It is impressive what a little distraction can do. I meant to return to this blog the second week of May. Now, here we are, June 23rd, and only now do I get around to some more 11pm blogging.

Referencing distraction, and in fact gratuitously repeating the word, makes little difference. Like a rainstorm falling at just the right angle to make itself look gratuitous, my own approach this evening bears almost no resemblance to what I may have meant to write when I sat down.

The act of teaching was the thing that kept me from this. I do not mean in-class teaching, that would be too easy and painfully exaggerated. No, I mean the other kind, that which comes only to the forefront when someone close to me needs something.

In this case, the persons in question are my wife and daughter. The former, having recently returned to her studies after around twenty years away from them, needs more than anything a lot of support and an ear to listen. She also needed someone to help reorganize the home office space and move various large, oak tables for a garage sale that ended in a lot of donated tables. The latter just needs to be asked lots of questions, reminded of how "forte e capaz" she is, and of course tickled with a dizzying frequency. Both, like me, are busy-bodies, always needing some sort of project to keep the mind active.

Instructing 18-in-class hours per week this summer has borne itself into a rather exhausting prospect, one which has left me drained and on many an evening and with very little creativity left over. Yet (and in the spirit of keeping you distracted while I get away with teaching something) I have still been able to write a few poems such as this one:

Old Sugar:

By the time the sofa

Was in place we realized

That the walls needed a

Fresh coat of white

Where the brick had

Been lain, crevasses

Between them with grey

Mortar, mold and bright

Reflections we’d

Dreamt of back in

2006 when we thought

In a year we’d buy easy

A dozen drywall slats

To cover up the brick,

Now that we haven’t

Done even that nor I

Had thought a couch

Would end up in the

Office where I could

Possibly nap or write

Hopeless to stop. Now

While everyone sleeps

The place has realized

Its fragile and balmy night.

25 / V / 2014, midnight 

It actually is not such a bad set of verses (if I do say so myself), referring mostly to what I had meant to say in the paragraphs above. It also encompasses the essence of true teaching (again, not instruction or facilitation, that's for my university students). To whom we may assign the title of "professor" in this case is still up for grabs. In which direction your spirit may wish to wane this evening is as well. 

Tonight's entry is very short. Really, I just mean to wish every mother a Happy Mother's Day.

We tend to look at a day like today as one of celebration and remembrance of the woman who either gave birth to us, or adopted us, the one who held us when we hurt and made us feel tall when nothing else seemed to. She took us by the hand and led us to ourselves, moving only as fast as we, their children, could go.

There is another piece of Mother's Day that no hallmark card wants to explore; that of pain, and then forgiveness. At some point in our lives we begin to see our parents through the lens of our own adulthood, one to which they had at least some part in leading us (as I said, by the hand). We lose our innocent adoration of them and start to look critically at all of the bits of us that we don't usually share, the memories of their human subjectivity and fallibility that we cannot want to accept. Nor can we grasp at it, as it resides only in a past told through our subconscious whose face we see in terms of its imperfection and what we like to qualify as their outdatedness. In effect, we do not want to live with the side-effects of being someone else's children; as such, we strike out at it. This becomes even more acute and defensible as our parents age, becoming more rigidly the people they were, or changing into people with whom our affinity may not be as apparent.

I won't get into details about why this occurs here, at least not in my own case. It should only suffice to say that the idea of forgiveness becomes paramount when we move through, then past, this phase of our adulthood. Yet, the forgiveness goes both ways; we must forgive them, and we must forgive ourselves for the guilt of having felt this way in the first place. When Dickinson says "the heart asks pleasure first / and then, excuse from pain" she is not just speaking of the love we all assume; she speaks of any love, any time when we adore, then challenge, then hurt, then beg forgiveness. In this vein, when we move through all of the motions and emotions of days like today, we need to make sure we can live with the past, the present, and the most hopeful future of who we are and who they are to us.

So, in that spirit, Happy Mother's Day; may you love, forgive, and treasure what your hearts asks and what their's have given to you. Good night / boa noite / buenas noches.

Absence and forgetfulness ... two excuses for not having returned to this page in over two weeks. Perhaps they tie into something deeper, or maybe we could write them off as part and parcel of a heavy schedule and the kind of exhaustion which makes TV seem that much more meaningful at eleven pm.

Tomorrow, April 14th, is my 38th birthday. I had not really put much thought into it, given the first three words of this post, at least until last Thursday when a colleague and friend asked me about it, for reference sake. I knew it was coming; over time we project onto ourselves and most likely onto everyone around us the sort of emotional bond with aging that ignore when we're younger because, frankly, we have that option. Not that I am that old, either - the average age of most Associate Professors (in Britain we would be called "Senior Lecturers") is a bit higher, a fact not lost on me nor on my fellow "youngins," as our elder colleagues humorously refer to us.

It would be at this point that this exploration should really begin: the poetry of youth and aging can take us to that "something deeper" I had hinted at above. Some of my favorite bits of verse on the topic come from Gloria Fuertes and her "poemas infantiles":

«Para felicitar un cumpleãnos»

Esta mañana temprano
cantaban las codornices
y en su cántico decían:
¡que los cumplas muy felices!

Here the joy and innocence of youth as a function of nature's beauty and apparent simplicity come to bare. Yet this happy, almost mythical, quartet stands in ironic contrast to another short poetic treatise on the contradiction of death's approaching caress:

«Lamento En La Montaña»

Aún te veo, río de mi vida,
con los ojos que miran las montañas.

...

Soñé... te quedarías a mi lado,
como un lago sin cisnes,
para siempre,
acunando mi ansia.
Qué locura más loca
enamorarse de un río una montaña!

In these short excerpts, the poetic voice remakes the natural pantheon into a force of love and destruction, as it is the "río" (river) which both carves the valley from the "montaña" and receives the latter's "ansia" (longing). (I should note that this is one of those rare glimpses into a Spanish form of what the Portuguese call saudade, although without the sea's presence among other subtle differences, as would be found in the works of many Lusophone poets of Fuerte's generation). The dream in which the mountain rejoices from the river's presence utilizes a traditional vision of the river as the symbol of life moving ceaselessly toward death and reunion with all others who have died (from Jorge Manrique's "Nuestras vidas son los ríos / que van a dar en la mar / que es el morir") and turns it ironically in on itself, creating a beautiful new space in the process. This space, an empty one filled only with the loveliness brought about by the river's constant and minuscule engulfing of the mountain, makes one forget that its creative force also must destroy its matéria prima.

Where one life starts another must give to it; where one life ends another takes from it. One begets the next, as we move forward in the time and place granted us. Let us make something beautiful from it all.

So in absence and forgetting, as in lifting our heads toward the sky to enjoy the fresh Spring air and birdsong, I invite you to consider this ageless interlude, and I wish you good night / buenas noches / boa noite.

Tonight's entry is about pain, "dor", illness, "doença", and beauty, "beleza".

One of my favorite poems begins as such: 

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

When Fernando Pessoa (ele mesmo) wrote these lines it was not to confuse us. Rather, his "heterónimo" meant to open us to a novel way of conceiving of our world.

Our world. That term takes on new meaning when you have a cold, or, if you are like me, you have a cold that goes to your left ear. As a left-hander (zurdo, canhoto) I have an inclination toward to left side of the body. Even my hearing and sight are stronger on the left than on the right. So when hearing in my left ear becomes at all impeded, the universe in which I live loses some of its flavor - a paella without azafrán, a bitoque without the egg. In not perceiving the more sinister side of my ontology in the way to which I am accustomed, I feel somewhat lost. This is not the feeling of Andresen's "Jardim Perdido", although there is an element of lost love in the mix (the love of perception, perhaps). It is the pain of sudden change. It is the novel concept of the world which I am forced to accept that makes me beg within myself to take it away, not because to my person "é dor / a dor que deveras sente", but because it is the "fingidor" who convinces me that I cannot survive without.

Yet there is a loveliness to the new epistemology of the swollen ear canal that takes me back, full swing, into a reality of healing. This afternoon it snowed (yes, in late March, in Georgia) for around 20 minutes. This is highly unusual for this region. At the time I was cooking and attempting to listen to a song my daughter was listening to; once I realized I could not hear it well enough to make it out, I turned to look out the window. In other words, if not for one sense being temporarily impaired, I would not have allowed myself the opportunity to become so taken with what was happening outside. I may never have seen it at all; we may never have called to our daughter to come take a look at "a neve de Março lá fora".

Even the pain of a slight loss can bring beauty to illness / Até a dor duma perda leve pode trazer à doença a beleza. I wish a healthy week to all - good night! / Boa noite! / ¡buenas noches!

In our profession there tend to be various types of personalities, some of which see us as more of a business. Universities make money by selling intellectual growth as a commodity which various "stakeholders" purchase for various prices. I have never subscribed to this commercialized philosophy, and today I had a reminder of why. 

When I was a graduate student instructor someone in a position of authority over me told me that with my "sotaque feio e inútil" I would never find a job. This was, of course, the day after I had successfully made the switch from teaching only Spanish to teaching Portuguese during the academic year, then Spanish in the summer. Perhaps it was my non-nativeness which drove this particular person to continue reminding me of how easy it would be to change accents, "tente, você vai ver!" I'm sure that Bakhtin would have reacted very differently to this situation than Lacan, and that both would have gotten a good laugh out of the whole thing anyway. I eventually learned to, and performed my duties rather well.

Still, when it came to my "lado luso" I found myself at various moments on the defensive, linguistically speaking. When I graduated and took my current position I thought that would end; yet, somehow, periodically I would hear comments such as "how could you teach Portuguese and not sound Brazilian?," or "you cannot build a program speaking an unpopular dialect," and the like. I did my best not to take offense, remembering that not everyone understands the nuances of sociolinguistic politics or rudimentary dialectology. Here I have built a program based on the notion that the language belongs to, and expresses, a world of cultures and perspectives (whether for good or bad I dare not say; some would have it either way - we present ourselves and our students with the difficult questions of who, why, how, and para quê). Olavo Bilac makes a case in his poem on the language:

Última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela,
És, a um tempo, esplendor e sepultura:
Ouro nativo, que na ganga impura
A bruta mina entre os cascalhos vela...

Amote assim, desconhecida e obscura,
Tuba de alto clangor, lira singela,
Que tens o trom e o silvo da procela
E o arrolo da saudade e da ternura!

Amo o teu viço agreste e o teu aroma
De virgens selvas e de oceano largo!
Amo-te, ó rude e doloroso idioma,

Em que da voz materna ouvi: "meu filho!"
E em que Camões chorou, no exílio amargo,
O gênio sem ventura e o amor sem brilho!
(in Perin dos Santos, http://www.infoescola.com/literatura/analise-do-poema-lingua-portuguesa/)

Love and death, tenderness and longing, tears and family ... the universality of the Portuguese language unifies with caring and a bit of resentment, it defies the logic of other languages. The literatures written in Portuguese may not surpass all others, but its prosaic, theatrical, musical, cinematic, scientific, historical, and poetic voices are second-to-none. I see one of my professional duties to be the fomenting of an appreciation for the language, the people who speak it, and all they've suffered for and achieved. (This is not, of course, to say that my "lado castizo" finds no home in my heart; indeed, this will be a topic for another day). For this reason I have begun co-leading an effort to make a wider outreach in this area as part of a larger institutional program.

We cannot dwell in this utopian epistemology for long, though; the reality of misunderstanding and reductiveness can catch us too quickly. Today, when I learned that there are those wanting to reduce the complexities and beauty of this endeavor to one of Public Relations and fundraising with a very specific and limited set of parameters (many of which would simply undo Bilac's ideal of what "A Língua Portuguesa" means), I found myself on the defensive again. Kennedy once said we need to perform great deeds and become greater than our pre-conceived limits, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Selling is easy; educating is hard. Buying into a brand is easy; growth and daring are hard. So, caros amigos e colegas, I ask you to consider which one you choose.

Tenham uma muito boa noite / Pasad unas muy buenas noches / Have a great evening!

It had been twenty years since I had run competitively. I was pretty fast before. Apparently that has change only by degree, not in principle. I ran five kilometers in 22 minutes and 45 seconds, coming in 7th overall and 1st in my age group. It was a really good day that made the month of training worthwhile.

So many of us have used exercise, or food, or other helpful or harmful pastimes to escape some other issue we did not wish to face. We have to ask ourselves, though, if running can be something more than just running from. Here I believe that yesterday it was running to.

I'll write more on this idea in my next blog entry. For now, have a calm and inspiring evening - I will leave you with this poem:

A Aluna:

Quando a aluna foi para a cama,

Os deveres feitos e não feitos,

A prova pronta mas a mente não;

A aluna sentiu-se aos dezanove anos,

Lá para ver a continuação dos colegas

Enquanto se achava pendurada no portão;

Quando a aluna foi para a cama,

Não era para viver nos lindos sonhos,

Mas para fazer-se uma tela de noite branda.

18/II/2014

Acworth, GA

Tonight's entry is about poetry and flowers. 

Yesterday I found myself staring at the ceiling in our townhome. This is not an unusual
occurrence, as I have always appreciated the pattern someone made when they first laid down the drywall, years before we bought the place. It is a flower-like pattern, very common in this area of the United States, made by pushing a large, dry, round brush into soft and wet drywall finishing. You observe the end result as a circle with non-standard lines pushing concentrically from the center toward an empty, white space. It is easy to do; even I have done it before. Yet having performed the act never took the magic out of the experience of gazing into it in the afternoon.

That day, though, something felt a little different. I could not tell what it was, the sort of converse effect of what Feijoo called the "yo no sé qué" (back before I spoke enough French to know from where he had taken the phrase); without better clarity I could not move intellectually from that spot.

I then remembered something I had written in my first short book of poems:

Through the street we walk, you and I,
Talking of strange things, holding hands
While the red lights and their merchandise entice us

As would the nicotine in the walls of an old bar
Whose darkness and four-sides enclosing me chill my mind,
Or as would the silence of novocaine on your lips
That makes skin tingle and sensation die
While the red lights and their merchandise cry out to us.
(New Poems from the Airplane and Graveyard, 12)  

When I first wrote these verses, back before I even know this house existed, I meant them as a comment on how the spaces we have occupied can freeze us in a single moment, not allowing us to escape. Such a place in memory keeps us from moving forward, even making love sour through not letting go of the past.

Yet when I re-read these verses today I realized that I had, even the day I wrote the words, lost the duplicity of their meaning. The connotation of enticement is a negative one; we need not of the thing that entices us. The red lights, in fact, were a reference to a brief stay in Amsterdam ... I was more than taken by surprise with what windows showing red lights were actually selling. An effect of the numbing sensation in the poem is that the poetic subject no longer desires to walk among those red lights; in a related way, what could trap him may actually free him.

Tonight I looked up at those repeating patterns again with silent delight. I was glad I could again smell the flowers.

Para esta noite não vou demorar muito nos vagares filosóficos nem nos neologismos nos quais tenho costume de me desviar. Aliás, ao rever os discursos das duas últimas semanas apercebo-me duma outra carência que, por desejar evitar a aparência de egoísmo (um ponto mesmo difícil de lograr dado o facto deste ser um blogue pessoal sobre temas pessoais num contexto individual e / ou ao redor de assuntos de família, etc), ignorara na hora de compor estes textinhos, como se fossem curtos ensaios sobre a arte de ensaiar.

Dali, uma série de pensamentos dirigiram-me até a uma relacionada, a ser esta a noção do poder das decisões. Pode-se-nos ou não gerar um certo constrangimento interno quando a confrontação das opções que nos são apresentadas no dia-a-dia chega ao seu momento crucial. Hoje, por exemplo, estava a caminho da oficina à qual tinha levado o meu carro fazer uma revisão do pára-choques (sofrera um pequeno acidente na semana passada e, embora o terapeuta me tivesse declarado em perfeitas condições físicas e não houvesse danificação visível alguma ao carro, resolvi levá-lo para lá por via das dúvidas) fazer compras quando lembrei de repente que a pequerrucha gosta sempre de me acompanhar nas aventuras frutíferas dos Sábados de manhã (entre outras de tipo carnívora ou duma sorte de busca das especiarias inefáveis que somente se acham, às vezes, na penúltima secção do Wal-Mart). Telefonei então à casa, e ao contar o meu plano de ir buscá-la para ali ouvi um forte grito a dizer que "sim"! O meu coração encheu-se de alegria, não por ter de dar mais uma volta e meia para conseguir voltar ao lar-doce-lar mas sim por ter surpreendido a minha filha com a possibilidade dalgumas horas de atenções dedicadas. Padeço mesmo dum fraquinho pela felicidade duma munchkin.

Nesse caso a decisão foi dupla: aquela de compartilhar a experiência vital e essencial das compras com alguém, e outra de outorgar um contentamento inesperado a uma pessoa para quem o mundo ainda é um acontecimento sempre por acontecer. Como dizia Platão, as boas acções sempre ajudam a resolver as aflições dos outros, como se a nossa sala de estar fosse a cova ... mas também não ia indagar em questões de egoísmo ...

Portanto, da decisão de manhã surgiu esta da noite, de lhes contar uma história um bocado mais íntima e de menos citações críticas indiretas, na nossa língua tão simples e bela de casa, e de compartilhar convosco um poema meu dos últimos dias. Espero que gostem, pois, fala mesmo dos temas da decisão e da memória. 

Parceiros da rara espécie:

Uma borboleta

Passou pelo jardim

Embora do jardim

Tenhamos removido

Ou, melhor, moído

As folhas atraentes

Às asas a chiarem

No lindo sol da mente

Passou pelo jardim

A minha borboleta

19/II/2014

Boa noite a todos / Buenas noches a todos / Good night to all!

Esta noche me apetece escribir un poco sobre las metáforas. Empiezo con el ejemplo de mi hija: cuando le pregunté (hace una hora y media, más o menos) qué era la metáfora, me respondió así «papá, a metáfora is uma coisa pequena como o elefante». (Notad el verbo copular en inglés - el cambio de código resulta uno de los rasgos más salientes del habla suya... tan bonito como confuso a la hora de comunicarse entre los familiares). Ahora bien, no es que se haya equivocado, pues, decir que una cosa es elefante ejemplifica desde ciertas perspectivas la metáfora no metonímica (sino solamente de comparación).

De hecho, cuando enseño a los alumnos una definición fácil de la metáfora, surge lo siguiente de la boca: «La metáfora es la comparación directa entre los o más objetos por algún elemento en común. Este elemento puede ser físico, emotivo o aplicado desde el punto de vista del observador / sujeto poético / narrador». Como he dicho, es fácil, si no cien por ciento acertadito.

Así, cuando les doy esta definición espero la regurgitación de la misma en el papel a la hora del examen, de una prueba, etc. Sin embargo, y lo más regular de todo, por lo general me ponen una respuesta de libro: «El dicho metafórico remite a los antiguos textos didácticos en el sentido teleológico en los cuales las significancias últimas y universales se transfieren a los objetos menos cotidianos...», etc. Ahora bien, les aplaudo el hecho de haber indagado en algo más allá de una simple serie de palabras otorgadas por el profe por miedo de perderles en el tránsito epistemológico que sería una explicación en salón. Por otra parte, me es obvio que no habían leído sus propios apuntes...

En esos momentos de perdición extracurricular tiendo a cerrar los ojos e intentar recordar que, como ya se sigue viendo en estos postings, la poesía nos dice todo. Entre los poetas hay uno, a mi ver, que ha definido la metáfora de manera que a mi pequerrucha le habría encantado:

Litany:

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass,
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is no way you are the pine-scented air.
...
(Billy Collins, Nine Horses, 69)

El poema me encanta, primeramente, por su exquisita y valiente audacia. La negación de las comparaciones caseras específicas nos parecen, a primera vista, irónicas. Sin embargo, y al basarme en la definición de la ironía como un final inesperado a una serie de eventos predecibles (otra simpleza pedagógica que he adoptado desde aquellos buenos tiempos), no pretende ofender ni limitar. Por el contrario, la delimitación de su propia expresión metafórica añade a la metáfora una belleza aun más profunda. De la primera estrofa comprendemos la noción del comienzo, del nacer de un mundo en pleno acto de despertar y de autocreación. De la segunda hay imágenes relacionadas a lo estático, a una estética de lo bello sin evolución. En este sentido el poema apremia a la interlocutora por su habilidad de auto-conmoción, por pertenecer a una visión del mundo sin socavarse en lo absurdo de una existencia a la que faltan los bonitos momentos de nacer.

Es aquí que surge «la nieve en la sima» (como dice Clara Janés en su Arcángel de sombra), en arrancar hacia una nueva vida que es, por antonomasia, la misma de siempre pero sí renovada por el amor y lo sublime del minuto, del segundo, en constante evolución. Lo pequeño, bajo esta cosmovisión, radica en lo elefantesco; mi hija, ahora dormida y nadando entre las nubes del sueño, sabrá que siempre ha tenido razón.

Buenas noches / good night / Boa noite!

When I began writing this blog in the beginning of February, I had a main theme in mind - illusions and their relationship with the illusory nature of human desire. So far I've approximated a discussion on this topic; there appears to be a new muse, however, that brought this back to the forefront for me.

I just finished reading an essay by Tom Eyers ("The Perils of Digital Humanities") on how the Digital in Digital Humanities breaks down older structures of the expression of thought, rebuilding them within an epistemology of the shallow and objectified. The author's voice in such an environment becomes less important than the medium of communication, rendering depth of expression all but mute and the all-important sign an empty referential shell.

The fear for someone like me, of course, is that I find nothing really wrong with publishing in an on-line medium. In fact, I have several journal articles in peer-reviewed / refereed on-line journals. I have also placed poems of my own on Facebook (not for review, obviously, but to share some of my poetry with others) and have even created a site for students and faculty at my institution to publish poems upon a editorial review process. As such, I need to ask - if the on-line experience is one of objectification and superficiality, have I not just fallen into its trap? Is this work, my own and that of countless others, now nothing more than a mass of data lost in a sea of Warhol soup cans pulled from images.yahoo?

Berg Nascimento's poem "Pulsando" hurls us into such a world in rather direct terms:

Ainda vivo:
na selva que antes era de pedra
e agora se tornou digital.

Ainda vivo:
no meio do caos diário
que só pertence a mim.

Ainda vivo:
catando palavras no espaço
e as embalsamando neste vidro.
(http://poesiasciberneticas.blogspot.com/, accessed 23 February, 2014)


Nascimento's act of entrapment is that of pathetic fallacy - the words captured and "embalmed" are actually the objects from which the poetic voice is constructed. The poem in this sense becomes almost mystical; the point of union between the creator and the created is finite and visible only to a poetic subject whose own subjectivity and divinity we inherently question. Such a vast space of postmodernity cannot lead us to the salvation of the "rock" from the first stanza, as that rock is of a world which no longer exists.


Is it right, then, for me to continue working in an on-line medium, one in which my own voice may fall deaf to itself for simple lack of importance vis-à-vis the space it inhabits? Is the act of dissemination one of self-intolerance, or simple masochism? I invite you to decide. In the meantime, I wish you


good night / buenas noches / boa noite!

Tonight's entry will be rather short. There is a storm coming toward our area; it will hit us quick and hard.

Of course I am not terribly concerned about a storm. I've weathered several, some snowy, some rainy, and even a few tornados within sight of the house. My daughter usually sleeps through them. What concerns me is not even for myself. I am thinking about those who are not ready, who do not think the storm will touch them, or those who believe that they can stand up to the coming winds, put up their hands, and watch as nature's torment plays the possum's game before them.

Many of you know that I am a loyal fan of Star Trek; I put on that hat even in class, where, if my students perform well on a major test, I teach a class day in my costume / uniform. What you do not know is that I also have a fondness for quotes and Star Trek mythology. So here is a little tale I took from Kahless, with a few changes for grammar, a faulty memory, and suspense:

... A great warrior once looked out the walls of the city and saw a great storm coming. He decided that he, with all his might, could break the storm and defeat it. So, he left that evening with only a spear and his armor, telling all who watched him that he would bring the storm back to the city on its knees. The sun went down, and the storm passed. The next day the people of the city brought the warrior's body back to the main square where they buried it...

The moral of this story - you can stand bravely, and you can stand proudly; you cannot stand against the wind.

I invite you to ponder this thought, and in the meantime, I wish you all a good night and an excellent day tomorrow!

Rejection doesn't usually make anyone feel good about their work. When you live the academic life, you either learn to slough it off into a corner of your memory reserved especially for it, or you cease and desist all forms of publication and, as such, cease. I, of course, chose the former a long time ago.
We can liken the rejection of an article or similar work to that of a sort of "amor não correspondido", the kind we find all the way back to poems such as this Cantiga de Amor attributed to D Dinis:

Proenças soen mui bem trobar
E dizem eles que é con amor
Mas os que trobam no tempo da flor
E não em outro, sei eu bem que non
an tan gran coita no seu coraçon
Qual m'eu por mia senhora vejo levar.

It seems that my manuscript, for all its efforts and "trobar", has not won the heart of sua senhora this evening.

Yet, despite the initial disappointment, this one was a particularly poignant rejection which, surprisingly, left me with a rather positive feeling. I had been waiting for word on an article manuscript of just over 10,000 words (yes, that long) which will also serve as the center for a book project I am currently writing (and for which a publishing house had invited my submission - I am still waiting to hear of its fate). The article was missing various elements of the overall study which I have already incorporated into the book project, along with other corrections I caught only once I had begun fleshing out the various chapters. The comments that the readers gave indicated the following:

1) the background needed more detail and examples;
2) the study of individual poems needed better contextualization; and
3) there were some blatant errors in phraseology.

All of this gets cleared up in the book. On top of that, in order to make the corrections in the article I would need to add another 2000 words or so. Since I know no one who would accept, much less read, a 12,000 word article, I came to the realization that, while my work may not have found love with this senhora, she really wasn't meant to give levar o seu coitado coração anyway.

I sent off another article this morning to a different journal. Let's hope this one is waiting only for its besito de bienvenida (I wrote it in Spanish).

Buenas noches / boa noite / good night!

It is touching when someone thinks of you. Knowing how busy we get, even if "busy" means sitting in front of the television or taking a walk, I admire anyone strong enough to take a moment to share a thought with me or with another. It was in this spirit that I felt very humbled when I saw someone had decided to send me an article on why the world needs academics.

Then I read the article and realized what message the author really meant to transmit. It is no way meant to defend us as a profession, as a group of intellectuals building theories which, although not immediately impacting the greater world, would set the tone for it. Rather, it emphasized how out of touch we are, how are peer-review system makes us obtuse and useless to the majority whom we apparently exclude (on purpose) in order that we maintain our authority over knowledge. The tone was not one of flattery but of impending doom for those who do not give up on our old and obviously aloof ways, and open ourselves entirely and only to the greater public. Only then would we mean anything to anyone other than ourselves.

Thus, the world needs us to come out of our ivory holes and stop ignoring the masses. One may imagine my dismay at the suppositions the author made about peer-review, about our place in the universe, the way his words fed into a stereotype of the academician locked in his (almost never her, interestingly) office, coddling a book in a dark corner as though it were a newborn, speaking only through his graduate assistants. Such a contradictory position reminded me of so many conversations I've had with my neighbors about how yes, I do work more than 5 hours a week, and yes, academic publishing is more than incomprehensible dribble, and yes, I do enjoy speaking with "normal" people, ...

I then remembered how Juan Benet, a famous Spanish architect, writer, and occasional literary critic used to disdain the whole critical apparatus (to which I belong) as anachronistic and worthless to the literary
practitioners on whom it prayed. He tended to make these statements in his works of literary criticism. This, of course, deepens the dilemma, for even within our ranks we see such actions as within the boundaries of the normal. There seems to be, in fact, a long and glorious tradition of scholars of literature bashing the field for which, in the same article no less, the critic claims to provide a preliminary solution.

Of course, we must then reflect on the labor culture in the academic world. Outside of the primary research universities, many a department and / or college within institutions in the United States has tended both to require higher standards for research while simultaneously putting pressure on faculty to do more service and take on higher teaching loads. The usual reason is that, well, since scholarship is no more than sitting around pondering (particularly for those of us in the Humanities), we are obviously just not "busy" enough.

It is at this point in the evening that we remember the words of Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos from his well-known poem "Os Pássaros de Londres" when reflecting upon such busy people as we are supposed to become:

...
os pássaros de Londres
falam de esplendor
com que se ergue o estio
e a lua se derrama
por praças tão sem cor
que parecem de pano
em jardins germinando
sob mantos de gelo
...

Yet, in returning to our space for contemplation and discussion, I have to wonder if taking a walk is really a good use of my thinking time, or if I should just go to Starbucks for a coffee and read a pamphlet. Perhaps our old friend Álvaro de Campos would have consoled us best, Ah não ser eu toda a gente e toda a parte ...
Please take a busy minute to ponder for yourselves, and to think of someone with whom to share your thoughts.

Buenas noches / Boa noite / Good night :)

Before getting started with tonight's entry, I wanted to wish everyone a safe and happy late winter. Many are still without power; others, with no safe way to leave their homes.

This morning my wife asked me if we had any birdseed for her bird feeder out back. When we realized we had none, and that the closest seed would be at the Publix about 2-ish miles away, I offered to go get some for her. Of course, three inches of snow had just dropped upon us and the roads were relatively icey, so I decided to walk. Besides, anyone who has been snowed in with a small child knows the power of an hour or so of not being snowed in with a small child.

After bundling up well and grabbing a thermal bag from the car (to make carrying back easier on the return trip), I set off. I had a mission to obtain not only seed, but some fruit, fruit juice, a toothbrush, and a few other bits for the house. Those reading this post with a literature background should by now recognize the genre upon which I had embarked; this quest would not take me "ainda além da Taprobana", but only to the corner store for some supplies.

So, bag in hand and winter hat on (no, not a "bacía", just a hat) I charged down the neighborhood toward the main road. Shortly there upon I remembered just how hard it was to trod through snow and keep my socks relatively dry. By the time I reached the main road, after a steep incline which would be challenging even in April, I could heard a voice in my head clearly begging "vou-me embora para Pasárgada" - this would be quite the trip.

Given the relatively simple nature of this voyage by foot I found many distractions which almost took me off the wanted path. At several points I would stop to hear the birds chirping to each other, the snow falling off tree branches, and the occasional sound of a car attempting vainly to navegate some neighborhood hill somewhere. One moment, in particular, brought me both joy and pain: I stopped at the downhill slope next to an undeveloped piece of land and looked out into the trees. I could see the green, white-topped branches moving gracefully in the breeze, as would ocean waves on a calm day. The air had the faint scent of cold rain, the sound was close to silence. It was there that I felt a sudden urge to go into the woods, to find what was giving me that wonderous sense of calm. I took one step, then another, until I realized that I was walking into snow untouched by any of the previous passers-by. I remembered then what the quest was about. You may or may not reach your intended goal, but that is secondary. The true lesson of the quest is an internal one, a moment of growth brought about through the hardships of the voyage. In that sense, by leaving the path for a minute and becoming part of such a place at such a time, I renewed myself and came to a new and enlightened state. It was not mystical, but mythic, for it did not bring me illumination but humility before my yet unseen world. Camões' narrative voice had seen this, and knew that it was a greater life than any ever known before:

De sorte que Alexandro em vós se veja,
Sem à dita de Aquiles ter enveja.

In that sense, my quest had both just begun and was over. I could continue my journey in peace, which I did, and at its end had a happy family and a happy me.

Looking out the window this morning I remembered how mythic a snowfall could seem. Watching flakes fall at just that slight angle, giving my eyes a soft, glancing blow, ... these are the memories that stay with us when we walk outside of our door in July and feel the blazing sun and humid air blast at us. It can occur to us, then, the way Robert Frost refers to snow and winter as life giving and life taking simultaneously, a memory of an unknown present which keeps us from visualizing our surroundings in any objective way. His "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" readily comes to mind:

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.
The poetic subject is speaking both of his own journey and of that of his potential, although unseen, observer. This first stanza sets the stage for the rest of the poem, in which the traveller seeks out his path but cannot fully comprehend its end (even if he knows it will arrive when he does).

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen also reflects on this notion of wintery haze in her poem «Inverno»:

Este inverno é longo gélido
E confuso

These first verses of the poem evidence her poetic voice's feelings about what the season symbolizes. In the second stanza her poetic voice speaks of how the poem cannot be born out of a "página em branco".

These are essential moments, ones in which I have to disagree with both poets. Although their poetic voices express the white of winter as it serves to paralise and defeat the poet's quest, I personally have found a writer's inspiration in winter. While uncomfortably and disquietingly lifeless at times, winter seeks to hand us the keys to Spring, to rejuvination, and the opposition to the striking heat we feel many months later. Perhaps it was this that they seeked out, and could never find until winter's end. Perhaps, looking out a window on a Tuesday morning to see winter's life unfold in frozen snow and roads iced over, they would have seen the friendly season I see.

Today I didn't sing. Today she sang. Hoje foi ela que cantou.

Today we celebrated the once a month Portuguese Community Lunch (O Almoço à Portuguesa, for those in the know) at Maximo's. O Sr. Pereira served "Cozido à Portuguesa", a combination of a half-dozen meats, carrots, cabbage, etc., which, when assembled properly, tastes as though a drop of heaven came down in the form of a cookbook and landed right on the kitchen counter. He made it, and it was good.

As the meal commenced, my daughter and her friend were busy playing and having a good time as any 6 or 7 year olds will do. She stopped cold when the "pastéis de bacalhau" (cod croquettes) arrived at the table. Then her Luso side kicked in and she was swept away, awash in "papá, this is tão bom!", chewing happily on half the pastel, and handing the other half to me to finish off (she likes only the ends, because apparently they're fresher). Her devoration of the chouriço, frango, bife, and (what makes for a happy papá) cenouras, would have made even Goya's Saturn jealous (and probably wishing he had made some better choices in that regard, I might add). My daughter generally opts for the most hot-dog-looking piece of food on or near the table; today the profoundness of that difference came upon me as though it were the anvil torn asunder by a feather (uma asa de pássaro a voar).

After a while she asked me if I was going to sing. Since May of 2013 I have been singing Fado at the local Portuguese restaurants. It is a relatively new (c. 250) year old musical form found in two places in Portugal, Lisbon and Coimbra. The music of the former, in 2002, drew me into the world of the Portuguese language and the people of Lisboa; that of the latter would have required me to find several dozen students with "guitarras", something I have neither the time nor frequent rail pass to do. It may seem out of place to some that, of all possible outcomes, I would have materialized as a Jew-ish Hispanist learning to sing Fado (I'll get to the first term of that statement in a future blog). I can remember it vividly: I was driving and listening to a CD of music from Portugal. I had bought it out of curiosity and a very odd instinct that somehow it was the best idea possible to learn something about this neighbor of Spain I had heard about infrequently from conversations my Brazilian friends were having (in Portuguese, no less, which at the time I could not speak). After a few minutes I heard this:

Foi por vontade de Deus,
Que eu vivo nesta ansiedade;
Que todos os "ais" são meus
Que é toda a minha saudade...
Foi por vontade de Deus ...

I had to pull over from the tears. I also had no concept of what she was singing. Amália has that way with her voice, the ability to draw out Fado's spirit of longing for that thing you have had yet also never had (so, the "saudade" you feel deep within your heart -it doesn't really matter what about-) in the listener, even when that listener has never heard Fado before. It was at that moment I realized I needed to learn this language and this music; I spent a week, 8 hours a day, pouring over a CD and book for European Portuguese. By the time I returned to campus after that Spring Break was over I could speak at the Intermediate level. By 2004 I was at the Superior level and preparing to marry the woman I met in Lisbon... Ever since then I have counted myself among the happily hybridized selves running amok in academia.

In an average night I'll sing "O Rouxinol da Ribeira", "Fado Português" (which, by the way, sounds good whether you are Amália or not), "Casa da Mariquinhas", and three or four other tunes. Many times I will sing alongside my colleague and friend Sara, a professional fadista whose vocal talent I can only hope to reach. The uniqueness of the show is not only that an "americano" would sing Fado, but that there are not "guitarristas" in the Atlanta metro (and if there are, please let me know). The entire show is a cappella.

The reason I told her I wouldn't, an answer which from the look on her face she didn't expect, had two principle motives. The first, I had already eaten. Anyone who sings at all knows it is a very bad idea to sing just after eating. The second, and more important reason, ... I've already said.

Boa noite a todos / good night, everyone / buenas noches a todos :)

So it's Saturday night, a tranquil and cold evening, one in which I have had a few hours to sit and consider a few things. Mostly I considered them while watching a special on how the Phoenicians could have landed in New Hampshire just before finding India, so it was easy to lose myself in thought.

Take, for example, Herberto Helder and his ideas on love. Perkins talks about the feminine subject and how its intercalations into his poetic restructuring of the intimate place from which Helder writes also fuses together various other epistemological processes at work in his verses. I particularly like the way Perkins puts these seemingly contradictory notions together. As such I would like to propose putting a few more together by leaving the single-author ideal of literary studies altogether.

When José Hierro speaks of the impediments to communication with those immediately around him in "Mambo," he does so with a somewhat Platonic ideal in mind - the recognition of the sublime in a world of shadows. His job -should- be to show the rest of us what fools we are not to look just slightly off center and see the truth of our mundane and colorful, but still very fake, world. Twenty years later we take the idea of revealing the relative as an axiom (although the poet can no longer be the iconic figure of yesteryear, oh no, that won't work at all - anyone seen that novel I was reading?)

So let's put these together. Helder writes in rebellion to the purely social bent of the Neo-Realists and later to the "Távola" group. We can also see his work as partly a construct to spite a social realm, a different focus and all that while Hierro, well, does something really similar, he just incorporates elements of the social more accessibly than Helder. I've discussed this before, and hope at least one or two readers of this blog will have read this from me, as well.

Now I would like to take this back to the moment in which I began re-pondering it, in the hopes that you will also ponder along with me. I was watching Disney channel with my daughter, then switched the station to a Star Trek episode when she went to have lunch (I had already eaten, but she and her mother were enjoying some time together and so I decided not to bother them). The former was about friendship, and the latter, about covering up truths. Each reflected on similar themes: the illusion of reality and the way we mask it from ourselves with convenient acceptance of what others tell us. Since I have gotten used to the formulaic nature of the one, and I had only a minute to watch a scene from the other before a certain pequerrucha noticed, the whole formula hadn't occurred to me then. It took only some observations on the Phoenicians to put it all (back) together (or maybe, really, for the first time).

As a token of my gratitude, I leave you with the following verses of mine to read and (hopefully, if you can read Portuguese) enjoy:

Azul:

Recentes investigações demonstram

Que, embora o céu seja azul, e a

Terra seja castanha e verde onde houver

Relvado, as árvores não vão permitir

Que as cidades se apoderem do reflexo

Que o mar faz no céu, pois, é por isso

Que o céu que todos nós vemos é azul. 

Assim, a manifestação vai decorrer

 No dia 23 de Dezembro de 2.012,

Às oito da tarde, após o anoitecer,

Enquanto todos nós estivermos a dormir,

E então, as mais ou menos corajosas

Árvores todas vão deixar de respirar. 

E, quando já tiverem morrido, e mortos

Nos acharmos, podemos consolar-nos

Com o facto da causa ter sido

Uma simples questão de cores. 

7/IX/2010

Acworth, GA

Boa Noite a todos / Buenas noches a todos / Good Night to all! 

Introito and Invitatio

So this is my first blog ever - welcome, and thanks for dropping by.

I hope to make this a space where you can come to chill with some poems, discussions, or just to observe and think. Inspiration comes from some fascinating places; let's make this one of them.

To start off, here's a stanza from one of my favorite poems:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
The kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the winches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers,
Let be be finale of seem,
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. 

Wallace Stevens was writing, of course, about the tradition in Key West at the time of service ice-cream at funerals. His characterizations of the almost mythological archetypes present, though, has always given me chills (no pun intended). Contrasts between the outward beauty of clothes and colors that barely hide the hideous truths around them, it makes the illusion that much less palpable once analysed even a little.

This is where we start, then - a discussion on illusions. We move through our time as though we had so much more of it than we do (not to be too fatalistic - I'm in very good health and work out often), we pretend that we are sinless when, in reality, we only dress the part. I am as guilty as anyone, although perhaps not as much as some :)

There's another poem I enjoy, by a poet from across the sea. Here's a snippet:

Tudo vale a pena
se a alma não é pequena.

In English this means "it is all worth it / if the soul be not small". I invite you, in perusing here, to put this message to terms with the one we've just discussed, and come up with a solution. I look forward to hearing from you!

Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15744#sthash.3cpjn9gS.dpuf

Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15744#sthash.3cpjn9gS.dpuf

Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15744#sthash.3cpjn9gS.dpuf