Monthly Archives: July 2005

Brazil

Just
finished over the weekend a terrific book on Brazil. If you’ve ever
been slightly curious about the place and can’t get there yet, try
Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil.  On
our ’98 trip we were only in São Paolo two nights and another at Iguazu
Falls, but I can’t get the place and people out of my mind. More
diverse population than I’ve ever seen and many other things to say
about them, from their sheer beauty while walking down a street to
their reknowned vitality and grace.  Robb
is an incredibly deft and compelling storyteller. Turns out he was gold
medalist swimmer in the ’58 Olympics and is an Australian. Neither
factoids play any key role in his tale. He just likes to visit Brazil.
He does bring in a bit more history than you find in most travel books,
but he does so in order to give, but he keeps it fascinating and never
heavy or longwinded. His main story concerns the political misdeeds of
key politicians in the 80s and 90s and his own investigation in the
famus death of one of them. But behind this immediate story he tells us
tales about the great sweep of forces in Brazil’s history, literature
and culture. First comes the fact that in colonial days the sexual
activity between masters and slaves was greater than anywhere else in
the new world and erased all bounds and classes—temporarily. It
produced the great mixture of races unique to Brazil. Next is the
immense gap between the monied and powerful few, very few, fewer than
in most other countries in the world, and the very very poor masses.
Brazil has never seen a real revolution or civil war. But in the time
Robb features, the past thirty years, a Workers Party, and a growing
middle class and educated population has begun to significantly change
the old political structures of power — again, perhaps. Robb writes
beautifully, and you find yourself glued to the page and waiting for
the next turn or development as though it were a great novel.

His third motif is that Brazil’s famous telenovelas
mirror the life of Brazil about as perfectly as any art form can. The
"scripts" are written only a day ahead of time so they can respond to
what audiences liked most in the story the day before.

Edith Wharton:  I had to chuckle early, on page 4 of The Age of Innocence, when she got my number with this line:
     "He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation."  Ouch I murmured to myself as I wondered yet another obsessive time just what our two months in Paris next spring will be like.  We’ve put a deposit on a tiny apartment.  It is appalling how the mythologies of Paris take over one’s mind.  How powerfully.  There must be a French virus that got injected into America’s bloodstream when the Statue of
Liberty was put up in the harbor–sort of a Trojan Dame.   Only an
exorbitantly priced visit to the  City of Lights can temporarily relieve the illness.  A visit or an addiction to French books, wines or women/lingerie/perfumes or aperitifs.  Forgot clothes I guess.  Cheeses. Food.  Fancy words.  High-blown intellectual theories no one can understand, especially those that discuss Freud, eroticism, sadism or the bad taste of showing interest in power relations.  Much more, for sure.  But I refuse to be drawn any further into interest in things French.  After all, a dilettante must never focus on any one topic.
Let’s see, can one be both a diletantte and a flaneur?

   Here is the Twombly book, published in France.  Took the    image  from UK Amazon.  I first realized I was looking at Twombly paintings in Buffalo six or seven years ago and then later in Philadelphia where a whole room is given over to some of his recent work drawn from the Iliad.  Of all the big name ab ex painters I know the least about him.  Maybe he is a generation or two after the main figures,  still living I think.  Born 1928.  This book lists his first exhibit as having been in Chicago 1951, catalogue essay by Robert Motherwell.  There’s a launch for you.

from a friend who lives in our nation’s capital

Rupert has just put up on his magazine five of the poems we recently wrote together along  with the collage images we made first around which to write the poems. 

see   

http://www.stridemagazine.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/2005/July%202005/ab%20stories.htm

Such a perfect and glorious day.  Visibility must be four hundred miles, the air is so clear and dry.  A cool breeze all day, while the sun is just hot enough to be hot but not hot.  The nights with all the windows open are sweet and cool enough for a light blanket–perfect for sleeping.  No wonder the saying goes in NH we have three season—fall, winter and the Fourth of July.  Now I´m continuing to line edit Va´s bibliography and she is going over the entries.  This is for her Valle-Inclán book.  Earlier we went to the Emergency room to have her left wrist x-rayed.  She took a spill in the yard yesterday and since the wrist had a little pain she wanted to double-check it.  No fracture that the doctor could see but he remarked on how thin the bones are due to osteoporosis.  We´ve pinned down a place to stay in Oaxaca for January.  Sabbatical coming up.  We wonder whether this will be our last "big trip."  Oaxaca seems one of those places you should visit just because the name is so terrific.  Oaxaca, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Sao Paolo, Rio, Carmel, Isla Negra and of course Paris.  Now that we´re planning to go to Paris on this trip, the notion of it, the fantasy and pull of the myths are inevitable.  I keep saying, oh, just take it as it comes and don´t make any fuss.  Then I read a footnote in Rabelais and it says the Street of Straw, where Pantagruel hears the university scholars in their pretentious disputations, still exists in the Latin Quarter and your historical imagination gets overheated by the dimensions of history, the infinite layers of association and culture embedded in places.  Places and their names.  I used to know all the names of the streets of central Madrid (and central Cumberland, Maryland) and have the map firmly in my mind.  What a pleasure that is.  To know your way around.  To have the illusion at least that since you know the lay of the land you can enjoy getting lost and then finding your way out of the labyrinth.