Mention should be made of the late Susannah McCorkle's bilingual version of "Waters of March" for which she revised and tweaked the standard English lyrics. McCorkle's version, which became her signature song, grows in poignancy when one considers the haunted (to borrow from the title of her biography) quality of her life.

http://www.last.fm/music/Susannah+McCorkle/_/The+Waters+of+March

Leon Wieseltier's beautiful remembrance of McCorkle may be found here:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/06/04/010604ta_TALK_POSTSCRIPT

I suppose it's not simply a coincidence that part of McCorkle's English lyrics may be found as an epigraph for a chapter in this book:

http://books.google.com/books?id=L41-0-SEIVwC&pg=RA1-PA814&dq=jdeveloper+spear

"how lists of objects themselves, without much further explication, can do the philosophical work of drawing our attention toward them with greater attentiveness."

I sometimes wonder if, just like there's no way to focus on everything, there is no such thing as a "correct" or "final" ontology. Maybe ontologies are ways of making us attentive to the things we've lost sight of. If so, ontologies would be essentially historical -- they would surface and re-submerge based on our philosophical needs.

Ian, your surprising post made me think. Think like a Brazilian. I did not resist and offer you some thoughts about your post.

"Waters of March" celebrates the end of summer, when the rains wash all and bring an air of renewal for the heavy summer in the Southern Hemisphere. It also celebrates the beginning of the year for Brazil, since only after the Carnival "we started to work." It is as if the waters refresh our heads to face a new year.

I believe this song is related to the Object-Oriented Philosophy in some points. First, you correctly mentioned, is the list of objects. Objects that in the new year go through a process of renewal. But they are not static objects, they are things immersed in processes. And they certainly make an aesthetic universe that weaves the place where the Brazilians live.

Second, I think this list is a summary of what Harman says it is one of the difficulties of Latour's ontology: a summary of the changes occurring in the alliances at the network. At the same time that it displays some of the actors who take part of the life of Brazil, it shows how a flow or fluid (or a different topology) help to reconfigure everything to a new year. It is the "promise of life" of the song. It is a new atmosphere to the place where we live. Perhaps this is a possibility to be explored in OOP.

(At http://www.iit.edu/~chilnic/aguasdemarco.htm you can see the original lyrics plus a literal translation and Jobim's English version of the song.)

Marcelo,

The comma at the end of your link leads it astray.

Here is the corrected link.

http://www.iit.edu/~chilnic/aguasdemarco.htm

Marc, thanks for providing the additional links, both at top and just above. I've also fixed the link in Marcelo's post to avoid any confusion.

Marcelo, everything you say about the song is right, and indeed it seems Jobim tried to genericize the lyrics considerably in his English version, stripping them of much of their Brazilian specificity. I think that specificity makes the song even more object-oriented, as I think you are also noting, thanks to that specificity.