legs splayed out, hunched over the keyboard.

He looks at home.

Nada que ocultar: “todos amamos la música de nuestra niñez. Cuando yo iba a la escuela, por la mañana encendía la radio y allí sonaba Glenn Miller o Billie Holiday. Eso se te queda grabado.” En su caso, le ha marcado de por vida.

¿Un retrógrado? Sí, y orgulloso de ello: incluso para sus películas, prefiere el sonido monoaural a la estereofonía. Woody debe ser el único neoyorquino treintañero, perteneciente al mundo del espectáculo, que se mostró indiferente ante el vendaval (contra)cultural de mediados de los sesenta. Y eso que estaba allí: como humorista, ejerció de stand-up comedian por locales del Greenwich Village, donde compartió camerinos y escenarios con futuras luminarias del folk y el rock.

Intuición + conocimientos

Esencialmente, Woody adorna sus películas con (1) piezas de jazz añejo, (2) standards olvidados del pop y (3) grandes éxitos de la música clásica. Tiene un conocimiento enciclopédico de esas canteras sonoras y, a la hora del montaje, no duda: sabe encajar esas grabaciones polvorientas en la historia que ha rodado. Es particularmente perspicaz con la música de apertura: asume que dan el tono para lo que viene a continuación. Así, un disparate como El vuelo del moscardón, versión Harry James, nos avisa para que nos rindamos a la fantasía de Días de radio.

Como se siente libre de la obligación de ser cool, puede recurrir a obviedades que -oh maravilla- funcionan. Ahí está la Rhapsody in blue, de Gershwin, suntuoso fondo de la fotografía en blanco y negro de Manhattan. O las congeladas gotas de piano (Erik Satie) que caen en Hannah y sus hermanas.

Debe agradecérsele ese trabajo de arqueólogo en la mina del olvido. Suena inconcebible en estos tiempos de música a la carta pero -un ejemplo- no era fácil localizar en 1972, cuando se estrenó Sueños de seductor, la grabación de As time goes by, canción central de Casablanca.

Sex and drugs and modern jazz

Woody es consciente de su reputación de reaccionario musical. Y sabe bromear con el asunto. En Alice, Mia Farrow es la púdica mujer casada que queda fascinada por un músico, encarnado por Joe Mantegna. Conviene recordar que se trata de una historia impulsada por las drogas, aunque se disimule muy bien. Allen elimina los aspectos sórdidos: el camello es un sabio doctor chino. Alice prueba una variedad de hierbas maravillosas y hasta fuma de una pipa que proporciona sueños reveladores.

Gracias a esas substancias, hay una divertida secuencia en la que se encuentra alardeando de “la primera vez que escuché a John Coltrane tocando el saxo soprano”. Pasado el efecto, se pregunta quién demonios es ese tal Coltrane, cuya música aparentemente cae muy lejos del canon woodyallenesco. Igual que Thelonius Monk, que suena en la película.

Puede que Woody sea, musicalmente hablando, menos conservador de lo que presume. Tengo la sospecha de que su verdadera dieta musical resulta mucho más variada de lo que pensamos. Por ejemplo, fue un visitante asiduo a las primeras ediciones del New Orleáns Jazz and Heritage Festival. Y su presencia legitimó el propósito del evento, que quería cambiar el paradigma musical de la ciudad: que no fuera solo la capital del jazz tradicional -precisamente, el que Allen toca- y que propiciara la variedad de ofertas estilísticas de Nueva Orleáns. Lo lograron, con la ayuda de Woody, efectivamente apoyando aquí al “enemigo”.

Aprovechando los privilegios

La pasión de Woody por el clarinete llega hasta el Registro Civil: hasta su nombre profesional está tomado de un maestro del instrumento, Woody Herman; repetiría la jugada con una de sus hijas adoptivas, bautizada Bechet, por el gran Sidney Bechet. En cuanto despegó como cineasta, aprovechó para tocar con la muy legendaria Preservation Hall Jazz Band, veteranos de Nueva Orleáns que grabaron la B.S.O. de El dormilón (1973).

No se hace ilusiones respecto al carácter y la vida profesional de los jazzmen. Emmet Ray, el guitarrista que interpretaba Sean Penn en Sweet and lowdown, es un completo hijoputa, aunque musicalmente se nos asegure que está a un nivel justo por debajo del gitano Django Reinhardt.

Jazzman de fin de semana

Las actuaciones de Allen y su New Orleáns Jazz Band merecen atención especial. Posiblemente, aunque asegura ensayar diariamente, Woody es el menos profesional de los integrantes pero su fama extramusical permite que esa agrupación gire, grabe discos y celebrada en un documental (Wild man blues). Desde el escenario, el proyecto se pretende didáctico. Sin embargo, domina el voyeurismo entre el público, a pesar de que Woody evite hacer gracietas o eclipsar a sus compañeros.

Para Woody, el compromiso también tiene funciones terapéuticas: sus conciertos regulares, que últimamente se celebran los lunes en el elegante Carlyle Hotel neoyorquino, proporcionan estabilidad a la vida del artista. Son más baratos (demonios, incluso ¡le pagan!) que las sesiones de psicoanálisis. Y proporcionan a una persona cerebral el placer de lo mágico, lo intuitivo.

Sin olvidar la excusa para no acudir a las convocatorias de los Oscar: el engañoso mensaje es “tengo cosas más importantes que hacer”. Perfecto para su perfil de creador extravagante en el contexto de Hollywood. Además, subyace una lección moral: el famoso que se somete a la disciplina de un conjunto. Buen argumento para usar con los actores estelares, si hay que explicarles que deben minimizar sus pretensiones económicas cuando les llama para aparecer en una de sus películas. Ya sabemos que el secreto de la constante actividad cinematográfica de Woody reside en lo ajustado de sus presupuestos.